A regime that commits massacres against its own people as a propaganda device to smear Russia is not going to own up to anything.
The NATO-backed Kiev regime has admitted to blockading its own Black Sea ports by mining the sea lanes for cargo ships exporting vital supplies of wheat and other food staples.
The disruption of civilian shipping – a putative war crime – has unleashed fears of a global food crisis from soaring price inflation and critical shortages of wheat and other grains. Ukraine and Russia account for about one-third of the global supply of cereals.
Of course, Western governments and media have repeatedly blamed Russia and its four-month-old military intervention in Ukraine for wreaking havoc on global food markets. Washington and its European allies have accused Moscow of holding the world hostage to fears of famine and using global food supplies as “blackmail”.
This week the New York Times reported that Russia had mined Ukrainian Black Sea ports thereby preventing ships from ferrying wheat and other grains to the world market.
Moscow has vehemently rejected the allegations, claiming that it is the Kiev regime forces that have opted to shut down its own ports and sea lanes by laying explosive mines. Russia also points out that Western bank sanctions are curbing its trade with the rest of the world.
Now, though, the NATO-backed Ukrainian authorities have come clean. Well, not explicitly, but one can deduce the admission from its partial disclosure and faulty logic.
In a bid to break the impasse over shipping from the Black Sea, Turkey is facilitating negotiations with Russia and Ukraine. Progress is being made, according to Ankara, in hatching a deal to provide safe passage for cargo ships. However, the Kiev regime is warning that it may take six months “to clear the coast of Russian and Ukrainian mines”, as reported by the Guardian.
So, in what appears to be a first, the Kiev regime is admitting that its own forces have laid the mines, albeit still also trying to lay blame on Russia. Up to now, it was Russia that has been solely held responsible for the sabotage of civilian commerce – an act that amounts to a war crime.
The next clue is faulty logic. Since when did any military force trying to take control of enemy ports ever hamper its own potential advance by laying explosive mines ahead of its own ships?
That’s what the Kiev regime is saying. On one hand, it is saying Russia is trying to take its ports, and then, on the other hand, it is also saying that Russia has ringed these ports with mines.
The Russian military has captured the port cities of Mariupol and Berdyansk. A third objective would be the taking of Odessa which would create a secure corridor for the Russian territory of Crimea and the self-declared independent republics of Donbass.
For Russia to mine these ports as the Kiev regime and the New York Times have claimed would be to turn all military logic on its head.
In any case, the ports of Mariupol and Berdyansk are reportedly back to normal shipping operations now that they have been taken from the Kiev regime. That in itself indicates who the saboteurs were.
Even the New York Times has admitted to this positive development in freeing up shipping, although it is shifting the propaganda goal-posts to now accuse Russia of “stealing Ukrainian wheat”. The UN said it has seen no evidence of alleged Russian looting. Moscow vigorously denies it, its ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia walking out from a Security Council meeting this week in protest when European Council President Charles Michel reiterated the claims.
What we can deduce despite the cacophony of emotive claims about Russian blackmail and starving the world is this: the far-right regime in Kiev that is being armed to the teeth and bankrolled by Western governments extorting their taxpayers is the guilty party playing hunger games.
As my colleague Declan Hayes eloquently surveyed recently, Ukraine is a full-blown disinformation war perpetrated by so-called Western democracies shutting down free speech and getting their household media brands like the New York Times, BBC and CNN to pump out the most audacious propaganda lies – all in the Orwellian guise of “independent news media”.
The litany of smears leveled against Russia is almost dizzying, but that relentless effort is itself at risk of backfiring for the obvious concerted manipulation that it is. Russia is accused of nuclear blackmail, energy blackmail, massacres, mass rape, holding the world hostage under the terror of starvation, and so on and so on. I mean, Jeez, can we please have a break from the moralizing and Machiavellian portrayals? Oh wait a moment, this relentless character assassination and demonization just doesn’t add up. Oh now we get it, it’s actually a parody of caricature overkill. It’s just all ridiculous lies and propaganda because the relentless narrative is simply so outlandish and preposterous to be credible.
I mean, please explain to us, plausibly, how barbaric can these evil Russians possibly be? The perception and projection of barbarity turn out to be actually a betrayal of the sub-human view of Russia held by those who promulgate it. And that sick mentality is becoming more evident with each passing day. Our so-called Western “leaders” and their media are coming out of the fascist closets they’ve been hiding in for years.
The reality is that it is the Western capitalist regimes who are prepared to starve the world into submission in order to promote their hegemonic anti-human, anti-justice and anti-peace agenda. They have unleashed the inflation of food and energy prices way before the conflict in Ukraine came to a head. The repercussion of poverty and deprivation (food banks proliferating across the US and Europe!) have nothing to do with Russia, as President Putin noted in an interview this week. The roots lie in the bankrupt Western economies and their chronic failure.
The ultimate illustration of the corruption in the Western regimes is their weaponizing of a Nazi-affiliated client state in Ukraine that has willfully blockaded its own ports to inflict pain on the rest of the world.
A regime that commits massacres against its own people as in Bucha and Mariupol as a propaganda device to smear Russia is not going to own up to anything. But even pathological liars sometimes stumble into telling a grain of truth.
