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A video of an alleged beheading of a Ukrainian soldier could be something much more than revenge in a vicious war Are gory proxy productions making a comeback?

 

By Sidney Hey

When the US media broadcast a video showing alleged PMC Wagner soldiers cutting off the head of a Ukrainian soldier, I could not help but be reminded of the horrible image of Iraq in 2004, when similar videos began to spread of the beheading of the unfortunate (never American) at the hands of alleged “insurgents” or “Al Qaeda” Islamists, which ten years later “ISIS” would make a central part of its propaganda. That was nothing more than a hoax by Anglo-American intelligence proxies that, while real in the execution itself, was not executed by those it purported to show.

Ordinary citizens have matured and the passage of time has taught them how far their government can go to manipulate them. Beheadings were presented -very conveniently and deliberately- by the Anglo-American media as the hallmark of “Islamist terrorism”. That, in addition to being an excuse to maintain the occupation, was the most important and Machiavellian rehearsal of what we know today as “hybrid warfare”. I have no doubt that here we are in something similar to what was done repeatedly in Iraq (with the ISIS hoax) and then tried to be replicated in Syria; the only thing that changes is the scenario, nothing else.

But is the sudden appearance of this video a coincidence, or is it rather a response to key events played out by PMC Wagner? Without mincing words, the mercenaries of this private Russian company are a pain in the ass for the AFU, let alone the foreign mercenaries recruited by the CIA and MI-6. The announcement by the leader of this group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, of the capture of the administrative centre of the city of Artemovsk by placing flags of the group and of the Russian Federation was a devastating blow to the morale of the AFU and also to the Atlanticist advisors who closely follow the operations on the ground. But the bad news does not stop there. The Wagner PMCs are also advancing relentlessly along the entire Donetsk Oblaz line, one of the latest strategic conquests being the Zaliznyanskoye settlement. How could they try to turn this situation around?

The staging and realism would be explained by the duplication of uniforms and insignia depicting PMC men played by foreign butchers posing as experienced Russians (from Iraq and Syria). Added to this, the impossibility of observing identifying features on these supposed Russian soldiers raises many suspicions about who these killers really are. If we look back a few years we see several similar hoaxes in which intelligence agencies produced audio-visual hoaxes such as the videos of a supposed Osama Bin Laden dubbed by impostors and the grand theatrical operation of his “assassination in Abbottabad, Pakistan” in may 2011. And that's where the more interesting questions begin. Why couldn't these guys be ISIS assets hired for these gruesome productions? To answer who their contractors are, for those who know where this fake Islamist franchise came from, would be redundant.

The release of this video does not seem coincidental. Even looking at the context of the place where it took place, it seems to show a very different season than the current one; more precisely, this vile act would have been carried out in spring or perhaps last summer (2022), so why is it being published now? Let's leave aside the supposed concern for brutality and inhumanity that the media like CNN, the BBC and the whole spectrum of media outlets that depend on Wall Street and the City of London. It's that the cheque has to come in every month if you want a story tailored to the government.

If we give a vote of confidence to these discredited media we must ask them where are the videos showing similar crimes carried out by Ukrainian Nazi extremists against Russian soldiers or even those carried out against pregnant Russian-speaking Ukrainian women in the Donbass? As the sense of humanity is very peculiar and random for liberal democracies, I anticipate that they will not want to give an answer.

The impact of seeing a human being beheaded is significantly horrifying, but also, its impact is psychologically exploitable for those who seek to demonise their enemy. Undoubtedly the image of PMC Wagner is being discredited. Because it has proven to be an important and effective backbone of Russian forces. When the administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney needed to cling to power amidst great questioning over the inconsistencies shown by the occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the losses from resistance operations, the CIA and military intelligence battalions under then General David Petraeus digitised counter-intelligence actions involving the actions of fake Islamists including “Al Qaeda-Iraq” and its successor in the charade, the “Islamic State of Iraq”. In the same muck was aligned the smiling Tony Blair who gladly and unscrupulously allowed the same dirty tactics to develop that would look like a bloody and indiscriminate insurgency that if not contained could leap into Europe.

Unlike Afghanistan and Iraq which had been hushed up, Russia can not only stand up to the dirty tricks and media censorship of the West but also gather evidence and bring it to the attention of international bodies which in turn have demonstrated a shocking opacity if we can in any way describe their incompetence.

What this video shows is perhaps one of thousands of episodes of the brutality of war or the falsification of a crime intended to sully the face of PMC Wagner, an outstanding tactical revelation on the battlefield that has shattered the expectations of NATO's masterminds.

The logic of this is clear and the message it conveys is “the Russians are evil and only the Russians are evil” and thus takes the other crimes committed by both regular army units and neo-Nazi groups led by NATO advisors out of the picture.