We have also been lied to about Ukraine

Published with permission of the author.
Fernando del Pino Calvo-Sotelo

2 February 2023

Covid, climate change and the war in Ukraine have two things in common. First, that our politicians defend foreign or supranational interests to the detriment of the interests of their own citizens. Second, that the well-paid media engage in aggressive propaganda campaigns based on huge lies until the test of virtue for a good citizen is to show either total adherence to the slogan or outright hatred for the targeted “enemy”.

Thus, after two years of covid lies, the media are now bent on lying about the war in Ukraine to give the impression that Ukrainian victory is just around the corner. Already in March last year, in a show of rigour, many of them (including the pretentious Financial Times) uncritically quoted “official Western sources” as saying that Russia was running out of precision missiles[1]: since then Russia has launched nearly 4,500. Also the New York Times claimed a few weeks ago, quoting “official sources” (Mortadelo y Filemón), that the letter bombs sent to the Moncloa Palace and the Ukrainian Embassy in Madrid were the work of Russian agents. After being reported by many Spanish media, we have learned that they were actually sent by a 74-year-old pensioner from Miranda de Ebro who acted alone.

The media also said that Putin had cancer and Parkinson’s, that he was a covid isolation lunatic and about to use chemical and nuclear weapons. They launched all these stories and then abandoned them without further explanation, exactly as they did with covid when overnight they stopped terrorising people. If Russia clearly wins the war, as seems likely, will they simply stop talking about it?
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Propaganda is useful to maintain the will to fight, which in Europe’s case consists of its citizens supporting the economic suicide decided by that US Protectorate called the EU. However, neither propaganda nor lies win wars. What is the real situation in Ukraine?

The recent decision to send Western tanks has been taken by politicians against the advice of their senior military commanders. At the whim of the US, the German government has changed its mind for the umpteenth time and, in yet another U-turn, decided to send one Leopard company (14 units) and allow other countries to do the same, with the aim of reaching two battalions (about 80 units). It is surprising that Germany, a country now controlled by the US, weak and without clear ideas, has discredited itself to the point of accepting the humiliation of having its Anglo-Saxon masters sabotage a gas pipeline that is key to its energy well-being (a casus belli) without saying a word.

Sending such different battle tanks entails enormous training and maintenance challenges. Moreover, the Russians also have the same anti-tank missiles that inflicted so much damage on themselves at the beginning of the conflict, and from a military point of view, sending a few dozen tanks is irrelevant in the face of a Russia that may have 8,000 operational tanks of varying tonnage[2].

Germany says that “the first” Leopards (3 or 4) will arrive in two or three months. Poland will send another 14 and the British will send 14 Challengers. Other countries have said blah, blah, blah, but probably that dropper of 40-45 Western tanks will be all Ukraine gets. In this regard, I trust that Spain will not engage in the stupidity of giving away tanks it has no surplus of to a country that is not its ally in order to attack a country that is not its enemy. Once upon a time this reasoning would have been axiomatic, but logic and reason no longer apply, as shown by France’s gift of a third of its howitzer guns to Ukraine and Estonia’s gift of its entire supply.

And what about the US? Hasn’t Biden announced the dispatch of 31 Abrams? The enormous reluctance of the Pentagon (as of all Western military establishments, including Spain), the complicated technical and logistical requirements of these tanks, which run on turbines and consume paraffin, and the contrived time horizon of eight months that the Americans have given for their delivery, lead me to conclude that it is most likely that not a single American tank will ever reach Ukraine, and that, therefore, the US has played a new trick on Germany.

Let us not forget that the two strategic goals of the US in provoking Russia were, on the one hand, to weaken it with a war of attrition, and on the other hand, to destroy the political and commercial ties between Europe and Russia (including Nordstream 2) to the detriment of European, in particular German, economic and geopolitical interests. ‘Fuck the EU’, said current deputy secretary of state Nuland in 2014. This was a crucial objective.

Thus, the Leopards that the unintelligent German government is sending for scrap to Ukraine will serve no purpose except to further deteriorate long-term relations with Russia and provide it with a valuable propaganda image: for the first time since the Nazi invasion of 1941, German tanks will kill Russian soldiers without Russia ever having assaulted Germany. Bravo.

But let’s back up for a moment. If the Ukrainians are winning, why are they so desperate for tanks? The response is that the reality in Ukraine is less rosy than we are told.

Since the beginning of the war, the publicists who make up actor Zelensky’s government have been able to create an iconic persona of carefully unkempt beard, perpetually furrowed brow and khaki green T-shirt, but they have proved to be highly unreliable sources of information about what is happening on the ground.

First, there were the staged reports of alleged massacres or non-existent indiscriminate shelling of civilians (the falsehood of which could be verified in real time on Ukrainian webcams). However, what marked a turning point in the Ukrainian government’s loss of credibility was its attempt to blame Russia for the missile debris that spilled out over Poland, killing two people. To the anger of Western countries, Zelensky blatantly lied in an attempt to drag NATO into a Third World War[3].

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The best independent analysts of the conflict paint a war scenario that is the opposite of the one portrayed so wilfully by the Western media. In fact, for those who want to continue consuming the press, the quickest way to understand what is going on in this war is to substitute the word Russia for Ukraine and vice versa. Thus, if you read that the Russians are demoralised, without weapons or ammunition, you understand that it really refers to the Ukrainians, and if you read that in six months Ukraine will retake Crimea (as the English press does[4]), you interpret that perhaps in six months Russian troops will be in Kiev or Odessa.

Most likely, I insist, after the Ukrainian mini-counteroffensive in the autumn, which allowed Ukraine to win a pyrrhic propaganda victory at the cost of heavy casualties, the Russian side will use its clear superiority to regain the initiative in an offensive that will break through the main Ukrainian defence lines.

Russia is interested in systematically decimating what is left of the Ukrainian army before advancing, for a cat that is scalded by cold water runs away and, after its initial strategic error, the Russians will advance methodically and avoid exposing themselves with bold strokes.

After the mirage caused by the heroic Ukrainian resistance and the enormous American aid (now practically exhausted), the media seem to have forgotten that Russia is still the world’s second military power, with immense reserves, air, land and electronic superiority and, above all, artillery that crushes Ukrainian positions with a rate of fire several times greater than that of the Ukrainians. The recent seizure of Soledar (which Ukraine took two weeks to recognise) and the imminent fall of Bakhmut, where Ukraine has massed many troops, may be an inflection point.

The icy Putin will not repeat what he sees as his initial mistake, i.e. acting with restraint towards a ‘brotherly’ Slavic country in order to facilitate subsequent negotiations. Given that Merkel herself has acknowledged that the unfulfilled Minsk Agreements (signed between Russia and Ukraine in 2014 with the blessing of France and Germany) were just a Western ploy to buy time, I believe that this time Russia will go as far as it has to go to be able to impose conditions that will guarantee it lasting security across its border in a more reliable way than the fragile word of Western politicians. At that point it will not be Zelensky who negotiates on Ukraine’s behalf but a different government, perhaps composed of a military officer outraged at the needless destruction of his country.

With the tide turning, the Americans may be eager to cast off before the ship sinks. No doubt a coup d’état in Ukraine with a new, internationally unrecognised “illegitimate” government negotiating a ceasefire would be in their best interests to save face. This would justify maintaining sanctions against Russia sine die and NATO would not lose out.

But in the absence of such a scenario, the US might consider a Russian victory (in my view, inevitable) to be an existential threat to its hegemony, in which case it might undertake a headlong rush to deliver, for example, longer-range weapons to attack targets on Russian territory.

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Many boundaries have been crossed and the hatreds fuelled by the horror of war will live on. What is left of Ukraine will not forget Russian aggression and Russia will not forget that the West sent weapons to kill Russian soldiers, but it will not accept being attacked on its own territory, a line of no return to which the warmongering of the Anglo-Saxon empire and the servility of a Europe on the verge of dissolving into nothingness can drag us.

With the passage of time, it is becoming abundantly clear that this war was always a power struggle between the US and Russia in which the Ukrainian people – who had been given up to a sterile sacrifice by their own rulers and by the US – bore the brunt of the death toll, while Europe, immolated by its political “elite”, committed economic and geopolitical suicide.

Before the war, Ukraine was a failed state, denounced by the UN Human Rights Council for “restricting fundamental freedoms[5]”, impoverished and hugely corrupt and bleeding to death through diaspora because Ukrainians did not want to live in their own country. In fact, no census had been taken since 2001. Do they really believe the story that it is now an ideal democracy fighting for freedom? What was NATO doing training, arming and encouraging the Ukrainian army to attack Russia in Crimea? What is NATO doing defending a non-member country in this way? What is it doing indirectly attacking a country that has not attacked any member country?

It is clear to the rest of the non-Western world that this war was perfectly avoidable and that its genesis was the constant provocation of Russia by NATO and the US. In order to prolong the war, they derailed the March 2022 peace talks when there were hardly any casualties and the conditions demanded could be acceptable. A year later, 20% of Ukrainian territory has been annexed to Russia and tens of thousands of Ukrainians have died[6]. To achieve what exactly?

Of the two strategic goals the US had in this conflict, it will achieve only one, namely the structural weakening of Germany and Europe and the diplomatic and commercial break-up of Eurasia thanks to the complicity of the pitiful European political class.

The other goal – weakening Russia – will fail. Economic sanctions have failed, autocrat Putin has reinforced his iron leadership and Russia will end up embraced by the East and strengthened, being the only army with experience of indirect combat against another great power and having demonstrated that the world no longer backs the West (as shown by the UN votes on the conflict or the refusal to impose sanctions on Russia by most of the planet) and that the US is perhaps a giant with feet of clay.

Truth was on the US side in the Cold War, which it fortunately won against the now defunct Soviet communist tyranny (Russia is not the USSR!), but from a military point of view it should not be forgotten that, since 1945, the US has fought primarily against ragtag lacking in modern technology or weaponry. Despite this, it drew in Korea, lost in Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan and Syria and, after 20 years, left nothing lasting in Iraq, which it attacked on the basis of “official” lies (weapons of mass destruction).

The facts suggest that on this occasion, in Ukraine (as in Iraq) the truth is not on the side of the US, but beyond the war or geopolitical confrontation, what this conflict reflects is, in the words of French historian Emmanuel Todd, that “the West has lost its values and is entering a spiral of self-destruction”. So, it is.

The original article can be found here