RT has played a major role in eroding support for Ukraine around the world, and the network has fundraised to buy weapons for the Russian military, the US State Department claimed on Friday. The US has sanctioned RT’s parent company in response.

In a press briefing in Washington, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken leveled a slew of accusations against RT. Blinken claimed that the outlet operates a range of nominally independent news channels on social media in order to spread pro-Kremlin messaging, that it operates a secretive cyber operations unit linked to Russian intelligence, and that it covertly manages a crowdfunding platform to arm and supply Russian troops fighting in the Ukraine conflict.

“Thanks to new information, much of which originates from RT employees, we know that RT possesses cyber capabilities and engaged in covert information and influence operations and military procurement,”Blinken told reporters.

Blinken did not fully explain RT’s supposed “cyber capabilities,” but said that the network’s alleged cyber unit runs “covert influence operations” around the world, and supplies information to Russian media outlets, “mercenary groups,” and other “arms of the Russian government.”

The crowdfunding campaign is not directly linked to RT, the American diplomat admitted, before claiming that it is covertly run by an RT employee. According to Blinken, this campaign has raised money within Russia to supply Russian troops with sniper rifles, suppressors, body armor, drones, and other equipment.

Aside from these alleged activities, RT’s reporting is damaging to US interests, State Department official Jamie Rubin told reporters after Blinken spoke.

“One of the reasons – not the only reason – why so much of the world has not been as fully supportive of Ukraine as you would think they would be, given that Russia has invaded Ukraine and violated rule number 1 of the international system –  is because of the broad scope and reach of RT, where propaganda, disinformation and lies is spread to millions if not billions around the world,” he declared.

Rubin runs the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), essentially its propaganda and intelligence wing. The GEC has funded propaganda games aimed at children and forced Twitter to censor pro-Russian content, while Rubin admitted last year that he intends to use the GEC to shut down Russian media outlets around the world. 

Blinken announced that RT’s parent company, Rossiya Segodnya, its director, and one other entity and two individuals, would be sanctioned in response to the allegations. 

The sanctions come just over a week after two people alleged to work for RT were criminally charged by the US Justice Department for their alleged role in pushing video content that sowed “discord and division” in the US. The two Russians were also sanctioned by the US Treasury Department, along with RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan and three other senior RT employees. 

Asked to comment on the State Department’s announcement by CNN earlier on Friday, RT’s press office sarcastically replied “We’ve been broadcasting straight out of the KGB headquarters all this time.”

“No, but seriously, we’re running out of popcorn to sit and watch what the US government will come up with next about us,” the press office added.

https://www.rt.com/russia/603996-ukraine-support-rt/

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The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has made the “unprecedented”decision to effectively cancel the scheduled showings of the documentary feature ‘Russians at War’. The organizers cited security threats after pressure from Ukrainian activists.

Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova spent seven months with a Russian military unit and produced the first-person documentary with Canadian government funding. Its pre-screening on Tuesday was picketed by Ukrainian groups calling it “Russian propaganda.”

“We have received reports indicating potential activity in the coming days that pose significant risk; given the severity of these concerns, we cannot proceed as planned,” TIFF organizers announced on Thursday evening. 

“This has been an incredibly difficult decision,” they added. “This is an unprecedented move for TIFF.”

The festival will “pause” the screenings scheduled for Friday, Saturday and Sunday but intends to show the film “when it is safe to do so,” the organizers said. Friday’s screening was supposed to be the feature’s North American premiere.

The Toronto Police Service told the state broadcaster CBC that the decision was not based on their recommendations and was made independently by TIFF organizers.

Ukrainian groups organized a protest outside Tuesday’s screening, accusing the film of “humanizing the aggressor.”Kiev’s consul-general in Toronto, Oleg Nikolenko, was part of the “large crowd,” as the CBC described it. One protester broke into the theater during the screening and denounced the movie as “propaganda” before he was removed by security, while another handed out pro-Ukrainian pamphlets to audience members.

Nikolenko claimed that the film has damaged the TIFF’s reputation and given “Russia a chance to further undermine democracy,” vowing that Ukrainians will “continue to fight Russian propaganda in every corner of the world using all peaceful and legal means.”

On Thursday, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress called for the resignations of the TIFF’s board of directors, the suspension of government funding to the festival, and an investigation into “advocating genocide.”

The producers of ‘Russians at War’ called the TIFF’s decision to effectively cancel the film “heartbreaking” and an “affront… to our democratic values in a free media.” They also condemned Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland as well as two Canadian senators and two MPs who joined Ukrainian officials in their efforts to get the film censored, for “irresponsible, dishonest, and inflammatory”rhetoric that “incited the violent hate” that led to the film’s censorship.

Freeland, whose grandfather was a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, said on Wednesday that she had “grave concerns” about the film and that it should not have received state funding. The project received about 340,000 Canadian dollars ($250,000) from the Canada Media Fund via TVOntario, which has since disavowed the film.

https://www.rt.com/news/603983-russian-documentary-censored-canada-toronto/

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The West is ensuring Kiev’s demise on purpose
By allowing Ukraine to hit Russia with their missiles, NATO members are enacting a cruel sacrifice to wind down the war

The predictable and predicted is happening again. Despite the coyly teasing dance of seven veils performedby, mostly, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to those who ignored the noise and focused on the signal, it’s always been clear that Washington and London would decide to – officially and openly – allow and help Ukraine to use their missiles for attacks even deeper into Russia than before. And of course, it’s been obvious to Moscow as well, as Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, made clear as early as September 11.

That the West is escalating is no surprise. It has a well-established pattern of continually ratcheting-up the stakes in its proxy war – including (but not restricted to) the supply of intelligence, mercenaries, ‘advisors’, various tanks, armored vehicles, missile systems, and recently F-16 fighter planes. Now it’s time to fully unleash Storm Shadow and then, if perhaps a little later, long-range ATACMS missiles. What we can safely disregard is the pretext of Iran allegedly shipping short-range ballistic missiles to Russia. It’s either simply untrue or irrelevant. 

Tehran denies the American claim. Those ready to scoff at that should recall that the West has a rock-solid record of making things up, from Iraqi WMDs to Israel’s legally strictly non-existing ‘right’ to defend itself against those it occupies and genocides. And even if Iran has handed over missiles – as, by the way, it would have an actual right to do as a sovereign state – that is not why this specific Western escalation is occurring now. 

The real reason why the restrictions on the use of Western missiles are coming off at this point in the war is that Kiev is even more desperate than usual. With Russia first containing Kiev’s Kursk Kamikaze incursion and now launching devastating counter-attacks, the Ukrainian operation has turned into the bloody waste it was destined to be, while Moscow’s forces are accelerating their advances elsewhere, as even the stalwartly pro-Kiev New York Times is admitting.

Not that adding deeper missile strikes will save the Zelensky regime from defeat and probably collapse. For one thing, Ukraine does not have a large supply of these weapons, and given Western politics and lack of production capacities, it never will. Kiev may get lucky and do some limited damage, but – as with earlier silver bullets – the missiles cannot change the course of the war. Russian countermeasures will greatly blunt their impact in any case. But the Zelensky regime has a habit of clinging to one straw after the other. And, in addition, Zelensky’s team is pursuing its usual double strategy of seeking spectacular attacks that can feed propaganda at home and abroad, as well as perhaps finally escalate the war into an open regional, that is European, or even global conflict. For that apocalyptic escalation is Kiev’s last – if insane and suicidal – chance of staving off defeat.

The risk of things getting out of hand beyond Ukraine is obvious. For those too slow to grasp them, Putin has just spelled out the essence of the issue. Since Ukraine can only target and launch these missiles with indispensable Western, that is, NATO assistance, their use will mean that NATO is at war with Russia. Some things need explaining in the West nowadays: If you shoot at a country or take part in shooting at it, you enter into direct armed conflict with it. Period.

But NATO acting in a way that establishes a state of war between it and Russia does not predetermine how exactly Moscow will react. As before, with the West provoking Russia in ways that should have remained unimaginable, it will be up to Russia to be the adult in the international room, exercise enormous restraint, and smother the general conflagration that the West seems so desperate to start. The good news here is that the Russian leadership is very likely to do just that. It is true that Western missiles fired deep into Russia with the help of Western logistics and hands-on assistance in Ukraine – remember those German Luftwaffe generals spilling the beans on that? – would be a legitimate reason for Moscow to strike not only at Ukraine but at the West, for instance at NATO bases in Poland and Romania. 

But Russia is virtually certain not to do so, because it is winning the war against both Kiev and its Western sponsors inside Ukraine. Moscow has no reason to do the Zelensky regime a huge favor by taking the bait and escalating to an open war beyond this theater. How can we be so certain? Because it makes sense and the Russian leadership has a habit of being sensible, and in addition because they have just told us so. Peskov had two things to say about Russia’s handling of future Ukrainian long-range strikes with Western missiles: that there will be an “appropriate” response and that “there is no need to expect some kind of response everywhere,” since the war in Ukraine – or, as Peskov put it, using the official Russian designation, the “Special Military Operation” – already is that response.

Note that no one in Moscow has ruled out that it could go beyond Ukraine. But a direct assault on British or US assets, even if perfectly legitimate, would still make little sense. Russia always has the option of paying its Western opponents back in their own coin by equipping theiropponents with better arms. That would be a quid pro quoas perfectly symmetrical as it can get in the real world. And Putin has of course already referred to precisely that possibility.

Peskov’s statement also raises another issue that Kiev should be very worried about, if the Zelensky regime were rational, which it is not. Let’s recall one simple fact: Ukraine’s Western supporters are friends from hell. Behind their rhetoric of “values” and “as long as it takes,” their policy toward Ukraine has been to exploit it as a proxy war pawn for their own misconceived geopolitical purposes. Now these same lethal ‘friends’ are graciously permitting Kiev to use their missiles to strike deeper into Russia. Yet if one thing about the Russian response is predictable, then that is that its first target will be Ukraine. Whatever Moscow may or may not decide to do about its Western de facto enemies, it will hit its Ukrainian direct opponent first.

Are we to believe that no one in Washington and London has considered this inevitable Russian counter-escalation by way of retaliation against Ukraine? Of course they have. And yet they are inviting it. How can we explain this? Consider this: As it happens, at exactly the same time that the missile restrictions are loosened with great fanfare, Kiev is also receiving Western signals that it is time to lower its expectations. For instance, in a recent Wall Street Journal article calling for “pragmatism” and “realism.” 

The West is now pushing Ukraine to be ready for compromises and concessions it has long ruled out. At long last, but so late indeed. One way to read this coincidence, which is definitely no coincidence, would be to explain it as a simple trade-off: Washington and London allow and help Ukraine to fire off a few more missiles even farther than before, purportedly to “improve the negotiating position,” and in return Kiev has to become more flexible about ending the war. 

Yet that would be a simplistic interpretation because firstly, Western geopolitics is more Machiavellian than that and secondly, it is obvious that Kiev will not improve but only further worsen its negotiating position and as a matter of fact, its position as such. Here is a more realistic hypothesis: Ukraine’s friends from hell will quietly welcome Ukraine being battered even worse by a retaliating Russia because that, in turn, will make Kiev more flexible when it comes to negotiations. And both the US and its UK sidekick, as well as the West in general would find it easier to wind down the war if they could point to Kiev throwing in the towel first: “Look,” they’ll tell us, “we’ve always said we’d help Ukraine to the end, but now they themselves want an end.” Ukraine sold out once more but with, for the naive, “agency” galore. 

Consider also that in the process of ending this war, as former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal has pointed out, the West is almost certain to face a deeply humiliating climb-down. This won’t be a mere crushing defeat for it, but a fundamental moral self-destruction too. Because Russia will impose a solution based on the peace agreement almost reached in Istanbul in the spring of 2022, plus additional territorial losses for Ukraine. But then the West’s sabotaging of that agreement – just admitted once more, this time by Victoria Nuland – and everything that it and Kiev have done since then will be revealed as one huge, wasteful fiasco. A fiasco within, as it were, the fiasco of the policy of turning Ukraine into a proxy of NATO expansion and then war against Russia.

This would be akin to what happened toward the end of another enormous US proxy cluster-mess, the Vietnam War. The Paris Peace Accords of 1973 did not actually end that conflict. That happened later when Washington’s proxy South Vietnam was overrun and abolished in 1975. But the Paris agreement served as an exit for the defeated US. 

The bloody irony was, of course, that a very similar deal had been available already in 1969. As historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin has correctly underlined, everyone who died between then and 1973 – that is, 20,000 Americans, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, and quite a few Cambodians – died not only for the general insanity of US overreach but for strictly nothing at all, an empirically measurable zero between what could have been settled in 1969 and was only signed in 1973. One day, the distance between the Istanbul peace option of spring 2022 and whatever agreement finally ends the Ukraine War will look very similar.

The permission for Ukraine to use Western missiles for long-range attacks on Russia is, in a terrible way, all too typical. It is yet another poison pill presented to Kiev as a form of ‘support’ and even ‘friendship’. Its real purpose is likely to be as sinister and selfish as can be, namely, to prepare the West’s way out of a lost proxy war it should never have provoked and should have let Ukraine end more than two years ago. One day, Ukrainians will be free to ask what all this was for and about. On that day, Zelensky and his team better not be within their reach anymore.

https://www.rt.com/news/603986-ukraine-russia-missiles-nato/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

SEE ALSO: https://sputnikglobe.com/20240914/us-sanctions-on-russian-media-reveal-fear-insecurity-of-dying-empire--ex-cia-analyst-1120141022.html