Much of the ‘independent reporting’ of western media outlets comes from videos and briefings provided by the numerous irregular forces within the Kiev establishment, writes Prof. Madhav Nalapat
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba seemed shocked during a BBC interview that the grotesque images of corpses at Bucha near Kiev failed to get NATO members to accept the complete shutdown of all ties between the countries in that alliance and Russia. Certainly the narrative presented within NATO (and which is identical to that of the Kiev government) has generated more anger, indeed hatred, directed at Russia and its people. Almost in lockstep, the Kiev narrative has been repeated by almost all media channels within NATO member states. Those refusing to fall in line may lose their promotions if not their jobs at such apostasy.
What Russia gained from torturing and killing hundreds of Ukrainians and then ensuring that the evidence was preserved for the Ukrainian army to discover is a matter for reflection. Even the suspicious scrawling of “This is for children” on a Tochka missile (abundantly available in the Ukrainian army) that Kyiv-NATO claims was dropped on a train station by Russia to kill civilians aroused no suspicion in the minds of a visiting EU delegation. All (anti-Russia) Ukrainians are good, while all Russians are bad, is the accepted wisdom within much of NATO.
There is in Atlanticist media a Saints versus Sinners narrative on the Ukraine war that has been playing out since the Russian invasion over television screens and in newspaper headlines in member countries of NATO. The wars it has fought in the 21st century have revealed that kinetic battles are clearly not a NATO forte, but the alliance has been adept at spin management within the International Community (aka its own membership). There is rising Russophobia within the Atlantic community, now that it has been subjected for weeks to a barrage of messaging that show Russians as barbarian hordes led by an incarnation of Adolf Hitler
Ironically, the last time the Russian people were characterised as barbarian hordes led by the satanic despot was during 1941-45, when Adolf Hitler made the second biggest mistake of his life by launching a war on the USSR led by J. Stalin, the biggest being the Holocaust that denuded Germany of its best and brightest minds. Then as now, news outlets in Nazi Germany portrayed until well into 1944 the army of that country (in its former avatar, the USSR) as being on the verge of collapse, and Stalin himself as having suffered a series of escalating mental breakdowns. This sounds familiar to the comments on the Russian military and on President Putin since the invasion of Ukraine.
ALSO READ: Death toll in Ukraine train attack hits 57
Every time Russian forces re-deployed their troops away from a Ukrainian town, their “defeat” at the hands of the Ukrainian forces (who entered such locations after the Russians left) is broadcast in the “international community”, which as always is defined as comprising only the NATO member states. Defeat after claimed defeat by Russian forces are reported, as were items on nervous breakdowns following each other at speed in the Kremlin, and yet this defeated, demoralised, untrained and poorly trained army still continues to dominate the battlefield in Ukraine.
Certainly RT (among the news channels blocked from transmission within NATO countries in order to protect freedom of the press) gives an entirely contrarian view to that of those outlets that generate so much Russophobia within their staple readership, outlets such as CNN, BBC, the Guardian or the New York Times. If RT is to be taken seriously, Russian soldiers are weighed down not with weapons but with candy for the children of Ukraine. The soldiers are indeed busy, not through fighting a war since February 24, but because so much of the day gets spent assisting elderly Ukrainians to escape the evil intentions of some of the troops in their own military.
Certainly the numerous Russophobes and Racial Supremacists that have been mainstreamed into the Ukrainian military since 2014 are not those who emulate the example of Mother Teresa or Mahatma Gandhi. This is clear from their record in dealing with Russian-speaking inhabitants of Ukraine after the elected government led by Viktor Yanukovich was toppled by street protests generously funded by NGOs patronised by Hillary Clinton. This was well before the 2017 US Presidential elections, in which Trump bested Clinton, and which was promptly blamed by the latter on Putin.A longstanding ogre, it would appear, to the formidable Empress of the Beltway.
If the Kremlin under Putin had been influential enough to decide on who would occupy the White House, the Russian economy and people would not have been in the less than ideal state that they have been in both before and after the toppling of the USSR at the close of 1991. At the same time, although such facts seem to be unknown to “international community” media, the irregulars who now dominate the Ukrainian military and security services have an easily trackable record of cruelty and oppression of the Russian-speaking inhabitants of Ukraine.
ALSO READ: EU to Speed up Process To Add Ukraine
The International Criminal Court seems as unconcerned about ascertaining the identity of the corpses that were strewn inside Bucha for media outlets to cover three days after Russian forces left. Much of the “independent reporting” of western media outlets comes from videos and briefings provided by the numerous irregular forces within the Kiev establishment. The working assumption is that if a Ukrainian source within an irregular-controlled zone says something, it is the gospel truth, whereas if a Russian says anything, it must be an untruth.
The CNN and BBC-certified “independent” reporters working on this axiom have wholly adopted the narrative that before the Russians left Bucha on March 30, and during the three days when Ukrainian authorities controlled the city (and never talked about such corpses), murder of hundreds of residents had been carried out. An alternative narrative from Ukrainian sources is that most of those killed were Russian-speaking, and were not part of the Russophobe Kiev establishment. And hence that they were punished for such heresy by Ukrainian army irregulars once they took back control of a city that had been abandoned by Russian forces.
The Kiev establishment has been spinning cartwheels seeking to generate enough of a frenzy within the “International Community” as to motivate the Biden-Johnson duo masterminding the NATO response in Ukraine to intervene kinetically. Presenting Kiev-declared victims of Russophobia as prey to Russian soldiers is engineered to generate sufficient anger within the public in NATO member states to force timid politicians to further tighten sanctions on Russia and finally meeting Kyev’s demand that NATO enter directly the battlefields of Ukraine. What the Bucha images and narrative have done is to make the public within the NATO bloc less than eager to enter into battle against an enemy as cruelly ruthless as what NATO info-warriors present them as being. It is of course plausible that most of the Bucha dead may have been regarded as Ukrainian spies by Russian forces and despatched to the other world.
Only an early and neutral forensic examination of the identities of the victims would determine which of the competing narratives is fact and which is false, but such an investigation seems remote. This is so despite the Ukrainian establishment now controlling this unfortunate suburb of Kyev. A genuinely independent investigation may still be in a position to uncover the identities of almost all the Bucha dead and reveal them and their social media views to the entire world, as distinct from the much more limited NATO-certified “international community”. Only a transparent investigation by observers from neutral countries would be able to find out if those killed were Russian-speaking collaborators of the “Occupiers”, or were Ukrainians who had signed on to the Russophobic agenda of the Azov Battalion. Truth is usually the first casualty of war, it is said, and that seems to have been the case with the tragic destiny that befell so many in Bucha and elsewhere.