Open Letter Demands EU Drop Sanctions On Jacques Baud.

A New Open Letter Demands The EU Drop Sanctions On Jacques Baud For His Criticism Of The Ukraine Proxy War.

A new open letter signed by prominent figures including the University of Chicago’s John J. Mearsheimer, Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, award winning journalist Aaron Mate, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and Julian Assange’s half brother Gabriel Shipton, among others, demands that the EU drop’s it’s sanctions against the former Swiss Army Colonel Jacques Baud over his criticism of the Ukraine proxy war.

The letter states, “With its most recent sanctions package, the EU has placed the military historian and former colonel of the Swiss Army and the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service, as well as member of the Swiss General Staff, Jacques Baud, under sanctions. Jacques Baud is a Swiss citizen and lives in Brussels. He is no longer allowed to leave Belgium, his assets have been seized, his accounts have been frozen, and his books may no longer be sold.”

It goes on to add:

Jacques Baud has worked, among other things, for NATO and the United Nations. He is an impeccable scholar and an honorable man. His books meet the highest standards of professional historical analysis. He works strictly neutrally according to the principle: Both sides must be heard.

It is not a crime to name the true reasons for the Ukraine war. It is not a crime to draw readers’ attention to untruths and to the EU’s and NATO’s own propaganda. It is not a crime to point out the thoughtless cooperation of the West with Ukrainian forces that show a dangerous proximity to fascists.

The letter goes on to note:

The Council of the European Union is destroying the foundations of freedom of opinion through arbitrary punitive measures against Jacques Baud and in total against 59 journalists and scholars.

These sanctions are illegal and contrary to international law, because they were not imposed by the UN Security Council. The legal opinion by former judge at the European Court of Justice Prof. Dr. Ninon Colneric and the legal scholar Prof. Dr. Alina Miron of the University of Angers shows that the underlying legal acts also violate EU law. The EU is using the sanctions list as an instrument to silence critics and is maneuvering itself ever deeper into an abyss of lawlessness.

We call on the European Parliament, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the German Bundestag, the German state and local parliaments, the entire German people, and the people in all countries of the European Union to now oppose with all their might those who are destroying democracy and those who are driving the war.

For context, in the EU’s latest sanctions package , it lists Jacques Baud as one of the newly sanctioned individuals, writing, “Jacques Baud, a former Swiss army colonel and strategic analyst, is a regular guest on pro-Russian television and radio programmes. He acts as a mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda and makes conspiracy theories, for example, accusing Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO. Therefore, Jacques Baud is responsible for, implementing or supporting actions or policies attributable to the Government of the Russian Federation which undermine or threaten stability or security in a third country (Ukraine) by engaging in the use of information manipulation and interference.”

In reality, as Baud notes in his response to the sanctions, his “approach to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict … is to expose the facts in order to understand what is happening, with the purpose of finding a solution” noting that, “from the way of understanding a crisis comes that of solving it”.

In reality, Jacques Baud’s “pro-Russian propaganda” consists of him documenting the Western policies that helped provoke the war in Ukraine, using almost entirely Western and Ukrainian sources.

As he noted, “for those who want to take the trouble to read my books, they will find that I do not use any Russian source, but exclusively the Ukrainian and American press” adding, “There are hundreds of notes: they almost all come from Ukrainian or American media”.

In fact, Jacques Baud went as far as to not appear on any Russian media, because he did not want his work to be used for propaganda purposes by Russia. As he noted, “I have always refused invitations from official Russian media, because I wanted to prevent my analysis from being exploited for propaganda purposes”.

While the EU labels Jacques Baud’s factual analysis of the Western policies, such as NATO expansion, that provoked and prolonged the war in Ukraine as a “conspiracy theory”- the architects of the war often admit privately what Jacques Baud documents publicly.

Most recently, Amanda Sloat, who was the senior director for Europe at the National Security Council- admitted in an interview with Russian pranksters who she believed were Ukrainian presidential aide Igor Zhovkva that, “We had some conversation even before the war started, about what if Ukraine comes out and just says to Russia, ‘fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO if that stops the war, if that stops the invasion,’ which at that point it may well have done.”

She added, “I guess if you want to do an alternative version of history, one option would have just been for Ukraine to say in January of 2022, ‘fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO, we will stay neutral.’ Ukraine could have made a deal around March/April of 2022 around the Istanbul talks. There is certainly a question, almost three years on now, would that have been better to do before the war started, would that have been better to do in Istanbul talks, it certainly would have prevented the destruction and the loss of life”.

For making the same point that Amanda Sloat admitted to privately, Jacques Baud got sanctioned by the EU.

As for the EU’s claim that Baud, “makes conspiracy theories, for example accusing Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO”, what they are actually referring to is the fact that Baud, in his books and interviews has cited a 2019 interview where then Ukrainian presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych said that the best case scenario for Ukraine would be a “large scale war with Russia and joining NATO as a result of defeat of Russia”.

For directly quoting a Ukrainian government official, Jacques Baud got labelled a conspiracy theorist and sanctioned.

The EU sanctions against Baud for his criticism of the proxy war in Ukraine mirrors similar sanctions the Western-backed Ukrainian government has placed on its own people for wanting to end the war.

The Ukrainian government placed sanctions, on the leading Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko in response to his (excellent) book, “The Joker: The True Story Of Volodymyr Zelensky’s rise to power”, accusing him of spreading “Russian propaganda” despite the fact that the book was sharply critical of Russia and opposed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, saying it “violated all norms of international law” but was also critical of the Zelensky government and Western policies that helped provoke the war.

The Western-backed Zelensky government even placed sanctions on the aforementioned Oleksiy Arestovych because - since leaving government- he has become a sharp critic of the proxy war and an advocate for peace and ending the war.

The EU sanctions on Baud also mirrors the U.S. abuse of sanctions against critics of the U.S. backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, most notably the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, who was slapped with sanctions by Marco Rubio and the Trump administration in response to her bombshell report exposing how the U.S. military industrial complex was profiting off the Israeli slaughter in Gaza.

If abuses such as the sanctions against Jacques Baud are not called out, anyone who criticizes Western foreign policy from Ukraine to Gaza could be the next target of this lawfare campaign.

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