The silence of Western media on the causes of confrontation and the criminal involvement of their own governments is complicity in creating conditions for war.
Russia provided more evidence this week that NATO and the Kiev regime were planning a deadly offensive on Donbass, which Russia pre-empted with its military intervention beginning on February 24. Russia has called its intervention a special military operation, while Western states have condemned it as “an unprovoked invasion” of Ukraine.
One senses that it is absolutely imperative for Western media to deny all Russian claims for why it took military action. To do so might lead to some acknowledgement that Russia has just cause, as well as attribute onerous responsibility to Western governments.
It should also be noted, although this is denied too in Western media, that Moscow assiduously tried to address its security concerns through dialogue with the United States and its NATO partners. But those efforts were continually rebuffed. Moscow was treated like it was a non-entity whose long-held security concerns were non-existent or a figment of its imagination.
Russia’s latest information this week substantiating its claims involves a grave multidimensional national security threat. The gravity of the threats makes them impossible to ignore, which makes Western media silence all the more damnable. Moscow says its security analysts are still processing the full extent of information and it will provide more details at a future date. Suffice to say that so far, Russia has identified three major areas where its national security was being threatened by the U.S. and NATO-backed regime in Ukraine. Those threats were greater and more pressing than previously understood, which then presaged the military conflict that is underway in Ukraine.
First, there has emerged more information that the Kiev regime was planning to launch a major offensive on the self-declared people’s republic of Donetsk and Lugansk. The military formations assigned for the attack were the National Guard whose ranks are packed with Neo-Nazi brigades such as the notorious Azov Battalion. Those brigades have been trained and weaponized by the United States, Britain, Canada, Poland, and other NATO members. The Kiev regime has been waging a low-intensity war on the Russian-speaking populations of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics for the past eight years since the CIA-backed coup in 2014. Some 14,000 people have been killed and up to one million displaced from their homes. The new intensified offensive was to be launched this month. Thus when Moscow recognized the independence of the Donbass Republics on February 21 and went to their defense three days later on February 24, it effectively preempted a military attack that in all probability would have been coordinated by NATO powers. Russia has said that its objectives in Ukraine are to denazify and demilitarize the Kiev regime. That necessarily means taking the military operation to the Ukrainian capital and terminating it as a hostile power center.
Second, the threat to turn Ukraine into a nuclear weapon state was a real covert project, not some idle threat, according to Russian foreign intelligence. It claims to have evidence that the U.S. and other NATO powers were well aware of plans for Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons. When Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky mentioned at the Munich Security Conference on February 19 that his country might abrogate the 1994 Budapest Memorandum banning such weapons in the former Soviet Republic it was not merely an idle whim or braggadocio.
Third, it has now transpired that the United States was funding biowarfare laboratories at dozens of sites across Ukraine. This has long been a Russian concern over many years since Ukraine’s independence in 1991. But this week, the Russian authorities were able to cite documents recovered from laboratories that showed that these facilities were indeed engaged in producing deadly pathogens or bacterial warfare agents. The facilities were apparently ordered to hastily destroy samples on February 24. Such activity is a violation of international bacterial warfare treaties and posed an unacceptable national security threat to Russia. The Pentagon is on record for publicly funding the laboratories. The State Department official with responsibility for Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, this week confirmed in congressional hearings that the laboratories were involved in producing hazardous materials because she expressed fears that Russian forces might obtain them. If they weren’t hazardous or illicit then why was Nuland so alarmed?
All in all, these three subject areas provide prima facia evidence for why Russia needed to launch its military operation into Ukraine nearly three weeks ago. Ever since the CIA-orchestrated coup d’état in 2014 against an elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, the country has been riven by civil war and used as a cat’s paw to destabilize eastern neighbor Russia. This of course conforms neatly with the deep imperial planning by the United States as articulated by people like Zbigniew Brzezinski for pursuing its hostility towards Russia and for continued Cold War division of geopolitical relations.
What is instructive, however, is the near-total silence among Western media outlets on all of the above. To his credit, Tucker Carlson at Fox News has been almost alone among the corporate media outlets in highlighting the warmongering duplicity of the Biden administration and its NATO acolytes.
By and large, though, the vital circumstances explaining the present conflict in Ukraine have been ignored or omitted by Western media. Any brief mention of Russia’s concerns that may be aired is quickly dismissed and ridiculed as “Kremlin propaganda”. It certainly does not help the public interest that Western states have recently taken draconian steps to ban Russian news media from broadcasting. The hypocrisy of Western claims about free speech is astounding.
But what is even more deplorable is the attempt by Western governments and their dutiful media to demonize and criminalize Russia. The climate of Russophobia is giving license to violent attacks on Russian citizens abroad. One reprehensible incident was a truck-ramming attack at the Russian embassy in Ireland.
The ignorance and bigotry being fostered by supposedly free media is lending policies of hostility and aggression by NATO powers. Weapons and war finance are being funneled to Ukraine from U.S. and European taxpayers under the guise of “defending democracy from Russian aggression”. There are real reasons for why the conflict in Ukraine has erupted and there is grievous responsibility by NATO governments. The silence of Western media on the causes of confrontation and the criminal involvement of their own governments is complicity in creating conditions for war.
This week the Russian government expressed again a readiness for diplomatic engagement to end the war in Ukraine. It wants a commitment to end the systemic threat of NATO, the end of aggression by the NATO-backed Kiev regime, and recognition of its historic territorial claim to Crimea. Rational dialogue can solve conflict and ensure peace. But how is dialogue feasible when Western governments and media do not even begin to accept an alternative perspective, let alone one that might even be valid?