The pseudo-journalists who produce propaganda for Western media have blood on their hands. Copious amounts of it. With varying degrees of responsibility depending on each case, we can say, that, in general, the ‘journalists’ who fake the news about Russia have the deaths of countless people on their consciences.. Telling lies is not free of consequences. The wall of fake news and analysis free, mythic, narratives produced by the media about the Ukraine war, allows people like Starmer, Macron, von der Leyen, Rutte and a host of Polish and Baltic ministers to tell their publics that we need to keep pouring arms and resources into the already lost war in Ukraine in order to defend ourselves against the Russian invasion of Europe, currently being advertised as scheduled for 2027.
One part of the wall-to-wall propaganda that seems to be coming to prominence at the moment, (but has been around for a long time), is to frame anything which Russia says as a “claim”. For example; “Europe live: Putin claims he never opposed EU membership for Ukraine but draws line at Nato” [1]
However; the fact is that Putin has simply said that he has no objection to Ukraine joining the EU, at various points during the war. It is not a “claim”. For example this is Putin reported by Euronews, (a fervently anti Russian outlet), saying just this in June 2022. [2] A little research will find multiple other examples. As so often, Western media narratives can be unpicked by a careful use of their own material. This is because the propaganda narrative is ordered at editorial level, but a certain amount of actual facts are still reported in individual reports by individual journalists. It is partly a “free” press. It is astonishing that they expect anyone to believe their propaganda. But, perhaps they don’t. The chief purpose of it may simply be to provide official cover for Ursula von der Leyen and the rest of them to appear to be acting rationally as they plan for never ending war with Russia for no reason at all. Meanwhile, the most extraordinary statements, such as the one about Russian planning to invade Europe, are never framed as a “claim”.
The point about the “claims” is to make it sound implausible, to discredit Putin, to make it sound like he cannot be trusted to speak the truth, and, of course, to cover up the fact that the Western media has been largely, at the editorial level, suppressing this fact for some time, (even, at times, telling the direct lie that Putin is seeking to block Ukraine’s membership of the EU). Why? Because, if the public fully understood that Russia’s objection is to Ukraine joining NATO, and not to Ukraine joining the EU, that would see that Russia’s position is reasonable – and the unreasonable, (though understandable*), position is that of the Ukrainian nationalists, and the irrational position of their partners in the EU who are willing to sacrifice endless lives to enforce this goal, a goal, not even particularly popular in Ukraine itself.
* In general, I can sympathise with and find understandable Ukrainian nationalism. Who wants to feel that they can only live by the somewhat patronising favour of a powerful neighbour? But; their position is not rational. There really are millions of people in Ukraine who wanted a pluralistic society, not a mono Ukrainian one. And, while they may not like it, other countries have to live with the realities involved in living next door to a superpower. Such countries are usually careful not to appear as a threat to that superpower by inviting in the military and intelligence structures of that superpower’s chief geopolitical opponent. This would have been the wiser course for Ukraine.
Update – are they really all rejecting Russian language in favour of Ukrainian?
This is another kind of story which frequently appears in the Guardian. A story which is designed to tell a story of how Ukrainians are, to the last person, united in their love for Ukrainian nationalism and their opposition to Russia. The story is attributed to Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian’s Culture correspondent. It concerns a movement in Ukraine against reading books in Russian. Some people have even thrown their Russian language books on public bonfires. How the journalist manages to report this without making an analogy to book burnings by the Nazi’s, I am not quite sure. To be fair, she does quote one bookseller as saying that suppressing language is something associated with authoritarian regimes and that the government is pursuing a policy of “forced Ukrainianisation”. However; the general aim of the story is to make it seem like this view is an outlying one. (And, indeed, this could be seen as an example of a typical journalistic device. To make the intended narrative more plausible you need to ‘balance’ it with a counter view, though the counter view, should clearly be presented as an outlying view, ideally represented by someone on the fringes, such as a lone bookseller surrounded by thousands of books in Russian, who cannot sell them; clearly a bit of a nutter).
We are also told:
Another bookseller, who preferred not to give her name, sells secondhand and antiquarian books in Ukrainian and Russian. She said the choice of language was largely determined by generation. “Young people mostly want to read in Ukrainian,” she said.
That sounds very plausible. I imagine most of Charlotte Higgins’s readers will take it at face value. I would like to counter that with the following anecdotal evidence. This author has worked at UK English Summer Camps for the last two years. In 2024 we had two groups of Ukrainian students, both largely composed of Ukrainian ‘refugees’ in the UK. This year we had a group who had come from Ukraine. In all cases all these teenagers preferred to speak Russian to each other.
Again; the media is straining every sinew to produce a certain narrative on Ukraine, which, at whichever part of it you look, is simply fake. Why? Because, I am increasingly coming to the view, at the editorial level the narratives are worked out either at the direct direction of the intelligence services, or, perhaps, through a more osmotic process, whereby the narratives are simply produced to align with the known preferred narratives of the corporate-military-arms-finance-industry-intelligence nexus.
Notes