Ukraine War Status Report 5-19-2024

Causes, Purposes, Propaganda, Misinformation, and Reality

Most Americans, Canadians, and Western Europeans are poorly informed or have been  deliberately misinformed on what is going on in “Project Ukraine.” This has been true for the entire conflict going back not only to February 2022 but to its real beginning in February 2014 with the Maidan Revolution and US-backed coup d’état that removed elected Ukrainian  pro-neutrality President Viktor Yanukovych and replaced him with a series of pro-NATO prime ministers and presidents.

Even before 2014, the US had set the direction in 2008 by insisting on making Ukraine and Georgia NATO members and bulwarks of anti-Russian defense and economy.  This was despite warnings by the UK prime-minister, the French President, the US Ambassador to Russia, and virtually all Russian leaders that this was an existential red line that would mean war.  The controversy went all the way back to  broken promises to Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 not to move NATO further east in exchange for Russian agreement to the unification of Germany.

The last straw was the betrayal of the 2015 Minsk Agreement, which promised to give more autonomy to the Donetsk and Lugansk provinces and guarantee the large Russian-ethnic and mixed Russian-Ukrainian population equal language, history, religious, cultural, and political rights. These had been severely abused by the Ukrainian coup government’s program of “Ukrainization” of non-ethnic Ukrainians. Only 60 percent of the pre-2014 Ukraine population regarded Ukrainian as their native language. The rest were mostly Russian or mixed Russian-Ukrainian. The Russian ethnic population of nine provinces in southern and eastern Ukraine is 60 to 90 percent Russian. This includes Crimea, the Russian Naval base at Sevastopol, and Odessa.  

This severe abuse of Russian ethnic and mixed Russian-Ukrainian rights caused a civil war starting in 2014 and continuing into February 2022, which killed 14,000 people, including at least 4,000 ethnic Russian civilians in Donetsk province alone. The very last straw before Russian intervention was Ukrainian Army artillery escalating shelling of civilian areas of Donetsk by ten-fold. The NATO and Western media claim that the Russian “special operation” intervention was an “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine was a huge and unconscionably deceptive Lie that uninformed, misinformed , and captive American media and therefore the American public bought hook-line-and sinker. The Ukrainian people—Ukrainian, Russian, and others—are the main victims. The Ukrainian State has been ruined by massive flight of civilians and devastating military casualties.

For what purpose? It is not to save Ukrainian democracy—another monstruous lie.  It was to significantly weaken Russia using a 2019  Rand Corporation military-think-tank plan. and thus maintain US global military and economic hegemony.  The plan was primarily to bring down Putin and Russia by imposing severe economic sanctions. The Russian “invasion” and Ukraine-Russia proxy war would “justify” the sanctions.  Although the Rand Corporation had advised against the plan as dangerous to US and Western national security and US  diplomatic credibility, the Biden Administration evidently resurrected and implemented it in 2021. In 2014, it was Biden and his senior diplomatic and defense advisers Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan who shaped the Maidan Revolution and coup d’etat that started the “Ukraine Project” that began the civil war that has evolved into the “Project Ukraine” War.

The project is having disastrous results just as the Rand Corporation predicted. These include considerable economic hardship especially on Germany and the UK, in Western Europe, because of energy shortages and higher energy prices. The Nordstream Pipeline sabotage in September 2022, which the Biden Administration ridiculously attributed to the Russians, but had strong circumstantial evidence pointing to the US, Joe Biden, and Victoria Nuland, may prove a severe undoing of US  diplomatic credibility and weaken NATO and European Union viability.   

On the Ukrainian/NATO side, maintaining all these lies about the causes and conduct of the war has required a tremendous propaganda war with emphasis on outright misinformation. Ukrainian General Staff propaganda, which is the only news allowed to be reported from Ukraine, is often so exaggerated and such a reversal of the truth that it is not credible to reasonable and knowledgeable people. In this sense it resembles the Biden Administration generally, which seems oblivious to how a continuous stream of obvious lies discredits them with honest and informed people. It is obvious that their appeal is to those they hope to keep misinformed. The shame of all this is that most of American and Western media repeat and proliferate these lies in obedient compliance. Major news and social media and technology firms often suppress anything but the government or mainstream media narratives, using cancel culture and economic and political threats to enforce acceptance of lies.

I have found that the Russians are probably not going to say much about setbacks or uncomfortable news, but they tend to be fairly accurate on what they do release. This is because they know they must maintain credibility with their own people and with the diplomatic world. The Biden Administration and its allies in Europe no longer seem to care about their growing lack of credibility. A major objective of the Biden Administration seems to be keeping truth and reality secret until after the November Election.

From the beginning, the Ukrainian General Staff, the Ukrainian intelligence agencies, and President Zelensky have constantly accused the Russians of atrocities and war crimes. Yet there is little credible evidence of it. The number and ratio of Ukrainian civilian deaths is actually quite low compared to most war experience. UN statistics and Statista  have less than 11,000 total deaths since February 2022.  Indeed, Putin has instructed his troops that the Ukrainians are brother Orthodox Slavs and should be treated accordingly. Yet the Ukrainians have bombarded ethnic Russian Ukrainians in Donetsk and Lugansk constantly from 2015 to date.

The so-called Bucha massacre occurred on April 2-3, 2022, at least three days after Russian troops departed Bucha. However, Ukrainian units of the fanatical and terrorist-associated Azov Brigade, closely associated with the Ukrainian Security Service, arrived in Bucha on April 2. I have summarized a half dozen articles pointing to  Azov units as the probable culprit, in my April 9, 2023, article, in the Times Examiner, entitled A Second Look at the Bucha Massacre. I agree with their conclusions that a unit of the Azov Brigade or possibly a right-wing Ukrainian National Guard unit, probably executed about a dozen Ukrainian civilians for cooperating with Russian troops. Col. Jacques Baud, former Chief of Staff of Swiss Strategic Intelligence and former NATO consultant tends to agree. He covers it in at least one of his books and several recorded interviews. An easy to find interview of Col. Baud covering Bucha was on April 15, 2022. Search for “Aaron Maté, ‘U.S., EU sacrificing Ukraine to ‘weaken Russia’: former. NATO adviser” (The Grayzone Project, 15 April 2022), posted April 17. It is also interesting to note that the “massacre” was announced three days before a critical vote in the U.S. Senate on April 6 on emergency funding for Ukrainian war efforts.  In addition, the “massacre has been used as an excuse to withdraw from peace talks with the Russians in Istanbul during the same period. Official withdrawal from an agreed peace plan came just after the visit of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson with President Zelensky on April 8.  The Azov Brigade and the Ukrainian Security Service has a well deserved reputation for terrorism, even in the US Congress.

For nearly two years, the Ukrainian General Staff, the Biden Administration, key NATO allies and the great bulk of American and Western media have been saying that Ukraine is winning, and we should keep suppling them with money, equipment, and munitions. But this has been an increasingly huge lie.  The Ukrainian Army is near collapse. It is short of ammunition and very short on manpower.  This has been largely and artillery war, and the Russians have ten-fold the artillery and missile power and ammunition of the NATO-supplied Ukrainians. The Russians now have dominant airpower and dominant air defense. Once outnumbered, they outnumber the remaining Ukrainian forces by far more than three to one. Russia has a massive military industrial production advantage of nearly three to one over the US and NATO. The $61 billion the US Congress just spent to save Ukraine may help US defense firms replace and modernize arms transferred from the US armed forces to Ukraine and then destroyed by the Russians or sold by corrupt officials in the international arms market, but it has no chance of saving Ukraine.

The Russians are very near surrounding and cutting off Ukraine’s second largest (and Russian-speaking) city of Kharkiv and clearing the way to the Dnieper River and possibly Kyiv. Putin recently said they have no intention of taking Kharkiv by force, only surrounding and cutting it off. A large Russian force has also appeared in northeaster Ukraine in the vicinity of Suny province and in reach of Kyiv. The main force of the Ukrainian Army under General Syrskyi is also in danger of being cut off from Kyiv.

The Ukrainians have managed to strike a Russian airfield on Crimea, destroying two MiG-31s, using the U.S. ATACMS 190-mile range missile system. The Russians claim to have shot down at least five of the approaching missiles. One or possibly two ATACMS hit the airfield.

On May 12, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who was the instrumental leader in building up Russia’s military industrial capacity was promoted to Secretary of the powerful Security Committee, replacing Nikolai Patrushev.  Shoigu had previously indicated he was ready to retire, but Putin asked him to stay longer as Defense Minister.  He will be replaced by Andrei Belousov, former First Deputy Prime Minister,  Belousov has an Economic background, indicating Putin intends to build an even larger military, while still improving the Russian economy, which is performing quite well despite the sanctions war against Russia. Belousov was the primary leader responsible for Russia’s remarkable economic growth during 2023 despite severe Western sanctions.

On May 15, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping held a Summit Meeting in the Chinese capital of Beijing. According to former CIA and State Department intelligence analyst Larry Johnson, the meeting had greater significance than the West imagines. In addition to unifying conversations between Putin and Xi, most of the major heads of government of both countries met with their counterparts to assure future cooperation in the Russian-Chinese alliance. They agreed that “the US must stop its Cold War Behavior,” of which both Ukraine and Georgia are just two current examples.

Ask your members of Congress some questions. How many tens of billions of US dollars have been spent on Ukraine since 2004 and the Orange Revolution? For what purposes?  Be prepared to probe more deeply than “promoting or defending democracy.”

Here is an even more important question: For what purpose have over 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers died?