A corrupt news-medium is one that’s fake, propaganda instead of honest news-reporting. Here’s an example:
The AP headlined on June 28th, “Ukraine spent years trying to build a Western-style democracy. Then Russia invaded the country”.
First, before discussing that alleged news-report, its headline itself is already feeding into a thoroughly false U.S.-and-allied ‘historical’ narrative about how and when (allegedly 24 February 2022) this war began; so, the first necessity here, is to state, while documenting by means of links through to its sources (all of which will be either the primary sources, or else articles that themselves link down through to the primary sources) the actual documented history of this war, so that any reader here can verify, on one’s own (without needing to rely upon this, or any other, alleged account, as being an ultimate source on the facts regarding this matter), each allegation within this history, and so to reasonably disconfirm that headline, on one’s own, rather than on any authoritarian basis:
The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said. It was started in February 2014 by a U.S. coup which replaced the democratically elected and neutralist Ukrainian President, with a U.S. selected and rabidly anti-Russian leader, who immediately imposed an ethnic-cleansing program to get rid of the residents in the regions that had voted overwhelmingly for the overthrown President. Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already be beheaded by America’s nuclear strike. (As I headlined on 28 October 2022, “NATO Wants To Place Nuclear Missiles On Finland’s Russian Border — Finland Says Yes”. The U.S. had demanded this, especially because it will place American nuclear missiles far nearer to The Kremlin than at present, only 507 miles away — not as close as Ukraine, but the closest yet.)
Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled goverment an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.
The U.S. Government had engaged the Gallup polling organization, both before and after the coup, in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in its Crimean independent republic (where Russia has had its main naval base ever since 1783), regarding their views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU; and, generally, Ukrainians were far more pro-Russia than pro-U.S., pro-NATO, or pro-EU, but this was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew that Crimeans would be especially resistant. However, this was not really new information. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.
In other words: what Obama did was generally successful: it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it changed Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American billionaires’ neoconservative heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow (which is the U.S. Government’s goal there). Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, that figure had already risen to 42%. America’s press — and academia or public-policy ‘experts’ — have been very effective at managing public opinion, for the benefit of America’s billionaires.)
Then came the Minsk Agreements (#1 & #2, with #2 being the final version, which is shown here, as a U.N. Security Council Resolution), between Ukraine and the separatist region in its far east, and which the U.S. Government refused to participate in, but the U.S.-installed Ukrainian government (then under the oligarch Petro Poroshenko) signed it in order to have a chance of Ukraine’s gaining EU membership, but never complied with any of it; and, so, the war continued); and, then, finally, as the Ukrainian government (now under Volodmyr Zelensky) was greatly intensifying its shelling of the break-away far-eastern region, Russia presented, to both the U.S. Government and its NATO military alliance against Russia, two proposed agreements for negotiation (one to U.S., the other to NATO), but neither the U.S. nor its NATO agreed to negotiate. The key portions of the two 17 December 2021 proposed Agreements, with both the U.S. and with its NATO, were, in regards to NATO:
Article 1
The Parties shall guide in their relations by the principles of cooperation, equal and indivisible security. They shall not strengthen their security individually, within international organizations, military alliances or coalitions at the expense of the security of other Parties. …
Article 4
The Russian Federation and all the Parties that were member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as of 27 May 1997, respectively, shall not deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997. With the consent of all the Parties such deployments can take place in exceptional cases to eliminate a threat to security of one or more Parties.
Article 5
The Parties shall not deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties.
Article 6
All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.
And, in regards to the U.S.:
Article 2
The Parties shall seek to ensure that all international organizations, military alliances and coalitions in which at least one of the Parties is taking part adhere to the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations.
Article 3
The Parties shall not use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.
Article 4
The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them.
Any reader here can easily click onto the respective link to either proposed Agreement, in order to read that entire document, so as to evaluate whether or not all of its proposed provisions are acceptable and reasonable. What was proposed by Russia in each of the two was only a proposal, and the other side (the U.S. side) in each of the two instances, was therefore able to pick and choose amongst those proposed provisions, which ones were accepted, and to negotiate regarding any of the others; but, instead, the U.S. side simply rejected all of them.
On 7 January 2022, the Associated Press (AP) headlined “US, NATO rule out halt to expansion, reject Russian demands”, and reported:
Washington and NATO have formally rejected Russia’s key demands for assurances that the US-led military bloc will not expand closer towards its borders, leaked correspondence reportedly shows.
According to documents seen by Spanish daily El Pais and published on Wednesday morning, Moscow’s calls for a written guarantee that Ukraine will not be admitted as a member of NATO were dismissed following several rounds of talks between Russian and Western diplomats. …
The US-led bloc denied that it posed a threat to Russia. …
The US similarly rejected the demand that NATO does not expand even closer to Russia’s borders. “The United States continues to firmly support NATO’s Open Door Policy.”
NATO-U.S. was by now clearly determined to get Ukraine into NATO and to place its nukes so near to The Kremlin as to constitute, like a checkmate in chess, a forced defeat of Russia, a capture of its central command. This was, but in reverse, the situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable, Biden is not; and, so, we again stand at the brink of WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (Biden — no better than Obama), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink in order to become able to achieve world-conquest.
Russia did what it had to do: it invaded Ukraine, on 24 February 2022.
Here, then, is the opening of the text of that AP ‘news’-report, “Ukraine spent years trying to build a Western-style democracy. Then Russia invaded the country”:
28 June 2024, Kyiv, Jill Lawless.
As an investigative journalist, then an activist, and later a lawmaker, Yehor Soboliev sought to expose corruption in business and government as a way to defend Ukraine’s budding democracy.
Now, as a soldier battling Russia, he’s had to put those aims on hold as he fights alongside some of the people he once tried to bring down.
Once an investigative journalist, then an activist, and later a lawmaker, Yehor Soboliev speaks during an interview with Associated Press in Kyiv, Ukraine, on May 3, 2024. In all of these roles, he sought to expose corruption in business and government as a way to defend Ukraine’s budding democracy. (AP Photo/Alex Babenko)
“Till the victory, we are on the same side,” said Soboliev, a lieutenant in a front-line drone unit. “But maybe — definitely — after the victory, we should separate ourselves from each other. And we should continue that fight in making our country more honest, more responsible, more serving to its citizens.”
Ukraine has spent years trying to build a Western-style democracy, although not without some bumps along the way as it shed habits from its Soviet past. …
The article doesn’t blame the U.S. Government for this, but the Soviet Government, and it presents Vladimir Putin as the stand-in for it, and the villain, as-if the U.S. Government had not forced him to invade Ukraine on 24 February 2022. It ignores the relevant history, and focuses instead on a probably sincere but misinformed Yehor Soboliev and personalizes the matter without presenting any of the relevant historical facts, which perhaps neither Soboliev nor the AP ‘journalist’ (propagandist) are aware of (or else hide, and thus lie to deny).
There is nothing exceptionally bad about that article, because it is merely a normal U.S.-empire international ‘news’-report. “Uncomfortable” historical truths are banned from all of the U.S.-and-allied international ‘news’-media. Like every empire, it’s an international dictatorship, no authentic democracy, at all.
RFK Jr. was essentially correct when he said: “Everybody realizes they’re not living in a democracy anymore. They’ve lost sovereignty of their lives, and their futures, as a result, are hopeless. I think it all flows from a cynicism and despair that flows from this corrupt merger of state-corporate power.” However, he certainly exaggerates with his “Everybody,” because by far the majority of U.S. voters are still preferring the astoundingly corrupt Trump and the even more corrupt Biden to be the next President; they’ve not yet recognized that a second American Revolution is needed, if this country — and the entire world — isn’t to fall into an unprecedented abyss. The purpose, right now, of all the propaganda is to hold off that realization long enough so that America’s billionaires will be able to (with either Trump or Biden) lock-in the end-game that they are looking for.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.