Deception, manipulation, sabotage: How the UK works to keep the Ukraine war going
Unless you want to be blind, it is obvious that Ukraine under the Zelensky regime is not remotely a free country. In politics, after massive repression, there are only remnants of an opposition, which face continuing oppression and harassment by the government, as even the French newspaper Le Monde, generally naïve about the Zelensky regime, has reported.
Ukraine’s public sphere is stifled by nationalist propaganda, pressure, and demonstrative, intimidating terror. Before the escalation of 2022, even a robustly propagandistic tool of Western information warfare such as Freedom House could still acknowledge that much: its 2018 report, authored by Ukrainian researcher Vyacheslav Likhachev, identified Ukraine’s Far Right organizations as “a threat to democracy” and “aggressively trying to impose their agenda on Ukrainian society, including by using force against those with opposite political and cultural views.”
Regarding Ukraine’s media, expect not much resistance from there. They are tightly controlled and, often, pro-actively obedient, whether out of misguided conviction, fear, or careerism. Even Ukraine’s Western supporters, as well as some courageous critics in Ukraine, have voiced criticism of the crude propaganda habits of the Zelensky regime.
Make no mistake: The authoritarian features of the rule of Vladimir Zelensky – formerly the object of a veritable Western personality cult that, by now, at least some devotees must feel embarrassed about – are not the result of the large-scale war. The politics of Zelenskyism, to coin an ugly but handy term, were always unusually deceitful and manipulative and, by 2021 at the latest, openly bending toward authoritarianism, as many Ukrainian critics pointed out at the time.
And yet: Imagine a future trial, maybe to be held in Ukraine, of Zelensky and his team. The defense would not be able to do much about their record of corruption, but it would certainly at least try to blame some of the former leader’s underhanded and tyrannical tendencies on the war. It would be a stretch, but lawyers have to do their best, even for the worst of clients.
In the case of the Western users of the Zelensky regime, though, such a defense would not be merely far-fetched but completely absurd. Yet a defense some of them at least might come to need. Take for instance the case of Britain’s Lieutenant General Charlie Stickland and his shadowy but numerous associates.
The unfortunately important general – boasting of his pirate ancestors and in charge of “UK-led joint and multinational overseas military operations” – and his motley crew have just been the object of an investigative exposé by Grayzone reporter Kit Klarenberg. In, for now, two articles, the Grayzone has detailed how, in 2022, Stickland set up a below-the-radar network of “an assortment of leading academics, authors, strategists, planners, pollsters, comms, data scientists and tech.” Under the name Project Alchemy and overlapping and liaising with another group of wannabe keyboard Ninjas calling themselves – I kid you not – “the Elders,” this conspiratorial group has worked on, in essence, keeping the Ukraine war going at any price and by means foul and fouler.
Based on leaked documents, the Grayzone’s reporting is revealing in more ways than can be discussed here. Yet, as we are dealing with prose authored by militant bureaucrats and self-weaponizing intellectuals in the land of George Orwell, that old stickler for the English language, we would be remiss not to appreciate their bizarre lingo. It brings together a certain jejune rugby field boyishness – “mischief” is proudly being made – with a militarized sociolect of corporatese: “fusion players” and “sideways thinkers” get “badged” and “meshed in” to “move at pace,” and – greatest pride of the eminent executive – stand ready to work over the weekend!
Doing what exactly? All kinds of things, really, and all based on one stupid yet once immensely popular assumption: that the proxy war in Ukraine could be leveraged to defeat Russia, reduce it to geopolitical insignificance, impose regime change on it, and even break it up. Some, including the new de facto foreign minister of the EU, Estonia’s Kaja Kallas – imagine Annalena Baerbock, but without the brilliant intellect – still seem to be on that political equivalent of an LSD trip gone terribly wrong. What a hangover it will be one day, probably soon.
In Britain, highlights of Project Alchemy groupthink included hatching plans for stay-behind sabotage networks and recommending the example of the underground “Gladio” operations that NATO ran in Western – not, please note, Eastern – Europe during the Cold War. Strictly speaking, Gladio was an Italian label, while the same bad idea had different names in other countries. By now, though, Gladio stands for a whole plethora of clandestine organizations set up, ostentatiously, to engage in partisan resistance in case of a Soviet attack and occupation.
You may feel that, in principle at least, for generals, preparing for the possibility of future partisan warfare is not an objectionable activity. Yet the issue is that, in reality, the Gladio operations were not only extremely dubious in constitutional and legal terms, as being entirely beyond democratic control and oversight, as well as tied to foreign intelligence services. In addition, these networks served to fight a dirty war against the domestic left, including by terrorism, false-flag attacks, the systematic use of far-right conspirators and terrorists, and support for military coups.
An influential, black-ops-connected British general and his chums wanting to learn lessons from Gladio for underground networks in Ukraine? The country with the best-armed (compliments of the West), most whitewashed and naively underestimated (compliments of the Western media and self-weaponizing intellectuals of the Anne Applebaum/Tim Snyder variety), most aggressive, and most militarized far right in the world? Swimming in arms right next to an EU-NATO Europe they will soon feel bitterly disappointed by? What could possibly go wrong? But maybe Charlie 'Pirate' Stickland is “fusion”-”thinking” “sideways” in Churchillian terms: “Set Europe Ablaze!” Yet Stickland seems to have overlooked that Churchill wanted to set it ablaze against the Nazis, not with them.
All of this is, in and of itself, very bad, if unsurprising, news. But Project Alchemy has been prolific, producing lousy ideas the way Russian industry is churning out artillery shells and missiles. There also were: a frank emphasis on “creatively using” – let’s be honest: breaking – the law so as to get silly violent things done, including “deniable ops”; a daft idea to attack the Kerch Bridge, as if Russia would not strike back (both have by now happened, the militarily useless attack and the painful payback); an anticipatory strategy of how to manipulate the British public in case it should get tired of pumping money into the proxy war; attempts to undermine BRICS-plus (thinking big and bigger); plans to shut down Russian media in the West, obviously; and, last but not least, an aggressive strategy to use covert lawfare and deliberate financial pressure to bring down Western critical media as well, including, as it happens, the Grayzone. Say what you will, but Stickland and company seem to have had a foreboding from where exactly they would get their richly deserved come-uppance.
It would be tempting to think of this wave of disinformation and manipulation in the West as a kind of “Ukrainization.” As if the West had caught the contagion of the Zelensky regime’s very bad habits. But to be fair, the West has its own, well-established tradition of waging war by massive lying on the home front. In 2019, it was the Washington Post, usually hewing close to the American government line, that ran a series of in-depth stories detailing how, during the West’s long war in Afghanistan, started almost two decades before, the US had been “at war with the truth.” Suddenly, clearly in preparation of the impending Western retreat, readers were allowed to learn that while “officials constantly said they were making progress,” they “were not, and they knew it.”
And the name of that Washington Post series? The Afghanistan Papers. That, of course, was a reference to the famous Pentagon Papers, an internal and classified Defense Department review of US policy and warfare in Vietnam that was leaked to the New York Times by the historic – and heroic – whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who suffered severe, criminal attempts to silence, and in effect, destroy him. The long American intervention, begun indirectly in the 1940s and escalating into one of the most brutal US campaigns of the twentieth century in the 1960s, only ended with the total defeat of both Washington and its South Vietnamese proxy in 1975.
The New York Times began to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Once again, as with the later bloody Western fiasco in Afghanistan, the moment of truth – some truth – came late, only toward the end of a policy catastrophe that had long been supported by compliant mainstream media. The Grayzone is considered alternative media, and its reporters are doing a much better job at real journalism than their competition in the mainstream version. As to them, they clearly have not yet reached the stage of always-too-late revelation that, during the proxy wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, was marked by 1971 and 2019, respectively.
How do we know? They are ignoring the Grayzone’s sensational revelations about a military-think-tank-industry conspiracy to undermine the law, deliberately manipulate the public, and wage proxy war in a way that is both dirty and bound to backfire very badly on the West itself. One more sign that all too many in the West are not yet ready to face reality, even while the Ukrainians they claim to help but only use keep dying.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
