Note to readers: With The New York Times’s recent ten-thousand-word piece exposing some of the lies we were told about Ukraine, I decided to write my own seven-thousand-word piece reviewing all the lies we were told about Ukraine but with the ability to add many that The New York Times’s limited hangout left out. The following article is my best attempt at a definitive review of the lies that were told about Ukraine.
Introduction
For years, Western governments and their servants in mainstream media have lied to the public to manufacture consent for war.
Perhaps the most extensive pro-war propaganda campaign in history is the campaign to manufacture consent for the proxy war in Ukraine and the new cold war with Russia.
Noam Chomsky, who co-wrote Manufacturing Consent, noted that the propaganda over Ukraine was the most extensive in his lifetime, saying that “censorship in the United States” over dissenting views on Ukraine “has reached such a level beyond anything in my lifetime.”
I recently covered the latest New York Times article on Ukraine, which finally admitted that the war was an American-run proxy war that risked World War Three and a nuclear war.
The article also revealed that the Biden administration and mainstream media lied about the war all along. As journalist Matt Taibbi noted in his piece on the article, it proves that “the public was lied to on a continuous basis from the outset of the conflict” and that “From Joe Biden down, they all lied about the risk of World War III”.
Despite the fact that the New York Times piece revealed many lies told about Ukraine, it was still a limited hangout that only got into a small fraction of them.
In this article, I will attempt to document all (at least most) of the lies we were told about Ukraine, including those included in the New York Times piece and those left out.
Lie 1: Unprovoked Invasion (NATO Expansion, Maidan Coup, Maidan Massacre, and more Provocations)
Perhaps the biggest lie told about the Ukraine war was the claim that the Russian invasion in February of 2022 was “unprovoked”.
While it was certainly illegal and, in my view, unjustified, the war was undoubtedly provoked. As Noam Chomsky put it, “It’s quite interesting that in American discourse, it is almost obligatory to refer to the invasion as the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine … Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion”.
In this section, I will focus on the two major ways the war was provoked, first by looking at NATO expansion and second by looking at the U.S.-backed Maidan coup of 2014.
NATO Provocation.
Perhaps the biggest hole in the lie that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” is the fact that Russia experts from across the spectrum warned that expanding NATO eastward to Russia’s borders would provoke a response from Russia.
As far back as 1997, the veteran U.S. diplomat Geroge Kennan wrote that NATO expansion was “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era”.
He wrote that NATO expansion would
be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma's ratification of the Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry.
Kennan wrote that this view was “not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters”.
Despite this, NATO expanded to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999 and Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004.
Willian Burns, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia who later became Biden’s CIA director, also warned about the consequences of NATO expansion in a 2008 memo titled “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia's Nato Enlargement Redines”.
In the memo, Burns said that the NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia “not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region.”
Burns warned that “experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face”.
Burns noted that “While Russian opposition to the first round of NATO enlargement in the mid-1990's was strong, Russia now feels itself able to respond more forcefully to what it perceives as actions contrary to its national interests.”
Despite this, the United States refused to take Ukraine's NATO membership off the table.
Even before the Russian invasion began, the United States refused to say that NATO would not expand toward Ukraine.
As Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson noted in their book The Myth of American Idealism:
The United States ... declined to push for a settlement. It Refused to consider revoking the commitment to admit Ukraine into NATO. In fact, in December 2021, NATO reaffirmed that it was ultimately planning to integrate. Even As the U.S. warned of an impending invasion, it made no diplomatic efforts to influence Russia's behavior.
This was despite the fact that they had no real intention of actually allowing NATO membership for Ukraine.
The Economist and Columbia University Professor Jeffery Sachs testified at the European parliament that he “had an hour-long call with” then national security advisor Jake Sullivan where he was “begging” him to “avoid the war”.
Sachs testified that he told Sullivan, “You can avoid the war. All the US has to do is say, NATO will not enlarge Ukraine”.
Sachs said that Sullivan replied, “Oh, NATO’s not going to enlarge Ukraine. Don’t worry about it.”
This shows that the United States not only provoked the Russian invasion but did so intentionally.
As the Ukrainian outlet Stranaua wrote, “Washington had two ways to prevent” the Ukraine war:
The first is to agree to the agreement on security in Europe proposed by Putin in December 2021, including a commitment not to expand NATO and not to include Ukraine in the Alliance.
The second is to make it clear that in the event of a Russian attack on Ukraine, the United States will enter the war. And back it up with concrete actions. For example, by sending US Army units near Kharkov and Kyiv.
But as the outlet noted, the administration chose neither because they “imagined themselves to be great ‘geopolitical combinators’ and decided to play a ‘cunning game’, actually pushing Putin to invade, hoping that it would lead to his collapse.”
Stranaua noted that the United States “did not make any compromises with the Russian Federation regarding the neutral status of Ukraine” while “on the other hand, almost daily repeating like a mantra that ‘the United States will not enter the war”, guaranteeing that Russia would invade.
Noam Chomsky has said that this strategy is parallel with “the U.S. attitude toward the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s”.
For context, the U.S. diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted in an interview that the United States gave “secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul,” which “knowingly increased the probability that” the Soviets would invade.
The intention, according to Brzezinski, was to “draw the Russians into the Afghan trap” because it gave them “the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war”.
In the case of Ukraine, the United States and NATO continued to expand NATO and signal support for Ukrainian NATO membership- despite the fact that virtually every Russia expert warned it would lead to a Russian invasion- in order to create a “Ukraine trap” so that they could use Ukraine to weaken Russia.
The Maidan Coup
The other way the United States massively provoked the war in Ukraine was by backing a coup against Ukraine’s democratically elected government and installing a more pro U.S. one.
The mainstream media completely ignored this fact in order to back up their lie that the war was unprovoked
The New York Times even smeared journalist Benjamin Norton as a “conspiracy theorist” for stating this fact.
The mainstream media and Western governments have claimed that Ukraine’s democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych was removed in 2014, solely due to grassroots efforts that had no U.S. backing.
While there were certainly protestors that came out in Ukraine in 2014 with legitimate grievances against Yanukovych, the U.S. was undeniably involved.
As journalist Mark Ames uncovered, New Citizen, the organization that the Financial Times said “played a big role in getting the protest up and running” had received “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from the U.S. government through USAID and NED.
Carl Gershman, the former head of the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy, even admitted this in September of 2013, a few months before the U.S. funded the Maidan protests.
In an Op-Ed in the Washington Post, Gershman wrote that the “The United States needs to engage with the governments and with civil society in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova” to push them in a more pro-West direction, stating that “the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help” and that “Ukraine is the biggest prize”.
Once Yannakovitch was overthrown, the aforementioned Jeffery Sachs was invited to Ukraine to advise the new government and said that United States officials bragged about this strategy.
In an interview with the “Breaking Points” show, Sachs said:
“I flew there (to Ukraine) … and when I got there somebody representing an American NGO … somebody explained to me how much American money had gone into pumping up the Maidan (coup). I saw it (the Americans said) we gave 50 thousand to this one (think tank), 5 million to this one, 5 thousand to this one and so forth”
Once the U.S.-funded protests were up and running, they began to be led by some more violent, far-right groups.
Journalist Branko Marcetic reported in Jacobin Magazine that the violence that led to the ousting of Yannakocitch was primarily perpetrated by “members of the far-right Svoboda party — whose leader once complained Ukraine was run by a ‘Muscovite-Jewish mafia’ and which includes a politician who admires Joseph Goebbels” and “Right Sector, a collection of far-right activists that traces its lineage to genocidal Nazi collaborators.”
Despite this, American government officials continued to support the protestors.
The U.S. Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy even went to Ukraine and stood alongside Oleh Tyahnybok- the leader of the aforementioned far-right Svoboda party- while he called to oust the Yanukovych government.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes reporting on this story at the time said :
When Senator John McCain and Senator Chris Murphy went to stand with these protesters in December, they stood next to this guy, who is an opposition leader and who also happens to lead Ukraine's right-wing nationalist party, Svoboda. They were also first registered as a neo-Nazi party and they're in the streets right now shooting at police.
You know what arguably could be called naive? Going on stage at a Ukrainian opposition rally and not realizing you're standing next to a man who heads Ukraine's right-wing nationalist party, a party that was first registered as a neo-Nazi party, which is exactly what John McCain did back in December when he stood next to Oleh Tiahnybok, the leader of Ukraine's Svoboda Party, which according to 'The New York Times' traces its roots to the Ukrainian partisan army of World War II, which was loosely allied with Nazi Germany.
After Yanukovych was overthrown in a violent coup, Chris Murphy even went on TV and bragged that the United States was behind it.
In an interview with C-Span, Murphy said:
With respect to Ukraine we (the U.S. government) have been very much involved, we have members of the senate who have been there, members of the State Department who have been on the square.
Murphy went on to say that “it was our role, including sanctions and threats of sanctions, that forced, in part, Yanukovych from office” and that the United States involvement “helped lead to this change in regime”.
The United States was also deeply involved in picking who would be in and out of the new Ukrainian government once Yanukovych was removed.
Victoria Nuland, who at the time was the United States’ ultra-hawkish assistant secretary of state, was caught on tape in a phone call with the United States ambassador to Ukraine, Jeffery Pyatt, picking who will make up the new government.
In the call, Nuland says:
I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience. He's the... what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know. I just think Klitsch going in... he's going to be at that level working for Yatseniuk, it's just not going to work.
Pyatt responded to Nuland saying “we want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing”.
“Yats” was referring to Arseniy Yatseniuk, one of the three top opposition leaders in Ukraine at the time, alongside Vitaly Klitschko and Oleh Tyahnybok.
Once Yanukovych was overthrown, Arseniy Yatsenyuk unspirpsingly became Ukraine's interim prime minister.
Forbes Magazine reported that the reason the United States installed “Yats” was because “Yanukovych resisted the International Monetary Fund's demand to raise taxes and devalue the currency” while “Yatsenyuk doesn’t mind”.
The Maidan Massacre Lie.
Finally, the entire justification for the coup turned out to be a lie.
The official justification for it was the claim that Yanukovych ordered a sniper massacre of Maidan protesters in the “maidan square” which killed 48 protestors and injured hundreds.
This massacre was used by the United States to push Yanukovych out of power. As the Ukrainian-Canadian professor of political science from the University of Ottawa, Ivan Katchanovski, wrote in his recent paper on the massacre:
Then US Vice President Biden revealed in his memoirs that during the Maidan massacre he called Yanukovych and told him that ‘it was over; time for him to call off his gunmen and walk away’ and that ‘he shouldn’t expect his Russian friends to rescue him from this disaster.’
However, extensive research from Katchanovski proves that this massacre was not carried out by Yanukovych and was actually a false flag perpetrated by the far-right paramilitary group Right Sector, which was trying to oust him.
Katchanovski carefully reviewed footage from a trial in Ukraine on this massacre and found that the majority of survivor testimony said “they had been shot by snipers from Maidan-controlled buildings or areas, had themselves witnessed snipers there, or had been told by other Maidan protesters about such snipers”.
The forensics from the trial also found that “40 out of the 48 killed protesters were shot from a high angle” at a time when Yanukovych’s forces were “filmed on the ground”.
The forensic finding showed that the victims had “steep entry wounds, consistent with the theory that they were shot by snipers in Maidan-controlled buildings”.
Despite the overwhelming forensic evidence and witness testimony showing that the sniper massacre was carried out by far-right pro-Maidan groups, the mainstream media has completely ignored these revelations.
Outside of a single sentence from a recent article in “The Hill” that says:
as recently documented by overwhelming forensic evidence, and affirmed even by a Kyiv court, it was Ukrainian right-wing militants who started the violence in 2014 that provoked Russia’s initial invasion of the country’s southeast including Crimea.
the mainstream media has completely ignored this research.
The New York Times even put out a phony forensic report using “3-D modeling” to try to prove that Yanukovych was behind the massacre.
Ivan Katchanovski revealed that the lawyers in the trial that paid for the study “did not present the SITU 3D model during the trial, even after wasting court and jury time by introducing it.”
This was because “the model was unreliable, having been based on a primitive fraud in which the victims’ wound locations, which in fact accorded with the direction of gunfire from Maidan-controlled buildings, were altered to accord instead with Berkut positions on the ground.”
The point of this fraudulent study was used “to propagate disinformation in articles published in the New York Times and other Western and Ukrainian media.”
Maidan Coup Aftermath
The coup in Ukraine also caused a civil war in Eastern Ukraine (exactly as William Burns predicted).
Shortly after the coup, Maidan supporters clashed with pro-Russian Ukrainian activists in Odessa, Ukraine, which resulted in the pro-Maidan activists trapping the Russian supporters in the burning Trade Union Building, which led to 42 of them being killed.
The European Court of Human Rights recently found that the new coup government in Ukraine intentionally allowed this massacre to happen ruling that “the relevant authorities had not done everything they reasonably could to prevent the violence, to stop that violence after its outbreak, and to ensure timely rescue measures for those trapped in the fire in the Trade Union Building”.
The court even found that “The deployment of fire engines to the site of the fire had been deliberately delayed for 40 minutes, and the police had not stepped in to help evacuate people from the building promptly and safely. Therefore, the State had failed to ensure timely rescue measures”.
These clashes eventually led to a full-scale civil war between pro-Russia Ukranians in the Eastern Ukraine Donbas region -backed by the Russian government- and the pro-West Ukrainian government- backed by the West.
While Obama refused to send lethal arms to the Ukrainian government while this was happening, the Trump administration did by approving lethal arms sales in 2017 and 2019.
These arms sales led to an increase in civilian casualties on the Russian-aligned side of the Ukraine conflict.
The United Nations found that between 2018 and 2021, 81 percent of the civilian casualties from the conflict happened on the pro-Russia side.
The coup also further intertwined American intelligence in Ukraine.
The New York Times reported that after the coup, the CIA began to use Ukrainian intelligence for their own goals.
The article notes that the CIA “supported a network of spy bases (in Ukraine) constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border.”
The article also found that “Around 2016, the C.I.A. began training an elite Ukrainian commando force — known as Unit 2245 — which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that C.I.A. technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems.” and that “the C.I.A. also helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other places where the Russians have a large presence.”
The Times reported that “The relationship is so ingrained that C.I.A. officers remained at a remote location in western Ukraine when the Biden administration evacuated U.S. personnel in the weeks before Russia invaded in February 2022.”
This “relationship,” according to the Times, “can be traced back to two phone calls on the night of Feb. 24, 2014, eight years to the day before Russia’s full-scale invasion.”
The Times noted that this was after “Millions of Ukrainians had just overrun the country’s pro-Kremlin government and the president, Viktor Yanukovych, and his spy chiefs had fled to Russia.”
Provoked
Contrary to the claim that the Russian Invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked,” the reality is that the United States and the West provoked the war, repeatedly including by expanding NATO and threatening to bring Ukraine into NATO, despite being repeatedly warned by Russia experts that it would trigger a war, and by backing a coup in 2014 that led to more violence against ethnic Russians in Ukraine and allowed for U.S. intelligence to use Ukraine to monitor Russia.
Lie 2: No Nazis In Ukraine.
Another massive lie from the mainstream media was that Ukraine did not have a problem with the far-right and neo-nazis and that this claim was “Russian propaganda”.
While it is true that Russia overexaggerated this issue to justify its invasion of Ukraine, and it is also true that the Russian government has ties to far-right groups itself such as the Wagner mercenary group, there is no denying that there is a neo-nazi problem in Ukraine.
As stated above, far-right groups such as the right sector and the Svoboda party played a major role in violence that led to the 2014 coup.
Unspirisigly, this led to these groups having much more influence in the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian society.
At the time, Foreign Policy Magazine noted that “The uncomfortable truth is that a sizable portion of Kiev’s current government — and the protesters who brought it to power — are, indeed, fascists.”
The magazine reported that the Svoboda party, which was “arguably Europe’s most influential far-right movement today”, “holds a larger chunk of its nation’s ministries” after the Maidan coup.
The UK’s Channel 4 news reported at the time that “the far-right took top posts in Ukraine’s power vacuum” after the coup.
The outlet reported that “the man facing down Putin’s aggression as secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council is Andriy Parubiy, the founder of the Social-National Party of Ukraine, a fascist party styled on Hitler’s Nazis, with membership restricted to ethnic Ukrainians.”
The outlet also reported that:
Overseeing the armed forces alongside Parubiy as the Deputy Secretary of National Security is Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of the Right Sector – a group of hardline nationalist streetfighters, who previously boasted they were ready for armed struggle to free Ukraine
and that
The new Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych is a member of the far-right Svoboda party, which the World Jewish Congress called on the EU to consider banning last year along with Greece’s Golden Dawn.
The Maidan coup also led to the creation of the “Azov Battalion”, a group of neo-nazi thugs that formed a paramilitary organization and fought in the Eastern Ukraine conflict as an official part of the Ukrainian military.
The group was so prevalent that in 2018, the U.S. included a provision in that year’s House spending bill prohibiting U.S. weapons from going to the group.
Reporting on the provision, the Hill wrote that “The Azov Battalion was founded in 2014, and its first commander was Andriy Biletsky, who previously headed the neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine. Several members of the militia, which has been integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard, are self-avowed neo-Nazis.”
Democratic representative Ro Khanna, who spearheaded the provision at the time said “White supremacy and neo-Nazism are unacceptable and have no place in our world, I am very pleased that the recently passed omnibus prevents the U.S. from providing arms and training assistance to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion fighting in Ukraine”.
However, the legislation was unlikely to actually prevent U.S. weapons from going to Azov. As Stephen F. Cohen wrote in the Nation at the time:
Congressional legislation recently banned Azov from receiving any US military aid, but it is likely to obtain some of the new weapons recently sent to Kiev by the Trump Administration due to the country’s rampant network of corruption and black market.
While neo-Nazis certainly make up a very small amount of the Ukrainian population, they are overrepresented in influence.
The most consequential example of this is when they were able to block the implementation of the “Minski 2 accords”, a peace plan that would have ended the fighting in Eastern Ukraine.
For context, Volodymyr Zelenskyy campaigned and was elected in 2019 on a platform of fully implementing the Minsk Accords and ending the war.
However, as the NGO Finnish Peace Defender reported :
While President Zelensky is trying to follow commitments given to his electorate and international obligations in implementation of the Minsk Agreements, he has to overcome obstacles placed by irregular armed groups who identify themselves as patriots of Ukraine.
On October 7, the Ukrainian Army should have withdrawn from the settlements at the frontline, Zolote and nearby Katerynivka, in the Luhansk Region. The 72nd Mechanized Brigade, which is currently deployed to the area, should have received the order in the morning that day. The same should have been done by the units of the opposing side controlling part of the villages. The OSCE SMM should have overseen the pullback.
It didn’t happen, due to the open threats and blackmail by far-right military circles in Ukraine, including the National Corps led by Andrii Biletski.
The President of Ukraine (Zelensky) went to a frontline in Donbas to personally convince far-right military formation members, reportedly from the neo-Nazi-led Azov regiment, to stop blocking implementation of the Minsk agreement to withdraw troops along with the militants of the self-proclaimed entities.
Andrii Biletsky is reported to continue threatening the president with thousands of volunteers engaged in “defending the last checkpoint” of Zolote if the president goes on with the disengagement plan.
Ivan Katchanovski noted at the time that “This shows that a few thousand neo-Nazis not only have power to block the crucial agreement towards peace in Donbas but that the president has no power and will to disband and arrest them and has to plead with them in person.” He said that this “is another manifestation of the actual power of the far right in Ukraine”.
This was even acknowledged by former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a podcast interview.
In the interview, he said, “Zelensky is not an unreasonable guy, he got elected as a peacenik, in 2019 he tried to do a deal with Putin, as far as I can remember his basic problem was that the Ukrainian nationalists (ie neo-nazis) couldn’t accept the compromise”.
Because of these facts, Ukraine’s neo-nazi problem was widely acknowledged before Russia’s invasion in February of 2022, even by U.S. government aligned outlets such as the Atlantic Council and Bellingcat.
However, after the war started, the West and the United States- in partnership with the mainstream media- ran a massive propaganda campaign to whitewash this fact.
When Biden’s DHS temporarily created a “disinformation governance board” its head -Nina Jankowitz- had a long history of whitewashing neo-nazis in Ukraine.
Ukranian-American journalist Lev Golinkin reported in the Nation that Jankowitz previously defended “Aidar, Dnipro-1, Donbas, and Azov,” four groups which have “a documented record of war crimes, while Azov is an outright neo-Nazi group” while she worked for the Ukrainian think tank “Stop-Fake”.
In a separate article, Golinkin found that Western outlets such as BBC, The Guardian and Deutsche Welle had all run articles whitewashing Azovs’s well documented neo-nazi affiliations after the Ukraine war began.
This was also true of American media like the New York Times. In a 2015 article, the Times described Azov as “openly neo-Nazi, using the “Wolf’s Hook” symbol associated with the SS.” In 2019, the paper again described the group as “a Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization”.
However, by 2022, the New York Times threw this fact down the memory hole and began running articles described the group as “Ukraine’s celebrated Azov Battalion” without mentioning the Neo-Nazi ties.
This propaganda campaign eventually led the Biden administration to lift the 2018 ban on U.S. weapons going to the Azov Battalion in 2024, thus allowing U.S. weapons to flow directly to a Neo-Nazi paramilitary group.
Lie 3: Russia Could Not Be Negotiated With.
Another major lie from the Western government and the mainstream media was the claim that Russia was not willing to negotiate an end to the war.
In reality, Russia was willing to negotiate from the beginning and it was actually the West that was not open to peace.
As the legendary late journalist John Pilger reported, Russia, at the UN, listed several demands to the West they would need in order to not invade Ukraine before the war began. They were:
NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missiles in nations bordering Russia. (They are already in place from Slovenia to Romania, with Poland to follow)
NATO to stop military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia.
Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.
the West and Russia to sign a binding East-West security pact.
– the landmark treaty between the US and Russia covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be restored. (The US abandoned it in 2019)
The West refused to negotiate on a single one of these demands, instead intentionally pushing Russia to invade as described above.
Furthermore, the West actively blocked a peace deal that could have ended the war two months in.
For context, Russia and Ukraine were close to negotiating a peace deal in Istanbul, Turkey, in April of 2022.
The Ukrainian outlet Pravda reported that the deal fell through because former UK prime minister Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv and told the Ukranians that “Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with” and that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they (the West) are not”.
The outlet noted that:
Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined and that there was a chance to press him.
Three days after Johnson left for Britain, Putin went public and said talks with Ukraine "had turned into a dead end.
This story was confirmed by the former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who took part in the peace talks and said he thought “both sides very much wanted a ceasefire,” but the West “stopped it”.
Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, the Turkish foreign minister who took part in the talks, also said he “did not think that the Russia- Ukraine war would continue much longer following the peace talks in Istanbul” but that after “following the NATO foreign ministers” he “had the impression that there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue” because “they want Russia to become weaker”.
This was also acknowledged by multiple Ukrainian officials.
Oleksandr Chalyi, a Ukrainian diplomat who was at the peace talks said he though “we were very close” to ending “our war with some peaceful settlement” during the Istanbul talks and that Russia “tried to do everything possible to conclude an agreement with Ukraine” and “really wanted to reach some peaceful settlement”.
David Arakhamia, the lead Ukrainian negotiator at the Istanbul talks, said:
Russia's goal was to put pressure on us so that we would take neutrality. This was the main thing for them: they were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality, as Finland once did. And we will give a commitment that we will not join NATO. This is the main thing
but
Boris Johnson then came to Kyiv and said that he did not want to sign anything with the Russians and (said) "let's just fight.
Contrary to the West’s claims that not taking the peace deal would have let Ukraine win, it is impossible to deny today that the Istanbul deal would have been better for Ukraine.
As the former Zelensky advisor Oleksii Arestovych said:
The Russian side still insisted on peace initiatives. And the Istanbul peace initiatives were very good, an intermediary document... Now 200-300 thousand would be alive, probably, and half of Ukraine would not be destroyed and mined... They agreed to political discussions on Crimea... We made concessions, but the amount of their concessions was greater. This will never happen again, it won’t, they will push more and more
Lie 4: Russia Blew Up Their Own Pipeline
Perhaps the most absurd lie about the Ukraine war was the claim that Russia blew up their own pipeline -the Nord Stream pipeline with Germany- in September of 2022.
The claim on its face was ridiculous. Because the Nord Stream pipeline sold gas to Europe, it was a key tool Russia had as leverage over Europe, they would have no motive whatsoever to blow it up.
The United States, on the other hand, had every motive to blow it up and admitted this publicly.
As Military Watch magazine noted, the Nord Stream bombing “follows years of American calls under multiple administrations” for Europe “to use more costly American LNG over Russian gas to deny Moscow both revenues and a significant strategic asset”.
Officials from the Biden administration even admitted their intention of blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline before and after it was done.
On February 7th of 2022, Joe Biden said in a press conference, “if Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine again, there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
After a reporter asked him how he was going to do that, he replied saying “I promise you: We will be able to do it”.
In a Senate Hearing, Senator Ted Cruz pressed the Under Secretary of State for the Biden administration, Victoria Nuland, on why they did not sanction Nord Stream earlier.
Nuland all but fully admitted the U.S. was behind the bombing, telling Cruz, “Senator Cruz, like you I am, and I think the administration is very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea”.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken even came out after the Nord Stream was bombed to say it represented a “tremendous opportunity” for Washinton to reduce Europe's reliance on Russian gas.
After making the ridiculous claim that Russia blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, the Biden administration leaked a series of contradictory and confusing stories to the mainstream media about what really happened to Nord Stream.
Some of these articles claimed that the attack was done by a Ukrainian officer with knowledge from American intelligence while others claim that the attack was done by a small group of rogue Ukrainian officials.
Some of these reports blamed the Ukrainian government for the attack, while others claimed the government did not approve the operation.
All of these intelligence reports were damage control for the real story, which was reported by legendary journalist Seymour Hersh before these “leaks” came out.
Hersh’s report- based on inside sources- reported that the Biden administration worked with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy to plant C4 explosives on the Pipeline and have them blown up on September 26th, 2022, by having Norway drop a sonar buoy by plane and setting off the explosives.
Lie 5- Ukraine Will Win.
Another major- and endlessly repeated lie- was the claim that Ukraine would win the war against Russia and win territory back in the “spring counteroffensive” of 2023.
The fact that Ukraine has not won proves this claim to be false, but it was not an example of the U.S. government just being incorrect.
Multiple recent reports have revealed that behind the scenes, the Biden administration knew full well Ukraine would not win and knowingly lied.
A recent report in Time Magazine noted that “When Russia invaded Ukraine nearly three years ago, President Joe Biden set three objectives for the U.S. response. Ukraine’s victory was never among them.”
The report quoted former Biden administration official Eric Green, who said, “We were deliberately not talking about the territorial parameters”.
Time Magazine noted that this showed “The U.S., in other words, made no promise to help Ukraine recover all of the land Russia had occupied, and certainly not the vast territories in eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula taken in its initial invasion in 2014.”
Green told the magazine, “The reason was simple, in the White House’s view, doing so was beyond Ukraine’s ability, even with robust help from the West”.
Green noted that the Biden administration's “success” was “unfortunately the kind of success where you don’t feel great about it because there is so much suffering for Ukraine and so much uncertainty about where it’s ultimately going to land”.
The recent New York Times piece found that even Mark Milley, who served as the Biden administration’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (ie, top military advisor), never thought Ukraine would win.
He was quoted in the article as often saying, “You’ve got a little Russian army fighting a big Russian army, and they’re fighting the same way, and the Ukrainians will never win”.
The article also documented the fact that Milley and the Pentagon always knew the “spring counteroffensive” would fail, writing:
At the Pentagon, officials worried about their ability to supply enough weapons for the counteroffensive; perhaps the Ukrainians, in their strongest possible position, should consider cutting a deal. When the Joint Chiefs chairman, General Milley, floated that idea in a speech, many of Ukraine’s supporters (including congressional Republicans, then overwhelmingly supportive of the war) cried appeasement.
Lie 6- The U.S/Biden Is Not Risking World War Three.
As Journalist Matt Taibbi noted, “we were consistently told by Biden and everyone else … that World War III won’t be fought in Ukraine, because the United States was not bringing its own troops into the theater of battle”.
However, the recent New York Times piece revealed that the Biden administration did risk nuclear war with Russia -repeatedly.
The article wrote that the intelligence “partnership” between the United States and Ukraine “operated in the shadow of deepest geopolitical fear — that Mr. Putin might see it as breaching a red line of military engagement and make good on his often-brandished nuclear threats”.
The Times even reported that “the story of the partnership shows how close the Americans and their allies sometimes came to that red line” because “Time and again, the Biden administration authorized clandestine operations it had previously prohibited”.
The report noted that time and time again, the Biden administration took more moves that further increased the chance of World War three, writing:
American military advisers were dispatched to Kyiv and later allowed to travel closer to the fighting. Military and C.I.A. officers in Wiesbaden helped plan and support a campaign of Ukrainian strikes in Russian-annexed Crimea. Finally, the military and then the C.I.A. received the green light to enable pinpoint strikes deep inside Russia itself.
First, the Biden administration opposed sending ATACMS to Ukraine, noting that “Russia’s military chief, General Gerasimov, had indirectly referred to them (ATACMS) the previous May when he warned General Milley that anything that flew 190 miles would be breaching a red line” and that “The Pentagon was already warning that it would not have enough ATACMS if America had to fight its own war”.
However, Biden crossed this red line and “Mr. Zelensky would get his long-pined-for ATACMS” from Biden, “which arrived secretly in early spring, so the Russians wouldn’t realize Ukraine could now strike across Crimea”.
Next, the Biden administration crossed its red line of not allowing U.S. strikes into Crimea, first allowing “the Navy to share points of interest for Russian warships just beyond Crimea’s territorial waters” and later giving the CIA “leeway to act within Crimea itself” and approving “the C.I.A. covertly supporting drone strikes on the port of Sevastopol”.
The Biden administration at first said approving American strikes into the Kerch Strait Bridge- which connects Crimea to Russia- was a red line because “Putin saw the bridge as powerful physical proof of Crimea’s connection to the motherland”
However, he went back on this and “authorized the military and C.I.A. to secretly work with the Ukrainians and the British on a blueprint of attack to bring the bridge down”.
The Biden administration then crossed what it previously called “the hardest red line,” which was American strikes in Russian territory.
The Times reported that Biden approved “an ‘ops box’ — a zone on Russian soil in which the Ukrainians could fire U.S.-supplied weapons” and allowed the CIA to “send officers to the Kharkiv region to assist their Ukrainian counterparts with operations inside the box”.
The Times noted that after this, “The unthinkable had become real. The United States was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil”.
Finally, in 2024, the Times reported that Biden “crossed his final red line” by “expanding the ops box to allow ATACMS and British Storm Shadow strikes into Russia”.
He also “authorized the C.I.A. to support long-range missile and drone strikes into a section of southern Russia used as a staging area for the assault on Pokrovsk, and allowed the military advisers to leave Kyiv for command posts closer to the fighting”.
A U.S. official was even quoted in the Times report saying, “Imagine how that would be for us if we knew that the Russians helped some other country assassinate our chairman, like, we’d go to war”.
Despite this, the Biden administration continued to cross its own red line, eventually supporting CIA-coordinated strikes with U.S.-supplied ATACMS deep into Russian territory, risking a nuclear war and World War three.
One Of History’s Most Extensive Propaganda Campaigns.
The propaganda used to push the Ukraine proxy war is one of the most extensive in history. This article -the longest I have ever written - did not even get to mention every lie the West and media told about Ukraine.
This propaganda is important to look back on not only to review how the public was lied to but also as a warning sign for the next pro-war propaganda campaign.
The establishment often recycles similar propaganda tactics from old wars to sell the next one. With a possible war with Iran looming and tensions leading to a new cold war with China, these propaganda tactics are more important to learn than ever.
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Once again. The Dissident excels in boldly dissecting the lies fostered by government and news media that endanger all of us.
great stuff