You'll Never Drink Alone were the words that hung above the bar at the Old Hem, an iconic pub in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

The pub is named after Ernest Hemingway, and its patrons would walk past a statue of the legendary American writer on their way in.

It was popular among the city's young creatives, and Serhiy Zhadan, one of Ukraine's best known poets, would often perform and drink there.

But now the Old Hem lies in ruins.

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So? The pub "colour" story is for yobbos, ignoramuses and old ladies knitting socks for the Ukrainian army... It's like "Dancing With The Stars"... These stories do not represent the hard facts: Russia is winning a war for the defence of its heartland, against the incursion of NATO... Read the real IMPORTANT news:

the ukrainian political swamp...

See:

... says Kotkin, Ukraine is winning the war only on Twitter. In reality, it’s losing. As a military veteran pointed out to me last week, the US needed three weeks to take Baghdad. Wars don’t run on TV schedules. There’s no doubt that Russia can conquer Ukraine in war if it wants to, says Kotkin, but there is every doubt that it can keep the peace. The Ukrainians will make it impossible to occupy.

Gus says that Putin is trying to minimise the human collateral damage and is concentring his incursion efforts in destroying the Ukrainian military (and its associated fascists). This is somewhat much harder than it looks because of the population being used as "shield". The Russian army has destroyed around 4,000 military targets, each involving many Ukrainian soldiers, command posts/command personnel/brass, etc...

Because of the rampant corruption that has existed in Ukraine and the various "gangs" of Mafia/Gangsters/Fascists that have rule Ukraine, the difficulty will be to dismantle the polarisation of the populations... read again: the ukrainian political swamp...

NOTE: THE RUSKIES DO NOT WANT TO OCCUPY UKRAINE... But they do not want Ukraine to be a NATO puppet with American nukes near the Russian border. A similar situation occurred in 1963, when the US planted nukes in Europe and the USSR responded with nukes stored on Cuba. The US president, JFK, negotiated a retreat with the USSR, for peace. A few months later JFK was assassinated by the secret service, on behalf of ... (the US warmongers /US industrialists/US Nazis — take your pick)... Meanwhile, has the US lost its moral compass with about 75 little wars around the planet?:

moral...

This subheading in a SMH story is a bit more brutal and contrary to what it was trying to achieve. The USA had only a fictitious moral compass since its inception and has had NO MORAL HIGH GROUND TO STAND UPON...

See also:

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW...

The ongoing Russian invasion has torn asunder whatever passed for geopolitical stability in Eastern Europe in the years since NATO expansion brought Poland and the three former Soviet Baltic Republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia into its membership.

While peeved, Russia had accepted the resulting equilibrium with stoic grace, bristling at every NATO effort at muscle flexing, but not overreacting. Even in the face of NATO and EU intervention in the affairs of Russia’s neighbor and ostensible ally, Belarus, in the aftermath of a contested August 2020 presidential election and sustained border crisis over immigration policy, Russia kept its cool, reining in Viktor Lukashenko, the impetuous Belarussian president, while trying to calm the situation with the four NATO members in question.

The Russo-Ukrainian War has changed this equation, with Poland and the three Baltic States using the conflict as an excuse to trigger Article IV of the NATO Charter to call for consultations among the NATO membership regarding a situation the four Eastern European nations view as a pressing national security matter. 

The article states simply:

“Article 4

The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.”

Defensive/Offensive Alliance

NATO is an ostensible defensive alliance whose core tenet of collective self-defense is enshrined in the oft-cited Article V of the NATO Charter. While NATO has been engaged in several conflicts in the past 30 years, however, none of them involved invoking Article V. Indeed, the collective defense clause has only been used once, in the aftermath of 9/11, when, at the insistence of the United States, NATO recognized the terrorist attack as a triggering moment.

The invocation of Article V was, however, more about political theater than genuine collective defense, with NATO deploying several airborne surveillance aircraft over North America, as well as assembling a small flotilla of ships in the Mediterranean Sea.

The real meat behind NATO’s actual use of military force in a combat environment has historically been Article IV; it was invoked to justify the dispatch of NATO troops to lead the Implementation Force (IFOR) and Stabilization Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina (SFOR) in the 1990’s; NATO aerial assault on Serbia and related deployment of troops into Kosovo as part of the Kosovo Force (KFOR) in 1999; the deployment of NATO troops to Afghanistan as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in 2001; the deployment of a training mission to Iraq in 2004 and the aerial bombardment of Libya in 2011.

While some of these missions had a legitimate peacekeeping function, at least three (the bombing of Serbia, the intervention in Afghanistan, and the bombing of Libya) were offensive in nature and associated with regime change policies.

The situation confronting Poland and the three Baltic States today in Ukraine is one that resonates across NATO and Europe — how best to respond to a Russian invasion that threatens fundamental principles of sovereignty and respect for international borders that had, in theory at least, served as the foundation of European peace and security since the end of the Second World War. (The case of the creation of Kosovo, carved as it was from the territory of Serbia, serves as an uncomfortable exception to this European narrative.)

Despite NATO’s decades-long courtship of Ukraine, and the fact that the Ukrainian military had been transformed into a virtually interchangeable part of NATO through a massive training and equipping operation that saw thousands of NATO troops rotate through Ukraine on an annual basis and thousands of Ukrainian troops operating alongside NATO forces abroad, the reality was that, as a non-NATO state, Ukraine could not benefit from the collective defense protections offered by actual NATO membership. That is something both President Joe Biden and NATO Secretary General Jen Stoltenberg have repeated several times before and after the Russian invasion.

Lethal Aid

NATO has been struggling with how best to support Ukraine. Prior to the Russian invasion, NATO member states — on an individual basis — were providing military equipment and supplies to Ukraine, most notably in the form of “lethal weaponry” such as anti-tank missiles and surface-to-air missiles. While this weaponry has proven effective on the battlefield, it has not been able to stem the tide of the Russian military advance, prompting these individual NATO members to continue supplying the same lethal aid.

Complicating the arms shipments is that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat to any nation that interferes with the Russian action in Ukraine. “Now a few important, very important words for those who may be tempted to intervene in ongoing events from the outside,” Putin declared at the end of his Feb. 23 address announcing the beginning of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine. He said:

“Whoever tries to interfere with us, and even more so to create threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never experienced in your history. We are ready for any development of events. All necessary decisions in this regard have been made. I hope that I will be heard.”

While stopping short of threatening the use of nuclear weapons, Putin’s comments left no doubt that any intervention by NATO as an organization, or individual NATO members, in Ukraine would result in war with Russia.

This threat has resonated as NATO considers its next move under Article IV. While NATO has activated, for the first time in its history, the 40,000-strong Response Force, and individual nations, including the United States, have mobilized additional military forces above and beyond those assigned to the Response Force, all of these troop movements have been declared to be defensive in nature, involving as they do the reinforcement of NATO’s eastern flank.

NATO is playing a risky game, however, by continuing to supply lethal weapons to Ukraine that originate from and are shipped through NATO members’ territory. While international law is insufficiently clear on the matter, it appears that the provision of weapons to Ukraine does not by itself open the door to legally justifiable military countermeasures by Russia. (For example, Russia can’t bomb Germany or Poland for facilitating arms transfers.)

But this is not the case when it comes to fulfilling one of Ukraine’s most oft-repeated requests, establishing a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine. If NATO aircraft were to engage in such an action, it would lead to direct contact with Russian aircraft in a theater of war, a result which would most likely end in combat between the opposing sides. Moreover, this is exactly the  kind of “intervention” Putin warned about on Feb. 23. NATO has, to date, consistently ruled out implementing a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine.

Ukraine has also requested NATO provide it with military aircraft, in particular MIG-29 fighters, that could be used to reinforce Ukraine’s much-diminished air force. While technically the provision of weapons is not a triggering moment for Russian countermeasures under international law, the delivery of combat aircraft too closely resembles the imposition of a no-fly zone and, given what that entails regarding a Russian reaction, has been deemed by the Pentagon to be untenable.

Refugee Danger

While the threat of NATO overreach in providing air support to the Ukrainian government exists, the greatest potential for a NATO-Russian clash in Ukraine rests in the ongoing flow of refugees from Ukraine into neighboring territories.

To date, more than 2 million Ukrainians have fled to sanctuary in Poland, Moldova, Hungary and Romania. The capacity of these nations to absorb these refugees is rapidly reaching the saturation point. If Russia begins its long-anticipated assault on Kiev, or otherwise engages in action which dramatically alters the situation in the rest of Ukraine, it is anticipated that millions more Ukrainians will be seeking refugee status, creating the real potential for one of the greatest humanitarian emergencies since the end of the Second World War.

Faced with such conditions, Ukraine’s neighbors may feel compelled to create a humanitarian buffer zone along Ukraine’s border with Europe which would require the deployment of some sort of peacekeeping force, operating under either the U.N., EU or NATO Article IV authority. The question of how Russia would respond to such an intervention is unknown.

If Russia were to militarily confront such a peacekeeping force on the soil of Ukraine, there is a distinct probability that NATO heavy forces might be brought in to protect the peacekeepers, raising the unthinkable prospect of a direct confrontation between Russian and NATO forces.

No one can predict with any degree of accuracy how events during war will unfold; no plan survives initial contact with the enemy, and the enemy always gets a vote.

However, if the war in Ukraine continues unabated at a level equaling or exceeding its current scope and scale, it is not a stretch of the imagination to think that there will be a refugee-induced crisis that will require some form of humanitarian intervention.

To the degree that such an intervention would be construed by Russia as a threat worthy of military countermeasures is unknown. Perhaps it is time for NATO and EU diplomats to act in a proactive fashion, reaching out to their Russian counterparts in an effort to anticipate both the problem, and the solution, in a manner which does not create the conditions for inadvertent military conflict.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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Shortly after Russia passed a new censorship law that effectively criminalized accurate reporting on the war in Ukraine, CNN executives on two continents gathered for an emergency video call to figure out what would happen next.

WHAT A FUCKING STATEMENT !!!!

The West journalists, including those of the NYT (above quote) — the same people who got "effectively" taken for a ride with "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" and have never mentioned that the whole thing had been cooked up by the CIA, are pontificating about "accurate reporting" while being BIASED like a box of squashed tissues for sobers...

Time to end the US Empire hegemony... It was designed to protect us from invaders, but it never had a moral compass and Biden is as "Christian" as the devil who sells his soul to Faust (note the reverse) to get more oil and gas for the furnaces of Hell...

The Italian newspaper La Stampa said on Thursday it didn’t do anything wrong when it printed a frontpage image showing the aftermath of a ballistic missile strike on Donetsk, the capital of a breakaway republic in eastern Ukraine, while promising readers coverage of Russian attacks in Kiev and Lvov.

The photo was meant to demonstrate the “clear horror of the war” and not to assign blame to any particular party, editor-in-chief Massimo Giannini said in an interview with La7 TV channel, responding to criticism of his editorial choices. He said his newspaper didn’t try to mislead readers, despite what detractors said.

“The thing that bothers me most and pains me a lot is that there are also some people here in Italy, some disgraced people of the web, who amplify this and call it a case of disinformation. Where is the disinformation?” he demanded.

The Wednesday print issue of the paper featured a full-page photo of a street littered with dead bodies, with a man covering his face in grief. “The Carnage,” the headline read. Short text teasers promised stories further in the paper about the “traumatized children in Lvov” and “Kiev preparing for the final assault” by Russian troops.

The photo was taken on Monday in Donetsk, the capital of the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic, after its center was struck by a tactical Tochka-U ballistic missile. Its leadership and Russia said Ukraine was the only party that could have launched it and that the rocket’s warhead was a cluster weapon, designed to kill unprotected soldiers in a wide area.

The attack on Donetsk killed 21 civilians and injured scores of others. Moscow called it a terrorist attack and a war crime. The Russian embassy in Italy, as it responded to La Stampa’s frontpage, said the newspaper didn’t bother to cover it.

Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said on Thursday that the Italian news outlet, like other Western mainstream media, was intentionally “distorting the perceptions of its own readers.”

The missile attack proved once again how strong the influence of radical nationalists and neo-Nazis was on Ukrainian armed forces, the Russian official said. NATO members allowed those forces to entrench themselves in the country “while the media kept silent,” she pointed out. La Stampa’s use of the photo stands out among examples of fake news and is “a real crime,” she asserted.

Lvov, a city in western Ukraine, has become a major destination for refugees fleeing the fighting in other parts of the country. The capital, Kiev, is partially encircled by Russian troops and has been damaged to some extent amid the fighting. The Ukrainian side claims Russia is deliberately attacking civilians in Kiev to terrorize them. Moscow denies that and blames civilian casualties on Ukrainian troops, who allegedly deploy their artillery and anti-aircraft weapon systems near civilian facilities, which get hit by return fire.

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GusNote: apparently, Zelensky-the-war-criminal is about to speak to the Italian parliament and demand a whatever-fly zone... Do the Italian representatives want WW3? I do not think so, but you never know with the Brown Pants people...

REE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

March 16, 2022

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Fox News, Ukraine and the Onset of the New World Order

Friends,

I have been writing and saying in numerous essays and articles published since 2013 that Fox News (that is, the news portion of the media operation) serves as a propaganda voice for the Neoconservative globalists of the managerial Deep State.

That much should be clear simply by tuning in for just a few minutes to view Fox News’ over-the-top coverage of the Ukrainian conflict. 

It’s nothing new. 

Two prominent examples immediately come to mind. Both primetime announcer Bret Baier, author of a potboiler praising Ulysses Grant, and Brian Kilmeade, author of an unserious volume praising the collaboration of Abraham Lincoln and radical revolutionary Frederick Douglass, serve as a zealous “amen corner” for American intervention globally. (Both books were no doubt written with critical collaboration from “ghost writers”)

And who can forget the unbridled globalism (and anti-Trumpism) of the late Charles Krauthammer, and his boast that after the fall of Communism, “we now live in a unipolar world,” controlled essentially by American business and political elites and the US state department, and anyone who stands in our (their) way must be taught “a lesson in American democracy?” 

Just as our Federal government had “saved” the Union in 1861-1865 by beating down those unprogressive racist Confederates and their traitorous leaders (e.g. Lee and Davis), so now America must go round the world to “enlighten” it about all the wonders and blessings of our form of liberal democracy.

Whether in Syria, where Fox was joined at the hip to the late John McCain’s frenzied calls for the United States to intervene against the legitimate and Christian-supported government of President Bashar Assad (as McCain stood on the ground arm-in-arm with ISIS-connected guerrillas), or its plea that American soldiers must stay in Afghanistan long after the imposed twenty-year US “experiment in democracy” had been deemed a failure, or now with its unbelievably propagandistic coverage of the conflict in Ukraine, Fox News is not adverse to employing disinformation and extreme emotionalism in the causes it advances. 

As I do each morning, but only for a few disagreeable minutes, Tuesday  (March 15) I switched on “Fox & Friends.” The program ended with the network offering its viewers a performance by pop singer Vladimir John Ondrasik of his new “patriotic” song: “Can One Man Save the World?” As I listened to Ondrasik and the words of his song, the motivation and object were apparent: the embattled president of Ukraine, Volodymir Zelensky, has become the new “savior of the world,” indeed a near-perfect, holy, Christ-like figure, sent from Heaven to lead the peoples of the earth into a new age, annealed in democracy, freedom, and accompanying exaltation…despite the fact that the country he leads is probably the most corrupt and undemocratic in Europe.

And Brian Kilmeade, seizing the moment and deeply affected by Ondrasik’s cloying paean, almost genuflected in homage. Here was “the Abraham Lincoln of Ukraine,” leading his beleaguered nation against those awful pro-Russian secessionists in Donetsk and Lugansk provinces which have declared their independence from Kiev (the flag these states have adopted is modeled on the Confederate Battle Flag) and against the forces of the new Satan himself, Vladimir Putin, brooding and mentally-deranged, crouching in the dark recesses of the Kremlin. 

But Volodymyr Zelensky—who is he really? Well, he is a comedian and former performing drag queen who was literally plucked out of nowhere to become the current president of Ukraine. Archbishop Carlo Vigano’, former Apostolic Nuncio in the United State for the Catholic Church and an highly informed observer of Eastern European cultural and political matters, offers this picture:

Zelensky’s performances as a drag queen are perfectly consistent with the LGBTQ ideology that is considered by his European sponsors as an indispensable requirement of the “reform” agenda that every country ought to embrace, along with gender equality, abortion and the green economy. No wonder Zelensky, a member of the WEF [World Economic Forum]  (here), was able to benefit from the support of Klaus Schwab and his allies [including George Soros] to come to power and ensure that the Great Reset would also be carried out in Ukraine…. In his homeland, many accuse him of having taken power away from the pro-Russian oligarchs not to give it to the Ukrainian people, but rather to strengthen his own interest group and at the same time remove his political adversaries.

After his election Zelensky closed seven opposition television channels, suppressed the opposition press, and arrested and accused the leader of the major opposition party in Ukraine, Arsen Medvedcuk, of treason, while naming his friends and associates to powerful and lucrative high positions in the government. 

And this is the man that Nancy Pelosi holds up as “the champion of democracy” and for whom Brian Kilmeade blubbers his unreserved admiration as another Abraham Lincoln.

Since 2014, the seceded republics of Donetsk and Lugansk have suffered approximately 14,000 civilian casualties at the hands of organized and irregular Ukrainian troops. But no Western media carry news of those outrages.

Instead, what American viewers get are graphic images of hospitals, maternity wards and civilian apartments destroyed, it is repeated incessantly, by Russian missiles and long-range artillery fire.

Yet, careful investigation of those purported “war crimes” should cause viewers to doubt what they are seeing. The first question that arises is: why would the Russian Army specifically target civilians and hospitals, for all the world to plainly see, when already they are receiving such negative press in the West?  Indeed, with nearly 20% of the Ukrainian population ethnically Russian and stated Russian war aims to pacify and win over at least portions of the country, such mindless attacks would seem counter-productive. 

And that brings us to the tactic of various irregular groups fighting at the behest of the Ukrainian government, such as the fanatical Azov Battalion militia group (trained by the CIA) and other violent nationalist formations which have engaged in terrorism against Russian civilians since 2014. Part of the strategy of such groups is to stage false flag operations, to occupy a hospital, for instance, and use it as a base for sniper fire against Russian regulars. Then, when the Russians fire back, to show vivid images to eager Western reporters of the “war crimes” committed by those hated Russians. Nothing gets the attention and sympathy of American viewers more than scenes of dying innocent mothers with their young babies, savagely slaughtered by those evil Orc-like demons from the cold north. And nothing makes better fodder for Ukrainian propagandists than those images spread across American HD wide-screens. 

As Archbishop Vigano’ has observed (March 6):

It is dismaying to see with what hypocrisy the European Union and the United States – Brussels and Washington – are giving their unconditional support to President Zelensky, whose government for eight years now has continued to violently persecute Russian-speaking Ukrainians with impunity (here), for whom it is even forbidden to speak in their own language… And it is scandalous that they are silent about the use of civilians as human shields by the Ukrainian army, which places anti-aircraft positions inside population centers, hospitals and maternity wards, schools and kindergartens precisely so that their destruction can cause deaths among the population.

Investigative journalists, Glenn Greenwald (on Substack), and Chronicles magazine assistant editor Pedro Gonzalez (March 7), have documented the incredibly large number of such instances, of horribly tragic attacks seemingly aimed at civilians, supposedly by the Russian army, only on closer inspection to have been committed by Ukrainian irregulars—who thereupon can utilize the unquestioning bias and favorability of the Western media to present their version widely:

…while the Western media shows images of the video game War Thunder (here), frames from the movie Star Wars (here), explosions in China (here), videos of military parades (here), footage from Afghanistan (here), from the Rome metro (here) or images of mobile crematoria (here), passing them off as real and recent scenes of Russian “war crimes,” the reality of the war in Ukraine is ignored because it has already been decided to employ the conflict as a weapon of mass distraction that legitimizes new restrictions of freedoms in Western nations, according to the plans of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset and the United Nations’ Agenda 2030.

And then, as intended, comes the outrage of American viewers, the feverish calls in Congress “to establish a no-fly zone” over Ukraine (an insane idea embraced by Republicans Lindsey Graham and Adam Kinzinger, which would lead undoubtedly to World War III) or to assassinate President Putin of Russia.

The propaganda works its magic. Not only is American corporate enterprise terminating all its business ventures in Russia, while most of the world, led by the United States state department and its Neocon apparatchiks, does the same, but anything or anybody in any way who dissents from the dogmatic establishment viewpoint on the conflict is “cancelled” or denounced as a “traitor” (e.g., Mitt Romney’s vicious attack on former Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s quite factual words as “treasonous”).

Have we not heard this chorus before? Is our memory so short that we cannot recall the unceasing examples of Russophobia during the Trump presidency? And yet many of the same “conservatives” who strongly and rightly resisted the disinformation percolating for the past six years, now accept the words, the photo montages, and the reporting of the same media and government voices as absolute, incontrovertible gospel?

Our news media decries censorship in Russia; the Russians, they say, are only presenting one side to their population. But, let me ask, is not the American media doing exactly the same thing? Are not their strident voices—and not just that of the brain-dead Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger—demanding that any dissenter, even the mildest and most circumspect (e.g., Tucker Carlson), be censored, throttled, even imprisoned for “thought crimes”? 

Even such internationally-famed artists and cultural icons as the Russian orchestra conductor Valery Gergiev and soprano Anna Netrebko are immediately fired, their contracts summarily terminated by practically all American and Western institutions they were to grace with their talent because they won’t openly and forthrightly denounce and condemn their home country and its president. And, more, the dozens of DVDs and compact discs of their performances are now disappearing from sellers, or prices for their works are now reaching astronomical figures.

Not even during the hottest moments of the Cold War was such extreme censorship exercised. 

Yes, it IS censorship, perhaps less open and more subtle, but there just the same, progressively accomplishing its goal of silencing and punishing anyone who demurs.

The American pot is calling the Russian kettle black.

Far too many Americans do not comprehend the fundamental issues involved in this conflict. Of course, Ukrainians are fighting Russians, and the near-totality of the West is both condemning the Russians and aiding Ukraine. But Ukraine is only a pawn in a much larger global game. Our managerial and foreign policy elites, despite their professed anguish over the blood being shed tragically in that corner of Eastern Europe, do not actually care about the poor Ukrainians living in besieged Kiev or the poor Russians living in the war-torn Donbas. What is important to them is, above all, the major effort and push for a globalist “Great Reset” using the Ukrainian conflict to finally accomplish their objective of bringing the entire world in accord with their plans for a New World Order. And to do that, Russia, which now stands athwart their designs, must be diminished and brought into line.

As international leaders from Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, to George Soros, with his multiple international NGOs, to various government officials in Kiev have declared (in the words of Ukrainian parliamentarian Kira Rudik to Fox News): “We know that we are not only fighting for Ukraine, but also for the New World Order.”

And that new order is not that of the traditional Christian West. Nor is Volodymyr Zelensky the “one man who can save the world.” That Man suffered on a Cross for us 2,000 years ago.

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by Ted Galen Carpenter Posted on March 22, 2022

American journalists have a long, ignoble history of being willing conduits for pro-war propaganda. Usually, that behavior is in service to a military crusade that Washington has launched or wants to initiate. At times, though, such a betrayal of journalistic integrity occurs on behalf of a foreign country that both U.S. political leaders and news media elites have adopted as a favorite cause. We are currently witnessing the latter phenomenon with respect to news coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war.

The dominant media narrative is that the US government (and all Americans) must "stand with Ukraine" in the latter’s resistance to Russian aggression. The identification with Ukraine’s cause is now nearly total, and it is infused with arrogant righteousness. Noticeably missing is any sense, once so powerful in US foreign policy and general discourse, that America’s interests often are – and should be – distinct from the interests and objectives of any foreign country. 

The emotionalism and shallowness is most evident with the television coverage of the conflict. American viewers are inundated with images of exploding shells from the invading Russian forces, sights of desperate, tearful refugees (mostly women and children) fleeing the invaders, and shots of other determined Ukrainian civilians arming themselves to defend their country. Television is a visual medium that always tries to evoke emotions among viewers, but that element has become truly over-the-top regarding treatment of the Ukraine war. Providing a deluge of images showing traumatized civilian refugees adds little to anyone’s understanding of the roots of the conflict, its underlying issues, or its likely outcome.

Indeed, prominent media outlets have been guilty of circulating transparently crude Ukrainian propaganda. Some of the material they’ve telecast turned out to be fake. A widely circulated image of a Ukrainian girl verbally confronting Russian troops actually was that of a Palestinian girl confronting Israeli troops. 2015’s Miss Ukraine was not taking up arms against the Russian invaders, despite a well-covered photo op. A closer examination of the image showed that she was brandishing an Airsoft gun. Some images of aerial combat footage of Ukrainian pilots battling Russian aggressors were from video games.

There also has been an array of more subtle, but decidedly deceptive, accounts that US press outlets distributed. The supposed martyrs of Snake Island, who allegedly were blown to smithereens after defying and cursing a Russian warship, turned out to be very much alive. The American news media dutifully reported a Ukrainian military account in early March that it had severely damaged, if not sunk, the Russian patrol ship Vasiliy Bykov in the Black Sea. The episode was supposedly a major victory, because the vessel was one of Russia’s newest warships. The credibility of Kyiv’s claim took a major hit on March 16, though, when the Vasily Bykov sailed, apparently unharmed, into the port of Sevastopol in Crimea. 

In light of such problems with accounts regarding the war, American journalists should at least be cautious about reflexively repeating Ukrainian government allegations. For example, Kyiv has repeatedly asserted that Russian forces deliberately target residential areas in their shelling campaigns, and the US media echo those claims. Perhaps the allegations are true, but the generally accepted figures with respect to Ukrainian civilian fatalities (726, as of March 17) do not seem consistent with wholly indiscriminate assaults. Journalists should at least view Kyiv’s accusations with some skepticism, yet there is scant evidence of meaningful scrutiny.

The Ukraine war would not be the first time that portions of the American press became willing conduits for foreign disinformation. In the years before the US entry into World War I, major American newspapers and magazines credulously repeated British propaganda about German forces in Belgium committing an array of atrocities, including raping nuns and bayoneting babies. Such stories later proved to be total fabrications, but they had a marked impact on American public attitudes toward Germany.

Some 7 decades later, following Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the performance of the American press was equally dismal. Media outlets gave prominent coverage to hearings by the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in October 1990, featuring alleged eyewitnesses to Iraqi war crimes. The leading witness was a tearful 15-year-old girl that Caucus chairman Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) introduced only as "Nayirah." A more detailed identification, Lantos cautioned, would endanger her friends and relatives in Kuwait. Nayirah described herself as a hospital volunteer who had personally witnessed Iraqi soldiers forcing maternity ward nurses to remove newborns from their incubators. That action, supposedly taking place at 3 hospitals, allegedly resulted in the deaths of 312 infants. 

The account was part of a sophisticated disinformation campaign by Kuwait’s government to whip-up American public opinion into a frenzied willingness to endorse going to war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. A regime that could commit such monstrous acts had to be stopped was the clear message. Eventually, the falsity of the incubator atrocity story became indisputable, especially when information confirmed that "Nayirah" was not a hospital volunteer, but the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States. By then, however, the United States and its allies were at war with Iraq. The false propaganda story had fulfilled its purpose.

In retrospect, the wonder is how professional journalists in the United States could have circulated such an inflammatory story without making even modest efforts to corroborate it. Yet they did so. Worse, their successors who are covering the Ukraine war show no greater degree of skepticism in putting Kyiv’s accounts of the conflict to such a test. Instead, they treat statements and images being given to them by Ukrainian authorities as though their authenticity is indisputable. 

Such credulity leaves the media open to cynical manipulation by yet another foreign government. And make no mistake about it: the purpose of the current propaganda offensive is to generate public support in the United States for Washington’s military intervention on Ukraine’s behalf. This time, the American people need to recognize pro-war propaganda in the news media for what it is, and not take the bait.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of 12 books and more than 950 articles on international affairs. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (forthcoming, July 2022).

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