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EVERYTHING MR. EMORY HAS BEEN SAYING ABOUT THE UKRAINE WAR IS ENCAPSULATED IN THIS VIDEO FROM UKRAINE 24
ANOTHER REVEALING VIDEO FROM UKRAINE 24
“Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
— George Orwell, 1946
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COMMENT: An important article in Covert Action Magazine accesses information by the brilliant, ground-breaking researcher/author Douglas Valentine on what appears to be a Ukrainian manifestation of the Phoenix Program.
Having written the foremost text about that operation, Valentine offers analysis indicating that the Ukrainian SBU intelligence service is following the lead of the partnered CIA in implementing a “cleansing” campaign in that country.
- ” . . . . Douglas Valentine, author of the seminal book The Phoenix Program (1990), in a recent interview told me that Phoenix went public in 1968 under the justification that it was ‘protecting the people from terrorism’—like with the SBU programs today. The detentions were largely designed to encourage defections while striking fear in the public. . . .”
- ” . . . . Douglas Valentine, author of the seminal book The Phoenix Program (1990), sees eerie parallels between the original Phoenix program and Zelensky’s operations today. In both cases, Valentine told CAM in an exclusive interview, ‘neutralism wasn’t tolerated.’ . . .”
State terror operations that follow from CIA playbook contradict saintly image of Zelensky promoted in the U.S. media.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s saintly image in the media is contradicted by state terror operations being conducted under his orders against political dissidents and Ukrainian civilians accused of collaboration with Russia.
The Associated Press reported last week that nearly 400 people in the northeastern city of Kharkiv alone have been detained under anti-collaboration laws enacted by Ukraine’s parliament and signed by Zelensky after Russia’s February 24 invasion.
A YouTube video accompanying the short article juxtaposed a speech by Zelensky saying that “collaborators will be brought to justice” with the arrest of a middle-aged Kharkiv man named Viktor by the Ukrainian Security Services (SBU) because of a social media post praising Vladimir Putin, calling for secession and insulting the Ukrainian flag—which Viktor called a “symbol of death.”
The SBU agent showed Viktor his social media post and asked: “You supported Putin? Are you supporting the Russian army. You are not speaking very nicely about the Ukrainian flag, are you?”
Viktor responded, before being taken away: “I am sorry. Yes I commented a lot. I told you. I changed my mind.”
The video shows another raid by the SBU on an apartment in Kharkiv where the SBU arrested a former Ukrainian army officer who had contacts with the Russians on his phone in the days after the city had been shelled.
An SBU agent says that the man had “put us in danger and civilians [in danger].”
The man’s father, Volodymyr Radnenko, asked the SBU agent: “Who is shelling us? It’s not our (people). It’s your fascists. And he [the son] just gets angry at that. So you understand. That’s all.”
Mr. Radnenko’s comments sum up the injustice of the SBU sweeps. Ukrainian citizens are being criminalized for expressing anger at Ukrainian army practices.
“Registry of Collaborators”
Roman Dudin, head of the Kharkiv branch of the SBU, in an interview with the Associated Press, said that the purpose of the SBU raids was to “have no one stab our armed forces in the back.”
Dudin ominously spoke in a dark basement where the SBU moved its operations after its building in central Kharkiv was shelled.
According to Oleksiy Danilov, head of Ukraine’s Security Council, a “registry of collaborators” by Ukraine is currently being compiled and will be released to the public as part of martial law programs that have resulted in the banning of 11 political parties.
Oleksiy Danilov [Source: wikipedia.org]
Under the current regulations, offenders face up to 15 years in prison for collaborating with Russian forces, making public denials about Russian aggression or supporting Moscow. Anyone whose actions result in deaths could face life in prison.
The governor of the Nikolaev region, Vitaly Kim, a member of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, openly called for the assassination of any Ukrainian citizen who supports Russia.
Phoenix Redux
A previous CAM exposé pointed to the ominous parallels between the SBU operations in Ukraine and the Phoenix program in Vietnam, which resulted in the killing, imprisonment and torture of thousands of South Vietnamese, including civilian officials accused of being loyal to the left-wing, anti-imperialist National Liberation Front (NLF).
In both cases, the CIA is a key coordinator behind the scenes and helps in the compiling of blacklists that result in the detainment, and often torture and murder of civilians. .
Vasily Prozorov, a former officer with the SBU, stated soon after his defection to Russia in 2018 that the SBU had been advised by the CIA since 2014. “CIA employees [who have been present in Kyiv since 2014] are residing in clandestine apartments and suburban houses,” he said. “However, they frequently come to the SBU’s central office for holding specific meetings or plotting secret operations.”
Douglas Valentine, author of the seminal book The Phoenix Program (1990), in a recent interview told me that Phoenix went public in 1968 under the justification that it was “protecting the people from terrorism”—like with the SBU programs today. The detentions were largely designed to encourage defections while striking fear in the public.
According to Valentine, on January 6, 1969, New York Times reporter Drummond Ayres offered a favorable commentary on Operation Phoenix, saying that “more than 15,000 of the 80,000 VC [Vietcong] political agents thought to be in South Vietnam are said to have been captured or killed.”
Ayres further expressed the belief that “the general course of the war…now appears to favor the Government” and predicted that Phoenix would “achieve much greater success as the center’s files grow.”
Despite the good reviews, Valentine said that the surfacing of Phoenix in the press sent the publicity-shy CIA running for cover, and led to new legislation designed to legitimate its activities.
Similarly today, as more information comes to light, we may see renewed CIA efforts to try to legitimate its undercover operations and to burnish the image of its proxy forces in Ukraine whose modus operandi—like that of its predecessors in Vietnam—is morally abhorrent.
Techniques of Torture and Assassination Deployed by the SBU (Ukraine’s CIA) Recall the U.S.’s Brutal “Operation Phoenix” in Vietnam
Vasily Prozorov, a former officer with the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU) stated soon after his defection to Russia in 2018 that the SBU had been advised by the CIA since 2014.
“CIA employees [who have been present in Kyiv since 2014] are residing in clandestine apartments and suburban houses,” he said. “However, they frequently come to the SBU’s central office for holding, for example, specific meetings or plotting secret operations.”
Vasily Prozorov (left) at work in the anti-terrorist operation zone in Donetsk region with Colonel Sergey Krivonos. [Source: mirror.co.uk]Vasily Prozorov [Source: tellerreport.com].[
Prozorov’s revelations take on extremely ominous implications in light of a new report by The Grayzone Project detailing the SBU’s participation in a campaign of assassination, kidnapping and torture overseen by Ukrainian President and Western media darling Volodymyr Zelensky.
The campaign bears comparison with Operation Phoenix in South Vietnam, which resulted in the killing, imprisonment and torture of thousands of South Vietnamese, including civilian officials accused of being loyal to the left-wing, anti-imperialist National Liberation Front (NLF).
During congressional hearings in 1971, Ogden Reid (D‑NY) said that, “if the Union had had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon, Georgia.”[1]
In the Ukrainian case, one of the targets of the SBU death squads was the mayor of the eastern city of Kreminna in the Ukrainian-controlled side of Luhansk, Volodymyr Struk.
On March 1, Struk was kidnapped by men in military uniform and then shot in the heart, with his tortured body displayed before the public. Struk had reportedly urged his Ukrainian colleagues to compromise and negotiate with pro-Russian officials.
Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, celebrated the mayor’s murder, declaring on his Telegram page: “There is one less traitor in Ukraine.”
Gerashchenko has compiled a “blacklist of enemies of the state.” It includes journalists who have been murdered by state-backed death squads, such as prominent columnist Oles Buzina, whose name had appeared on the list.[2]
As of today, eleven mayors in Ukrainian towns are missing. On March 7, the mayor of Gostomel, Yuri Prylypko, was found murdered. Prylypko had reportedly entered into negotiations with the Russian military to organize a humanitarian corridor for the evacuation of his city’s residents—a red line for Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who had long been in conflict with the mayor’s office. (The Ukrainians claim that Prylopko was killed by Russian soldiers while distributing food and medicine)
Then there was the murder of Denis Kireev, a top member of the Ukrainian negotiating team, who was killed in broad daylight in Kyiv after the first round of talks with Russia. Kireev was subsequently accused in local Ukrainian media of “treason.”
President Zelensky stated that “there would be consequences for collaborators,” indicating his support for the Phoenix-style operations.
Police State
Currently, Zelensky is promoting a bill that would expand the SBU’s powers. The head of the SBU, Ivan Bakonov, is a close friend of his.
The director of SBU’s counterintelligence, Oleksandr Poklad, is nicknamed “The Strangler.” He has a reputation for using torture and assorted dirty tricks to set up his bosses’ political rivals on treason charges.
In a March 19 executive order, Zelensky invoked martial law to ban 11 opposition parties. The outlawed parties consisted of the entire left-wing, socialist or anti-NATO spectrum in Ukraine. They included the For Life Party, the Left Opposition, the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, the Socialist Party of Ukraine, Union of Left Forces, Socialists, the Party of Shariy, Ours, State, Opposition Bloc and the Volodymyr Saldo Bloc.
Openly fascist and pro-Nazi parties like the Azov National Corps were left untouched.
On April 12, Zelensky announced the arrest of his principal political rival, Viktor Medvedchuk, by the SBU. In a photo released to the public, Medvedchuk’s face appeared to be swollen and bruised, the likely result of beatings by SBU goons.
Inmates considered SBU-run prisons to be “like a small Guantanamo.” Beatings took place at all hours of the night amidst the backdrop of Ukrainian nationalist music.
Phoenix Redux
Douglas Valentine, author of the seminal book The Phoenix Program (1990), sees eerie parallels between the original Phoenix program and Zelensky’s operations today. In both cases, Valentine told CAM in an exclusive interview, “neutralism wasn’t tolerated.”
Valentine recounted how legendary CIA officer Lucien Conein had told him that Phoenix was, “a very good blackmail scheme for the central government. ‘If you don’t do what I want, you’re VC [Vietcong].’”
This is similar to Ukraine today—exemplified by the killing of government negotiators who advocate for peace with Russia, or mayors adopting a compromising or neutralist line.
Valentine noted that under Phoenix, or Phung Hoang as it was called by the CIA’s South Vietnamese counterparts, due process was totally non-existent. South Vietnamese civilians whose names appeared on blacklists could be kidnapped, tortured and murdered simply on the word of an anonymous informer—which is again happening in Ukraine.
Tellingly, after Volodymyr Struk’s death, Anton Gerashchenko claimed that Struk had been judged by the “court of the people’s tribunal” rather than any formal legal state court structure.
‘Rampage Against Any and All Iterations of Internal Political Opposition”
The Grayzone Project reported that, since Russian troops entered Ukraine on February 24, “Ukraine’s SBU security service had been on a rampage against any and all iterations of internal political opposition,” which indeed sounds a lot like Phioenix. “Leftist Ukrainian activists have faced particularly harsh treatment, including kidnapping and torture.”
On March 3 in the city of Dnipro, SBU officers accompanied by Azov ultra-nationalists raided the homes of activists with the Livizja (Left) organization, which has organized against social spending cuts and right-wing media propaganda.
While one activist said the Azov member “cut my hair off with a knife,” the state security agents proceeded to torture her husband, Alexander Matjuschenko, pressing a gun barrel to his head and forcing him to repeatedly belt out the nationalist salute, “Slava Ukraini!”
“Then they put bags over our heads, tied our hands with tape and took us to the SBU building in a car. There they continued to interrogate us and threatened to cut off our ears,” Matjuschenko’s wife told the German publication Junge Welt.
The Azov members and SBU agents recorded the torture session and published images of Matjuschenko’s bloodied face online.
The torture of left-wing activist Alexander Matjuschenko on March 3 in Dnipro, recorded by Azov members and posted on Telegram by the city of Dnipro. [Source: thegrayzone.com]
Matjuschenko was jailed on the grounds that he was “conducting an aggressive war or military operation,” and now faces 10 to 15 years in prison. Despite enduring several broken ribs from the beating by state-backed ultra-nationalists, he has been denied bail. Meanwhile, dozens of other leftists have been jailed on similar charges in Dnipro.
Among those targeted by the SBU were Mikhail and Aleksander Kononovich, members of the outlawed Leninist Communist Youth Union of Ukraine. Both were arrested and jailed on March 6 and accused of “spreading pro-Russian and pro-Belarusian views.”
In the following days, the SBU arrested broadcast journalist Yan Taksyur and charged him with treason; human rights activist Elena Berezhnaya; Elena Viacheslavovna, a human rights advocate whose father, Mikhail, was burned to death during the May 2, 2014 ultra-nationalist mob attack on anti-Maidan protesters outside the Odessa House of Trade Unions; independent journalist Yuri Tkachev, who was charged with treason; disabled rights activist Oleg Novikov, who was jailed for three years this April on the grounds that he supported “separatism”; and an untold number of others.
These cases are all reminiscent of the Phoenix program in Vietnam, where Provincial Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) goon squads trained by the CIA targeted human rights and other political activists, journalists and opponents of the Thieu-Ky clique that Washington had propped up in South Vietnam.
In the Ukraine case, Zelensky may have gone one step further: There are reports that SBU agents have tried to kidnap and kill dissidents abroad, including opposition figure Anatoly Shariy, a critic of Zelensky and his predecessor Petro Poroshenko and 2014 Maidan coup who was branded by the Lithuanian media as a “favorite friend of Putin.”
Fascist Lineage
According to the World Socialist website, the SBU—a successor of the Stalinist secret service KGB in Ukraine—has long-standing ties to the Ukrainian far right, including the neo-fascist Azov Battalion.
It has been heavily involved in efforts by the Ukrainian state to rehabilitate the Nazi collaborationist organizations, the Ukrainian Insurgency Army (UPA), and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was headed during World War II by fascist Stepan Bandera.
Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, the first head of the SBU after the Euromaidan regime-change operation of 2013–2014, declared in 2015 that the SBU “does not need to invent anything new, it is important to build on the traditions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and UPA in the 1930–1950 years.”
During World War II, Ukrainian fascists of the OUN‑B were involved in the massacres of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles, as well as of Ukrainian opponents of fascism. After the war and well into the 1950s, both the OUN‑B and UPA were engaged in an insurgency against Soviet rule, with backing from the CIA, during which the UPA killed another 20,000 Ukrainian civilians.
CIA Pacification
Not surprising perhaps given his historical outlook, Nalyvaichenko nurtured close ties to Washington when he served as general consul to the Ukrainian Embassy in the U.S. during the George W. Bush administration. During that time, Nalyvaichenko was recruited by the CIA, according to his predecessor at the SBU, Alexander Yakimenko, who served under the Russian-oriented government of deposed President Viktor Yanukovych.[3]
Douglas Valentine believes that the CIA “is applying the same organizational structure in Ukraine as it used in South Vietnam to conduct an updated version of the typical ‘two tier’ Phoenix program. The top tier is to assure political control, the lower tier to pacify the population.”
Valentine continued:
“Organizationally, Phoenix coordinates CIA foreign intelligence and covert action officers and operations from the highest national level through the provinces down to the most remote territorial outposts.
Foreign intelligence officers advise SBU security service to assure ‘top tier’ internal security and political control; and Ukrainian CIA agents run ops into Donbas, Russia and Belarus, sending illegal travelers, smugglers, and agents to set up agent nets and penetrate the enemy in his territory, [and carry out] sabotage and subversion. SBU and Ukrainian CIA are where hit-lists get authored. CIA officers advise military, militias and mercenaries in deniable political, paramilitary and psychological operations to terrorize and otherwise persuade civilian population to support Zelensky while demoralizing and fighting the enemy.”
As in Vietnam, some of the CIA agents may be operating under the cover of State Department-run police training programs which were instituted in Ukraine after the 2014 Maidan coup.[4] Others were known to have been assigned to specialized paramilitary units fighting in eastern Ukraine.[5]
Phoenix Always Rising from the Ashes
According to Valentine, the disaster now unfolding in Ukraine has long been in the works. Starting in 1991 with the fall of the USSR, the CIA began buying property and setting up organizations and businesses in Ukraine so it would have fronts and safe houses.
“All these things serve as places where CIA officers can meet and plot and engage in unilateral recruitments to put politicians and civil servants and businessmen in place who can assure that the CIA can reorganize the economy and the government and put a Defense Minister and Minister of the Interior in place who is on their payroll, who will then appoint police chiefs who will be on the CIA payroll—for the purpose of furthering U.S. policy, not Ukraine policy.”
The ultimate goal since 1991 was to start a war in the Ukraine against Russia, which weakens Russia but also forces Ukrainians to flee the war zones. As soon as that happens, the prices go down and who is going to go swooping in there to buy it up?
Meanwhile, Valentine says, “the CIA is building a compatible civil base through unilateral recruitments. Also, U.S. universities and unions send advisers to help create schools and indoctrinate youth and workers.
Business advisers create a Rotary Club and a Chamber of Commerce. They create a foreign relations council. This is how the CIA rules a foreign society: through the ownership of property and having the proper people in government security and defense industries and control of the civic institutions.”
According to Valentine, “the CIA is working with bankers. They want Ukrainians putting their money in a Morgan Stanley brokerage firm in Kyiv. They want to suck the life out of Ukrainians. People do it on the promise of a brighter future—others are bribed, still others like Zelensky in my humble opinion are blackmailed.”
“Whatever, the CIA is manipulating them toward U.S. policies. CIA officers are recruiting people and putting them in place, having them sign contracts.
It would be like the Russians coming here to the United States and recruiting people and our police forces and our government institutions. It’s illegal. You can’t do it. You can’t take money from a foreign intelligence agency and work against your own government, but that is what the CIA is doing in the Ukraine right now on a massive scale.”
Valentine further notes:
“They’re always finding a reason to start a war, so they can send the next generation of young men into battle, to learn how to kill people in the most brutal fashion—that’s Phoenix, always rising from the ashes of war. The U.S. has an imperative to be as super-aggressive as it can be, so it doesn’t lose its edge. If its predatory impulse to dominate was stilted in Vietnam, that doesn’t mean the soldiers and spies aren’t going to pop up someplace else. They’re always going to pop up someplace else. They always do. Like in Ukraine.”
Where Is the Congressional Oversight?
Valentine pointed out that, at the conclusion of the congressional hearings into the original Phoenix program in 1971, Representatives Pete McCloskey (R‑CA), John Conyers (D‑MI), Ben Rosenthal (D‑NY), and Bella Abzug (D‑NY) stated their belief that “the people of these United States … have deliberately imposed on the Vietnamese people a system of justice which admittedly denies due process of law…. In so doing, we appear to have violated the 1949 Geneva Convention for the protection of civilian peoples” in time of war.”
“Some of us who have visited Vietnam,” they further said, “share a real fear that the Phoenix program is an instrument of terror… and that U.S. civilian and military personnel have participated for over three years in the deliberate denial of due process of law to thousands of people held in secret interrogation centers built with U.S. dollars.” They added that “Congress owes a duty to act swiftly and decisively to see that the practices involved are terminated forthwith.”[6]
Now where is the congressional oversight of the CIA’s abuses in Ukraine? And mainstream media scrutiny, which would generate the kind of public outrage necessary for instituting congressional hearings?
Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2000), 13. ↑
Buzina advocated for unity among Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia and campaigned to outlaw neo-Nazi organizing. ↑
Mintpress reported that the CIA has an entire floor in the SBU headquarters in Kyiv. ↑
For the historical pattern, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). ↑
CIA agents trained their Ukrainian counterparts, according to a Yahoo News exposé, in sniper techniques and use of Javelin anti-tank missiles. ↑
Valentine, The Phoenix Program, 235. ↑
Even MORE Fun With Science: Earthquake Weaponry
Part of what made the reports of the assassination of Daria Dugina so troubling is that it signaled the kind of escalation in the conflict that can be hard to control. High level assassinations tend to elicit reprisals. Escalated conflicts can’t always be contained. And that brings us to the following article in Covert Action Monthly about the growing suspicions held by Douglas Valentine — an expert on the history of the CIA’s Phoenix Program — that the CIA was involved with the plot against Dugina. Valentine admits he’s basing these suspicions purely on speculation. But as we’re going to see, it’s pretty informed speculation, which includes the publication last week of a puff piece in the NY Times touting a newly-created secret civilian assassination program run by Ukraine’s military. Members of the assassination unit — the “civilian volunteers” — were made available to the media to discuss its operations. So when members of a civilian assassination unit are being touted in the NY Times, that certainly suggests this is a CIA-approved operation.
Under a law passed last year, Ukraine’s special forces can secret train, arm, and pay secret combatants fighting on Ukrainian territory in time of war. Interestingly, Ukraine interprets these secret civilian fighters as have a legal basis for attacking civilians, which would be prohibited for soldiers under international law. International law actually considers them combatants once they engage in hostilities, but Ukraine is making a different legal determination. Operating in a cell-like manner, members only know the identities of their fellow cell members, so if these issues are ever investigated it’s not necessarily going to be easy to get accurate info on who was actually involved in any of the crimes carried out by these units.
And while the Ukrainian law said special forces are allowed to train these civilians units, it actually sounds like the civilian volunteers were initially trained under programs operated by Right Sector and Azov’s National Corp. So Ukraine’s Nazi battalions are setting up secret cells of civilian assassins. What could possibly go wrong?
Ok, first, here’s the report from Covert Action Magazine describing Douglas Valentine’s dark suspicions. The kind of suspicions that, if true, suggests there’s going to be a lot more high-level assassination attempts in the future. And potential some very nasty blowback:
“According to Douglas Valentine, “Zelensky doesn’t go to the bathroom without asking permission from his CIA case officer. Ten billion dollars comes with a lot of strings attached. The CIA would have been intimately involved in recruiting the woman assassin, preparing the plan every step of the way including escape. That’s just Standard Operating Procedure.””
Was the CIA intimately involved in the planning of Dugina’s assassination? If so that’s the kind of escalation that trigger some very unpleasant blowback. And would Valentine was admittedly just engaged in informed speculation about the CIA’s involvement in the plot, it’s hard to ignore the circumstantial evidence he cited. There’s the directly claims of former SBU officer Vasily Prozorov about the CIA’s direct involvement in advising SBU operations, which is little surprise. But it’s that NY Times article from last week describing a civilian ‘partisan’ network that is perhaps the most compelling circumstantial evidence that the US government at least approves of Ukraine’s assassination programs. Because as we’re going to see, the that NY Times piece is basically a public relations piece touting the newly created civilian partisan assassination network. And when puff pieces about civilian assassination programs are showing up in places like the NY Times, that’s a clue about the CIA’s attitude regarding these programs:
Ok, and now here’s last week’s NY Times puff peace about the secret — but not so secret anymore — civilian partisan assassination squad: the “community volunteers”. As we’ll see, the Zelenskiy government was making members of the unit available for interviews with the media. So the Ukrainian government wanted to make it publicly known that it has already set up a secret civilian assassination squad targeting those deemed to be traitors.
The “community volunteers” are overseen by branches of the military but trained by groups like Right Sector and Azov’s National Corp. Members are placed into separate cells and don’t know the identities of other cells, and tasked with identifying and terrorizing or killing civilians deemed to be traitors. It’s one of the main features of the whole enterprise. Under a Ukrainian law passed last year, the military’s Special Operations Forces are authorized to train, arm and pay secret combatants fighting on Ukrainian territory in time of war. And according to Ukrainian interpretation of the laws of war, these civilians are legally allowed to target civilians, which would normally be prohibited by the laws of war. International law still considers that civilians become combatants once they take up hostilities, but Ukrainian is going ahead with its legal interpretations anyway:
“In recent days the Ukrainian military made Svarog and several other of the operatives available for interviews in person or online, hoping to highlight the partisans’ widening threat to Russian forces and signal to Western donors that Ukraine is successfully rallying local resources in the war, now nearly six months old. A senior Ukrainian military official familiar with the program also described the workings of the resistance.”
It’s a remarkable juxtaposition: the Ukrainian military is engaged in a kind of public relations campaign for Ukraine’s assassination force. An assassination force overseen by the military but comprised of non-soldier civilians. Civilian-partisans trained by groups like Right Sector and Azov’s National Corps. So this is a secret civilian assassination squad trained by neo-Nazis now engaged in a public relations campaign:
And note the special privileges these civilian assassins get: Under a Ukrainian law passed in 2021, the military’s Special Operations Forces are authorized to train, arm and pay secret combatants fighting on Ukrainian territory in time of war. But these secret combatants are apparently still considered civilians and therefore can legally attack civilian officials. It’s a legal loophole for setting up a domestic Phoenix Program. Except it’s not actually the legal loophole Ukraine claims it is. These secret assassins should still be considered combatants. But that’s all presumably part of the purpose in keep their identities a secret because this appears to be a wildly illegal assassination program under international law:
And given that the exiled mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, has been boasting of the achievement of the partisans lately, it’s worth recalling the episode back in March when Russian soldiers occupying the town arrested Fedorov, himself is a member of Right Sector, on charges of terrorism, before releasing him unharmed in the face of public protests. So when we’re now learning about this secret civilian assassination program that Fedorov has been touting lately, it does raise all sorts of interesting questions about those terrorism allegations against him:
Finally, note how even teachers in the occupied areas are targets. And while the partisans claim they aren’t directly assassinating teachers, it’s pretty obvious that they are trying to get these teachers assassinated. Plastering their names and faces on utility poles is basically a death sentence in the current environment. if these targeted teachers do end up dead, it’s not like we can rule out direct action from these assassination squads. For all we know, publicly posting names and pictures of their intended victims might be phase 1 in the assassination campaign to give plausible deniability when the victims show up dead. They’re operating in secret, after all:
No education for kids in occupied territories it seems. How many of these targeted teacher will end up facing vigilante ‘justice’? Time will tell. But the message is clear: Ukrainians deemed to be traitors will be hunted down by this secret government hit squad. And that message — in the form of the interview with members of this secret civilian assassination program — was being sent in the leading US newspaper with an extensive history for laundering CIA narratives. It’s pretty obvious US intelligence fully approves of this initiative. And that’s all part of the circumstantial evidence around Valentine’s speculation regarding the CIA’s involvement in Ukraine’s growing assassination ambitions. Ambitions that start with sending a “no one is safe” message to targeted population, but could end up in a “no on is safe” situation for everyone after these basic rules of war have been blown to bits.
What will the US government do when Ukraine’s Phoenix Program gets turned on US citizens? That’s the question raised by a disturbing new piece in Consortium News by Scott Ritter about the Ukrainian “blacklists” against anyone who doesn’t toe the line on the narratives related to Ukraine. Blacklists that double as an implicit kill list. And blacklists that, at least in one case, were basically financed and touted by the US government. That’s part of what makes the questions about how the US will respond to Ukrainian assassination teams such a disturbing question.
We’ve long know about the Myrotvorets blacklist that Ukraine has been operating since 2016. Recall how Myrovorets was defended by Anton Gerashchenko after it published the names and contact information of thousands of journalists — including Western journalists — and labeled them terrorist accomplices for their reporting on Ukraine. And as Ritter notes, the recently assassinated Daria Dugin was indeed on the Myrovorets enemies list before her assassination. Her entry was updated with a diagonal “liquidated” graphic across her photo. Because it’s a kill list.
It also turns out that Myrovorets kill list recently got quite a few additional entries. And those additional entries just happened to be the names of people who showed up on a different “blacklist” created in July. The list was assembled by the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation and unveiled at an event sponsored by a US-funded NGO that the US State Department attended. Beyond that, it turns out the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation is funded, in part, by the US. So this was a blacklist created by a US-funded Ukrainian ‘anti-disinformation’ entity that was unveiled at a US-NGO event that the State Department attended. That’s basically a US-government-endorsed blacklist.
Adding insult to injury, here’s a tweet thread from PropOrNot — the anonymous ‘anti-disinformation’ outfit that has a history of publishing its own lists of ‘traitors’ — celebrating the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation’s list:
But that list didn’t last long. It was pulled from the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation website following pushback from a number of the Americans who showed up on the list. But the list didn’t go away. It basically reappeared on Myrotvorets.
Did the US finance the creation of a “blacklist” that ended up on a Ukrainian kill list website? It sure looks like it. And don’t forget Douglas Valentine’s warnings in relation to the assassination of Daria Dugin: there’s a high probability that the CIA is assisting Ukraine in these kinds of operations. And that’s why we should probably start asking how the US can be expected to respond should those CIA-trained Ukrainian assassination teams start directing their terror towards US citizens. Or domestic lone wolf lunatics who just decide on their own that these government-backed kill lists are reason enough to take ‘justice’ into their own hands:
“Why the paranoia? Simply put, my name has been added to a Ukrainian “kill list.” Think I’m getting too wound up? Ask the family of Daria Dugina, the 29-year-old daughter of the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. Both she and her father were on the same list. Both were targeted for death by an assassin dispatched by the Ukrainian security services. Only a last-second change of plans, which put Alexander Dugin behind the wheel of a different car, kept him from being killed in the blast that took the life of his daughter.”
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. Especially when your name shows up on an apparent government-backed enemies list. And most especially when that government-backed enemies list was financed by your own government. Scott Ritter has cause for concern. It started with the publication of a “blacklist” back in July by the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation. A blacklist that was unveiled at a function organized by a US-funded NGO and attended by the State Department. This was a US-government-endorsed Ukrainian blacklist. A blacklist filled with the names of US citizens like Scott Ritter:
Following some pushback, the blacklist was removed from the internet...only to be taken up by the notorious Myrotvorets website that’s been compiling lists of ‘traitors’ since 2016. It’s the kind of move that suggests the US government wasn’t particularly comfortable with financing a group that creates blacklists of US citizens, but was perfectly fine if that group hands the list off to a different group that’s hard to trace back to US funding. And then we find that Daria Dugin’s entry on that Myrovorets enemies list was updated with a “Liquidated” message following her assassination. That’s kind of the heart of Ritter’s complaint: it’s not hard for anyone to arrive at the conclusion that the Myrotvorets blacklist is endorsed by the US government, including Banderites living in the US:
A “liquidated” stamp. It’s not exactly subtle. And while the West had little trouble celebrating the assassination of Dugina on Russian soil, the fact that Ukraine’s assassination squads are operating on non-Ukrainian soil should serve as a warning. Ukraine’s Phoenix Program has international reach. And international backing. At least for now.
And while it’s hard to imagine Ukraine would risk inflaming its key sponsor by carrying out assassination of prominent US citizens on US soil today, let’s keep in mind that the US has been teetering on the verge of open fascism for quite a few years now. Just how handy might a Ukrainian Phoenix Program be for a second Trump administration? Or candidate looking for a bigger and more explosive Jan 6 showdown. It’s not hard to come up with all sorts of domestic bad actors who would love to have a CIA-trained elite assassination squad ready to do a few favors. And that’s all why the grim answer to the question of how the US might respond to a Ukrainian Phoenix Program ‘liquidating’ US citizens is probably: it depends. That kind of blowback is just more momentum for insurrectionary fascists, after all.
What’s the US government’s response going to be when US citizens on the Myrotvorets ‘hit list’ start experiencing untimely deaths? That’s one of the disturbing questions raised by the following Covert Actions Magazine report about the growing number of people around the world finding themselves on a Ukrainian government-backed barely-veiled kill list. Because as the piece points out, not only did the Myrovorets kill list originate from the US-financed Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), but the homepage of Myrovorets actually lists Langley, Virginia, as its location. Langley, famous for being the home of the CIA, is listed right there on the upper right hand corner of the homepage. And that’s why we have to ask: so what’s the US government going to say when US citizens on a blacklist originally financed by the US end up dead for nothing more than pointing out inconvenient facts? It’s hard to come up with a worse 1st Amendment free speech crisis, but here we are:
“The profiles of many people targeted under the “hit list” has been posted on a website, Myrotvorets (meaning “peacemaker” in Ukrainian), whose domain name is listed as being in Langley, Virginia, headquarters of the CIA.”
It’s not exactly subtle. The Myrotvorets website literally states it’s located in Langley, Virginia on its home page. Right in the upper-right corner of the home page. And it’s not like this is an attempt by Myrotvorets to claim an association with the US government that doesn’t exist. The site was set up in 2014 with assistance from a US intelligence officer. And the lists of targets found on the site was generated by the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), which is financed by the US government. Recall how the list was initially hosted on the CCD’s website but was pulled due to outcry over the US-financing of blacklist. Then the list popped up on Myrotvorets. That’s a big part of what makes the content of this site so disturbing. It’s basically celebrating the deaths of targeted individuals with the US government’s endorsement:
And as Ritter reminds us, Ukrainian nationalist training camps for children are scattered across the US, including upstate New York. Recall that July 2019 article in the Kyiv Post describing camp “Spilka Ukrayinskoyi Molodi” in upstate New York where children are indoctrinated with Banderite ideologies and engage in military-style games. That’s presumably the camp Ritter is presumably referring to:
Finally, regarding Riiter’s observation that he’s being attacked in part for his analysis that refuted the claims of Russian atrocities in Bucha while pointing out that the evidence appears to indicate that many of those civilian deaths could be attributed to forces subordinate to the Ukrainian government, recall the video evidence of Azov forced operating under the command of Sergey “Boatsman” Korotkikh engaging in war crimes in Bucha during this time. Also recall how the Ukrainian authorities actually admitted to creating the mass graves blamed on the Russian soliders in Bucha, but those reports just ended up falling down the memory hole. In other words, Ritter hasn’t just been making accusations that the Ukrainian finds uncomfortable. He’s making accusations with publicly available evidence behind them. That’s part of the context of this hit list. It’s silencing people who are saying things that can be easily proven:
Is dead whistleblowers the goal here? Of course not. The goal is silence. Death threats are just the means to those ends. Death threats and/or actual death for the ‘liquidated’.
And yet, as Ritter and the other outspoken figures on that list aren’t shutting up. They haven’t been intimidated into silence. What’s the next step? We’ll see. But given the lack of any real push back by Western governments, we can be pretty confident there’s going to be a next step.
How close can Russia and NATO get to a direct conflict without it spilling into WWIII? That’s just one of the profoundly disturbing questions raised in a report published last month by investigative journalist Jack Murphy describing a growing US-led sabotage campaign being conducted inside Russia. A sabotage campaign that the US isn’t directly executing, but is overseeing and supporting. And the intelligence service actually directly running these operations is described as a key NATO ally. Yes, the CIA is overseeing sabotage operations inside Russia run by an unnamed key NATO ally. US special forces are also reportedly playing a role, including providing real-time intelligence inside Russia using still-classified drones.
At least that’s what was reported in a report willed with anonymous intelligence community sources, which brings us to another highly disturbing aspect of this story: while steps have been made to ensure the US will have plausible deniability should the saboteurs get captured, the US and its NATO allies still want the Russian government to know that NATO is executing this sabotage campaign. Creating a sense of paranoia inside the Russian government is part of the plan. Which, perhaps, explains why these anonymous US intelligence sources went to Jack Murphy with the story in the first place.
We’re also told that other European spy agencies have been running sabotage operations of their own, outside the oversight of the CIA, adding to the potential chaos of the situation. Beyond that, we’re told that one of the challenges the CIA has run into is multiple sabotage teams disrupting each other’s operations when they target the same infrastructure, resulting a need for some sort of “deconfliction” efforts between the various sabotage teams. So there are apparently so many sabotage teams running around inside Russia that NATO can’t even keep track of them.
This is a good time to recall some of the earlier reports we’ve already had about sabotage operations targeting Russia:
* There was Nord Stream attacks. Don’t forget the update we received last month about the investigation into the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines: investigators aren’t seeing proof of Russian culpability.
* Recall how the NY Times published a front-page article about Ukrainian guerrilla fighters operating inside Russia just days before Darya Dugina’s assassination by an apparent Azov operative.
* Recall how the Myrotvorets “hit list” website that included Dugina and celebrated her assassination listed Langley, Virginia, as its home location. A hit list, we should add, that includes a number of Americans.
* Recall the damning Grayzone report about the secret British intelligence plot to blow up Crimea’s Kerch bridge. Is the UK possibly the “key NATO ally” in this story? We don’t know, but the back that British intelligence was involved with plotting something as provocative as blowing up that bridge suggests the UK is taking an escalatory approach to this conflict.
So it appears that a secret-but-not-actually-secret NATO sabotage campaign directly striking inside Russia is now part of this conflict. Along with the yet-to-be-determined Russian response:
” Years in the planning, the campaign is responsible for many of the unexplained explosions and other mishaps that have befallen the Russian military industrial complex since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, according to three former U.S. intelligence officials, two former U.S. military officials and a U.S. person who has been briefed on the campaign. The former officials declined to identify specific targets for the CIA-directed campaign, but railway bridges, fuel depots and power plants in Russia have all been damaged in unexplained incidents since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February. ”
Years in the planning. This isn’t some impromptu sabotage campaign. What we’re seeing play out was envisioned years ago. Which obviously included plans to carry out this high risk sabotage campaign while employing layers of plausible deniability. Plausible deniability for the US, but not necessarily for NATO because it appears that the unnamed NATO ally the CIA is working with is directly involved in carrying out these sabotage missions. That’s a big part of the story here: the CIA is hiding behind another NATO member in this operation. It’s not exactly a low-risk gamble here:
But it’s not just the CIA. US special forces are involved too via JSOC’s support on areas like targeting information from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, such as drones, that can see and hear deep into Russia. Highly classified drones that the world doesn’t even know about yet just loitering Russian airspace, according to these anonymous sources:
And yet, at the same time, we’re learning about these years-long efforts preparing for a deniable sabotage campaign, we’re also told by these anonymous sources that multiple European spy agencies are running their own separate sabotage operations independent of the CIA. Crucially, we’re also told by these anonymous sources that creating a situation where Russia’s security services are forced to scramble in response to attacks without knowing the culprit is part of a broader psychological operations campaign. It points towards the precarious nature of the situation: multiple intelligence agencies are separate sabotage operations in a manner where it’s going to be very difficult for Russia to determine who was ultimately responsible, or who else the responsible party was working with, but can still be very confident that guilty actors was a NATO member. It’s like a recipe for goading Russia into this into a Russia vs NATO direct conflict:
And then there’s the fact that Ukraine is running sabotage operations of its own. And while it may be running these operations independently from the CIA, it’s not at all clear how Russia is going to know if that’s really the case. In other words:
To top it all off, we’re told that, while some NATO members appear to be backing away from these types of sabotage operations, the US and its “key NATO ally” have remained aggressive and are likely to get more aggressive as the war drags on, particularly if Russia uses WMDs. Or, presumably, is seen as crossing similar ‘red line’:
And as analysts also point out, the more effective this sabotage operation is at constraining Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, the greater the incentives on Putin to escalate the conflict further. That’s all why concerns about the risks of a nuclear escalation loom large in this situation: NATO is attempting to militarily back Russia into a corner via direct attacks on Russia’s infrastructure. Sure, these direct attacks are ostensibly deniable, but they aren’t intended to be denied entirely. Russia is supposed to know that a NATO member was behind the attacks, even if it can’t name the specific member. It’s like a nuclear game of chicken with a major trolling element spiked in:
So we have to ask, who is this key NATO ally that is in a position to carry out these sabotage missions inside Russia on behalf of the CIA? We aren’t told, but it’s worth noting this detail: the sabotage doesn’t appear to be carried out by networks of GLADIO-style local partisans. Instead, it’s following a model the similar to the approach the US used with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, where Kurdish sabotage teams were sent into areas of Iraq under Iraqi-government control. it’s the kind of distinction that suggests the sabotage may be carried out by foreigners living and working in Russia:
Along those lines, note how the sabotage networks set up by this unnamed NATO ally were, in some cases, set up almost 20 years ago involving an “extensive network” of front companies. And the explosives and other sabotage gear involved was smuggled into the country a decade ago. This further suggests that the economic activity of this mystery key NATO partner inside Russia was used as the front to set this sabotage network up:
This is a good time to recall how Western oil companies have been investing in Russia for decades, despite a highly tumultuous relationship with the Russian government at times, including the UK’s BP. So if you’re wondering about the kind of economic activity between Russia and the West, keep in mind that the world’s largest petroleum companies have had a major interest in Russia that ended up getting severely disrupted with this war.
So that’s the ominous update we got last months. An ominous update about a secret NATO plot that the plotters appear to want the Kremlin to know about. Plausible deniability is the game here. Not complete deniability. Russia is supposed to know about this sabotage campaign and respond to it. And now it knows. Which also raises the question of what the response to a secret-not-so-secret sabotage campaign might look like.
With news of the planned Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian fleet at Sovastopol only getting thwarted at the last minute by Elon Musk refusing to extend Starlink coverage to Crimea, it’s worth asking the question: so how much preemptive ass-covering is there already going on in case the world does end up in WWIII?
And that brings us to the following fascinating Newsweek piece by Bill Arkin published back in July. A piece based on interviews with over a dozen anonymous intelligence officials and with a largely uniform underlying message: the CIA is playing a more active role in Ukraine than generally recognized. A role in both waging a shadow war against Russia that the US military can’t formally wage while also playing the role in keeping things from escalating out of control. Twin roles of escalation and deescalation.
It’s an ominous article given that it’s clearly communicating a message, off the record, that the CIA wants delivered. A message that’s effectively a warning that the CIA is trying to contain the situation but not necessarily succeeding. Along with the message that keeping Ukraine under control hasn’t proven easy. In other words, it’s the kind of message that the agency would likely want disseminated should there be an expectation of a dramatic escalation of tensions.
And it’s not just anonymous US officials. The article ends with an chilling message from an anonymous Polish official: “In my humble opinion, the CIA fails to understand the nature of the Ukrainian state and the reckless factions that exist there.” In response, an anonymous senior U.S. defense intelligence official acknowledged that continuing Ukrainian sabotage “could have disastrous consequences.”
And, again, this was a message the CIA clearly wanted delivered to the world. You don’t have a dozen officials anonymous talking to Newsweek if this isn’t a planned message. So as we’re still trying to understand what the possible implications were for the failed Ukrainian drone attack on Sevastopol, it’s important to keep in mind that the intelligence community was recently issuing preemptive ‘it wasn’t our fault!’ narratives warning that the conflict in Ukraine could end up a conflict between NATO and Russia sooner rather than later despite the CIA’s best efforts:
““There is a clandestine war, with clandestine rules, underlying all of what is going on in Ukraine,” says a Biden administration senior intelligence official who also spoke with Newsweek. The official, who is directly involved in Ukraine policy planning, requested anonymity to discuss highly classified matters. The official (and numerous other national security officials who spoke to Newsweek) say that Washington and Moscow have decades of experience crafting these clandestine rules, necessitating that the CIA play an outsize role: as primary spy, as negotiator, as supplier of intelligence, as logistician, as wrangler of a network of sensitive NATO relations and perhaps most important of all, as the agency trying to ensure the war does not further spin out of control.”
A clandestine war being largely managed by the CIA. That’s the state of affairs described in this article. An article comprised of statements for over a dozen anonymous US intelligence officials. In other words, an article that is delivering a message to the public that the CIA wants delivered. A message about how the CIA is working to keep things under control and avoiding some sort of escalatory spiral. As one anonymous official opines, “Is the CIA on the ground inside Ukraine? Yes, but it’s also not nefarious.” That’s the underlying message being delivered in this piece:
But also note the acknowledgement that the CIA has been playing an active offensive role in actions like the killing of Russian generals on the battlefireld or “important striks outside Ukraine, such as the sinking of Moskva Flagship”. So the CIA is playing a leading role in the execution of a number of the kinds of high-profile attacks. But NOT in the high-profile attacks that are likely to provoke Putin into an escalation. Any provocations are the work of Ukrainians alone operating against the CIA’s wishes. That’s also message here:
The idea that the US and Russia are operating on mutually agreed upon established “rules of the road” — like the rule that the US wouldn’t pursue regime change in Russia and Russia would limit its assault in Ukraine — is also part of the messaging here. At the same time, the article attributes Zelensky’s charisma with US agreeing to supply Ukraine with the kind of longer-range weapons that in theory could threaten Russian territory and threaten an escalation:
And then we get to these warnings about how some of the coalition partners — the UK and Poland in particular — are anxious to go further than the CIA is comfortable with. This is a good time to recall the evidence that MI6 was actively planning attacks on the Kerch bridge. It’s a reminder that there’s actually an abundance of potential ‘partners’ who can be blamed should things spiral out of control. Which is the perfect situation for a kind of ‘no one is at fault because everyone is at fault...it all just got out of everyone’s control’ kind of excuse should this conflict blow up into WWIII:
There’s also the warnings about a mysterious increase in sabotage attacks inside Russian, along with suggestion that Zelensky didn’t haven’t complete control over his own forces. And then there’s the “rumors” about a “mysterious third party” directing others to strike inside Russia, prompting a firm denial from the CIA. Recall it was Jack Murphy’s intriguing story — also based heavily on anonymous intelligence officials — about CIA-direct sabotage networks inside Russia that the CIA was refuting with those denials:
And that brings us to the truly ominous statement from the anonymous senior Polish official: “In my humble opinion, the CIA fails to understand the nature of the Ukrainian state and the reckless factions that exist there.” Because at the end of the day, if someone is going to take the blame for everything spiraling into a much larger conflict, the perfect culprit would be ‘reckless factions’ inside Ukraine. Blowing this up into a larger NATO-vs-Russia conflict is basically a goal of Ukraine at this point:
It all hints at a situation where the pieces are largely in place for a dramatic escalation that is everyone’s fault and, therefore, no one’s fault. We tried. We just couldn’t keep those crazy Ukrainians in check. That’s the message delivered in this piece. An anonymous warning that things no one want to take credit for are already in motion.