As I noted weeks, maybe months ago — hard to tell because time flies when you are having fun — the Washington hullaballoo about the ‘imminent invasion’ by ‘Putin’s Russia’ has been nothing but a PR/strategic communications operation much like Russiagate to boost Biden’s collapsing poll numbers (https://gordonhahn.com/2022/01/24/reading-between-the-gray-old-ladys-lines/). It involves many of the same criminals involved: Biden, Sullivan, Ignatius, Alperovitch, the Atlantic Council, NATO, unidentified US intelligence sources, and hundred more. Washington had some support from its allies, but it seemed thin and half-hearted. Some, like Germany, refrained from the propaganda follies and sought to address the issues that Putin sought to resolve through his coercive diplomacy (https://gordonhahn.com/2022/01/31/putins-coercive-diplomacy/). Not even Ukraine went along with the game, as Zelenskiy and top Ukrainian security and military officials denied the imminence of any invasion and began to smell the stinking rat that has become US foreign and domestic policy. The only one missing in the stratcomm campaign was our honorable vice president, Kamila Harris, whose hapless, giggle-filled public appearances made it incumbent that she kept as far away from Operation ‘Boost Sagging Joe’s Ratings’ with her mouth as tightly shut as possible. If anyone has any doubts now about the nature of the global oligarch-tied new technical fascist regime, he should have his Pay Pal account shut down.
What is truly astounding is just how poorly this operation was executed and how easy it was to read. First, overkill is the understatement of history when it comes to characterizing the massive number of reports, leaks, invasion dates, invasion strategies, coup plots, etc., etc.
The idea of the operation was to establish a binary choice of possible outcomes: either Putin invades or Biden stopped him. In order to maximize the heroism of Biden’s flight into combat with Putin the boiling sun of Putin’s playbook, the threat of invasion had to be branded into the minds of the American people as a sure thing, pre-planned by Putin. This was covered by the soon abandoned claims that Putin still had not made his final decision. That caveat has disappeared over the last week as Biden established a date certain: February 16th. To be sure, other US officials offered different time lines. This will allow the regime to string the threat ruse out. It should be said that Washington probably would like to see Putin invade in some way. An invasion will allow it to further isolate Putin and drum up support for the NATO expansion that is not on the table.
A clear indication of the use of Putin’s coercive diplomatic demarche to re-start Minsk and start other negotiations on NATO expansion and European security to boost Biden’s ratings is how early the regime’s propagandists turned the page and have now begun to inject the idea that Biden’s strength has stayed Putin’s raging fist. The Democrat Party-state, NATO, and CIA gray cardinal of Russiagate fake fame, David Ignatius, could not even wait for the fateful P-Day invasion’s first day to end before again posing as a journalist. He has already declared victory for Biden; after all there are less than nine months before Republicans begin investigating the DemParty-state and perhaps people like Ignatius’s buddy Jake Sullivan or Ignatius himself. On February 16th the WP (Washington pravda) published another Ignatius fable. The key phrase reads: “(Putin’s) bold opening moves have been met with a surprisingly resolute counter from President Biden and his NATO allies” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/15/putin-biden-diplomatic-solution-ukraine/). Without Biden, NATO expansion, and US intelligence, Putin’s tanks would already be crossing the Englsh Channel headed to your backyard. Later, in this manifesto, Ignatius argues Putin is now playing out the whole affair hoping to recoup his losses. But we can feel safe: Uncle Joe will continue defending the free world at least until November, when he will have to turn to defending it from the Republicans. conservatives, and other white supremacists.
Further we read: “(Putin) has been met by a stalwart Biden, the genial career politician who stumbles over his sentences — but not, in this case, with his actions. Biden has countered every Putin thrust with the one strategic weapon in which the United States has overwhelming but usually unexploited superiority: its ability to blast declassified intelligence about Russian activities across the global information space” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/15/putin-biden-diplomatic-solution-ukraine/). Does Ignatius mean such US intelligence as that taken by the CIA from Hillary Clinton campaign operatives obtained by hacking Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, personal residences, and Executive Office of the President’s servers, or that concluding that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian disinformation operation, or that regarding Sadaam Hussein’s WMD? What “the United States has overwhelming but usually unexploited superiority” in is the ability to spread conjured fakes as intelligence across much of the globe. We used to spread democracy. Now we spread disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation while we point to others doing so. We also spread instability, as democracy promotion and the propaganda campaign’s effect of panicking Ukrainian society and the economy is demonstrating. The head of the deputies’s group in the Ukrainian Rada criticized US media and by implication the US intelligence sources they anonymously cite:”This hysteria is now costing our economy $2-3 billion a monthly” (https://vesti.ua/strana/arahamiya-obvinil-vedushhie-zapadnye-smi-v-fejkah). I will note that during Russia’s spring training exercises there were nearly as many Russian troops operating in many of the same places they are now, and there was no hysteria with designated ‘Russian invasion’ dates, coup plots, etc.
Ignatius notes that “Putin has appeared flummoxed, as his aides complain about U.S. ‘hysteria'”(https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/15/putin-biden-diplomatic-solution-ukraine/). I, for one, have not seen a flummoxed Putin. One can put this propaganda line in the same garbage can with Michael McFaul’s claim that Putin is “acting crazy” ostensibly to scare the US (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/former-us-ambassador-to-russia-says-putins-acting-crazy-over-ukraine-and-its-getting-scary/ar-AAS3UJB) and similar nonsense (https://gordonhahn.com/2015/09/19/putin-is-crazy-and-sick-the-lows-of-american-rusology/). What I have seen and read is Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy and numerous top officials complaining about Biden’s hysteria and intel-fed media fakes (https://gordonhahn.com/2022/01/24/reading-between-the-gray-old-ladys-lines/; https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/28/politics/us-ukraine-biden-zelensky/index.html; https://gordonhahn.com/2022/02/05/who-is-driving-a-wedge-between-the-west-and-kiev/; and https://vesti.ua/strana/arahamiya-obvinil-vedushhie-zapadnye-smi-v-fejkah).
I would continue ripping Ignatius’s regime-directed propaganda apart, but what is the point. He will continue to lie, and idiots will continue to believe it, as we all fall behind the gates of hell. I would rather spend my time reading Anatol Lieven, Dmitrii Trenin, James Billington, Glenn Beck, Peter Schweizer, Glenn Greenwald, Darren Beattie, Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Mason, Madison, Solomon Volkov, Florenskii, Solovev, (Sergei) Bulgakov, Semyn Frank, and Nikolai Berdyaev.
What is more troubling than media sycophants’ perfidy, is a US president and administration that make truly absurd predictions about specific dates when an invasion will occur–dates that change relentless, and invasions that will definitely occur even though they might not occur. One official says one thing, another – something else. Not even the Ukrainians, who desperately need a reliable US ally, believe this stuff. Russia could conceivably ‘invade’ for various reasons or provocations, but what is the point of these sill predictions? This just exacerbates the situation Ukraine has been put in by the US’s broken promise to Moscow of no NATO expansion, promise of NATO membership ‘someday’, provoking anti-Russian revolutions in the country in which extremist neofascists played a key role, lying about the birth of the Maidan regime’ born “in blood,” as Zelenskiy himself said during his presidential campaign. Washington has ensured there will be even more itchy fingers on more triggers than even last autumn. Biden has put the Ukrainians’ heads on the altar of U.S. electoral politics, rather than making an earnest effort to resolve the complicated knot of issues strangling Kiev..
The most likely path to war is the one that occurred in August 2008 in Georgia, when a gradual escalation in fighting between a Western-backed state and Russian-backed separatists. The fighting escalated until Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili snapped, invaded, and bombed sleeping Tskhinvali and killed 19 Russian soldiers, whereupon Moscow had no choice but to ‘invade.’ Who will snap first now: the separatists, Kiev’s neofascist element, Zelenskiy, or Putin? Whatever the outcome, the West has marched blindly into this conflict and is now actively helping to fuel the conflict, but in the West only Russia will be blamed. In Russia, only the West will be blamed. Both sides are wrong, and the Ukrainian allies of each are unreliable elements, who despise each other as all hell. The blood-letting seems to have only just begun. The only questions are where, how, and when.