Nederland leverde tot dusver voor ruim 50 miljoen euro aan wapens aan Oekraïne
31 maart 2022 15:17
Laatste update: 2 dagen, 6 uur geleden
559 NUjij-reacties
Delen via Whatsapp Delen via Facebook Delen via Twitter Delen via Linkedin Delen via email
Nederland heeft voor meer dan 50 miljoen euro aan wapens aan Oekraïne geleverd, maakte minister Kajsa Ollongren (Defensie) donderdag bekend in de Tweede Kamer. Dat bedrag (het gaat om de boekwaarde) zal nog oplopen, want Nederland gaat door met de wapenhulp.
"Defensie heeft een belangrijke taak, nu Rusland Oekraïne heeft aangevallen."
Als het niet zo diep tragisch was, zouden we erom kunnen grinniken. Kajsa Ollongren, ooit als minister van Binnenlandse Zaken belast met de keuze voor het enige juiste stempotlood, stuurt nu Panzerfaust 3-raketten naar Oekraïne. Dat zijn antitankwapens die vanaf de schouder worden afgevuurd.
Verder regelde ze honderd scherpschuttersgeweren met 30.000 stuks bijbehorende munitie, radars en detectoren. De wapens zijn nodig ter zelfverdediging, aldus de D66-minister. Toch even iets anders dan potloden en stembiljetten.
De Oekraïners mogen ook rekenen op 3000 Nederlandse gevechtshelmen, 2000 scherfvesten, vijf wapenlocatieradars, dertig metaaldetectoren, twee gevechtsveldbewakingsradars en twee draadgeleide detectierobots om zeemijnen op te sporen.
Ollongren is dag en nacht bezig met de oorlog in Oekraïne, zo onthaalde ze deze week F-16-vliegers in Volkel, na een intensieve dag patrouilleren in het NAVO-luchtruim. Die zeiden: "We zijn op onze hoede, maar hier hebben we natuurlijk voor getraind. We zijn goed voorbereid op deze taak."
Ollongren zag de beide toestellen in het donker landen op de vliegbasis na hun Air Policing-taak boven Polen. Terwijl de luchtmachtdelegatie Ollongren bijpraatte over de huidige inzet in het nieuwe gebied, werd het jachtvliegtuig de shelter in gesleept op de vliegbasis.
"Indrukwekkend om te zien. Zo zie je met eigen ogen hoe de Koninklijke Luchtmacht een belangrijke bijdrage levert aan onze veiligheid en toont Nederland zich solidair met onze oostelijke bondgenoten", stelt de minister op dag 2 van de nieuwe missie. In de ochtend waren er al 2 F-35’s vanuit Leeuwarden ingezet aan de oostkant van het NAVO-luchtruim.
'HET IS BELANGRIJK DAT WIJ ALS NEDERLAND NU LATEN ZIEN DAT WIJ ER ZIJN ALS LID VAN DE NAVO'
De Nederlandse jachtvliegtuigen krijgen net als andere NAVO-bondgenoten steeds een tijdsblok toegewezen voor de patrouilles, die 24/7 doorgaan. En dat is niet voor niets, benadrukt de minister. "Defensie heeft een belangrijke taak, nu Rusland Oekraïne heeft aangevallen."
Ze noemt het buitengewoon ernstig wat er aan de hand is. "Het is belangrijk dat wij als Nederland nu laten zien dat wij er zijn als lid van de NAVO, dat we met onze krijgsmacht bereid zijn om Nederland te beschermen en het NAVO-grondgebied te verdedigen. "En", refereert ze aan de vliegers, "dat is wat deze jongens hebben gedaan."
Het volgende bericht trof ik aan in de krant van de Drentse Gemeente Westerveld van woensdag 23 maart 2022:
Uitgiftepunt Menstruatieproducten.
De kosten voor maandverband of tampons kunnen hoog oplopen, waardoor deze producten voor vrouwen en meisjes lang niet altijd betaalbaar zijn. Stichting Armoedefonds heeft deze producten gratis beschikbaar gesteld bij een erkend menstruatieproducten uitgiftepunt (MUP). Heeft u menstruatieproducten nodig? U kunt ze gratis ophalen bij Tweede Kans Kleding Westerveld in Dwingelo en de Voedselbank.
Nederland leverde tot dusver voor ruim 50 miljoen euro aan wapens aan Oekraïne
31 maart 2022 15:17
Laatste update: 2 dagen, 6 uur geleden
559 NUjij-reacties
Delen via Whatsapp Delen via Facebook Delen via Twitter Delen via Linkedin Delen via email
Nederland heeft voor meer dan 50 miljoen euro aan wapens aan Oekraïne geleverd, maakte minister Kajsa Ollongren (Defensie) donderdag bekend in de Tweede Kamer. Dat bedrag (het gaat om de boekwaarde) zal nog oplopen, want Nederland gaat door met de wapenhulp.
Scherpschuttersgeweren
Nederland zegde een week geleden toe om honderd scherpschuttersgeweren te leveren met 30.000 stuks bijbehorende munitie, radars en detectoren. De wapens zijn nodig ter zelfverdediging, zei de D66-minister toen.
De Oekraïners mogen ook rekenen op 3000 Nederlandse gevechtshelmen, 2000 scherfvesten, vijf wapenlocatieradars, dertig metaaldetectoren, twee gevechtsveldbewakingsradars en twee draadgeleide detectierobots om zeemijnen op te sporen.
Zelensky als Criminele Dienaar van het Volk
Op 31 december 2018 maakte Zelensky bekend dat hij zich namens een nieuwe partij met de naam Dienaar van het Volk ('Sloeha Narodoe') ook daadwerkelijk kandidaat stelde voor de presidentsverkiezingen in 2019,
aldus de internet encyclopedie Wikipedia, die eraan toevoegt:
Zelensky had bij zijn verkiezingen geen duidelijk omlijnd programma. Hij nam een gematigde positie in en presenteerde zichzelf tijdens de verkiezingen als iemand die corruptie wilde bestrijden en partijen bij elkaar wilde brengen. Hij was vooral populair bij kiezers uit de lagere middenklasse, die traditioneel niet erg geïnteresseerd zijn in politiek. Wel werd er in Oekraïne gespeculeerd over mogelijke banden van Zelensky met de controversiële oligarch Ihor Kolomojsky.
Typerend voor Oekraïne is dat Zelensky gekozen werd zonder een ‘duidelijk omlijnd’ politiek ‘programma,’ maar dat de belofte de wijd verspreide corruptie in het land te zullen bestrijden in feite voldoende was om tot president te worden gekozen. Dat is opvallend, want op 3 oktober 2021 maakte het gerenommeerde Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), een 'niet-gouvernementele organisatie van onderzoekscentra, media en journalisten die actief zijn in Europa, Afrika, Azië, het Midden-Oosten en Latijns-Amerika,’ het volgende bekend:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his partners in comedy production owned a network of offshore companies related to their business based in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, and Belize.
Zelensky’s current chief aide, Serhiy Shefir, as well as the head of the country’s Security Service, were part of the offshore network.
Offshore companies were used by Shefir and another business partner to buy pricey London real estate.
Around the time of his 2019 election, Zelensky handed his shares in a key offshore company over to Shefir, but the two appear to have made an arrangement for Zelensky’s family to continue receiving money from the offshore.
Actor Volodymyr Zelensky stormed to the Ukrainian presidency in 2019 on a wave of public anger against the country’s political class, including previous leaders who used secret companies to stash their wealth overseas.
Now, leaked documents prove that Zelensky and his inner circle have had their own network of offshore companies. Two belonging to the president’s partners were used to buy expensive property in London.
The revelations come from documents in the Pandora Papers, millions of files from 14 offshore service providers leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with partners around the world including OCCRP.
The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, set up a network of offshore firms dating back to at least 2012, the year the company began making regular content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch dogged by allegations of multi-billion-dollar fraud. The offshores were also used by Zelensky associates to purchase and own three prime properties in the center of London.
The documents also show that just before he was elected, he gifted his stake in a key offshore company, the British Virgin Islands-registered Maltex Multicapital Corp., to his business partner — soon to be his top presidential aide. And in spite of giving up his shares, the documents show that an arrangement was soon made that would allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to his wife.
Met andere woorden: de ‘dienaar van het volk’ Zelensky en zijn kornuiten sluisden hun vermogen, inclusief Zelensky’s geld, naar belastingparadijzen, speciaal in het leven geroepen voor de georganiseerde misdaad, om zo de belastingen in Europa’s armste land te kunnen ontduiken of te ontwijken, zo u wilt. Met enige verbazing schreef de OCCRP dan ook over deze joods-Oekraïense oligarch, voor wie bijna de voltallige Tweede Kamer op 31 maart 2022 uitbundig applaudisseerde...
BBC reports on suspicious destruction of Mariupol theater were co-authored by a Ukrainian PR agent tied to a firm at the forefront of her country’s information warfare efforts, reports Max Blumenthal.
Before serving as a fixer and reporter for the BBC in Ukraine, Orysia Khimiak handled PR for a start-up called Reface which created what the Washington Post called a “reality distorting app” now serving as “a kind of Ukrainian war-messaging tool.”
According to her Linkedin profile, Khimiak was the director of PR for Reface until October 2021. While working that job, Khimiak says she built “long-term relationships with editors and media representatives.” She has also overseen a PR course for the Kiev-based Projector Institute, whose website currently greets visitors with the slogan, “Glory to Ukraine. We Will Win.”
With her wealth of media contacts, Khimiak now plays an instrumental role in shaping BBC’s coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian war. She has even shared a byline with the network’s Lviv-based correspondent, Hugo Bachega, co-authoring reports focused on demonstrating Russian culpability for the bombing of the Mariupol dramatic theater.
Khimiak broadcasts her political bias in her Twitter bio, stating that she is “a fixer in Lviv for journalists for reporters who show honest image of Russian war against Ukraine. Ukraine will resist.”
Khimiak’s Twitter background references the “Snake Island” standoff which was widely reported by mainstream Western media outlets and heralded as a testament to Ukrainian military bravery. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, 13 Ukrainian border guards “died heroically”defending an island base against they Russian Navy. “Russian warship, go fuck yourself!” were the soldiers’ final words, or so the story went.
The Ukrainian guards ultimately turned up alive as Russian captives. The entire story of courage under fire, including the Snake Island defenders’ famous last words, was a myth – one of so many stories fabricated or heavily distorted by pro-Ukraine elements that they have become impossible to count.
On the Twitter page of the PR agent-turned-BBC correspondent Khimiak, the phony Snake Island stand-off is still treated as a real historical event. On her Twitter timeline, meanwhile, Khimiak takes credit for the BBC’s reports on the destruction of the Mariupol dramatic theater. She and her co-author, Bachega, have yet to respond to a request for comment from The Grayzone.
The incident at the Mariupol theater represents one of the most suspicious events of the war, with both the BBC and CNN citing a claim by one local Ukrainian official claiming hundreds were killed inside the building, but producing no evidence to verify it.
CNN, BBC Rely on Single Official Pro-Azov Source
Russian forces have caused widespread destruction across Mariupol, where they have been engaged in intense street-by-street fighting with Ukrainian forces led by the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
However, as this reporter detailed, the Mariupol theater was controlled by retreating Azov militants who were desperately appealing for military intervention by NATO. Several evacuees have claimed Azov detonated the theater to create the impression of a Russian attack that might draw the West into the war. Meanwhile, video of the alleged Russian attack on the theater has yet to materialize, and images of the supposed rescue of survivors or mass deaths at the scene remain unavailable.
On March 25, nine days after the incident, CNN broadcast what it said was the first footage of the attack on the theater. The footage (seen below) was only 20 seconds long and showed a small group of civilians slowly ambling down a staircase to the ground floor of a building. A narrator can be heard behind the camera repeatedly referring to an airstrike but claiming that those on the first floor had survived.
The video appeared to have been shot some time after the attack, as none of the smoldering present in video taken in the aftermath of the explosion could be seen. That video, seen below and taken on March 16, shows a smoking building with no rescuers or any people on site.
CNN has also claimed that 300 civilians were killed inside the theater. The BBC also echoed the official Ukrainian claim of 300 dead, but acknowledged, “Communication with Mariupol remains difficult so it is hard to independently verify information.”
Both networks relied on just a single source for the dramatic allegation: Petr Andryushchenko, an advisor to the mayor of Mariupol who recently saluted the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion as courageous “defenders” of his city.
The official’s evidence? According to the BBC, “officials were able to check the death toll because they had a record of who was in the theatre before the missile strike and had spoken to survivors.”
Western media did not see fit to mention that Andryushchenko was likely far from Mariupol, as he recently acknowledged “that we are forced to move in order to preserve our intelligence network.” His boss, Mayor Vadim Boychenko, reportedly fled the city several days ago.
Curiously, partisan Ukrainian reporters claimed a day after the attack that everyone sheltering inside the theater’s basement had miraculously survived.
Illia Ponomarenko, correspondent for the US and EU-sponsored Kyiv Independent, cited official sources a day after the theater incident claiming all had survived
Also on March 17, Ukrainian government ombudswoman Ludmyla Denisova stated on Telegram: “The (theatre) building withstood the impact of a high-powered air bomb and protected the lives of people hiding in the bomb shelter.”
Four days before the incident, Mariupol locals informed Russian media that the theater was to be the site of a false flag operation aimed at generating Western outrage and triggering NATO intervention.
One day after the incident took place, civilians evacuated from Mariupol testified to Donbas-based media that Azov fighters blew the theater up as they retreated. They went on to detail how Azov used them as human shields throughout the fighting, even sniping at them as they tried to escape.
Among the most curious aspects of the incident of the theater was the disappearance of all vehicles from the parking lot in front of the structure hours before the explosion occurred. It seems that though they had been removed in order to avoid being damaged by the expected blast.
Photos and Maxar satellite images of the theater (above) on March 15 show vehicles parked immediately next to the building.
Photos and Maxar satellite images taken in the immediate aftermath of the explosion at the theater show no vehicles, as though they had been removed in expectation of the blast.
Ukrainian PR Agent-Turned-BBC Fixer Hand Picks Local Sources
Ignoring the accounts of evacuees from Mariupol who said Azov militants had destroyed the theater before retreating, the BBC’s correspondent, Bechaga, and his fixer, Khimiak, initially turned to official Ukrainian sources and a resident who was not present at the theater on the day of the supposed attack.
On March 17, the day after the theater incident, Bechaga and Khimiak reported that “according to Ukrainian authorities, [the theater] was bombed by Russia…” Their only local source said she left the theater one day before the building was destroyed – when most, if not all those on the grounds appeared to leave. “We knew we had to run away because something terrible would happen soon,” she told the BBC.
The BBC reporter and PR agent-turned-fixer co-authored a March 22 follow-up article quoting two local witnesses who said they were near the theater when a massive blast occurred. Both delivered cinematic accounts which open source intelligence analyst Michael Kobs called into question.
The male witness said he “saw plenty of people bleeding.” However, in a time when nearly every person carries a smartphone, video of the harrowing scene he described has yet to surface.
Finally, the BBC turned to McKenzie Intelligence, a private contractor founded by a former UK military intelligence officer, to hypothesize that a Russian 500-pound laser guided missile was used to destroy the theater. But as the open source analyst Kobs pointed out, “the center of destruction sits right in the middle of the stage, so two dumb bombs can’t possibly be to blame.”
While the BBC seems intent on legitimizing the official Ukrainian narrative of the theater incident, other mainstream outlets have quietly moved on. “Even now, the fates of most of those people [inside the theater] remain unknown,” the NY Times noted in passing on March 21.
BBC Fixer/Correspondent Worked for Top ‘Ukrainian-War Messaging Tool’
The BBC’s choice of an overtly nationalist Ukrainian public relations agent to guide its coverage of the war highlights the network’s absolute alignment with NATO’s objectives.
Before her gig with the British state broadcaster, Khimiak handled public relations for a Kiev-based start-up that created an AI app enabling users to superimpose their faces on the bodies of famous people. Called Reface, the app has become “a kind of Ukrainian-war messaging tool” disseminating anti-Russian push notifications to millions of users, The Washington Post reported.
According to the Post, “reality-distorting apps like Reface are a way for users to absorb messages they might otherwise tune out. People have their guards up with political news on those platforms… But they lower them for an immersive experience like face-swapping.”
Reface now says it is engaged in a “viral battle against #russianterrorists.”
As part of its efforts against Russia, Reface said it has blocked Russian users from accessing the app. Further, “everyone who opens the app sees a message to support Ukraine” along with a banner “with information about the real losses of the Russian army.” A watermark with the Ukrainian flag and the hashtag #StandWithUkraine is layered over each video that appears on the app.
Reface says its employees have joined “the territorial defense units and volunteers, and several teams have also joined the cyber troops to fight Russian propaganda.”
All Reface videos contain a watermark urging users to support Ukraine’s war effort.
For her part, the former Reface PR director Khimiak-turned-BBC correspondent/fixer has not been reticent about Ukraine’s Russian adversaries. “I just can’t accept opinion that not all Russians are bad. All I feel is pain and hate, because their silence is a consequence of this war,” she declared on Twitter in reaction to a video depicting rescuers trying to save a young girl from rubble.
Though BBC proclaims in its own statement of values, “Trust is the foundation of the BBC. We’re independent, impartial and honest,” its hiring of a Ukrainian public relations specialist who has confessed to hatred of all Russians to arrange its coverage of the war in the country is hardly surprising.
As The Grayzone reported in February 2021, the British broadcaster’s non-profit arm, BBC Media Action, participated in a covert UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) program explicitly designed to “weaken Russia.”
As seen below, UK FCDO documents revealed that BBC Media Action proposed working through a private British contractor called Aktis to cultivate and grow pro-NATO media in conflict areas like the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, now the focal point of fighting between pro-Russian forces and the Ukrainian military.
The BBC’s secret information warfare initiative had turned the network into an arm of British intelligence, operating as an actor in a foreign conflict which its broadcast media arm was simultaneously claiming to cover in an objective manner.
Now, the BBC has shed any pretense of objectivity by hiring an overtly nationalist Ukrainian public relations operative to shape its coverage of one of the most heavily disputed incidents in a war filled with cynical deceptions.
The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
YouTube has deleted the entire archive of “On Contact,” an Emmy-nominated television show by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges which was hosted on the Russian government-funded news channel RT America. We speak with Hedges, who connects the YouTube censorship of his show to a growing crackdown on dissenting voices in American media. “There’s less and less space for those who are willing to seriously challenge and question entrenched power,” says Hedges, who says “opaque entities” like YouTube shouldn’t have the power to take down outlets like RT America, despite the channel’s source of funding. “Are we better off not hearing what Russia has to say?” asks Hedges.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We spend the rest of the hour with Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who has just seen YouTube delete the entire archive of his Emmy-nominated television show On Contact, which he hosted for six years on RT America, a news channel funded by the Russian government that recently closed down. This comes as Britain announced Thursday new sanctions on 14 more Russian entities and people, including state media organizations behind RT and Sputnik and some of their senior figures, to target those who spread President Putin’s, what they called, quote, “fake news and narratives.” RT’s deputy editor-in-chief, Anna Belkina, told Reuters, quote, “With this action, the U.K. government has sounded the death knell for media freedom in Britain.” Belkina said Britain had tried to silence both RT and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
For more, we’re joined in New York by Chris Hedges, who is just back from London as a guest at the wedding of the imprisoned WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, and his partner, now wife, Stella Moris. We’ll talk more about that in a minute. But first, Chris, you wrote a piece headlined “On Being Disappeared” about having your RT show’s archive completely deleted, saying, “If this happens to me, it can happen to you, to any critic anywhere who challenges the dominant narrative.” Chris Hedges, can you lay out what happened?
CHRISHEDGES: There was no notice. There was no warning. There was no inquiry. It just vanished. It’s not surprising. I think if you go back and look at the 2017 director of national intelligence report, seven pages were devoted to RT. And while they accused RT of disseminating Russian propaganda, all the examples that they cited in that report were that RT was giving a voice to Black Lives Matter activists, anti-fracking activists, Occupy activists, third-party candidates — all of which was true. And so, I think this was the culmination. We expected it.
I was on your show, by the way, when they deleted Trump from the social media, and vigorously opposed it, not because I ever want to read another tweet by Donald Trump, but because we don’t want these opaque entities — and they know everything about us, we know nothing about them — to wield this kind of censorship. What I didn’t expect when I was arguing not to delete Trump from social media was that I would so quickly be one of the victims.
AMYGOODMAN: So, do you have any access to this archive?
CHRISHEDGES: Through the — the RT.com On Contactsite is still up. I don’t know how much longer. So we’ve copied them, so at least I’ll have them. But, no, off of YouTube. And you had hundreds of thousands of views for some of those shows. It’s all gone.
I want to stress that there wasn’t one show on Russia, and the few times that we ever mentioned Putin or Russia was not in very flattering terms. I remember the great investigative journalist Allan Nairn using RT — I’m sure, on purpose — to excoriate Russia for war crimes in Syria. But we broadcast it.
This was a show that, if we had a functioning public broadcasting system, would be on, probably late at night. I primarily interviewed authors — I’m an author myself, of course, have written 14 books — and intellectuals that I admire — Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek. And it was erased for its content, I mean, not because it was Russian propaganda but — it wasn’t — but because there’s been such a marginalization of critics of anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism. I’m a very strong supporter, very public supporter, of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction movement, which, of course, I think was the key issue that saw my great friend Cornel West denied tenure at Harvard.
The walls have just closed in, Amy, since I began as a reporter in Central America in the 1980s. There’s less and less space for those who are willing to seriously challenge and question entrenched power. I mean, you do it. Allan does that. But it’s become a pretty lonely profession. And, of course, Bob Scheer, who I write for Scheer Post, but he doesn’t have any money. He doesn’t have any advertisers — also true when he ran Ramparts. So, it’s becoming harder and harder. I’ve gone to Substack, like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, ChrisHedges.substack.com. And if I can get enough subscribers, I will fund the column and fund the show myself. But that’s where we’re left at. And, of course, you pioneered that model for many of us.
AMYGOODMAN: And, Chris, if you were on RT America right now, if it existed, if DirecTV hadn’t canceled, taken RT America off, what would you be saying about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
CHRISHEDGES: Well, I denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the inception, for the same reason I denounced our invasion and occupation of Iraq at the inception — for which, of course, I ran into conflict and had to leave The New York Times — because preemptive war, under post-Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of aggression. And I was very clear about that. Now, RT went dark six days later. I don’t — I have hard time believing Moscow would have allowed me to publicly embrace that kind of critique and remain on the air. I mean, I don’t know. That’s conjecture. But, yes, I can’t — it would be deeply hypocritical to lambaste the United States for war crimes and not lambaste Vladimir Putin for war crimes — with this caveat: The invasion of Iraq, occupation of Iraq, was based on lies and fabrications.
I believe — I was in Europe in 1989 covering the revolutions in Eastern Europe. And this, of course, was — we assumed, naively, that NATO would be obsolete. NATO was created to prevent Soviet expansion in Eastern, in Central Europe. I saw the leaders of — Margaret Thatcher and the Reagan administration, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, all promise Gorbachev that NATO would not be expanded beyond the borders of a unified Germany. Then later, with the Clinton administration, after 13 or 14 states now, of course, have been integrated into NATO, the Clinton administration promised not to station troops. This was another violation. Russia has every right to feel threatened and baited. That doesn’t justify the war crime that they committed. I mean, they pulled the trigger. But again, this kind of understanding of the historical antecedents that led to the attack on the Ukraine — you’ve had Katrina on here. She, of course, knows Russia very well. That’s almost unheard of within the kind of cheerleading from the media, within the mainstream media.
AMYGOODMAN: Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher —
CHRISHEDGES: Yeah.
AMYGOODMAN: — of The Nation. Chris, you wrote the award-winning book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. What does this war give Russia in terms of meaning?
CHRISHEDGES: Well, I just read The New York Times this morning, and they’re talking about Putin’s approval ratings going through the roof. That’s what war does. It unleashes all sorts of dark, toxic poisons, including the poison of nationalism, which we imbibed in Iraq and, I think, to a certain extent, are imbibing now, ignoring the two decades of egregious war crimes that we committed in the Middle East. The idea that somehow NATO is a defensive organization would be greeted with ridicule in countries like Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria or anywhere — or Libya or anywhere else. So, yeah, of course, every society is susceptible to that dark elixir. Russia is no exception. They’ve, of course, turned on their press, and they’re drinking deep from it. But we’re as guilty of that sin as the Russians.
AMYGOODMAN: What would you say to critics that say RT America, RT, was an outlet for Russian state propaganda, which is why it was targeted for removal by YouTube?
CHRISHEDGES: Well, to a certain extent, that’s probably true. But are we better off not hearing what Russia has to say, not understanding why they think the way they do? I was a foreign correspondent for 20 years. My job was to be culturally, linguistically, historically, religiously literate, to step into the shoes of a Syrian or an Iraqi or a Palestinian — and, of course, I spent six years in Latin America and then, later, in Yugoslavia — and explain how the world looked from their vantage point, why they felt the way they did. And oftentimes the grievances they have are very legitimate. I certainly think that Putin’s complaints about the expansion of NATO have a great deal of credibility. It’s just a historical fact that the leaders of the West lied to Gorbachev, lied to Yeltsin and lied to Putin. That’s just historically true. We’re not a better world by shutting down these outlets and essentially living within our own echo chamber, especially when we wield the kind of military power that we do wield. And this gets into the whole collapse of foreign reporting. It’s kind of gone the way of the dinosaurs. But it’s extremely important, especially when you’re an imperial power.
Watch Full Show
