Tag: ukraine

“INDEPENDENT” UKRAINIAN “KILL LIST” ACTUALLY RUN BY KIEV, BACKED BY WASHINGTON

Late last year, my name was added to a blacklist published online by the Ukraine Center for Countering Disinformation. I joined over ninety others deemed to be “speakers who promote narratives consonant with Russian propaganda.“

These included Manuel Pineda and Clare Daly, both leftist Members of the European Parliament (MEP); Also counted are people on the right, such as Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, neocon and former IDF officer Edward Luttwak, a slew of rightist MEPs; Ex CIA officer, Ray McGovern; former military and intelligence figures such as Scott Ritter and Douglas McGregor, as well as academics such as John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs. Journalists on the list included Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson and Eva Bartlett, Roger Waters from Pink Floyd, and even actor Steven Seagal.

What was my crime? It said my “pro-Russian narrative” was claiming that “NATO’s proxy war with Russia is taking place in Ukraine”. Of course, a NATO proxy war is exactly what is happening there, as this article will only further confirm.

The listing helpfully provided a link with the evidence, an article I wrote for Mayadeen English called “How disinformation works: Western intelligence agencies global war on the left.” It contained a single, 176-word  paragraph on Ukraine titled “‘Russian Disinformation’ or Ukrainian lies?” It recounted several examples of Ukrainian misinformation and concluded that “Anyone who mentions any particular truth is derided for echoing Putin’s ‘talking points’.” In the event I was actually denounced as an “information terrorist” who might be guilty of “war crimes.”

Being added to the blacklist concentrates the mind wonderfully on the forces ranged against the possibility of truth and justice in the crisis-ridden West. When I was first accused, over a decade ago now, of antisemitism, my response was to intensify my research and writing activities on the organizations involved in defaming me. Since then I have produced a long catalog of work on the Zionist movement as well as on Western propaganda activities. Of course, the defamatory attacks encourage an atmosphere where social media threats can be made. But the issue of Nazism in Ukraine will be seen in retrospect as a defining issue of our era and it is important to remember that the reason I and many others are threatened by the Ukraine government and their NATO backers is because we in turn threaten to expose them for what they are: Nazi collaborators.

Keep reading

Ukraine Expands Weapons Training For Children As Bakhmut Reportedly Falls

Only two months ago the mainstream media widely circulated a video which they said showcased “shocking footage” of Russian school children training with military weapons in programs designed to prepare them for the military.  The programs were widely criticized as “indoctrination.” 

Of course, Ukraine has also been involved in weapons training for children and these efforts have only increased in recent months as the city of Bakhmut, an epicenter of the fighting for many months, has reportedly fallen to Russia’s Wagner Group.  CNBC has briefly reported on the “Defense of Ukraine” program at the military-patriotic center for schoolchildren in Lviv.  The center was opened this month with plans to open dozens of other training facilities for children across the country in the near future. 

The western city of Lviv has been a primary relocation point for children escaping the war in the east, so it’s not surprising that the Ukrainian government would seek young recruits for the war effort there.

Keep reading

Kyiv Residents Who Posted Footage of Russian Air Attack on Social Media Threatened With Jail

Six Kyiv residents who posted shocking night-time footage of missiles flying through the air which quickly went viral could face up to eight years in prison if charged with breaking wartime censorship rules.

While in an age of social media saturation, it may seem natural to record and post something extraordinary happening outside your bedroom window, that is presently illegal in Ukraine, as six locals — including a locally famous Instagram model — are finding out.

Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said the Kyiv City Prosecutor’s Office have launched “comprehensive measures” to “establish all the circumstances of the crime and bring the guilty to justice” after footage showing the night-time sky of Kyiv during Tuesday’s “exceptional ” air raid was published online. Russian ‘hypersonic’ missiles and suicide drones were among the 18 incoming shot down in the raid, according to the Ukrainian government.

Keep reading

Russian porn star added to Ukrainian ‘kill list’

A notorious Ukrainian government-linked website that tracks purported enemies of the state has added Russian-born porn star Eva Elfie to its “hit list.” According to the Mirotvorets database, the adult film actress is guilty of “legitimizing the occupation of Crimea.”

Mirotvorets publishes profiles of public figures and private citizens whom it considers to be enemies of Ukraine, marking those have died by any causes as “eliminated.” It is also known to dox its targets whenever it obtains their personal data. Some of the people blacklisted by Mirotvorets have been murdered.

The website took issue with Elfie, whose real name is Yulia Romanova, traveling to Crimea for a photo shoot 2018, just as her adult entertainment career was taking off. The Siberian-born actress’s popularity was given a boost in 2021, when she received the ‘Best New Foreign Starlet’ accolade at the adult movie industry’s prestigious AVN Awards.

According to an anonymous Mirotvorets editor, Elfie was blacklisted after she became “the number one porn actress in the world.”

A screenshot posted by Elfie in November of her Pornhub profile showed that she was ranked first on the adult website, with over 870 million views and 1.9 million subscribers. In April, she received a Pornhub award for ‘Most Popular Female Performer Chosen by Women’.

Keep reading

St. Petersburg Uhuru members speak for first time since indictment

It’s a matter of free speech, says Omali Yeshitela, the longtime leader of the St. Petersburg-based Uhuru Movement and founder of the African People’s Socialist Party.

Yeshitela was indicted by a federal grand jury in Tampa last month and accused of working with Russian nationals to sow discord in the United States, spread pro-Russian propaganda and influence elections, along with two other members of the Uhuru Movement, Penny Joanne Hess and Jesse Nevel.

On Wednesday, the three Uhuru members spoke to the press for the first time since their indictment.

“I believe in free speech,” Yeshitela said at the news conference. “If I didn’t believe in free speech, I would never have said anything because they kill Black people for talking in this country.”

Yeshitela founded the African People’s Socialist Party in 1972. The Uhuru Movement is the party’s activist branch, started in the 1990s. The group supports reparations for Black people and has protested racism, colonialism and capitalism for decades. Hess and Nevel are the chairpersons of groups for white allies under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement, respectively.

Keep reading

U.S. meddling contributed to the Russia-Ukraine war, it’s time we stop meddling around the world

The United States should end involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war, call for a cease-fire and begin negotiations immediately.

No matter what the War Party claims about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s supposed desire to reinstate the Soviet Union or Russian empire, the fact is that this war was provoked by the United States, and — no surprise — particularly the neoconservatives.

Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama overthrew the government of Ukraine twice in 10 years, with their astro-turfed fake Orange and Maidan so-called “revolutions” of 2004 and 2014 because the people of Ukraine kept voting for the wrong guy.

W. announced at Bucharest in 2008 America’s determination to bring both Ukraine and former-Soviet Georgia, both of which border Russia, into the NATO alliance, just as he had overseen the addition of the Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in 2004. This led to war in Georgia just a few months later when their American-installed regime attempted to reconquer two provinces lost during the breakup of the Soviet Union.

W. also began installing anti-ballistic missile systems in Romania and Poland, which are launched from the dual-use Mark-41 launchers, which can also fit Tomahawk cruise missiles, which can be fitted with hydrogen bombs, thus violating at least the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s great Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty of 1987, which President Donald Trump tore up in 2019.

The Obama administration — led by Robert Kagan’s wife, former Dick Cheney advisor Victoria Nuland — supported the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, with neo-Nazi and far-right groups taking an active role in the overthrow. Soon, the new regime threatened to kick the Russians out of their only year-around, warm-water port at Sevastopol, Crimea, leading to Ukraine’s loss of the entire peninsula and the outbreak of war in the far-eastern Donbas region, which was majority ethnic Russian and had supported the recently ousted president.

After France and Germany struck the Minsk peace deals of 2014 and 2015 between Ukraine and Russia, Obama and Trump sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons to Kiev, incentivizing their continued violation of the peace deals.

After eight years of so-called “low-level” proxy war in the east, Putin demanded the full implementation of the Minsk agreements and a new treaty with the United States promising not to integrate Ukraine into NATO or station missiles there.

Instead of negotiating in good faith, the Biden administration said they were looking forward to replicating U.S. support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s. They would bog Russia down and bleed them to bankruptcy just as the Soviets had helped do to the United States in Vietnam and our own government has been helping Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda do to us for the last 20 years in the Middle East.

Keep reading

This Is What Dystopia Looks Like

So U2 singer Bono is doing illustrations for the imperialist propaganda rag The Atlantic now, because that’s the sort of thing that happens in a dystopian civilization during the death throes of a globe-spanning empire.

A Washington Post article, “Bono likes to sketch Atlantic covers, so the magazine hired him,” reports that “Bono is into Atlantic cover fanfic — so much so that he was invited to illustrate the magazine’s June cover featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.” 

Bono’s latest contribution to the mountain of cringe-inducing Zelensky moments we’ve been seeing for the past year provides a cover image for an article by lifelong war propagandists Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg.

The article endorses a Ukrainian offensive to recapture Crimea, which experts largely agree would be the move most likely to trigger a nuclear war in this conflict.

Here’s a paragraph from Applebaum and Goldberg’s article, just to give you a taste of the infantile “Good Guys vs Bad Guys” framing that Western liberals are being fed by mass media war propagandists these days:

“Sometimes, the war is described as a battle between autocracy and democracy, or between dictatorship and freedom. In truth, the differences between the two opponents are not merely ideological, but also sociological. Ukraine’s struggle against Russia pits a heterarchy against a hierarchy. An open, networked, flexible society — one that is both stronger at the grassroots level and more deeply integrated with Washington, Brussels, and Silicon Valley than anyone realized — is fighting a very large, very corrupt, top-down state. On one side, farmers defend their land and 20?something engineers build eyes in the sky, using tools that would be familiar to 20?something engineers anywhere else. On the other side, commanders send waves of poorly armed conscripts to be slaughtered — just as Stalin once sent shtrafbats, penal battalions, against the Nazis — under the leadership of a dictator obsessed with ancient bones. ‘The choice,’ Zelensky told us, ‘is between freedom and fear.’”

Keep reading

“Consider it a fake, even if it’s not” – FBI accused of assisting Ukraine with Facebook censorship

The FBI has been pressuring Facebook and other platforms to censor misinformation on behalf of Ukraine, even when the information is not necessarily untrue, according to a report by independent journalist Lee Fang.

Fang learned about the FBI’s alleged role in the censorship after interviewing the head of the Department of Cyber Information Security of Ukraine, Illia Vitiuk.

“Once we have a trace or evidence of disinformation campaigns via Facebook or other resources that are from the US, we pass this information to the FBI, along with writing directly to Facebook,” said Vitiuk.

“We asked FBI for support to help us with Meta, to help us with others, and sometimes we get good results with that.”

They also flag information that might be true.

“When people ask me, ‘How do you differentiate whether it is fake or true?’ Indeed it is very difficult in such an informational flow,” said Vitiuk. “I say, ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’ Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.”

From the report:

“During the panel, Vitiuk thanked the Ukrainian government’s many public and private sector allies in the United States, including Mandiant, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Clearview, Google, Amazon, and Starlink, among others. Cyber security support from American partners has helped thwart Russian cyber attacks on civilian and military infrastructure and have been a “psychological game changer,” Vitiuk said. He emphasized that the FBI has been his agency’s ‘top partner.’”

While such tactics are a common, but controversial, warfare practice, the FBI is supposed to have the First Amendment to think about.

The allegations that the FBI continue to be involved in online censorship is concerning, especially given that the FBI’s censorship efforts have already been exposed by Matt Taibbi and other journalists who released the Twitter Files.

Keep reading

Russia says foiled Ukrainian drone attack on the Kremlin

The Kremlin said on Wednesday it shot down two drones launched by Ukraine and accused Kyiv of attempting to kill Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The alleged thwarted operation comes on the heels of a series of incidents — including trains sabotage — ahead of the popular WWII victory celebrations.

“Today at night, the Kyiv regime attempted to strike the Kremlin residence of the President of the Russian Federation with unmanned aerial vehicles,” the Kremlin said.

“Two unmanned aerial vehicles were aimed at the Kremlin,” it said.

“We regard these actions as a planned terrorist act and an attempt on the life of the President of the Russian Federation.”

Moscow said Putin was not wounded and its forces downed the drone without any casualties.

It said that debris from the drone “fell on the territory of the Kremlin.”

Authorities have tried to reassure Russians that the conflict is distant and does not pose a threat to Russian territory.

Keep reading

How The FBI Helps Ukrainian Intelligence Hunt ‘Disinformation’ On Social Media

The Federal Bureau of Investigation pressures Facebook to take down alleged Russian “disinformation” at the behest of Ukrainian intelligence, according to a senior Ukrainian official who corresponds regularly with the FBI. The same official said that Ukrainian authorities define “disinformation” broadly, flagging many social media accounts and posts that he suggested may simply contradict the Ukrainian government’s narrative.

“Once we have a trace or evidence of disinformation campaigns via Facebook or other resources that are from the U.S., we pass this information to the FBI, along with writing directly to Facebook,” said llia Vitiuk, head of the Department of Cyber Information Security in the Security Service of Ukraine.

“We asked FBI for support to help us with Meta, to help us with others, and sometimes we get good results with that,” noted Vitiuk. “We say, ‘Okay, this was the person who was probably Russia’s influence.'”

Vitiuk, in an interview, said that he is a proponent of free speech and understands concerns around social media censorship. But he also admitted that he and his colleagues take a deliberately expansive view of what counts as “Russian disinformation.”

“When people ask me, ‘How do you differentiate whether it is fake or true?’ Indeed it is very difficult in such an informational flow,” said Vitiuk. “I say, ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’ Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.”

In recent weeks, Vitiuk said, Russian forces have used various forms of disinformation to manufacture fake tension between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the four-star general who serves as commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s military.

Keep reading