OPERATION SELF-DELUSION

Why is the Ukrainian incursion into Russian territory a chokehold?

 

By Sidney Hey

On 20 May, the head of the Russian PMC Wagner appeared in a video broadcast on Telegram with a Russian flag in his hands and some of his men behind him brandishing the flag of his group, announcing the total takeover of the city of Artemovsk (Bakhmut). The news could not have been anything other than the consequence of an expected event. Although several US generals had raised scepticism about the Kiev regime's hopes of driving the Russians out, Volodymyr Zelensky, emulating Stalin's bloodthirsty and blind stubbornness with his order 227 (Not a step back), sent tens of thousands of his fighters to their deaths.

It has become clear that this was a crushing blow to Kiev but also to the sponsors in Washington, especially Biden. For months the media in the collective West had been making war propaganda about Bakhmut with all sorts of speculation, much of it fantastical, trying to cover up a lousy situation.

The desperation of those in Kiev and their backers to distract attention materialised last week with the attack on the airfield in “Berdiansk”, Russia. The raid involved the launching of British “Storm-Shadow” missiles from MIG-29 aircraft (delivered by Poland) which caused the destruction of Russian aircraft stationed on the runway. Beyond the material result of the attack, legally Moscow has the legal grounds for retaliation against Britain. From now on, the British could ask: Was the Foreign Office aware of this, did its advisers who put these missiles on the planes and those who train the Ukrainians know about this attack on Russian territory?

With Yevgeny Prigozhin's announcement, a Hollywood narrative that sought to dent the morale of the Russian population, maintain a triumphalist folklore in the European Union and at the same time feed the White House's political arguments as to “why” it was necessary to continue donating billions of dollars and armaments in bulk to a pro-Nazi regime led by an Ashkenazi Jew collapsed.

The Ukrainian failure in “Bakhmut”, now “Artemovsk”, despite the massive armoury that was sent in, is a subject for further analysis. For the time being, its total seizure is a conclusive and irreversible fact that the hemisphere's media are trying to deny with child's fables.

Along these lines, and with a clear intention to distract, the CIA and its British colleagues have set in motion a staging of another of their assets on Russian territory in Belgorod. In broad daylight and firing on Russian civilians, a column of US armoured vehicles, two T-90 tanks and some eighty men from the “Azov” battalion and another group in Ukrainian uniforms sought a strong publicity impact to distract attention from the catastrophe announced two days earlier by Prigozhin from “Artemovsk”.

The added value of this incursion was the dissemination of videos of an alleged Russian nationalist commando called “the Freedom of Russia Legion”, which, giving a speech in the Russian language, seeks -according to its contents- the overthrow of Vladimir Putin. Perhaps public opinion, which has no need to know about deception and war propaganda, believes that there are “internal opposition forces in Russia” and that they have risen up spontaneously. It is quite clear that there is nothing clear in all this.

It is a scam that has been widely used by the CIA and its British colleagues for decades. The involvement of the “Azov” fanatics in this suicide mission is no surprise (as several attempts have already failed), but a Russian nationalist commando joined with these Russian-hating extremists? That's not really explained. The renting of a handful of people who do not agree with the policies of their governments is the “ABC” of how to recruit unscrupulous or unwary elements to be used by these agencies. There are several examples, but at the same time the most notable are the Iraqi militias made up of Arab mercenaries and Iraqi criminals recruited by the CIA and trained in Jordan before the 2003 invasion, which were later set up in opposition to other shams such as “Al Qaeda-Iraq”, the “ISI” genesis of “ISIS” in 2014, or the FSA that the CIA set up in Jordan before the 2003 invasion; or the FSA that the CIA set up with the cooperation of the Turkish MIT by recruiting officers from the Syrian army and the Kurdish FSD groups trained by the US military to attempt a coup against Bashar Al Assad.

To set up all these “ventures”, all you need is money, and that is something that agencies like the CIA have at their discretion.

The staging of this raid on Belgorod is not new, nor does it escape this mechanics. This kind of deception is part of an Anglo-American intelligence engineering that has been exploited ad nauseam in the Middle East (with the cooperation of the Muslim Brotherhood) but which, in the case of Europe, has extensive precedents. One of NATO's Cold War-era “Stand Behind” programmes was the use of terrorism as a tactic to eliminate pro-Soviet or pro-communist targets in Europe.

While the White House has publicly stated that the resources given to Ukraine should not be used on Russian soil, we know that such talk is false and actually follows the twisted logic of "double standards" in which the federal government pretends that one hand does not know what the other is doing.

The uniformed men and their spokesman could be Russian nationals, recruited and employed (and that means paid) by the CIA to act on the occasion and lend their skins so that in just a few hours they could be eliminated by the Russian anti-terrorist reaction force. They are not the first dupes the Americans have used for this purpose. Even confidential sources confirmed that the FSB was already carrying out raids and arrests of subjects inside Russia linked to this operation.

The problem with self-deception is that those who act in this way cover up the reality and, far from making the problems disappear, they will only multiply them.