The U.S. leadership has a long history of lying about Washington’s foreign objectives and the nature U.S. clients. In Washington’s elaborate propaganda narratives, minor or even minor threats and disruptions were made to be existential threats to America’s security as well as threats to the regional or global order. Multiple administrations also routinely covered up the records of foreign client authoritarians. Autocrats like Nicaragua’s Anastasio Soloza Debayle and Egypt’s Hosni Mobarak were made honorary members by the “Free World”.
Both of these components are present in Washington’s current disinformation campaign regarding the Ukraine war. The two deceptive arguments used by the U.S. in propaganda are so outrageous that they make for huge whoppers. The first is that Russia’s war on Ukraine was completely unprovoked. Nothing Ukraine, NATO, or the United States did to threaten Russia or contribute in any way to the current bloody tragedy. The second is that Ukraine, a liberal democracy country, is terrorized by Vladimir Putin and his inner circle.
In his first statement from the White House President Biden stated that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was ” Unprovoked, Unjustified.”
Criticizing Russia’s military actions as over-the-top and brutal is perfectly justified. However, the argument that Russia’s military action was unprovoked is misleading and a complete falsehood at worst. Respected analysts warned for over a quarter century about the dangers of expanding NATO eastward to Russia’s borders. This was because it was intrusive on Russian interests and inherently dangerous. Multiple U.S. governments ignored those warnings. In fact, the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations continued to push for Ukraine’s inclusion into NATO, despite constant and steadily increasing warnings from the Kremlin that such an action would violate a redline and cause a crisis.
Critics who claim that these Western actions were unwise provocations and were a major contributor to the collapse of East-West relations are subject to a barrage of vilification by the Biden administration. They are claiming that they echo “Putin’s talking points.” However, the historical record is clear against this claim.
The more sophisticated supporters of the thesis that NATO and the United States did not provoke Russia argue that Ukraine was unlikely to join the Alliance for many, if any, years. These arguments conveniently ignore the fact that Moscow didn’t object to Ukraine being granted a NATO membership card. Rather, Russian leaders opposed Ukraine becoming a NATO military resource, regardless of whether it was a feature.
This distinction is important because Western weaponry was poured into Ukraine, U.S. personnel taught Ukrainian military and intelligence troops and U.S. forces participated in joint war games (military drills) with Ukrainian units as well as forces from other NATO nations. Even credible evidence exists that U.S.-Ukrainian intelligence operatives carried out joint cyberattacks against Russian targets. It is deeply dishonest to claim that such actions were not a major provocation.
That’s enough for the first whopper. We now move on to the second whopper. Now, we get to whopper two. Former CIA station chief Dan Hoffman claimed that Vladimir Putin is afraid of democracy. He also stated that Putin couldn’t stomach a democracy at his border with a Russian speaking population and commercial connections to Europe.
This argument is at best half-true. Russia is the aggressor of the current war. There is no doubt Russia is an authoritarian, nasty state. Putin has been slowly killing the country’s democracy for over two decades.
The notion that Ukraine is a democracy, much less a liberal democracy, is disproven by numerous facts. There were many worrying features in Kyiv’s behavior even during the initial years following the 2014 “Maidan Revolution”. The new government of President Petro Poroshenko implemented a stringent censorship regime, jailed and harassed critics of the regime, shelled civilians in Donetsk, Luhansk, and continued the systemic corruption that plagued Ukraine since 1991. These trends are continuing under the current President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Ukraine was not a democratic country by the standards of corruption or political freedom before the war with Russia. Transparency International’s annual report on corruption, which was published in the early 2022 should have been alarming for Ukraine’s defenders. Transparency International evaluated 180 countries and ranked them on a 1 – 180 scale. 1 is the country with the most corruption. Ukraine was ranked 122. This is just 14 points more than Russia, which is notoriously corrupt.
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Freedom House’s 2022 annual report on political freedoms rated Ukraine as “partly free,” an equivalent to the status given to countries run by sketchy regimes like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. That was an extremely generous rating at the time. Multiple accounts indicate that there has been a significant decline in freedoms across the board since then. Zelensky banned opposition political parties and closed almost all opposition news outlets. He also imprisoned many critics and officials within his own administration, accusing them of being pro-Russian traitors. credible reports show torture in political prisons, as well as pro-regime death teams operating throughout the country.
Zelensky, and his associates, have zero tolerance for foreign critics. His willingness to intimidate and target foreign critics was evident when his government’s Center for Countering Disinformation (partially funded by U.S. taxpayers no less) published a “blacklist of such opposition. Among those on the list were John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago Professor and dean of foreign-policy realists), Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, and Doug Bandow, Cato Institute Senior Fellow. In late September, the CCD published a revised list (including addresses) that highlighted the threatening, dark nature of the blacklist. This narrower, more urgent list decried those critics as war criminals and “disinformation terrorists”. Such conduct is clearly not compatible with the behavior in a liberal democracy. But Washington and its media echo chamber continue to try to market this whopper.
Washington’s pervasive and dishonest propaganda campaign will continue, with the help of a shamelessly prowar news media. It is more important to ask whether the American people will realize they have been deceived about an illegal U.S. intervention overseas for a more suspect foreign client.
