Tag: ukraine

Trans Spox Says Ukraine Will Hunt Down “Russian Propagandists” Around The World

Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, the transgender ex-journalist from the US who is now a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, has issued yet another bizarre and unhinged statement on behalf of the Ukrainian military.

The military spokesperson is vowing that Russia’s “propagandists” will be “hunted down” in a message which was published days ago, but which is now going viral and being mocked. 

Ashton-Cirillo said in the clip, “Next week, the teeth of the Russian devils will gnash ever harder, and their rabid mouths will foam an uncontrollable frenzy as the world will see a favorite Kremlin propagandist pay for their crimes.”

“And this puppet of Putin is only the first. Russia’s war criminal propagandists will all be hunted down, and justice will be served, as we in Ukraine are led on this mission by faith in God, liberty, and complete liberation,” he said.

The message appeared to be on the occasion of Ukraine’s criminal trial against detained Chilean-American journalist Gonzalo Lira. In May, Lira was arrested for a second time by the SBU and has been in detention since then, reportedly on charges of “justifying Russia’s aggression, denying/glorifying Russian war crimes, and undermining Ukraine’s leadership and Defense Forces.”

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Blinken OKs Attacks On Russia With US Missiles

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at the start of this week that it was up to Ukraine whether or not to target Russian territory with US-provided weapons, a policy that brings the US and Russia closer to a direct clash.

Blinken made the comments after ABC News reported that it’s likely the Biden administration will soon arm Ukraine with Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), which have a range of up to 190 miles.

While appearing on ABC’s ‘This Week,’ Blinken was asked if he was OK with Ukraine using ATACMS to hit targets deep inside Russian territory.

Here was the Secretary of State’s response: 

“In terms of their targeting decisions, it’s their decision, not ours,” Blinken replied.

When asked about the increasing Ukrainian drone attacks inside Russia, Blinken claimed the US does not “encourage” or “enable” the operations. However, The Economist recently reported that Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia frequently use intelligence gathered by Kyiv’s Western backers.

ABC reviewed: “With a range of up to 190 miles, depending on the version, deploying ATACMS could allow Ukraine to reach targets nearly four times further away than with the currently-provided rockets for its U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and M270 multiple-launch rocket systems.”

As the war has dragged on, the Biden administration has been less and less concerned about the risk of Ukrainian attacks inside Russia escalating the war. The administration previously feared that Russia could respond to such attacks by targeting a NATO country.

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Zelensky Issues Veiled Threat To Destabilize Europe If Weapons Flow Curtailed

As predicted by a number of independent geopolitical commentators, including ourselves, the emerging official narrative on why Ukraine’s counteroffensive ended in failure will be to falsely claim the West didn’t provide “enough” weapons in a timely fashion. Despite the literally tens of billions of US taxpayer dollars sunk into Kiev’s war effort at record-breaking pace and scale, it will be the “fault” of the United States and its allies—or at least this will be solidified as the Ukrainian government’s perspective and narrative (and then will be parroted among Zelensky’s most diehard hawkish supporters). 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has this week been busy advancing this as a key talking point, first telling CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Sunday his country “waited too long” to start counteroffensive. The reason? He blames the West for forcing his military leaders to wait so long for the necessary weaponry and equipment. 

“We — look, we waited too long. It’s true. No, I’m thankful to partners, to the United States, EU, other partners,” Zelensky said. “I’m thankful very much to President Biden and to Congress, but we have to understand: We waited too long, they put mines.”

“Then when we been ready from the point of view of our partners because the decision to give us, for example, Bradley [Fighting Vehicles] and other kind of weapons, the decision, it doesn’t mean the result.” And The Hill underscores of his remarks, “Zelensky noted that Ukraine does not get the weapons promised to it immediately after they are announced by allies.” This is not the first time Zelensky has blamed slowness in supplies and training from his Western sponsors. But behind the scenes, his Western patrons have criticized him for being “ungrateful”. 

In late March, Zelensky when asked about why the counteroffensive was being delayed said that he can’t “start yet” as he’s unable to “send our brave soldiers to the front line without tanks, artillery and long-range rockets.” And then in May he reasserted that “We can advance with what we’ve got and I think we can be successful but we will lose a lot of people, I think that is unacceptable.” He had added at the time, “We need to wait, we need a bit more time.” The offensive later belatedly kicked off in full force in June.

In another interview freshly published this week with US media, Zelensky took this theme of “blame the West” even further. In remarks to the Economist, he issued a thinly veiled threat to those countries thinking about curtailing aid in any way, warning that “millions of Ukrainian refugees in European countries” are capable of destabilizing the West. 

Here’s what Zelensky said as captured by the Economist interview published this week: 

Curtailing aid to Ukraine will only prolong the war, Mr Zelensky argues. And it would create risks for the West in its own backyard. There is no way of predicting how the millions of Ukrainian refugees in European countries would react to their country being abandoned.

Ukrainians have generally “behaved well” and are “very grateful” to those who sheltered them. They will not forget that generosity. But it would not be a “good story” for Europe if it were to “drive these people into a corner”.

A number of online commentators took note of his surprisingly open and aggressively accusatory rhetoric, saying he seems to be threatening Europe with terrorism if Ukraine doesn’t get its way.

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Ukraine’s Growing Assassination Program

Ukraine’s domestic security service (SBU) has an elite ancillary known as the fifth counter-intelligence directorate, which has taken a central role in “counter-Russia operations” specializing in “wet work” or assassinations, according to a report in The Economist.

The report discusses the killing of Yevhen Yunakov, the former mayor of Velykyi Burluk in the Khariv region, after he had been targeted as a “collaborator” with Moscow. Yunakov was meticulously stalked for days by a group of local officers from the Special Operations Forces (SSO) before being murdered with a bomb.

“Over 18 months of war, dozens of people like Yunakov have been targeted in clinical operations across occupied Ukraine and inside Russia itself. They have been shot, blown up, hanged and even, on occasion, poisoned with doctored brandy,” the report reads.

SSO is described as a relatively new group that directs the Resistance Movement, Ukraine’s partisans. One officer in the SSO, told the outlet the group is demanding more authority to conduct operations within Russia.

Ukrainian military intelligence has been implicated in various attacks inside Russia which have targeted civilians. “If you are asking about [creating a version of] Mossad…We don’t need to. It already exists,” General Kyrylo Budanov, chief of Main Directorate of intelligence for the Ukraine defense ministry, boasted during an interview this July.

But it is noted that the SBU has a five times greater budget, which permits it to carry out more sophisticated operations such as the October truck bombing of the Kerch Bridge which connects Crimea with mainland Russia. That attack, which also killed non-combatants, provoked Moscow’s first large-scale strategic airstrikes on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure.

Modern Ukraine’s assassination program began in 2015, following the US-backed coup in Kiev a year earlier. The SBU “created a new body after Russia had seized Crimea… Valentin Nalivaychenko, who headed the SBU at the time, says the switch came about when Ukraine’s then leaders decided that a policy of imprisoning collaborators was not enough. Prisons were overflowing, but few were deterred.”

As Nalivaychenko bluntly puts it, the SBU “came to the conclusion that we needed to eliminate people.” This is how the fifth counter-intelligence directorate, which originally formed as a “saboteur force,” was born.

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NATO Chief Openly Admits Russia Invaded Ukraine Because Of NATO Expansion

During a speech at the EU Parliament’s foreign affairs committee on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg clearly and repeatedly acknowledged that Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine because of fears of NATO expansionism.

His comments, initially flagged by journalist Thomas Fazi, read as follows:

The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

Stoltenberg made these remarks as part of a general gloat about the fact that Putin invaded Ukraine to prevent NATO expansion and yet the invasion has resulted in Sweden and Finland applying to join the alliance, saying it “demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he’s getting the exact opposite.”

Stoltenberg’s remarks would probably have been classified as Russian propaganda by plutocrat-funded “disinformation experts” and imperial “fact checkers” if it had been said online by someone like you or me, but because it came from the head of NATO as part of a screed against the Russian president it’s been allowed to pass through without objection.

In reality Stoltenberg is just stating a well-established fact: contrary to the official western narrative, Putin invaded Ukraine not because he is evil and hates freedom but because no great power ever allows foreign military threats to amass on its borders  —  including the United States. That’s why so many western analysts and officials spent years warning that NATO’s actions were going to provoke a war, and yet when war broke out we were slammed with a tsunami of mass media propaganda repeating over and over and over again that this was an “unprovoked invasion”.

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US Intel Official: Media Misleading Americans About Ukraine’s Battlefield Success

In an interview with renowned reporter Seymour Hersh, a US intelligence official scolded the media for misleading the American public about Ukraine’s battlefield failures during the Spring counteroffensive. The unnamed official additionally told Hersh he believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the assassination of PMC Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin to deescalate tensions with NATO.

Responding to reports in recent weeks that Ukrainian forces were gaining momentum and recapturing territory, the official remarked, “Where are the reporters getting this stuff?” he asked. “There are stories talking about drunk Russian commanders while the Ukrainians are penetrating the three lines of Russian defense and will be able to work back to Mariupol.”

He continued, “The goal of Russia’s first line of defense was not to stop the Ukrainian offense, but to slow it down so if there was a Ukrainian advance, Russian commanders could bring in reserves to fortify the line.” The official added, “There is no evidence that Ukrainian forces have gotten past the first line. The American press is doing anything but honest reporting on the failure thus far of the offense.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered a similarly optimistic message during his trip to Kyiv on Wednesday. “In the ongoing counteroffensive, progress has accelerated in the past few weeks. This new assistance will help sustain it and build further momentum,” he said at a press conference.

The official says that message is being delivered from military intelligence to the White House, while the CIA has drawn other conclusions. “This kind of reporting from the military intelligence community is going to the White House. There are other views,” he said, referring to the CIA. The official explained those views do not reach President Joe Biden.

For over three months, Kyiv has ordered its forces to advance on entrench Russian defensive lines in southern Ukraine. Russian minefields caused Ukraine to lose a significant portion of its Western-trained soldiers and equipment in the opening weeks of the offensive. The massive push by Ukraine resulted in nearly no territorial gains.

Still, Washington has pushed Kyiv to continue the counteroffensive. The White House acknowledges that for Ukraine to have a possibility of success, Kyiv will have to be willing to sustain high casualties.

The official told Hersh no matter how committed Kyiv is to the war effort, President Zelensky’s goals are unattainable.  “Zelensky will never get his land back,” he said.

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Musk ordered shutdown of Starlink in Crimea 

Elon Musk personally intervened to stop a Ukrainian attack on Crimea last year due to fears of a nuclear war, CNN reported on Thursday, quoting an excerpt from the upcoming biography of the SpaceX and Tesla founder.

As Ukrainian drones approached the Crimean coast, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” according to the book by Walter Isaacson, scheduled to be published next week. 

Musk had secretly ordered SpaceX engineers to shut off the Starlink signal near Crimea, according to this account, concerned that Russia might use nuclear weapons in reaction to what he described as a “mini-Pearl Harbor.”

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FBI Knew Ukrainian Spy Was at Capitol Riot: QAnon Shaman

Jacob Chansley, known as the “QAnon Shaman,” claimed the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) knew that an alleged Ukrainian spy participated in the riot at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Chansley, who was sentenced to 41 months in prison over his involvement in the January 6 riot but was released earlier this year, said in an interview with conservative activist Laura Loomer that the FBI questioned him about the presence of Sergai Dybynyn, an alleged Ukrainian spy with reported ties to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which has risen to prominence amid the Russia-Ukraine war.

The FBI has not confirmed Chansley’s statement, which could not be independently verified. Newsweek reached out to the FBI via email for comment.

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Sen. Blumenthal: US Getting Its ‘Money’s Worth’ in Ukraine Because Americans Aren’t Dying

Fresh from a trip to Kyiv, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) is arguing that the US is getting its “money’s worth” in Ukraine because Russia is taking losses and no Americans are dying, showing a lack of concern for Ukrainian lives.

“Even Americans who have no particular interest in freedom and independence in democracies worldwide, should be satisfied that we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment,” Blumenthal wrote in the Connecticut Post.

“For less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half … All without a single American service woman or man injured or lost,” he added.

The argument has become a common talking point among hawks in Washington who want the US to keep fueling the proxy war against Russia. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) recently called the conflict “the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done.”

“We’re losing no lives in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are fighting heroically against Russia,” Romney said. “We’re diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money … a weakened Russia is a good thing.”

The hawkish senators’ comments came amid Ukraine’s faltering counteroffensive. Despite the lack of success on the battlefield, the Biden administration and most members of Congress want to keep funding the war, which they acknowledge would not continue without US support.

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Biden Looks to Prevent Future President From Ending Ukraine War

The Biden administration is working to reach a deal with Ukraine for long-term military support to keep backing the war with Russia that would be difficult for a future president to exit, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

The effort is part of a commitment made by G7 nations at the recent NATO summit in Vilnius to negotiate their own bilateral security deals with Ukraine. Besides the G7 nations, 18 other countries have agreed to provide long-term military support for Kyiv.

The idea of the long-term commitment is to show Russia that it can’t wait out the Biden administration. The Journal report reads: “Western officials are looking for ways to lock in pledges of support and limit future governments’ abilities to backtrack, amid fears in European capitals that Donald Trump, if he recaptures the White House, would seek to scale back aid.”

Trump, who escalated US involvement in Ukraine during his term by taking the step to provide Javelin missiles, has said he would end the Ukraine war within “24 hours” if elected in 2024. The former president is the current frontrunner for the Republican nomination.

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