Last May, The Irish Independent claimed that Smith is “an unlikely key player in the information war,” who “estimates he has given about 100 TV, radio and print interviews with the international media in the past few months to tell Kyiv’s side of the story.” Smith has a nice line in outrageous propaganda gambits, claiming that Russians are the actual Nazis and that they murder, rape and pillage, including the rape of children.
As it turns out, the source of many of the allegations of rape – including multiple alleged cases of rape to death of children – was the Ukraine parliamentary commissioner for human rights, Lyudmila Denisova. Her evidence was alleged to be a helpline set up to report allegations of human rights abuses. Her tales were too much even for the Ukrainian government, which dismissed her at the end of May 2022.
Last year, it was comprehensively demonstrated that her stories had little evidential basis. However, even before this, she had already reportedly admitted to “promoting fake news to persuade Western countries to send more arms and aid.” Smith nonetheless carried on making vague allegations of rape (including of children) for months afterward. Naturally, no evidence was ever cited. He repeated the rape allegation almost monthly between April 2022 and January 2023. (In 2022: May, August, September, October, November, and in 2023: January, April, May).
In April 2022, he concluded a tweet about the alleged rapes of “2 million women of all ages” with the line: “Russians are fucking animals, there is no other Russia, they must be defeated.”
Three weeks earlier, Smith asked, “Is there any difference between” Russian tank crews in Mariupol and “Nazi SS murderers who put Jews in the gas chambers.”
In December, he paraded claims that “Russians are much worse than Nazis.”
Of course, Smith denies Maidan was a U.S.-backed coup, that NATO expansion did not cause the Russian intervention and that Ukraine “is not full of Nazis” integrated into the military, police and intelligence services. Thus, we find him at the forefront of Nazi apologism. But who is he working for?
According to his own account, “Since Moscow began threatening a full invasion, he has been in daily contact with former Ukrainian colleagues and friends.” As he told The Irish Independent:
‘I was out there in December [2021] visiting and they said it would be really helpful if you can help as a commentator because you really understand us,’ he says. ‘This is also an information war and I am trying to make a small contribution. Russia is a country that lies on an industrial scale, and we were trying to get people to see that for years, but it’s only now that the scales are falling from people’s eyes.’”
Curiously, this would appear to suggest that Smith is working for actors in Ukraine. However, he has on several occasions insisted he is doing it “pro bono,” meaning without being paid. According to his LinkedIn page, he has been in various self-employed consultancy roles since January 2019.
Yet in September 2022, he tweeted that he had “six years experience of Ukraine, including two years working at the heart of her government.” This suggests that his self-employed role has involved significant work on Ukraine for an unknown client.
Perhaps of more relevance to his actual role is the latter part of that admission: his two years in Ukraine. What was he doing there, and for whom did he work? It turns out that he was a British government agent. Perhaps he still is. Smith joined the U.K. Cabinet Office in April 2016. He gave this account on his LinkedIn page in 2020:
After three months at the Cabinet Office I was asked to travel to Ukraine to lend communication expertise to the country’s government as strategic communication advisor to their foreign minister. I was attached to the British Embassy in Kyiv and became the first foreigner to be embedded in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) of Ukraine.”
“Over 18 months I was credited with introducing positive changes to…how the MFA communicated, not just in Kyiv but across the globe. I also worked with the Ministries of Health, Finance, Education & Science and the Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration; as well as advising both the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine and the NATO mission in Kyiv on crisis communication.”
Smith’s eighteen months in Kiev were followed by seven months in London with the National Security Communications Team (NSCT), a body in the U.K. Cabinet Office. Today, his LinkedIn page does not mention the NSCT, referring simply to the Cabinet Office. But back in 2020, it said otherwise.
What is the NSCT? At that point, the unit had just been set up and focused much of its efforts on influencing the public on the alleged Russian poisoning of the defector Sergei Skripal. Smith wrote in his now deleted résumé that “by the end of the Summer [of 2018], the NSCT had played a pivotal role in a ‘hands down’ victory over the Kremlin in the information war.” It is instructive to learn from this his key role in coordinating the lies and misinformation circulated by the British state in that period.
The Counter Disinformation and Media Development program in the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) was run by an honorary colonel in military intelligence. But The NSCT was funded by the U.K. Foreign Office’s Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) and, as can be seen in documents published by the Foreign Office, the identity of the lead agency (indeed even the “type” of agency) was redacted on “security” grounds. The only agencies liable to redact in these circumstances are intelligence agencies, suggesting that it was MI6, the UK’s foreign intelligence agency. NSCT is thus revealed as a potential MI6-directed op.
Other NSCT personnel have traveled to Ukraine to advise the government. In 2018, Henry Collis of the NSCT attended and spoke at “The Hybrid War Decade: Lessons Learned to Move Forward Successfully,” held between November 7-8 in Kyiv. Unlike Cormac Smith, Collis also has a known history in military intelligence, having been a reserve officer in the Honourable Artillery Company, one of the constituents of the British Army Intelligence Corps.
STOPFAKE – NAZI APOLOGISTS
While advising the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Smith became involved with the team at StopFake (created just after the 2014 coup), including its “co-founder” Yevhen Fedchenko, an academic. On his return to London in 2018, he posed in his garden with a StopFake t-shirt. My “gaff [British slang for one’ home] is now full of memories from Ukraine,” he said. Unsurprisingly, he signs off the exchange with the Banderite fascist greeting, “Slava Ukraini!” (“Glory to Ukraine.”)
While seen by many Ukrainians as a hero and the father of the nation (a position the current government has promoted), Stepan Bandera was a Nazi collaborator whose group, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), helped carry out the systematic extermination of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians during World War Two. The full slogan originally accompanied by a Nazi salute of the kind all too familiar to students of Hitler’s Nazi movement was a call and response: “Slave Ukraini” – “Heroyam Slava!” (Meaning, Glory to Ukraine – Glory to the heroes!). Thus, endorsing this greeting is an indication of what might be seen as Nazi apologism.
Also advising StopFake in 2016-17 was the well-known U.S. official Nina Jankowicz, who, according to her own account, “advised the Ukrainian government on strategic communications under the auspices of a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship.” Prior to her Fulbright grant in Ukraine, Jankowicz managed “democracy assistance programs” to Russia and Belarus at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a core part of the “CIA sidekick” organization, the National Endowment for Democracy.
StopFake was created in March 2014, the same month as InformNapalm, which runs the kill list. It claims to have “launched as a volunteer project” “not supported financially or otherwise by any official Ukrainian organization or government agency.” This assertion is undermined a little by the fact that it does admit to receiving funding from a host of Western governments and intelligence-linked agencies, such as the Atlantic Council, the International Renaissance Foundation (the Ukraine branch of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations), the Foreign Ministry of the Czech Republic, the Embassy of the United Kingdom, and nearly $250,000 from the British Foreign Office.
StopFake has also received funds from the Sigrid Rausing Trust, which states that it paid the Media Reforms Center (the parent of StopFake) £205,000 (around $250,000) between 2015 and 2019. StopFake does not admit to the money which it received from the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA front group.
The claim to be unaffiliated with the government is also undermined by a leaked Ukrainian Defense Ministry PowerPoint presentation from 2015 which lists StopFake as one of their “special projects.”
Support for the idea it is a government cutout also comes from the fact that both Smith and Jankowicz were consulting it in their capacity as government advisers.
StopFake has a deserved reputation for Nazi apologism. For instance, in 2018, the site defended military boot camps for children run by the Neo-Nazi group, the Azov Battalion. In 2017, Jankowicz hosted a StopFake video episode about Russian propaganda and Ukrainian volunteer battalions.
On Jankowicz and StopFake, The Nation stated:
Painting neo-Nazi paramilitaries with an extensive record of war crimes as patriots helping refugees, all while working with a ‘disinformation’ group that turned out to run interference for violent neo-Nazi formations—that’s the experience Biden’s new disinformation czar brings to the table.”
Multiple established Western media outlets, including The New York Times, have reported on StopFake’s ties to white power or Nazi groups. But when local independent journalist Ekaterina Sergatskova co-authored a long investigation exploring these links, she received death threats and was forced to flee Kiev. The intimidation tactics suggest that StopFake has more than a passing similarity to the work of InformNapalm, which hosts the kill list Myrotvorets.
Further Nazi connections are visible in the personage of Irena Chalupa, one of three Ukrainian-American sisters deeply involved in pro-NATO propaganda networks. The sisters are – so it is reported – devotees of World War Two-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and his OUN-B fascist militia.
Irena works for the U.S. state propaganda outfit Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty and was also (around 2015) a non-resident fellow at the NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council. In 2016, she regularly hosted debunking posts on StopFake. According to Ukrainian nationalist sources, both of her sisters, Andrea and Alexandra Chalupa, were founders of a propaganda outlet Digital Maidan, created in New York in January 2014, which agitated for the coup. Their “closest working partners” included EuroMaidanPress which was founded by Banderite thugs and regularly publishes pieces by a wide range of official U.S. propaganda outlets like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Alexandra was co-chair of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC’s) Ethnic Council and her fingerprints are all over the disinformation that the Russians hacked and leaked the Clinton and Podesta emails – a core claim of the Russiagate deception. In 2015, according to her own account, Andrea was close to Michael Weiss of the Atlantic Council and various other NATO propaganda operations, such as The Interpreter Magazine. The connection of all three to Banderite propaganda networks and of Irena and Andrea to the Atlantic Council is illuminating, given the role that it appears the Atlantic Council played in a further Ukraine related propaganda operation.
PROPORNOT
A supposedly independent website helping users to differentiate between real and fake news, Propornot emerged some eighteen months after the Maidan coup. Its domain name was registered on August 24, 2016, and its first blacklist of websites allegedly purveying Russian propaganda was circulated in October of that year. It complemented the kill list on Myrotvorets (the “peacemaker” website), hacking by the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance and the debunking work of InformNapalm, which MintPress revealed is the parent of both the former operations. Was Propornot part of the same op?
Unlike Myrotvorets or InformNaplam, Propornot redacted the name of the person that registered the domain. But that did not prevent the persistent Donbass-based journalist George Eliason from using basic scanning tools to reveal that Propornot was a product of The Interpreter Magazine.
The Interpreter was set up by Michael Weiss, a longtime Zionist and Neocon who is close to at least one of the Chalupa sisters. Weiss was previously been attached to the controversial U.K. think tank, the Henry Jackson Society – a group that has been widely accused of promoting Islamophobia.
Between 2013 and 2015, The Interpreter was run by the Atlantic Council. In January 2016 it became a project of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a direct U.S. government propaganda operation. The organization even went so far as to encourage colleagues at the Atlantic Council to denounce its activities in the hope that they would not link the two organizations together. The same trick was used on the kill-list Myrotvorets, from which Bellingcat, for example, attempted to distance itself.
Later Weiss also got involved with New Lines magazine (described by journalist Max Blumenthal as hosting “a rogue’s gallery of U.S. regime collaborators, neocons and corporate media hacks”), where he showcased his investigative prowess reporting from “inside Ukraine’s psyops”, when he is himself deeply embedded in the psyops operation.
Propornot, of course, is on the same page as the other Banderite propaganda efforts discussed here. In 2016, it tweeted a puff piece by Radio Free Europe on the “Ukrainian ‘Hacktivist’ Network Cyberbattling The Kremlin” – referring to the work of InformNapalm – with the Banderite slogan “Heroyim Slava!” (“Glory to the heroes.”)
The U.S.-backed coup of February 2014 came after significant Western involvement in Ukrainian politics. The Maidan “uprising” began in November 2013, and the government was replaced by February 2014.
This ushered in a substantial Western effort to advise the government on propaganda and “strategic communications” as well as extensive training of both military and civilian forces in the information and influence operations favored by NATO, the U.S. and the U.K. The evidence is that some of that advisory effort had already started in 2012 – well before the coup.
In 2015, a leaked PowerPoint file titled “Free Russia,” said to be from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, stated there was “co-operation” with two NATO groups (StratCom and Cyber Defense Centers of Excellence); three American groups (U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. Cyber Command and Psyops); and two British units (the 15th (U.K.) Psyops and 77th Brigade).
The 15th Psyops ceased to exist in April 2015 when it was merged into the 77th Brigade, a grouping created on 1 January 2015, thus indicating British involvement in early 2015 at the latest. Amongst the revelations in a separate leaked NATO document from this period was that the U.K. military had been (prior to February 2015) training the Ukrainian forces in psyops/propaganda: “Ukrainian MOD [Ministry of Defense] receiving mentoring from JIAG [Joint Information Activities Group] (U.K. MOD) was mentioned as a past successful experience.”
The involvement of Western psyops in Ukraine continued throughout the period, and the U.S. group even posted images of their Ukraine activities on Instagram in 2019.
A third leaked document also included references to a U.K. government-funded FCO CSSF project worth nearly £250,000 (U.S. $315,000). It was to be run in 2014/5 directly with the Ministry of Defense and the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, which expressed full “support” for the project. All activities “will be coordinated with HQ of armed forces, and will be implemented with the participation of Ukrainian official representatives.”
The purpose was to “discredit” Russian policy towards Ukraine, demonstration of “Putin’s regime responsibility for all Donbass people troubles,” demonstration of “Putin’s inner circle personal interest in destabilization in Ukraine” and “demonisation” or Russian politicians “that are most popular in Ukraine.” This project was led by an organization (the Ukrainian Institute for International Politics) that also claimed a range of additional Western funders. In 2014, for example, it received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy.
One Ukraine Ministry of Defense PowerPoint titled “Free Donbass” referred to “The analysis of NATO’s actions in the Balkans, as well as the conduct of Operation Iraqi Freedom,” which “demonstrated the importance of the so-called ‘perception management.’” This is said to include “public diplomacy, information and psychological operations (IPO), public information, disinformation, and covert action.”
In late 2022, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, Commander of United States Army Special Operations Command, noted that “Our Psychological Operations combination exercise now incorporates synthetic internet and real-time sentiment analysis to educate students on the speed of information.” “The speed of information, the power of information ops, might be one of the greatest lessons learned from the events unfolding in Ukraine,” he said, adding that, “Ukrainians spent the past eight years—since the annexation of Crimea in 2014—learning a lot from special operators and other U.S. trainers.”
One panelist— “speaking under Chatham House rules that forbade reporters to attribute remarks” — said, “We’d spent eight years building rapport… and building deep relationships. And all of a sudden, when it’s game on,” they were called back to the United States.” “That did not go over well… We’re seeing a master class on [strategic communications] and psyops every day. But it started out with our SOF [Special Operations Forces] guys helping them out,” the panelist added; “Two of the first strikes on Feb. 24 into the Kyiv area were on the psyop-production facility…with long-range precision strike missiles. That’s how much value the Russians put into messaging.”
Western propaganda experts and intelligence officials have been deeply involved in advising Ukraine on how best to launder its image. Take the examples of Alicia Kearns, Chris Donnelly, Gerry Osborne, Ewen Murchison and Phil Jones – all of whom have been involved in propaganda and/or intelligence with the British state.
Alicia Kearns is a Conservative MP (since 2019) and was shortly thereafter installed as the youngest chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee as well as vice-chair of the All-Party Group on Ukraine.
Kearns has a history as a British government propagandist, working very closely with (if not in) MI6 at the Foreign Office. She listed herself as “’Cross-Government lead for Counter Daesh, Syria and Iraq Effort’ on her LinkedIn page, which indicates she was running the Counter-Daesh Coalition Communications Cell at the Foreign Office. There she oversaw overt and, what she has described in a leaked résumé, as “discreet” propaganda on Syria. The résumé was submitted in a bid for a government contract. Her activities at the FCO included working to soften the image of NATO proxy Salafi terror groups and to falsely implicate the Syrian government in chemical weapons attacks with a whole host of MI6 contractors, including ARK, Incostrat, CIJA and, most famously, the White Helmets/May Day Rescue.
She then spent a period working covertly with MI6 contractors Torchlight in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. The tender documents issued by the government specifically state that “you may not mention that the client is HMG [Her Majesty’s Government]” This latter role was never mentioned on Kearns’ LinkedIn page, and she scrubbed all mention of her other derring-do once elected to Parliament in 2019.
Among her contributions on Ukraine, she said, “I remember being stood behind Ukrainian President Poroshenko at the NATO Summit in 2014 as he discussed the Minsk Protocol, a ceasefire agreed with pro-Russia separatist leaders. The atmosphere was full of cautious optimism and hope. Devastatingly, the violence returned.” Notably, She fails to acknowledge the significant Western involvement in the subsequent violence.
She also states that “in 2015… I visited Ukraine to support the Ukrainian Government,” where she spoke at a “Ukraine Government Communications Service” event, according to her leaked résumé. She went back in March 2023 to meet Zelensky. She also takes pride in using the full Banderite slogan, “Slava Ukraini! Heroyim Slava!” on social media.
Chris Donnelly is a former advisor to the NATO Secretary General and an Honorary Colonel in the British Army’s shadowy Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI). He was involved in advising Ukraine from the first moment after the coup, writing a memo on March 1, 2014 (which was later leaked). “If I were in charge,” he wrote, “I would get the following implemented asap.” This would include “a cordon sanitaire” around Crimea with “troops and mines” and “Min[ing] Sevastopol harbour/bay.” “The government needs a strategic communication campaign,” Donnelly concluded: “I am trying to get this message across.”
In 2016, he oversaw a visit of five Ukrainian military intelligence personnel to the U.K. This was as part of his work with the Integrity Initiative, a Foreign Office-funded project alleged to focus on countering Russian disinformation. However, one of its principal targets was British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. The Ukrainian spooks were hosted and dined at the British government’s expense. Donnelly billed the Ministry of Defence for £6788 (U.S. $8,500) for the trip. Among those that they met while there were assorted British military intelligence operatives, including a day with the SGMI and with the British Army psyop outfit, the 77th Brigade.
In 2022 Donnelly was involved in plans to blow up the Kerch Bridge to Crimea (which were leaked after the bridge was bombed. The leaks were reported by Kit Klarenberg). It is notable that Donnelly’s Integrity Initiative FCO-funded propaganda project strayed into both Holocaust revisionism in the Baltics and Nazi apologism in relation to Ukraine, notably in the significant work it did with StopFake in 2016-18, during which both Jankowicz and Smith were there.
Lt. Col. Ewen Murchison worked in Military Strategic Effects, in the Operations Directorate of the U.K. Ministry of Defence, between September 2012 and August 2014. This is the new name for an MoD propaganda unit which it has adopted in part in order to divert attention from the fact that its role is propaganda, all the previous euphemisms (such as “psychological operations”) having been devalued by the discovery of previous lies. Murchison attended the first NATO Stratcom Center of Excellence steering group in Latvia in July 2014, at which Ukraine was a topic of discussion.
Col. Gerry Osborne was Strategic Communications Manager at the U.K. Ministry of Defence between December 2012 and August 2014 and then Strategic Communications Director until December 2014. In the former role, he undertook the following role with regards to Ukraine: “delivered and ran Strategic Communications campaigns for U.K. activity”; “Project Director for Strategic Communication capacity building missions” including to Ukraine and Georgia to address defense priorities and build governance in pre-post conflict environments.
In order to gain “global traction for the U.K. Strategic Communication Approach,” he also “took a leading role as U.K. MoD subject matter expert in the successful brand development of the Multinational Information Operations Experiment and NATO StratCom Center of Excellence and was a principal visiting lecturer to partners,” including in Ukraine. Osborne attended the 1st NATO StratCom Center of Excellence Steering Committee meeting in Riga, Latvia, on July 24-25, 2014 and contributed to its October 2014 study of “Russia’s Information Campaign Against Ukraine” along with Steve Tatham of the SCL Group. (Note that Osborne’s role in relation to Ukraine may have started before the NATO-backed coup in early 2014.)
Phil Jones – Another British advisor, Jones worked at the U.K. Ministry of Defence between 2005 and 2018. His last five years at the MoD were in the post of U.K. Special Defence Advisor to the Ministry of Defence, Ukraine, 2013 – 2018, in Kiev. We can note that this advisory role began prior to the 2014 NATO-backed coup in Ukraine.
Jones does not boast any particular expertise in strategic communications or influence ops on his LinkedIn page, but he did take part on February 19, 2015, in a NATO StratCom Center of Excellence (COE) “coordination meeting” to assess the “capacity building needs of the Ukrainian, Georgian and Moldovan wider security sector in the area of Strategic Communications (StratCom).”
He was in Kiev through the entire period of the coup and the development thereafter of Ukrainian propaganda activities and institutions and appears to have maintained a connection with the country, including serving as a “personal advisor” to the Minister of Defense in Ukraine under the aegis of the U.K. Government’s Stabilization Unit in early 2020 and since October of that year as a Board Member of the Centre for Defence Strategy, Ukraine.
It is not known how influential he was or was not in the creation of the Ministry’s kill list or the other cut-outs it created, including InformNapalm, StopFake and others. The center is financed by two of its “partners,” the National Endowment for Democracy and UKAid, a British government operation.
The 2015 NATO StratCom CoE conference was “part of the larger project to improve the strategic communications capabilities of … as well as the institutional strategic communications capacity” of Ukraine and the other countries. Leading that project were two further Western operatives, both of whom have military and intelligence experience, Steve Tatham and Nigel Oakes.
The minutes of the meeting were leaked, and the document was claimed by the chair of the meeting, Steve Tatham, to have been “subtly doctored” in a Russian “hack and leak” operation. It was claimed that one bullet point was added and that a contact name was removed from the document. This statement thus implied that the rest of the document was genuine.
Tatham was attached to the NATO center for that year and had previously been the commanding officer of the 15 (U.K.) Psychological Operations Unit in the British military until 2014. He then joined the MoD propaganda unit called Military Strategic Effects until his retirement from the service later in 2014. After that, he joined Strategic Communication Laboratories, a private PR firm that was later implicated in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Oakes had founded the firm and was thus Tatham’s boss. The import of that scandal was that the firm used a huge amount of Facebook data to influence the U.S. presidential elections and also the U.K. Brexit referendum in the interests of Russia. As it turned out, there was absolutely no evidence that this had happened either in the U.S. or in the U.K. Back in the real world, this document and other public information demonstrate that, on the contrary, SCL Group and its subsidiaries SCL Defence and Iota-Global (led by Tatham) were, in fact, working closely with Ukraine against Russia. This was even reported in the mainstream media, though the conclusion that the Russiagate hysteria was overblown did not percolate through.
So we have established that Western forces have been training and advising the government of Ukraine from before the coup, though noticeably more afterward. What did they do with this advice? They set up a range of cut-outs and front groups which they pretended were independent of government in order to aid plausible deniability.
Each was marked indelibly by Nazi apologism, or was run by Banderite ideologues with whom British and American officials evidently closely co-operated. The prominent role of Banderite Neo-Nazis in all of these Ukraine government propaganda operations suggests that Nazi apologism has spread into the core institutions of the government of Ukraine– perhaps more than the dominant Western view is able to admit.
Professor David Miller is a non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Islam and Global Affairs at Istanbul Zaim University and a former Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol. He is a broadcaster, writer and investigative researcher; the producer of the weekly show Palestine Declassified on PressTV; and the co-director of Public Interest Investigations, of which spinwatch.org and powerbase.info are projects. He tweets @Tracking_Power.