UKRAINE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

Britain’s Fanatic Royals
Driving the Planet to Nuclear War

by Stanley Ezrol

[Print version of this article]

May 5—We have been told by the Western corporate press that a monster, Vladimir Putin, has launched an “unprovoked and unjustified” war and a cascade of genocidal war crimes against the innocent, noble, democratic, and free nation of Ukraine led by the heroic Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The top information controllers rarely mention that the United States spent at least $5 billion prior to 2014 on a bloody coup that forced the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, out of office. They do not repeat the U.N. findings that up to 14,000 mostly Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine were murdered by various military and neo-Nazi militias between 2014 and February 2022. These things are reported through opposition media outlets around the world, but withheld from the majority of citizens of the West. The intended result is acquiescence in a war on Russia, potentially a nuclear war.

We here present the evidence that the fake narrative has been organized by a cabal of war propagandists centered in London. On March 22, MintPress published a detailed report by Dan Cohen, “Ukraine’s Propaganda War: International PR Firms, DC Lobbyists and CIA Cutouts,” which was widely circulated and reported on in alternative media. Other journalists, notably Max Blumenthal of Grayzone, amplified Cohen’s revelations.

Cohen writes:

The international effort is spearheaded by public relations firm PR Network co-founder Nicky Regazzoni and Francis Ingham, a top public relations consultant with close ties to the UK’s government. Ingham previously worked for Britain’s Conservative Party, sits on the UK Government Communication Service Strategy and Evaluation Council, is Chief Executive of the International Communications Consultancy Organisation, and leads the membership body for UK local government communicators, LG Comms.

“We’ve been privileged to help coordinate efforts to support the Ukrainian Government in the last few days,” Ingham told PRovoke Media. “Agencies have offered up entire teams to support Kyiv in the communications war. Our support for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine is unwavering and will continue for as long as needed.”

Tracing Cohen’s leads uncovers a vast web of public and private PR, media, government, and cooperating agencies and individuals that control the flow of truth to the public. The participants who are guided by or trapped in this enormous web, numbering thousands or tens of thousands, are each warned, and, are shown that the warnings are genuine, that failure to follow the prescribed British/American narrative would ruin their careers or more.

Ukraine Communications Support Network

This cabal was rapidly expanded following the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, but key parts of the apparatus have been in place since the coup of 2014 or earlier. On March 28, PRovoke Media, a British journal for public relations firms, announced the launch of the Ukraine Communication Support Network (UCSN), convened by the Public Relations Communications Association (PRCA) and the International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO) “to coordinate volunteer communications activity for the people of Ukraine.” ICCO includes 41 firms in 70 countries. As we will show, this network is characterized by control from the City of London, The Atlantic Council, the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED), George Soros’ Open Society Institutes, and other operations openly deployed for the purpose of subverting or overthrowing non-compliant governments. Now, this hydra-like structure, centered in the City of London, controls thousands of journalists, communications personnel, and volunteers from around the world.

A key operative is UCSN co-chair Nataliya Popovych. Ukrainian citizen Popovych, founder of the One Philosophy public relations consulting group, was appointed Kiev’s Presidential representative to Crimea in 2014 at the time of the U.S.-backed coup. When Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia, she shifted her base of operations to Kherson. Popovych has worked with the U.S. State Department and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who preceded Zelenskyy. She was a co-founder of the Ukraine Crisis Media Center (UCMC) that was founded in 2014 to back the coup that overthrew the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovich. UCMC was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. Embassy, and NATO. It has defended billionaire George Soros and his Open Society Foundations. UCMC literature and others involved in the 2014 Maidan coup use the phrase “Revolution of Dignity” to describe the 2014 bloody overthrow of an elected government. That “revolution” and the government that it installed have been characterized by crude and bloody Nazi fellow-travelers and their descendants.

In 2015, Popovych delivered the keynote address to the Ukraine Society of Switzerland’s gala 70th anniversary dinner, recalling the “Revolution of Dignity.” She made clear that this “dignity” required massive action including censorship in the West in order to stop Russian President Putin, saying:

Russia is spending billions on manipulation of information, on Russia Today (RT) reaching the homes of people in Europe and the world, on challenging the very values on which European democracies are built on. They spread chaos, mistrust, and hatred. Ukraine cannot fight this alone. We need support from communications partners who share the same values as we do and who would be willing to play their part. By helping us display Russia’s fakes and manipulations, you are also making the societies you live in healthier and stronger. When you look at the examples of Greece and Spain and Portugal and even France and Germany where Russia was able to win support through financing of the radical parties, through sponsoring of the politicians, through influencing the local media and creating narratives that have nothing to do with reality—one should seriously think what should be done about it.

This is an indication that the 2014 coup, bought and paid for by the United States, was intended not only to defeat ethnic Russians and friends of Russia in Ukraine, but to destroy Russia itself, by destroying the President who had taken giant steps to restore Russia’s sovereignty after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This demonstrates how the “rules-based order” rejects democracy and free speech under the guise of “democracy.” (See the article, “Neo-Nazis, War Crimes and the Theater Called Ukraine,” by David Shavin, for a profile of the Nazi networks in Ukraine.)

Atlantic Council and the New ‘Newspeak’

Perhaps the most influential operative is Francis Ingham, whose roles include Chief Executive of the “International Communications Consultancy Organization,” a leading public relations organization; Director General of PRCA, which claims to be “The world’s largest and most influential PR professional body”; and head of LG Comms, whose members are UK local government communicators. Dan Cohen reports that Ingham is close to the UK government and has worked for the Conservative Party.

On March 1, industry newsletter PRovoke Media reported that Ingham’s PRCA warned employees that they will be expelled if they work with sanctioned firms and should “consider the reputational risk of working with firms that are linked to the Russian government.”

Cohen writes that Ingham and Nicky Regazzoni, a co-founder of PR Network, “joined by an anonymous Ukrainian figure, helped the Kyiv regime’s foreign ministry create and distribute a ‘dossier’ with materials instructing public relations agencies on ‘key messages,’ approved language, content for debunked propaganda constructs, far-right and neo-Nazi propaganda.” These are 2,000 top communications professionals who are bound by their employers to stick to the “rules-based” narrative they have been given. Reflections of George Orwell’s “1984 Newspeak” are not accidental.

Richard Edelman of Richard Edelman Public Relations has worked with Popovych’s One Philosophy firm and other arms of the hydra-like monster. Edelman’s firm has 43 offices (U.S. 13, Canada 5, Latin America 6, Europe 13, Mid-East 2, and Africa 2). Edelman is on the Board of Directors of the Atlantic Council and is a member of The World Economic Forum (WEF). The Atlantic Council is the NATO-linked think-tank of the rules-based order, although its October 2019 68-page “Present at the Re-Creation: A Global Strategy for Revitalizing, Adapting, and Defending a Rules-Based International System” actually lists no specific rules, but all of its publishing and other activities clearly communicate that not following them means trouble. The WEF is the billionaire’s club that meets annually at Davos to plan its looting operations for the coming period, using the Green New Deal as a cover for its Malthusian attack on industrial and agricultural production.

Cohen reported that these networks use “fact checking” agency StopFake, which, he writes, “is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council, Czech and UK foreign ministries, and the International Renaissance Foundation, which is funded by billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.”

Fake News: Mariupol

As of this writing, the Donbas city of Mariupol is now almost entirely controlled by Russia, as the Azovstal steel plant, where approximately 2,000 Azov Brigade and other Ukrainian military as well as civilians had taken refuge, is being cleared.

Two events in the city of Mariupol illustrate the way that the British communications network and the leading Ukrainian neo-Nazi force, the Azov Battalion, work in tandem to create false reports of Russian attacks against civilians. Mariupol is part of Donetsk, but outside the region which declared itself independent of Kiev as the Donetsk Republic after the Maidan coup of 2014. The Azov Battalion was formed at that time from existing Nazi organizations, taking over Mariupol for operations against the Donbas region.

Grayzone journalist Max Blumenthal has produced a detailed, documented study on the reported attacks on the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater in Mariupol. The fake stories came from two BBC correspondents working from Ukraine, Orysia Khimiak and Hugo Bachega, using as their single source Petr Andryushchenko, an advisor to the pro-Azov Mayor of Mariupol, Vadim Boychenko.

Blumenthal (Grayzone, March 25, 2022), reports that prior to shifting to BBC, Khimiak worked for startup “Reface” that the Washington Post labelled a “reality distorting app” and “a kind of Ukrainian war-messaging tool.”

Different accounts include that civilian refugees were sheltering in the theater when it was attacked; Azov Battalion soldiers were holding civilians there as human shields; Azov Battalion soldiers were there without civilians; hundreds were killed; few were killed; none were killed. I believe that the last account reported was that all were safe.

A second example was a report based on a March 12 tweet from the Ukrainian embassy in Turkey: “The mosque of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and his wife Roxolana (Hurrem Sultan) in Mariupol was shelled by Russian invaders. More than 80 adults and children are hiding there from the shelling, including citizens of Turkey.” This was widely reported internationally, but it is difficult to locate any reports or pictures of damage or casualties at the mosque, nor any withdrawal of the report. On March 17, Al Jazeera reported that of 80 Turkish citizens who had sheltered in the Mosque, 50 had left to return to Turkey and 30 remained. There has still been no confirmation of any attack on the Mosque. Al Jazeera reported, “Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said a day later (March 13) that it remained intact.”

Fake News: the Ruin of Zaporizhzhia

On March 2, 2022, Russian troops peacefully occupied the nuclear power station in Zaporizhzhia, a city 227 km from Mariupol. When Ukrainian militia fired on the Russians at night from a nearby building unconnected to the reactors, the Russians used flares to provide light as they drove the militia out of the building, which was set on fire as they left. The fire was quickly put out and the Ukrainian staff of the power plant continued to operate it without interruption. However, Zelenskyy and his spokesmen issued warnings that the Russians had nearly triggered the biggest nuclear disaster in world history. News stations across the West warned in hushed tones of a pending nuclear disaster affecting all of Europe and beyond.

By the following day the truth was known, and yet the “Russians risk nuclear holocaust” meme continues to be retailed by the fake media cabal. Almost two months later, on April 27, the “Servant of the People” went on television and denounced Russia’s “irresponsible actions around nuclear power plants,” demanding that every nuclear power plant or other nuclear facility controlled by Russia must be seized and put under control by the “international community.” This is a request that makes sense only if Zelenskyy hopes to be remembered as triggering a nuclear disaster – nuclear war.

Fake News: the Snake Island Affair

In the early days of Russia’s military operation, media reports included an audio recording consisting of a Russian ship’s officers demanding the surrender of Ukrainian soldiers on the small island in the Black Sea called Snake Island. The soldiers answered with “go to hell,” “go f---- yourself,” and similar niceties. It was then reported that all of the soldiers were shot dead on the spot. President Zelenskyy delivered a national radio address pledging to honor the 13 dead soldiers as “heroes” of the Army. The next day, the Ukrainian Navy announced that the soldiers had surrendered to the Russians, and were alive and well. The Russian Navy released them within a few days.

Ukraine MFA Nazi-Style Communications

Cohen reported, “Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs distributed a dossier with materials instructing public relations agencies on instructing public relations agencies on “content for debunked propaganda constructs, far-right and Neo-Nazi propaganda.”

This dossier, according to Cohen, includes a collection of posters established for promoting the cause. Not all of those files were necessarily used in public, but they do reveal the thinking of the collection’s curators. The others are a handbook created for recruits to President Zelenskyy’s “Foreign Legion.”

Beyond containing praise for neo-Nazis and Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera, C14 leader Yevhen Karas, and others, the documents are dominated by bestial treatment of the forces they confronted. Bandera was an ultra-nationalist who led an army that worked side by side with German Nazi forces during World War II, both in battle and in the mass murder of Jews and other Nazi targets. His supporters claim Bandera worked with the German Nazis in order to win independence from the Soviet Union.

Posters

The ministry files include posters of citizens throwing Molotov Cocktails at the Russians, except they are called “Bandera Smoothies” and “Bandera Smoozi.”

The posters demonstrate a depraved indifference for life and depraved enjoyment of mass-murder. While charging Russia with war crimes without any evidence, the Ukrainian military’s media apparatus openly promotes itself as merciless, cold-blooded killers. Examples from the Ministry’s collection of posters include:

• Schematic drawing of dead bodies on the ground surrounded by bombs. The caption reads, “Grandma’s advice to Moskovites: Hide in the fields. When you die in the hands of our army, sunflowers will grow better.”

• “Thank you Ukrainian Army” poster of a uniformed Azov Battalion soldier with a Wolfsangel patch on his sleeve. (The Wolfsangel is similar to the Nazi Swastika and was adopted as a badge by Waffen SS units during Hitler’s reign. It is now a proud favorite of the Azov Battalion dating from its founding during the Maidan insurgency.)

• “Democracy is a Weapon.”

• “The Encyclopedia of Incurable Diseases: Russia, Belorussia, North Korea, Syria, Eritrea” (not in English).

• Line drawings of Czar Nicholas, Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev nested like a Russian doll, with the saying, “This Mental Moscovian Dragon is Not Changeable During 300 years.” A line across the bottom reads, WAR/TERROR/ SLAVERY/DEHUMANIZATION/ HOLODOMOR/CONCENTRATION CAMP. (“Holodomor” refers to the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine.)

• A severed and bleeding green head lying on the ground with the caption, “Putin’s Orcs got whipped.” (“Orc” is used in fantasy literature to refer to ugly and violent creatures.)

• A rough sketch of a naked President Putin, with a large rocket lodged in his back, and blood pouring from his mouth. The caption is “PUT the rockets IN.”

Many posters call for a “No-fly Zone” over Ukraine. Marionette Zelenskyy may not get it, but even Joe Biden knows that an air war between the U.S. and Russia would be the cause of, not the savior from, nuclear catastrophe.

Recruitment

Soon after the Russian incursion into Ukraine, Zelenskyy’s Foreign Ministry released a call for an International Legion of Defense of Ukraine, a “Foreign Legion.” The dedicated website contains basic instructions for mercenaries to join the legion, though little is said about required skills or training. It triumphally states: “Join the Legion and help us defend Ukraine, Europe and the whole world!”

This is a somewhat odd way to describe a government which came to power in a violent coup against the elected government, a coup organized and financed by foreign interests that has severely restricted the use of the Russian language, shut down opposition newspapers, imprisoned opposition leaders, openly supported neo-Nazi’s atrocities, and bombarded the Ukrainian citizens who opposed the violent overthrow of their elected government, for eight years. But Zelenskyy’s election, as a comedian who ran for a political party named after his comedy show, “Servant of the People,” was appropriate. It was especially appropriate that he won 70% of the vote on a platform of peace and freedom, and reversed himself within months of election as unable or unwilling to counter the Nazi factions.

Correct Wording

The material under this topic would be quite familiar to people who have been cut off by social media in the West, which now function as a block to free speech, especially if it speaks the truth. For example, “correct wording” does not permit expressions like, “annexation of Crimea,” “reunification of Crimea with Russia,” “referendum in Crimea,” or, worst of all, “will of the people of Crimea.” Permissible expressions for these unwanted circumstances must imply that the arrangement is temporary and improper. “Temporary occupation of the territory of Ukraine—the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol,” “occupied Crimea,” “occupied Crimean Peninsula,” “attempted annexation of Crimea,” or “occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea” are allowed, because they “emphasize the gravity of the internationally wrongful act committed by the Russian Federation.” Similarly, expressions that refer to conflict or crisis in Donbas are prohibited even though the UN High Commission for Human Rights estimates that 14,200 people, including 3,404 civilians, have been killed in internal fighting in the Donbas conflict area after the 2014 coup.

Key Messages

The difference between “correct words” and “key messages,” is that “key messages,” true or false, report ideas that must be communicated to instill the proper understanding of a situation. For example, a “key message” broadcast March 22, was: “entire Europe was put on the brink of nuclear disaster, when the Russian troops began shelling Zaporizhzhya, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe.” We know, however, that International Atomic Energy Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi announced that there was no shelling of the plant, and that the plant is being managed by the same staff that ran it prior to the Russian arrival.

Other “key messages” included in the dossier are that this attack involved Russian troops simultaneously attacking from Russia, Belarus, and the “temporarily occupied regions Donetsk, Lugansk, and Crimea.” It is a “full-scale war,” not a “conflict.” Also, “We protect the entire Europe, not only ourselves, as Putin will not stop in Ukraine.” The instructions go on to state what the next steps in the attack will be, what weaponry Russia will use, what its advantage is, what it will bomb, what it will destroy, and how many it will kill. This leads up to “We urgently need the no-flight zone, or air defense fighter planes. This would significantly accelerate the end of war.” It goes on providing more words to describe damage it claims has already occurred and damage that will occur. Some reported events are similar to actual events, but most of the predicted events have not occurred. The important thing is that the “correct terms” and “key messages” are repeated often enough and emphatically enough to make it feel as if they had occurred or will occur.

The Wider Net

The last section of Dan Cohen’s article, “Intelligence operations,” deals with a network centered on Ukrainian media and related operations that is fastened into a much wider network directly connected to the leading structure of the “rules-based international order.” A central part of this is the Russian Language News Exchange (RLNE) consisting of opposition media, founded in 2016 and funded by the Dutch government and the European Commission. It was investigated by the Russian media agency, RIA FAN.

In July, 2021, six journalists were sent to Poland for media training with all coronavirus restrictions waived. They included Andrey Lipsky, deputy editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta and CEO of Hromadske TV. Hromadske is one of the most watched TV networks in Ukraine. It is funded by governments and foundations including the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the European Endowment for Democracy, and Free Press Unlimited (FPU). Pierre Omidyar, billionaire founder of eBay, was also involved. Hromadske describes itself as an NGO or “Public TV” channel. Hromadske co-founder Maxim Eristavi, an Atlantic Council expert in its Millenium Leadership Program and other areas, presented an introductory video for the network’s founding.

On March 5, Eristavi and others raised 2 million euros for “Media Lifeline Ukraine.” That organization soon partnered with Reporters Without Borders and the Ukrainian Institute for Mass Information, aka Lviv Press Freedom Center. That organization is led by USAID communications officer Oksana Romaniuk and funded by USAID and the UK government.

Beyond media control operations, this huge network has an active Capitol Hill lobbying machine. Atlantic Council advisor Daniel Vajdich, registered as a foreign agent for the Ukrainian Federation of Employers of the Oil and Gas Industry, also works for President Zelenskyy to lobby for weapons. He heads Yorktown Solutions and has advised current U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and former Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker. It is said that Vajdich wrote Zelenskyy’s March 16 speech to the U.S. Congress.

Knowing what we now know about the international media operations organized out of London for the purpose of weaponizing the Ukrainian government and military/militia apparatus against those powers that the Atlantic elites have deemed threatening, it is easy to understand why almost every bit of data provided to us by “the media” is anti-Russian and false. In some cases, the connection to this network is identified, in other cases not. But the fact that, for instance, information about the efforts of China and Russia to build a foundation for peace based on economic development has been described by U.S. Cabinet members; Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President; Frederick Kempe, President of the Atlantic Council; and others as a plan to destroy both developing and underdeveloped nations for their benefit, is evidence of the worse than unwholesome nature of the Rules-Based International Order and its slaves.