Factchecking The Guardian's "Factcheck" On Ukraine

In an attempted "factcheck", The Guardian Spreads False Information On The Ukraine Proxy War.

Pictured Above: The Guardian writer’s room.

The British newspaper The Guardian recently put out a “fact check” of Donald Trump’s recent statements about Ukraine during the current peace negotiations. I have a million problems with what Trump said- and what he leaves out- but none of them are mentioned in the article.

In this article, I will be doing a real fact-check on the guardians’ propagandistic “fact-check” of Trump’s statements.

The Guardian article states that:

The US president, Donald Trump, has made a number of at best controversial – and at worst outright false and misleading – statements about Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy

This is just as equally true about a number of claims within the article itself.

Claim one: Unprovoked Invasion

In the “fact check” in response to Trump’s claim that Zelensky “started” the Ukraine war, the Guardian wrote, “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked”.

The reality is that the war has been provoked by the West since the 1990s.

The US government has spent 5 billion dollars since 1991 on propaganda operations in order to bring Ukraine into a more pro-West, anti-Russian direction.

In 1997, the renowned American diplomat George F. Kennan warned in a New York Times op-ed that NATO expansion Eastward, toward Russia “would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”

He prophetically warned that:

Such a decision may 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.

Democratic and Republican administrations alike decided to ignore this warning and expand NATO membership into The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland under Bill Clinton in 1999.

The George W. Bush administration continued this policy by expanding NATO membership to Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia In 2004.

The United States also “unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over Russia’s strenuous objections” under the Bush administration.

In a 2008 diplomatic cable sent by then U.S. ambassador to Russia William Burns, he warned that “Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region.”

He prophetically 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.

The U.S. not only did not take Ukraine and Gergia’s NATO membership in Ukraine off the table, but they decided to do a coup in Ukraine which provoked Russia even more.

The United States sent hundreds of thousands of dollars through USAID to the think tank “New Citizen” which helped organize protests against Ukraine’s then democratically elected-pro Russia-leaning president Viktor Yannkovitch.

The protests were eventually taken over by far-right groups such as the “Right Sector” and “Svoboda” party.

The U.S. Senators Cris Murphy and John Mcain actively went down to Ukraine and stood alongside Oleh Tyahnybok- the leader of the far-right Svoboda party -while he called to overthrow the Yanukovich government in a coup.

The far-right group “Right Sector” then began firing at protestors in Ukraine’s Maidan Square with snipers from a hotel building called “Hotel Ukrayina” that they were occupying.

They then blamed this massacre on Yanukovych and used it to violently depose him in an illegal coup.

After going to Ukraine while this coup happened, Senator Chris Murphy went on C-Span and 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 (Maidan) square.

Murphy said that this along with the Obama administration “passing sanctions”, the Senate being “prepared to pass its own set of sanctions” and the “clear position of the United States” is what “in part what has led to this change in regime”.

Columbia University Professor Jeffery Sachs-who played a role in the economic reforms of post-Soviet states after the Cold War was invited to Ukraine to do the same after the coup.

In an interview with the political talk show “Breaking Points,” 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

Along with the U.S. selected Arseniy Yatseniuk, who became interim prime minister of Ukraine after the coup, the new government was filled with far-right anti-Russian figures.

Channel 4 News reported that the post-coup government included :

the founder of the Social-National Party of Ukraine (later Svoboda), a fascist party styled on Hitler’s Nazis, with membership restricted to ethnic Ukrainians, Andriy Parubiy as the head of National Security and Defence Council

the leader of the Right Sector – a group of hardline nationalist streetfighters, who previously boasted they were ready for armed struggle to free Ukraine, Dmytro Yarosh as Deputy Secretary of National Security.

and

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, Oleksandr Sych as The new Deputy Prime Minister

Unsurprisingly-as William Burns said- this led to civil war in Eastern Ukraine between the pro-Russian Eastern Ukrainians (backed by the Russian government) and pro-West, Western Ukrainians (backed by the United States)

In 2017, the Trump administration sent lethal arms to Ukraine, which ramped up the civilian casualties on the Russian side of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. The United Nations found that between 2018 and 2021, 81.4 percent of the civilian casualties were on the pro-Russia side.

Trump also unilaterally pulled out of the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty) which “banned missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km” in the U.S. and Russia.

Aside from this, when Zelensky ran for president of Ukraine in 2019, he campaigned on implementing the “Minsk 2 Accords”, a peace plan that would have ended the conflict in the Donbas and was unanimously supported by the UN security council in 2015.

He was unable to implement them because of “open threats and blackmail by far-right military circles in Ukraine, including the National Corps led by Andrii Biletski.”

The late professor of Russian studies Stephen F. Cohen noted that the Trump administration refused to back Zelensky up against these threats and instead sided with the “quasi-fascist movement” that was threatening his life to blackmail him against ending the war.

Moving to the Biden administration, he continued to push for NATO membership into Ukraine, as late as December of 2021. As Noam Chomsky noted in his most recent book “in December 2021, NATO reaffirmed that it was ultimately planning to integrate Ukraine”.

Reality: So to recap, the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine was in fact not “unprovoked” and was continuously provoked by both Democratic and Republican administrations despite repeated warnings from multiple experts that it would lead to a war.

Claim Two: The Biden Administration Tried To Stop The Ukraine War.

In the “fact check,” the Guardian wrote:

To deter Moscow from launching the invasion, the US declassified and released intelligence reports exposing Russia’s plans to attack, warning that harsh economic sanctions would follow if the Kremlin proceeded.

In fact, the Biden administration did not want to actually “deter” Russia at all and actively wanted them to invade Ukraine so they could use it to their own geo-political advantage.

At the United Nations, Russia gave a list of demands they would need from the U.S. to not invade Ukraine. They were as the late journalist John Pilger reported :

-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 Biden administration refused to negotiate on a single one of them. As Noam Chomsky noted:

The United States ... declined to push for a settlement. It Refused to consider revoking the commitment to admit Ukraine into NATO. 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.

Chas Freeman, a veteran diplomat who has served in multiple American administrations noted at the time that the Biden Administration's policy was “the neoconservative objective of regime change in Russia” and they wanted to “fight to the last Ukrainian to achieve it.”

The Ukrainian news outlet Stranaua also noted that:

Biden and his key advisers, Nuland and Blinken, apparently 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.

Reality: The reality is, that the Biden administration refused to take NATO membership for Ukraine off the table or negotiate on any of their security concerns, likely because they wanted Russia to invade so they could use the war to “weaken Russia” as defense secretary Loyd Austin said.

Claim Three: The Peace Deal.

The Guardian article also completely misrepresents how the peace deal that was worked out between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul, Turkey in April of 2022 fell through.

In the article, they wrote:

In the days and weeks after the invasion, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators held several rounds of talks in Belarus and Turkey. However, Russia’s demands were maximalist, including the partial demilitarisation of Ukraine, which would have in effect crippled the country’s ability to defend itself in the future.

This completely glosses over what really made the peace deal fall through.

In May of 2022 the Ukrainian outlet “Pravda” reported that the peace deal fell through after UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv and blocked it. As the outlet reported:

According to Ukrainska Pravda sources close to Zelenskyy, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages.

The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with.

And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.

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".

The former Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett -who took part in these peace talks -confirmed this story when he revealed in a podcast interview that he “was under the impression that both sides very much wanted a ceasefire” but “they (the West)blocked it”.

Benett said that “I claim there was a good chance of reaching a ceasefire” and nodded in agreement when the podcast host followed this by saying “had they not curbed it”.

This story was even confirmed by David Arakhamia, the lead Ukranian negotiator, during the peace talks who said

They (Russia) were prepared to end the war if we agreed to – as Finland once did – neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO.

Arakhamia said “There was no confidence in the Russians that they would do it. This could only be done if there were security guarantees”.

He went on to note that when Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv at the behest of the collective west he refused to give Ukraine the security guarantees they wanted and told them they “shouldn't sign anything with them at all – and let's just fight”.

What then Guadian is referring to about the “demilitarization of Ukraine” is a claim made not by Ukraine, but by Joe Biden’s undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland, an ultra-hawkish neo-conservative who is married to Robert Kagan- the co-founder of the think tank behind the Iraq war, “Project for the New American Century.”

When asked by an interviewer about the West’s blocking of the peace deal in Istanbul, Nuland admitted that the U.S. and UK opposed the fact that the deal “included limits on the precise kind of weapons systems that Ukraine could have” and “it was at that point that it fell apart”.

Reality: The reality is that Ukraine and Russia came close to ending the war, with Russia agreeing to withdraw troops if Ukraine agreed to NATO neutrality, but the West actively blocked the deal and refused to sign it or give Ukraine the security guarantees they wanted, urging them to “just fight” instead.

Claim Four: Zelensky Is Polling At 57 percent.

This is probably the most dishonest part of the Guardian’s article so far- where they respond to Trump’s claim that Zelensky is “down at 4% approval” in Ukraine.

The Guardian responds to this by saying :

While Zelenskyy’s popularity has declined since the start of the full-scale invasion, a February poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 57% of Ukrainians trusted the president, up from 52% in December.

The implication of this is that Zelensky would win an election if it were held in Ukraine, so he has no reason to postpone it for his own political survival.

The question asked in the poll cited by the Guardian was Do you Trust Zelensky to which 57 percent of respondents said yes and 37 percent said no.

However, this poll does not reflect electoral polls in Ukraine at all. As the Times of London reported in November of 2024 “Just 16 percent (of Ukrainians) would vote to re-elect him (Zelensky) for a second term, according to an opinion poll of 1,200 Ukrainians published this week by the Social Monitoring Centre in Kyiv.

The Times went on to write that

The poll, the most comprehensive study of electoral preferences since the invasion began in 2022, also found that about 60 percent would prefer Zelensky not to even stand for re-election.

They also reported that “Valery Zaluzhny, the former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces” was “Top of the poll, ahead of Zelensky, with 27 percent”.

Reality: The Guardian is trying to undermine claims that Zelensky wants to postpone elections to stay in power by citing a vague poll asking if people trust him which does not represent more specific polls that show, he in fact would almost certainly not win the next election.

Fact-Checking the “fact checkers”

This is the issue with official “fact-checking” and the misinformation industrial complex, in attempting to fact-check Trump, the Guardian is itself spreading misinformation to justify the official narrative on Ukraine.

Trump’s statement that Zelensky started the war is false because it ignores the long history of the U.S. provoking the war long before Zelensky ever came to power, but the claim that the war was “unprovoked” also erases this long and well-documented history.

What Trump gets wrong about the peace deal is the fact that the West intentionally blocked it from going through, but the Guardian’s narrative again ignores this well-documented fact.

Trump’s claim that Zelensky is polling at only 4 percent may be an overstatement but the Guardian is making an overstatement in the other direction, citing a vague poll that does not reflect more specific electoral polls in Ukraine.

In an attempt to “fact-check” Trump, the Guardian is spreading pro-war misinformation, which in the long term will have a more damaging impact.

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