Majorityrights News > Category: Geopolitics

As was revealed by France24 video, using this CCTV recording on Uniannet, the RoseMarie restaurant beside the playground in Kryvyi Riy was not, in fact, “hosting a meeting between military commanders and Western instructors” on 4th April.  Only the local folk and their children were killed and wounded when two Iskander-M ballistic missiles struck.  They both had cluster warheads to maximise casualties.  Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov was retailing a lie, which should surprise no one.  He has doubled-down since.

For the avoidance of doubt, Russian war policy is to attack the people of Ukraine, and lie about it.  It is a settled policy, visible to all in the west since the attack on the railway station at Kramatorsk on 8th April 2022.  That also involved two ballistic missiles with cluster warheads.  Then, it was refugees escaping west.  Now, it’s children forty miles from the front line - no matter that peace negotiations are supposedly in train between Moscow and the Trump team.  On which subject, in the aftermath of the attack Bridget Brink, the American ambassador in Kyiv, managed to deliver herself of these cowardly sentiments:

It is horrifying that tonight a ballistic missile hit near a playground and restaurant in Kryvyi Rih. Over 50 injured and 16 dead, including 6 children. This is why this war must end.

In Zelensky’s words:

They are even afraid to say the word “Russian” when talking about the missile that killed children.

I think he is wrong about fear, though.  The American government response is calculated and forward-looking, to a world in which rules are supplanted by force and the will of the Great Powers as the driver of world affairs.  Children die, refugees die, but what are these deaths to the powerful?

... be cautious about who seeks to inflect you!

As the Trump administration struggles to impose a ceasefire on the Russian aggressor, the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine warns of an intensification in the Kremlin’s propaganda programme:

The Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine records the transition to an acute phase of the hostile information operation conducted by the Russian federation against Ukraine. Its aim is to eliminate Ukrainian statehood not on the battlefield, but in people’s heads: by delegitimizing the Ukrainian Government, devaluing democratic institutions and imposing an external political scenario with signs of controlled capitulation. The operation is conducted with the use of the capabilities of the Russian federation’s special services – the FSB, SVR, and GRU – under the overall coordination of the presidential administration of the rf.

The Essence of the enemy’s Operation

Under the guise of “peacekeeping initiatives” and “analytical discourse”, on the Ukrainian and international societies is being imposed the idea of:

the Ukrainian government’s alleged loss of legitimacy due to the failure to hold elections during martial law;

the need for a “temporary administration” under the auspices of the UN, the USA, the EU, or even the “quartet format” with the rf;

the impossibility of russia’s concluding a peace agreement with the Ukrainian government, which, according to the enemy, should become a casus belli for changing the political course.

Such narratives are not just disinformation, but an element of a special operation to force Ukraine to political capitulation under the guise of a “peaceful settlement”.

Methods of Implementation

The operation is carried out through:

⁕ formally Western or “neutral” media, which act as a proxy for Russian theses. Among them:

Magyar Nemzet, Magyar Hirlap, Pesti Srácok (Hungary): promote the idea of “Ukraine’s being incapable of self-governing”;

Salon24.pl (Poland): published a fake blog by an anonymous author “MarcinWi”, which, under the guise of “expert analysis”, supported the narrative of a “split” between the military and political leadership of Ukraine;

Réseau International (France): promotes theories about Ukraine’s alleged being incapable of conducting combat operations on its own and the “deep strategic gap between the Ukrainian political leadership and the General Staff”.

⁕ anonymous telegram channels posing as “insiders” in the Armed Forces of Ukraine or political leadership;

⁕ a coordinated wave of emotional videos on TikTok and YouTube with the narratives such as “the West no longer supports Ukraine,” “we have been deceived,” “we need a change in government,” as well as “it’s time for a change,” and “we need another government for peace.”

⁕ massive dissemination of destructive materials with the same theses on (Telegram /Strana.ua, Scott Ritter/, X /RothLindberg, DougAMacgregor/, Facebook /Florian Filippo, Fernand Kartheiser/) with the involvement of botnets and accounts associated with pro-Russian structures in Europe and Latin America. They publish pseudo-documents, statements and “analytical notes” that question the authority of the Ukrainian government;

⁕ quoting pro-Russian “experts” with the titles of “former diplomats”, “independent political scientists”, “UN veterans” who promote the thesis that “even the West needs a different Ukraine”;

⁕ the use of Ukrainian defendants in treason cases to legitimize narratives (including publications and comments by representatives of former pro-Russian political structures).

These actions are accompanied by the infiltration of the Kremlin’s narratives into the structures of influence of Ukraine’s partner countries, in particular through the organization of public “discussions” on the legitimacy of the government, the prospects for negotiations without Ukraine’s participation, and the alleged “loss of trust” in Kyiv.

Radosław Sikorski, the Polish Foreign Minister, powerfully rebutting the accusations of the Russian representative to the UN Security Council, Vasily Nebenzya:

Madame President,

I associate myself with the words of minister Kuleba and my colleagues from the European Union.

I’m amazed at the tone and the content of the presentation by the Russian ambassador.

And I thought I could be useful by correcting the record. Ambassador Nebenzya has called Kyiv a client of the West. Actually, Kyiv is fighting to be independent of anybody.

He calls them a criminal Kyiv regime. In fact, Ukraine has a democratically elected government.

He calls them Nazis. Well, the president is Jewish, the defence minister is Muslim, and they have no political prisoners.

He said that Ukraine was wallowing in corruption. Well, Alexei Navalny documented how honest and full of probity his own country is.

He blamed the war on US neo-colonialism. In fact, Russia was trying to exterminate Ukraine in the 19th century, again under Bolsheviks, and now it is the third attempt.

He said we are prisoners of Russophobia. “Phobia” means irrational fear. Yet, we are being threatened almost every day by the former president of Russia and Putin’s propagandists with nuclear annihilation. I put it to you that it is not irrational – when Russia threatens us, we trust them.

He said that we are denying Russia’s security interests. Not true. We only started rearming ourselves when Russia started invading her neighbours.

He even said that Poland attacked Russia during World War II. What is he talking about? It was the Soviet Union that attacked Poland together with Nazi Germany on the 17th of September 1939. They even held a joint victory parade on the 22th of September.

He says that Russia has always only beaten back aggression. Well, what were then Russian troops doing at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920? They were on a topographic excursion? The truth is that for every time Russia was invaded, she has invaded ten times.

He says that it is a perfidious proxy war by the West. My advice is – don’t fall into the Western trap. Withdraw your troops to international borders and avoid this Western plot.

He also says that there was an illegal coup in Kyiv in 2014. I was there. There was no coup. President Yanukovych murdered a hundred of his compatriots and was removed from office by a democratically elected Ukrainian parliament, including by his own party, the Party of Regions.

And finally he is saying that we the West are somehow trying to persuade that Russia can never be beaten. Well, Russia did not win the Crimean War, it didn’t win the Russo-Japanese war, it didn’t win the World War I, it didn’t win the battle of Warsaw, it didn’t win in Afghanistan and it didn’t win the Cold War.

But there’s good news. After each failure there were reforms.

Such demagoguery is unworthy of a member on a permanent basis of the Security Council. But what the ambassador has achieved is to remind us why we resisted Soviet domination and what Ukraine is resisting now.

They failed to subjugate us then. They’ll fail to subjugate Ukraine and us now.

Thank you very much.

Another old and wise hand who understands the global contest in which the war in Ukraine is a key element.  As he says, “The question is: will the world in the 21st century be based upon force and tyranny, or not?

The American diplomat and academic Mitchell Reiss airs his views of Donald Trump’s forthcoming conversational intervention in Ukraine, indicating that Trump has a degree of realism that will disappoint the bravado-filled pro-Putin right.  Interview by Times Radio.

Alexey, a 47-year-old Russian and a teacher by profession, shares his perspective on Putin’s war in Ukraine.  Among other things, he explains why he believes Ukraine should not cede territory, and questions whether the West is really the great enemy to Russia:

“We have China right next door and it’s many times scarier.

... China’s policy is that the whole world, that is, the globe, is China.  And all those who think otherwise simply do not understand the magnitude of the imperial scheme of the Chinese and their emperor”

Video from HEADSHOT, who specialise in bringing the vox populi of that vast country to the internet.

This video explains the short- to medium-term geopolitical objectives of Moscow and Beijing in their struggle against American global hegemony and the western international order.  It is produced by the Warsaw-based institute, the Centre for Eastern Studies.  Its website explains:

The Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) was established in 1990 in Warsaw as a public institution. It was created to meet democratic Poland’s demand for analytical research on the processes that had occurred in the Soviet Union, and later in the states that emerged following its collapse. At present, the OSW’s portfolio includes Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, the Balkans, Germany, the Baltic and Nordic states, China, Turkey and Israel. In addition, we carry out research focused on specific sectors, for example the EU’s energy policy, transport, trade and digital connectivity in Central Europe, as well as on European security.

A residential apartment block in Dnipro hit by a Russian missile on 14th January 2023

This morning the DT’s live Ukraine feed carried a brief report of comments by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s, revealing the Kremlin’s real interest in peace talks with Ukraine, ie, it doesn’t have any.  The war is for empire and geopolitics, not for ethnic Russians in Ukraine (or in Russia).  The Kremlin’s interest is that the United States “negotiates” giving up of its status as global hegemon in exchange for Putin making nice with Zelensky for five minutes.  Lavrov actually means that American maintenance of the rules-based international order has to be ended so Russia can upgrade its non-rules-based, eurasionist model of imperial power to a global level.

I would remind readers that the Kremlin power elites define multipolarity as a collection of economic blocs, each led by a dominant power.  The model allows the Kremlin to piggy-back (with “no limits”) off the China’s inevitably global hegemony - as close as it can get to hegemon itself.

Here is the report:

Any Ukraine peace talks should be about ‘new world order’

Moscow wants any Ukraine peace talks to focus on creating a “new world order”, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on a visit to Turkey on Friday.

He also threatened to abandon a landmark grain deal, which Turkey helped broker, if obstacles to Russian exports remain.

“Any negotiation needs to be based on taking into account Russian interests, Russian concerns,” Lavrov said.

“It should be about the principles on which the new world order will be based.”

He added that Russia rejects a “unipolar world order led by ‘one hegemon’”.