Gray Lady's Info War Against Novorossiya

For the most part the Gray Lady's reporting on the battle for Novorossiya has been adequate. If a person is willing to read the dispatches every day from start to finish, while maintaining an eye on other sources available on the Internet, then one can basically figure out what is going on.

The problem is in what the Gray Lady chooses to emphasize. Take the story by Andrew Kramer, "Ukraine Says Army Controls Center of a Rebel City," which I spied on the newspaper of record's web site last night before going to bed:

DONETSK, Ukraine — The Ukrainian military on Sunday moved into the heart of the separatist hub of Luhansk for the first time, officials said, chipping at one of the cornerstones of the pro-Russia rebels’ disintegrating virtual state. 

Ukrainian officials said army units had raised the national flag over a police station in central Luhansk, the eastern city that, along with Donetsk, has been a center of rebel activity and an important destination for Russian fighters and aid. Other parts of Luhansk, however, were still said to be under rebel control. 

The claim could not be independently confirmed, though a photograph of the flag and police station was circulating on social media, and the report was consistent with the progress of fighting there going into the weekend.

There is a tendency in the Western press to "stovepipe" or "front load" all bogus junta claims to the top of the story, usually constructing the headline out of said claims, and then append a demur, parenthetical "could not be independently verified." With that disclaimer the Gray Lady can argue, in a legal sense, that she is objective and neutral, when clearly she is waging an information war.

The objective is to create the impression that for Novorossiya all is lost. And I must admit it had an impact on me. I went to bed and dreamed disturbed, harrowing dreams. But all is not as the Gray Lady would have us believe. For instance, Kramer says that "Besides the advance in Luhansk, the Ukrainian military made another critical move, capturing the town of Yasinovataya, a strategic railway hub north of Donetsk." But according to a report by the reliable Colonel Cassad, Yasinovataya has not been captured by the junta:

Yasinovataya is currently not captured by the junta. As stated at the beginning of the offensive, Yasinovataya is a key goal for the junta in the battle for Donetsk. So when junta tanks rolled into Yasinovataya, Poroshenko’s Twitter reported it captured, although there is a difference between entering a city and capturing a city. Similarly, claims about the taking of Lugansk were untrue, when a couple of days ago junta’s infantry entered to the West of Hriaschevaty suburbs. Yasinovataya is now under fighting, both sides have been amassing reserves, with extensive use of tanks and artillery.

So there you have it. A night filled with nightmares for nothing. But that is the point of disinformation.

In his story Andrew Kramer paints a picture of drunken and unruly rebels at the point of collapse:

The army has tightened its siege on Donetsk in recent weeks, and inside, a breakdown in discipline among the hard-pressed rebel fighters had locals on edge. Residents said rebel fighters had taken to carousing drunkenly at night and wearing civilian clothes at checkpoints, a change that would allow them, at a moment’s notice, to throw down their weapons and blend in with the population.

Kramer also speculates that the large number of empty trucks in the humanitarian aid convoy, still idling at the border where they have been since Friday, are meant to transport the routed rebels back to Russia:

The seemingly imminent defeat of the rebels also raised the possibility that the huge convoy of trucks waiting to bring aid from Russian to civilians in Luhansk and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine might also be used to carry fighters and weapons out of the country. During random inspections by journalists, a number of the trucks have turned out to be mostly empty, and Russian officials have not offered much explanation other than to say they were trying to account for the possibility that some trucks might break down.

Kramer could just as easily talk about the rebel victories in, as Colonel Cassad says, "Ilovajsk, Miusinsk and Krasny Luch," or the fact that the junta cannot use air power without it being shot down:

Today self-defence shot down 3 aircraft: one MiG-29 and two Su-25. Regarding the MiG, there’s confirmation from the junta. A video already appeared about Su-25 (although the video is confusing, a fuller version actually shows visible characteristic of the wreckage of a MiG-29, so this may be one and the same aircraft). So, confirmed 2, and 1 unconfirmed. In general, we can say that junta’s attempts to use aviation in the zone of punitive operation has always ended with losses, because of no opportunity to crush even such old air defence systems, as ADMS and MANPADS.

Why doesn't the Gray Lady report any of the turmoil emanating from Kiev? The sanctified space of the Maidan has finally been cleared by skinheads. Where is the outrage? Where is the unsigned editorial inveighing against the use of violence on peaceful protesters? Also, an internal power struggle has broken out into the open between Dmytro Yarosh of Right Sector and junta interior minister Arsen Avakov. Yarosh is threatening a march on Kiev to be staged by Right Sector's volunteer paramilitary unit unless the interior ministry rescinds all charges against the group's members.

But for all the exigencies of the information war -- what trifling anecdotes get emphasized at the expense of real newsworthy events like the forced clearing of the Maidan, the epicenter of the February coup which brought us where we are today -- the Gray Lady's Kramer concludes by pointing the informed reader in the correct direction:

In the past week, three senior rebel leaders have left the war zone, in moves seen as setting the stage for a possible negotiated settlement by removing contentious personalities or Russian citizens from top positions. 

In Luhansk last week, the prime minister and military commander of the Luhansk People’s Republic, Valery Bolotov, announced in a recorded video address his “temporary resignation” as leader and departure for Russia for medical treatment. 

Aleksandr Borodai, a Russian citizen, stepped down and was replaced by Mr. Zakharchenko. Mr. Borodai later announced that a fellow Russian who had been the military commander, Igor Girkin, who uses the nickname Igor Strelkov, or Igor the Shooter, had also resigned and a Ukrainian citizen appointed in his place. 

Mr. Borodai said Mr. Strelkov had left the eastern Ukrainian war zone for a “vacation,” and would return. 

Something is definitely in the works. The aid convoy is a distraction meant to buy time. In Berlin there is a powwow between the foreign ministers of Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine who are trying to hammer out a deal. It doesn't look like we are there yet.

Kiev Losing Control

Not having posted on Ukraine since the sham OSCE round table talks the middle of May, there is a good place to dip back. Sabrina Tavernise has an interesting story this morning, "Separatists Storm Border Post in Eastern Ukraine." What is interesting about it is the story undercuts its own headline. But I'll get to that in a minute.

First, a few words about Sabrina Tavernise. I remember her as a reporter in Iraq covering the U.S. occupation during the period of time preceding the surge. She is very attractive, which is memorable, but I also thought she was intelligent. I didn't follow her in Lebanon, but recently she has been covering public health in the United States. (I did a post on a story she did about the low life expectancy in the U.S. compared to other developed countries.)

That's why it is sad for me to find her in Donbass peddling the U.S. Department/Gray Lady line: the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine is experiencing a Putin-contrived violent rebellion against the people-powered democratic government in Kiev.

This morning she reports that a border control headquarters in the city of Luhansk was attacked by "Hundreds of separatist fighters":

The attack in Luhansk, Ukraine’s easternmost province, began at 4 a.m. and fighting was still raging at noon. Oleg Slobodyan, a spokesman for the Ukrainian state border service, said about 500 rebels had stormed the district headquarters building in the Mirny neighborhood, using automatic weapons and rocket launchers with snipers posted in nearby apartment buildings.

Five rebels were killed and eight wounded, Mr. Slobodyan said, though there was no independent confirmation of that count. Seven border guards were injured, he added.

Then five paragraphs later she refutes the first part of the story and says it was the Right Sector dominated Ukrainian National Guard that attacked the border control HQ:

The rebels gave a different view of the fight, saying that their forces were battling members of the ultranationalist Ukrainian group Pravy Sektor and the National Guard, a quasi-governmental force that includes many of the so-called defenders of Maidan who were part of the protests in Kiev that toppled the government this year. 

According to an account from the Russian news agency Itar-Tass, citing the press service of the separatist Luhansk People’s Republic, several hundred armed men took up positions around the border patrol building and began shooting at around 4 a.m. It was not clear who the men were, but the agency characterized the fight as being between Ukrainian nationalist radicals and central government forces. 

It also said that the Ukrainian military had sent a fighter jet to defend the building. Mr. Slobodyan acknowledged that a jet had been dispatched, but he said it flew over without taking action because the fighting was taking place in a residential area.

This squares with plenty of information about the reluctance of the Ukrainian military to get involved in the fighting going back to the beginning of the Donbass uprising. Right Sector is there to guarantee that the Ukrainian military fights. Here is how The Saker describes it in a post from Saturday:

Right now the junta is using an old Bolshevik technique: they send conscript units into combat and right behind them they use "blocking squads" - special Right Sector death squads which will summarily execute anybody not willing fight. While such methods are more or less doable in open terrain they are absolutely impossible to use in an urban environment. Thus, those Ukrainian army forces which might be able to competently execute an urban assault (paratroopers) are rarely willing to do so, while those who would be most willing to do so would either be killed in minutes ("street rioter turned national guardsman in 2 weeks") or to cowardly to try (death squads).

Tavernise basically paints the same picture in her story:

The attack was a deeply troubling sign for Ukraine’s new government, whose president elect, Petro O. Poroshenko, has pledged to crush the separatist movement in the country’s east. That promise may prove difficult to keep, particularly in the lawless areas of southeastern Luhansk, where separatists control large swaths of territory that have become combat zones for Ukrainian forces. 

The assault also raised the question of how strong the central government’s forces are in the east, where many members of the police and other state security forces have either melted away or joined the rebels. Border guards are one of the few forces left in eastern Ukraine, but are not particularly practiced in combat.

If you take the forty minutes or so to watch Frontline's "The Battle for Ukraine," which was broadcast May 27, you come away with a similar impression. The country is being pushed towards anarchy and civil war by the Ukrainian ultra-nationalism of Right Sector. The reporting is strongly skewed toward the Western perspective. The Donbass uprising is portrayed as violent and lawless and paid for by Russia; the bloody attacks on the Maidan in February are entirely the fault of Yanukovych's security forces; Yanukovych abandoned the government in Kiev instead of escaping from a Right Sector death squad; Stepan Bandera was a nationalist hero who fought both the Soviets and the Nazis without a word about the ample role of Bandera's Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in the Holocaust; the strong turnout for the independence vote in Donbass was downplayed; etc.

Nonetheless, the picture "The Battle for Ukraine" presents is clear. Right Sector is attacking the east and Ukraine is being torn apart. You have Dmytro Yarosh on camera saying so.

Contradictions From the Gray Lady's Foreign Correspondents

At times I feel sympathy for the Gray Lady's foreign correspondents. They are, as I am, factotums. Their job is to produce copy that toes the paper's line, a line designed to mirror that of the USG. This requires reportage filled with contradictions. Take for instance today's Ukraine installment by Andrew Higgins and David Herszenhorn, "U.S. and NATO Warn Russia Against Further Intervention in Ukraine." The story begins with that prodigious liar Secretary of State John Kerry ominously claiming to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the pro-Russian protests and government building occupations in eastern Ukraine are the work of Russian saboteurs. Herszenhorn and Higgins then proceed to make a compelling case, complete with quotes from a Ukrainian Interior Ministry official, for the opposite. The uprising in the East is a bickering, not broadly representative movement led by pensioners whose goals are myriad and contradictory -- independence, accession to the Russian Federation, autonomous status within Ukraine:

Ukrainian security experts said the pro-Russia camp in Donetsk was bitterly divided over its goals and scoffed at its attempt to seize power. “They have no clear idea of what they want,” said Nikolai Yakubovich, an adviser to the Interior Ministry in Kiev. “It is a nonsense, a dangerous nonsense.” He said negotiations had started between protest leaders in Donetsk and the authorities but had been hampered by infighting between rival pro-Russia factions over their aims. 

As part of its efforts to regain control, the government in Kiev flew antiterrorism forces to the Donetsk airport on Tuesday and vowed to prevent eastern Ukraine from going the way of Crimea, where pro-Russia demonstrations paved the way for a formal annexation by Moscow.

If this was a Russian operation like Crimea, as Kerry claims, there would be nothing but precision and efficiency. That is what Crimea showed, prompting a love letter of sorts to the new Russian military from C.J. Chivers, an unlikely source. But the Gray Lady must stick to the script, which is that the pro-Russian protests are not a spontaneous vox populi; rather, they are the work of the evil Putin. This allows the U.S. State Department to call for a brutal crackdown on protesters when they inveighed against any such moves on the Maidan. Nonetheless the reporting shows the strain of the contradiction.

The same can be said for Andrew Higgins' "Among Ukraine’s Jews, the Bigger Worry Is Putin, Not Pogroms," which seems to be written in belated response to the widespread acceptance that neo-Nazis were an essential part of the putsch coalition that brought down Yanukovych in February. Call it damage control. But, once again, if one takes the time to read the story, the headline rings hollow. Higgins, in making the case that Jews have nothing to worry about from Right Sector and Svoboda, actually creates the impression that they should be very worried:

When protests against Mr. Yanukovych started in November, [Rabbi Kaminezki said], many Jews shared the pro-European aspirations of the demonstrators who gathered in Kiev’s Independence Square, though some worried about the role played by far-right groups. One such group, Svoboda, stirred particular unease because of anti-Semitic remarks by its leaders in the past and its lionization of Ukrainian nationalist heroes who, in some cases, helped the Nazis and shared their ethnicity-based concept of nationhood. 

But Rabbi Kaminezki [chief rabbi of Dnipropetrovsk] said fears of a fascist revival had faded, “as there is a difference between what these people say to their own crowd and what they do when they become legitimate political leaders.” Anti-Semitism, he added, “exists in Ukraine, like everywhere,” but it has shown no sign of increasing since Mr. Yanukovych lost power. 

After a series of unsolved anti-Semitic attacks since his ouster, including an assault on a rabbi and his wife in Kiev, the new head of Ukraine’s state security service told Jewish leaders that he would reopen a special unit to fight xenophobia and anti-Semitism that had been shut down under Mr. Yanukovych. 

Even Right Sector, a coalition of ultranationalist and in some cases neo-Nazi organizations, has made an effort to distance itself from anti-Semitism. In late February, its leader, Dmytro Yarosh, pledged during a meeting with Israel’s ambassador in Kiev to fight all forms of racism.

See, it is all good. Dmytro Yarosh is going to lead the struggle for tolerance.

One of the most bow-backed of the Gray Lady's scribes is Anne Barnard; she has had to shoulder untold column inches of manure fertilizing the canard that the war in Syria is result of a bloodthirsty dictator's lust to obliterate skyping pro-democracy activists in skinny jeans, rather than a region-wide war pitting Shiite-aligned states against the West and their Gulf sheikhdom clients. But at this point in the war, with any Syrian opposition swallowed up by jihadis, and the jihadis at war among themselves and regularly defeated on the battlefield by the Syrian Arab Army and its allies in Hezbollah, Barnard, while never missing an opportunity to denigrate or downplay the Assad government, lets it be known that Syria is winning the war. Her story today, "Muslim Shrine Stands as a Crossroads in Syria’s Unrest," is worth reading:

Hezbollah has long said that protecting the shrine [the tomb of Zeinab, a granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad, outside Damascus] was a major rationale for sending fighters to Syria, a move that upended regional alliances, deepened Lebanon’s political and sectarian divisions and turned crucial battles in the Syrian government’s favor. 

Hezbollah and Syrian officials long played down the party’s role, saying the Syrian Army led the fight. But with recent victories, their calculus appears to be shifting. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, recently declared that the Syrian government was safe from collapse and that his group’s only mistake was entering the battle “late.” 

Some in Syria are newly eager to catalog, as a show of strength, the added muscle from abroad, and not just from Hezbollah.

A Syrian who coordinates between government forces and Hezbollah around the shrine said that Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards are not simply advising Damascus, but fighting near the northern city of Aleppo. Hezbollah and Iran, he said, have trained more than 100,000 Syrians, in Syria, Lebanon and Tehran, to form the National Defense Forces militias. On Tuesday, Iran delivered 30,000 tons of food supplies to Syria, The Associated Press reported. 

“The game is changed,” the coordinator said, asking not to be identified for his safety. He confirmed much of what Western officials assert about the government’s foreign support, calling it a trump card that Damascus saved for the right moment. 

“It is no longer a secret,” he added. “It is on the table.”

The government could not have advanced on the Lebanese border and east of Damascus without Hezbollah’s expert fighters, he said. But the bulk of Shiite volunteers, he added, are Iraqi Shiites, lightly trained in Iraq and sent to front lines in Damascus suburbs like Qaboun and Jobar because “we need numbers.” 

But now, after new training as the Abu Fadl al-Abbas brigades, the Iraqis are “able to do something, not just coming to be killed,” the coordinator said.

This is a huge achievement for Hezbollah, Iraq and Syria. I assume a lot of the turmoil in Ukraine, Turkey and of course Iraq is connected to the bad fortune of the jihadis in Syria.

Ukraine is Going to Get Even Messier

As another week comes to an end and Washington and Moscow are still jousting over Ukraine, the best statement, a statement that properly encapsulates what we are witnessing in this new Cold War, comes from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs' rebuttal to the embarrassingly weak “President Putin’s Fiction: 10 False Claims About Ukraine” put out by the U.S. State Department on Wednesday:

“They cannot get over it and come to terms with the fact that they cannot always dictate their will and act in their customary role of ‘infallible judge,’ which is followed by — the last word,” it said. “Their nerves are giving out, but that is no reason to thrust guilt on the innocent.”

It is just going to get worse for the United States. Crimea will vote in nine days to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation, and there is nothing the United States can do about it. And this is driving the smart set at Great Satan HQ batty. Obama, in what is becoming regular ritualized performances of "The Emperor Has No Clothes," steps before the cameras and denounces the Crimean vote as a violation of international law. “Any discussion about the future of Ukraine must include the legitimate government of Ukraine.”

And therein lies the problem for the U.S./EU: the insistence that a government that came to power by means of a violent insurrection in Kiev spearheaded by fascists from western Ukraine is legitimately democratic, while an autonomous jurisdiction that is historically Russian seeking to realign with the Russian Federation by plebiscite is illegal, unconstitutional and anti-democratic. Obama's statement is risible.

One would hope that the Cold Warriors in the State Department would cut their losses now and end this charade, but don't count on it. I don't think that they are going to let the Crimea vote come off unimpeded. Whether through overt saber rattling by sending more U.S. fighter jets to the region or more war ships to the Black Sea, or a covert campaign of destabilization using Right Sector shock troops, as was done during the February putsch, I don't know. But as of now I think that some form military escalation is likely.

Take the news, reported today in "Moscow Signals It Will Embrace Crimean Move for Secession," by Steven Lee Myers, David Herszenhorn and Alan Cowell, that DmytroYarosh, the head of the fascist organization Right Sector, plans to re-brand his group and run for president:

In Kiev, the leader of the Right Sector movement, Dmytro Yarosh, will run for president of Ukraine, the chairman of the local branch of the movement, Andriy Tarasenko, said on Friday. The nationalist group, which was important in the fight for Kiev’s Independence Square, will rename itself at a congress in a week and participate in elections at all levels, Mr. Tarasenko said. 

Right Sector has been controversial for its semi-military organization, but it has also refrained from working in eastern Ukraine, where its presence could be seen as a provocation by Russia. But Mr. Tarasenko said that the group is prepared to fight, in Crimea and elsewhere, “if the Kremlin tramples on us further.” He added, “Accordingly, we are conducting mobilization and are preparing to repel foreign aggression.”

This is bad news for the West. Not only does it expose the lie that far right ultranationalists were a negligible part of the uprising against Yanukovych, it means that the putsch government might have great difficulty implementing the IMF austerity mandates coming their way. Right Sector, according to a decent, dispassionate appraisal by Emmanuel Dreyfus, "Who Was in Kiev’s Independence Square?," that appears in the weekend edition on the Counterpunch web site, is to the right of Svoboda, another Banderist political construct, and does not support integrating with the European Union:

The biggest, Pravy Sektor (right sector), emerged after the Grushevsky Street clashes and, for the moment, enjoys real popular support. It has a few thousand members across the country, including people disappointed by Svoboda, members of ultra-nationalist groups, hooligans and dropouts. Their common denominator is a taste for radical action, and for the ideology that one of the movement’s leaders, Andrei Tarassenko, dispensed from its high-security headquarters on the fifth floor of Trade Union House, on Independence Square. Pravy Sektor defines itself as “neither xenophobic nor anti-Semitic, as Kremlin propaganda claims” and above all as “nationalist, defending the values of white, Christian Europe against the loss of the nation and deregionalisation”. Like Svoboda, it rejects multiculturalism, as “responsible for the disappearance of the crucifix and the arrival of girls in burqas in your schools”, but it does not advocate joining the EU, which it describes as “liberal totalitarianism in which God has vanished and values are turned upside down”.

Pravy Sektor supports none of the opposition parties, especially not Svoboda, disappointed by its “appeals for calm and negotiation with the authorities”. It could contemplate becoming a party itself, which would be awkward for Svoboda’s Tyahnybok: besides seeing his reputation as an anti-system champion seriously dented by his appeals for moderation during the clashes, he would have to come to terms with a party even further to the right, whose feats of arms and determination are known. 

Svoboda’s success over the past few years and the presence of neo-fascist groups such as Pravy Sektor in Independence Square are signs of a crisis in Ukrainian society. It is first and foremost a crisis of identity: in 22 years of independence, Ukraine has not managed to develop an unbiased historical narrative presenting a positive view of all its regions and citizens: even today, the Ukrainians are seen as liberators in Galicia but as fascists in Donbass. It is also a political crisis: some Ukrainians, exasperated and disappointed with the Orange Revolution, have turned to voting for extremist parties, more out of pique than for real ideological reasons. Though Independence Square will go down in history as an extraordinary example of collective and popular action, the political outcome is as yet unclear. Ukraine is in need of a new force that truly serves the people and transcends its many social and political divides.

Ukraine is going to get even messier. The United States has made a terrible blunder and there is no indication that any remedy is in the works.