United in propaganda
Mainstream media emphasize Russia's mistakes and play down those of the West; in alternative media, this is often the other way around. It's time to face the whole truth.

On the propaganda front, Russia is in no way inferior to the West. Olga Skabejewa, presenter of the most popular political talk show on Russian state television, has explicitly admitted to making propaganda for the Russian government. She calls this "common sense propaganda, propaganda of the interests of your state, even if it is an aggressive enforcement of the interests of your country," because "if we consider ourselves patriots, it is better to follow the state's point of view and work for the state." In addition, the Kremlin uses AI-based bots on social media that look like real people's profiles and spread propaganda in the interests of the Russian government. This article summarizes the main propaganda lies of the Russian government about the war in Ukraine. The detailed analysis of the history of the Russian-Ukrainian war with further background information and evidence is available exclusively at Substack.
by Christian Stolle

[This article posted on 8/13/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/in-propaganda-geeint.]

On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared war on Ukraine, calling it a "special military operation". In his televised address, he accused NATO and the United States in particular of waging a series of wars of aggression against Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and Syria, as well as supporting separatists in Russia in the 1990s and 2000s. He argued that NATO's warmongering and its eastward expansion were endangering Russia's security. Putin said:

"Further expansion of the infrastructure of the North Atlantic Alliance or continued efforts to gain a military foothold in Ukrainian territory are unacceptable to us."
In summary, Putin justified Russia's full-scale attack on Ukraine as a preventive war, as a liberation of Ukraine from a neo-Nazi regime, and as a humanitarian intervention to end Ukraine's alleged genocide of its Russian-speaking population.

In fact, the Russian-Ukrainian war had been raging since 2014, when Russia intervened militarily in Ukraine in response to the Ukrainian coup against pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, which led to the annexation of Crimea and the establishment of Russian satellite states in Donbas. While the removal of Yanukovych was illegal and the result of a false flag attack, it did not justify the subsequent Russian invasion. The principle of "iniuria non excusat iniuriam" applies – one wrong does not justify another. Neither did the West have the right to support militant neo-Nazis in a coup that cost the lives of dozens of innocent people, nor did Russia have the right to interfere militarily in Ukrainian affairs and split off regions from Ukraine.

Moreover, it is hypocritical for Putin to condemn the Ukrainian false flag attack during the Euromaidan protests in 2014, because his political rise was also facilitated by false flag attacks, in which Putin, as a former Soviet secret service officer and head of the Russian secret service, was almost certainly involved.

A series of bombings of apartment buildings in Russia in September 1999 killed at least 299 people – significantly more than the Maidan massacre in Ukraine. In the aftermath of the attacks, Putin established himself as an effective leader who restored order and security in the country with a firm hand, centralizing political power, restricting civil liberties in the name of security, and bringing the separatist Caucasus republic of Chechnya, which had been effectively independent of Russia since 1996, back under Russian control with extreme military force and at the cost of tens of thousands of civilian casualties.

Evidence that the 1999 bombings were false flag attacks can be found in the book "Blowing Up Russia" and the documentary film "Assassination of Russia". Both were published in 2002. The author of the book, Alexander Litvinenko, and the financier of the film, Boris Berezovsky, were apparently murdered by the Russian secret service.

Alexander Lebed, who as secretary of the Russian Security Council ended the first Chechen war in 1996 with a peace agreement that Putin described as a betrayal of Russia, also suspected the Russian government of being behind the attacks. Lebed died shortly afterwards in a helicopter crash, which many suspected was sabotage. It is also noteworthy that, for example, in the USA, countless books and documentary films are freely available, according to which the attacks of September 11, 2001 were carried out under a false flag, whereas "Blowing Up Russia" and "Assassination of Russia" are banned in Russia. A German-language analysis of this content, which is banned in Russia, appeared on the YouTube channel Kompromist in 2022.

By the time the Russian army escalated its war against Ukraine in 2022, around 14,000 people had already been killed in the Donbas, including soldiers and civilians on both sides, with two-thirds of the deaths occurring in the first two years of the war, which were particularly fierce. The declining death tolls in the further course of the war refute Putin's accusation that the Ukrainian government is committing genocide against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas.
Although Russia had started the war in the Donbas and tens of thousands of Russians, including numerous neo-Nazi groups, had been fighting in Ukraine since 2014, Putin claimed that Russia had "done everything possible to resolve the situation by peaceful political means". The number of deaths and refugees as a result of the Russian major offensive from 2022 onwards – especially in areas with predominantly Russian-speaking Ukrainians – quickly exceeded the number of victims in the eight previous years of war, which shows that Russia's alleged protection of the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine did more harm than good to those affected and was more likely to serve to expand the Russian government's sphere of influence.

Putin explicitly justified the Russian major offensive with Article 51 of the United Nations (UN) Charter, which refers to the right of individual or collective self-defense in the event of an attack on a UN member state. However, the separatist Donbas republics were not UN member states, unlike Ukraine. Under the UN Charter, Russia should have supported Ukraine, if at all, in defending itself against the separatists, who were only able to occupy Ukrainian territory thanks to Russian assistance.
A similar scenario had already played out in Georgia. In the early 1990s, Russia supported militant separatists in the Georgian border regions with Russia. The military support was followed in 2002 by a citizenship law initiated by Putin that allowed people in separatist regions of the former Soviet Union outside Russia to acquire Russian citizenship more easily, further Russifying the Georgian separatist regions.

Just a few months after Georgia and Ukraine were declared candidates for NATO membership in 2008, the Georgian military attempted to regain control of the separatist regions, but Russia intervened again on the side of the separatists, even advancing into Georgian territory outside the separatist areas. As a result of the Russian intervention, the regions retained their de facto independence from Georgia and were further integrated into Russia economically, politically and militarily. Almost all UN member states still regard the Georgian separatist regions as Georgian territory illegally occupied by Russia.

The Russian wars in support of the separatists in Georgia and Ukraine strengthened Putin, as did the violent suppression of the Chechen independence movement in Russia, as the German-Russian political scientist Andreas Umland noted:

"An important internal factor for the Russian attack on Ukraine is the fact that Putin's various wars since 1999 have been a source of popularity, integrity and legitimacy for his undemocratic rule. The occupation, subjugation and/or oppression of peoples such as the Chechens, Georgians and Ukrainians has broad support among average Russians, which is sometimes overlooked in analyses of the social foundations of Russian authoritarianism. The support of ordinary Russians for victorious military interventions – especially in the territory of the former Tsarist and Soviet empire – is an important political resource and social basis of the increasingly autocratic Putin regime. (…)

Russia's attack on Ukrainian democracy is not only a revanchist war of a former imperial center against its former colony, but is also driven by Russian domestic politics. It is a consequence of the re-autocratization of Russia since 1999, which in turn follows a larger regressive trend of the worldwide spread of authoritarianism."

Just as opportunistically as the Western NATO imperialists, Putin supports or fights separatists depending on whether it serves his political interests. In 2013, Putin even criminalized peaceful calls for separatism within Russia, even though Russia is a multi-ethnic state with numerous minorities that have a legitimate interest in political independence, especially in the border regions. And just as Western leaders exaggerate their enemies as arch-villains, Putin's constant references to Nazis in Ukraine are exaggerated – which is not to say that there are no neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
There are. They played an important role in the 2014 coup and in defending against the subsequent Russian invasion. However, Ukraine has worked to remove neo-Nazis and other political extremists from its armed forces, so that even the infamous Azov Brigade, which at its inception in 2014 was 10 to 20 percent neo-Nazi, has been transformed into an elite unit with dozens of Jewish fighters.

US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of supporting pro-Western forces in Ukraine before the 2014 coup, deliberately backed the racist and ultra-nationalist Svoboda party of Oleh Tjahnybok, which has an openly neo-Nazi background. In a leaked telephone conversation, Nuland expressed the hope that Tjahnybok could help the West-backed Arsenij Jazenjuk to power.

In the 2012 elections, Svoboda had won 10 percent of the vote and in 2014 it did indeed form a coalition government with Yatsenyuk. However, in all elections since 2014, Svoboda has barely won any votes and has thus disappeared into political insignificance. The claim that Ukraine is being ruled by neo-Nazis is also refuted by the fact that President Zelensky is Jewish. Despite the presence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine, it should be noted that they are a fringe group. The Euromaidan protests that preceded the 2014 coup d'état were also largely made up of politically moderate citizens who advocated Westernization.
Contrary to Putin's claims, neo-Nazism is not a dominant phenomenon in Ukraine, neither in politics nor in the army nor in civil society. Moreover, there are neo-Nazis in many countries, including Russia, where "Russia's use of right-wing extremists on the side of the separatists in the (Donbas) provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk has had a greater military and political impact than the involvement of right-wing extremist Ukrainian groups," according to a study by Russian political scientist Vyacheslav Likhachev. Particularly noteworthy are Russitsch, the Russian Imperial Movement and the Russian National Unity.

In the fight against Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, Moscow relied on the neo-Nazi group Russki Obraz. Kremlin official Alexei Petrov, who spread neo-Nazi propaganda on social media for years, including references to Adolf Hitler and the Hitler salute, was involved in the abduction of Ukrainian children to Russia during the Russian-Ukrainian war, together with the Russian presidential commissioner for children's rights. Dmitri Utkin, founder of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, had a tattoo of the Waffen-SS on his neck and an imperial eagle on his chest. Denis Puschilin, who, before his political career as a separatist in the Donbas, defrauded countless Russians and Ukrainians of their assets as a financial fraudster, awarded a medal to a separatist in 2022 who wore neo-Nazi insignia on his uniform.

The forced recruitment for the Russian war against Ukraine disproportionately affects ethnic minorities, which is clearly racist. A 2015 study by Richard Arnold of Muskingum University also found that "Russia is indeed the most dangerous country in Europe for ethnic minorities":

"These data make Russia the most violent country in the former Soviet Union in terms of ethnic minorities, far surpassing the next most dangerous country, Ukraine, where the statistics are much lower even when taking into account the difference in population size (about one-third of Russia's). In 2006, for example, 522 people were beaten and 66 killed in racist crimes in Russia.

By comparison, in Ukraine 12 people were beaten and two killed. In 2008, 434 people were beaten and 97 killed in Russia. In the same year, 79 people were beaten and four killed in Ukraine(.) (…) While racially motivated violence has declined since its peak in 2008, skinheads remain a strong force in Russia: there were 187 deaths and 206 injuries in 2012 (…). Racist groups are still thriving in Russia and form a significant part of the social support for Putin's New Russia policy (…) in eastern Ukraine (…)."
Putin's constant harping on Ukrainian neo-Nazis is gaslighting to deflect from Russian neo-Nazis. It is also probably intended to recall the Soviet Union's war against Nazi Germany and to rekindle the Soviet fighting spirit for Russia's war against Ukraine. The fight against "the fascist dark force" is immortalized in the song "The Holy War" from 1941, the most popular song on Soviet radio during World War II. The song is played every year in Moscow at the parade commemorating the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

Putin's argument that NATO has betrayed Russia with its eastward expansion is at best only half the truth. It is true that US Secretary of State James Baker told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not expand eastward if Gorbachev agreed to German reunification. However, in contrast to reunification, the question of NATO's eastward expansion was ultimately not contractually regulated.

The Russian government evidently did not insist on the renunciation of NATO expansion to the east being enshrined in a binding treaty. On the contrary, in the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, Russia committed itself to "respecting the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states, as well as their natural right to choose the means to ensure their own security (...)".

In 1999, Russia reaffirmed in the Istanbul Document "the inherent right of each participating State (of the OSCE) to be free to choose or change its security arrangements, including treaties of alliance, as they evolve". The NATO-Russia Founding Act and the Istanbul Document are not treaties in the sense of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, but these documents carry more weight than an oral statement made years before the signing of these documents. Russia's explicit rejection of Ukraine's NATO membership came only after Putin took power.

Moreover, Russia has threatened and deceived NATO more than once. In 2007, Russia suspended the implementation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, which sets limits on arms build-up in Europe. Russia thus issued itself a blank check for military build-up.
During the Zapad exercise in 2009, the Russian military simulated an attack on NATO member Poland. Zapad is the Russian word for West. Further Zapad exercises followed in 2013 and 2017, with Russia apparently understating the number of participating soldiers in order to avoid inviting foreign observers, as required by the Vienna Document of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). All Zapad exercises have involved attacks on Eastern Europe.

Russian officials have long emphasized that Russia would never tolerate Ukraine's NATO membership. Nevertheless, the West persistently pushed Ukraine in that direction without providing sufficient military assistance to prevent or repel a Russian attack. This was a fatal situation, yet Ukraine's pro-Western governments stubbornly pursued their NATO ambitions.

Immediately after the Russian major offensive in February 2022, both Putin's and Zelensky's approval ratings skyrocketed. In this respect, the escalation of the war was a blessing for both presidents. With a united population behind him, Zelensky immediately banned 11 political parties, including the largest opposition party. He also merged the largest national television stations into a platform called United News.

Putin, for his part, passed laws that criminalize any criticism of the war. It is even forbidden to call the war a war at all, and not, as the Kremlin does, a "special military operation". Alexei Gorinov, a member of the opposition Solidarnost movement, was sentenced to seven years in a penal colony for doing so. A text like this would undoubtedly be criminal in Russia and could also have legal consequences in Ukraine. Freedom of the press in Germany currently allows for more freedom, although it has not been under a good star since the Compact magazine was banned.

In summary, it can be said that Ukrainian, Russian and Western politicians are jointly responsible for the war in Ukraine. The post-revolutionary Ukrainian governments came to power through a false flag attack and rejected separatism even where it clearly expressed the will of the people, namely in Crimea. The Russian-led militant separatists in the Donbas acted against the will of the majority of the population they claimed to be liberating.
The Russian army repeatedly illegally invaded Ukraine and escalated the war in the Donbas on several occasions on the side of the separatists. In doing so, the Russian government demonstrated its willingness to use force to split Ukraine. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian government consistently planned to recapture the Russian-controlled territories by military means. The Western corporate state encouraged Ukraine in this course of action, thereby provoking the Russian major offensive in 2022 with its eyes wide open, possibly in order to profit economically and politically from the war.

The ruthless power politics that can be observed on all sides is abhorrent. Political forces in the West, Ukraine and Russia have deliberately resorted to terror and war in order to advance politically and line their own pockets, paid for with the blood of the people. But even if all those involved bear some of the blame and the West has started the most wars in recent history, Russia is the main culprit in Ukraine. The Russian-Ukrainian war is a Russian campaign of conquest following a coup d'état in Ukraine supported by the West.

Contrary to popular belief in the alternative media, it was not just British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who prevented a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022. Johnson may have had such intentions, but the peace process also failed due to Russia's reaction to the Istanbul Communiqué, which contained the Ukrainian proposals for an immediate peace and largely met the well-known Russian demands. Russia responded to the communiqué by adding a demand that, in the event of a renewed attack on Ukraine, it should be able to veto international assistance to Ukraine. This condition was, understandably, unacceptable to Ukraine.
At present, the Ukrainians seem to be caught in a turf war between rival gangs. This predicament is emblematic of the attempt by political groups to impose their preferences on everyone. Mass movements like the Euromaidan, which are largely supported by well-meaning and politically moderate citizens, cannot remedy the situation if they once again place their hopes in political coercion to enforce particular interests and do not protect themselves from agents provocateurs. In order not to be crushed or co-opted by the conflict between the political power blocs, genuine sovereignty and independence are required.

Christian Stolle, born in 1986, studied Asian Studies in Bonn. After long stays abroad in Mongolia, Portugal, Spain, Ecuador and the USA, he moved to Berlin in 2016, where he works as a bouncer. As part of his publishing activities, he published the book "Generation Mensch" in 2019, which deals with the basic parameters of human existence.
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07.08.2024 by Rüdiger Rauls

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Journalism is not a one-way street
Manova is interested in the opinions of its readers and looks forward to receiving letters from them.

A society that is increasingly losing itself in separate information spaces is dependent on dialogue that takes place in public. If the media shy away from this dialogue, however unpleasant it may sometimes be, or even prevent it because they are not open to criticism, they not only stagnate in their own development and lose their level, they also cement those separate information spaces. Manova wants to set a good example and promote dialogue between readers and authors.

by Elisa Gratias, Madita Hampe, Jana Pfligersdorffer, Nicolas Riedl, Roland Rottenfußer

[This article posted on 8/12/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/journalismus-ist-keine-einbahnstrasse.]

"Journalism should not be a one-way street." A sentence that has become as hollow and trite as it is important for the existence of a press that fulfills its mission. But what does "not a one-way street" mean? In Germany, the public media are hardly subject to any kind of criticism from their viewers and listeners. Their license fee financing allows them to ignore what is brought to their attention by recipients. Even if the last person were to turn off the television, their self-created bubble of mostly well-off middle-class editors with similar political views would continue to exist.

There are ways of making contact, such as a radio complaint or sending a letter to the editor, but anyone who has tried this knows how high the bureaucratic wall of ignorance can be, which you have to break through to be truly heard and taken seriously. A serious, open dialogue, beyond outrage and copy-paste answers, rarely comes about, and even more rarely does anything change. Even the comment sections of YouTube channels are regularly blocked on politically explosive topics.
The consequences of this isolation, the perceived impossibility of expressing one's anger about one-sided reporting to ears that are not deaf, can often be seen at demonstrations, where angry citizens are no longer willing to give journalists interviews or even insult them. This may not be a meaningful contribution to the debate and may cause anger or even fear in the journalists concerned, but it is ultimately the result of a refusal to listen that has lasted for years.
Journalistic offerings on the internet, outside of the established media, work in a completely different way. While public broadcasting and the major newspapers leave you feeling resigned that you have little opportunity to express criticism to those who work in the media, here it is lost in the sheer mass of comments.

Between praise, insults, emojis and short statements with poor syntax, well-founded criticism usually does not get the attention it deserves. The ignorance of the regulation gives way to an ignorance of inflationary indifference and digital overload. The truth is: just because a medium has an open comment section, it does not mean that the journalism it practices does not lead to a dead end.

Media professionals should care about what their readers think, because if they start to do journalism for other journalists and various experts, who particularly appreciate the praise for the last text, they are sabotaging social peace, usually without even knowing it or with bad intentions.

But they also shouldn't let themselves be thrown off course by every "I don't like it" that comes their way, because then they would hardly have time to do their work. What is needed is an open-ended and lively dialogue at eye level.

Here at Manova, there is currently no comment section, apart from our Twitter or X-channel. This is a conscious decision based on our capacities, because a comment section of this kind requires a level of work that we are currently unable to provide. We publish around 25 articles a week, and each one would require advertising and spam to be filtered out and questions to be answered. In addition, our articles are often still relevant months later, which would mean a workload that we are unable to handle with our small team. Furthermore, our website is self-programmed, as we take our promise to collect as little data as possible from our readers seriously. This is only possible without a standard software product. The programming and integration of a comment function is therefore currently beyond our capabilities.

Nevertheless, it is important to enable this dialogue at eye level, perhaps even more seriously than would be the case in a comment column. That is why we would like to make use of a well-known concept that is part of the standard journalistic repertoire of every magazine, but which was taken much more seriously a few decades ago than it is today: letters to the editor. By this we mean not so much a simple "That was great" or "Not so much", which you could also comment on under a YouTube post, but rather well-founded criticism, positive feedback or further development of the respective authors' ideas. Letters to the editor that could be worth publishing and have the potential to open up a dialogue between media professionals and consumers, to make debates more lively and to create space for new ideas and views that may not be given enough attention by us. After all, it is respectful dialogue that is able to at least heal the social wounds of recent years.

Of course, we cannot promise to publish every letter to the editor and, depending on the volume, we may not be able to answer every e-mail in detail, but we would like to try to treat the effort and trust that you, our readers, place in us with respect. After all, we too depend on feedback and criticism in order to remain lively and alert and to be able to provide the kind of journalism that many of us would have liked to see from the established media in recent years.

Please send us your praise, criticism or thoughts in the form of a letter to the editor to: leserbriefe@manova.news. Please write the title of the article you are referring to in the subject line so that we can forward your feedback to the respective authors.