June 20, 2023
A MintPress investigation
has found that a host of Western government officials, intelligence agents and
assets have been directly involved in intimate collaboration with Nazi groups
and individuals since at least 2014. This has included involvement in creating
and operating the Nazi-run kill list in Ukraine, which MintPress revealed
recently.
While Western media have
belatedly been forced to concede that there are Nazi influences in Ukraine,
many journalists have insisted that the visible fascist patches on uniforms are
only there to troll Russians and that they are insignificant and a gift to
Russian propaganda. Still, other journalists admit to asking Ukrainian service
members to cover up their Nazi symbols. Yet, as we shall see, this
collaboration goes much further.
Perhaps a good place to
start is with the ongoing role of a key intelligence-linked official who has
taken on a propaganda role on behalf of Ukraine since the launch in February
2022 of what the Russian government calls its “Special Military Operation.”
Meet Cormac Smith, a member of the first Irish bobsleigh team to qualify for
the Winter Olympics in 1992. He has
appeared in scores of news reports passing on Western propaganda talking points
about the role of Russia in Ukraine. But who is Smith working for?
According to his own
account, he is a “private citizen” supporting “Ukraine/global freedom.” Yet
until December 2018, he was the deputy director of communications for the
British Cabinet Office – the official body responsible for supporting the prime
minister. He was also previously attached to the UK Foreign Office as the
strategic communications advisor to the foreign minister of Ukraine.
Last May, The Irish
Independent claimed that Smith is “an unlikely key player in the information
war,” who “estimates he has given about 100 TV, radio and print interviews with
the international media in the past few months to tell Kyiv’s side of the
story.” Smith has a nice line in outrageous propaganda gambits, claiming that
Russians are the actual Nazis and that they murder, rape and pillage, including
the rape of children.
As it turns out, the source
of many of the allegations of rape – including multiple alleged cases of rape
to death of children – was the Ukraine parliamentary commissioner for human
rights, Lyudmila Denisova. Her evidence was alleged to be a helpline set up to
report allegations of human rights abuses. Her tales were too much even for the
Ukrainian government, which dismissed her at the end of May 2022.
Last year, it was
comprehensively demonstrated that her stories had little evidential basis.
However, even before this, she had already reportedly admitted to “promoting
fake news to persuade Western countries to send more arms and aid.” Smith
nonetheless carried on making vague allegations of rape (including of children)
for months afterward. Naturally, no evidence was ever cited. He repeated the
rape allegation almost monthly between April 2022 and January 2023. (In 2022:
May, August, September, October, November, and in 2023: January, April, May).
In April 2022, he concluded
a tweet about the alleged rapes of “2 million women of all ages” with the line:
“Russians are fucking animals, there is no other Russia, they must be
defeated.”
Three weeks earlier, Smith
asked, “Is there any difference between” Russian tank crews in Mariupol and
“Nazi SS murderers who put Jews in the gas chambers.”
In December, he paraded
claims that “Russians are much worse than Nazis.”
Of course, Smith denies
Maidan was a U.S.-backed coup, that NATO expansion did not cause the Russian
intervention and that Ukraine “is not full of Nazis” integrated into the
military, police and intelligence services. Thus, we find him at the forefront
of Nazi apologism. But who is he working for?
According to his own
account, “Since Moscow began threatening a full invasion, he has been in daily
contact with former Ukrainian colleagues and friends.” As he told The Irish
Independent:
‘I was out there in December [2021] visiting and they said it would
be really helpful if you can help as a commentator because you really
understand us,’ he says. ‘This is also an information war and I am trying to
make a small contribution. Russia is a country that lies on an industrial
scale, and we were trying to get people to see that for years, but it’s only
now that the scales are falling from people’s eyes.’”
Curiously, this would
appear to suggest that Smith is working for actors in Ukraine. However, he has
on several occasions insisted he is doing it “pro bono,” meaning without being
paid. According to his LinkedIn page, he has been in various self-employed
consultancy roles since January 2019.
Yet in September 2022, he
tweeted that he had “six years experience of Ukraine, including two years
working at the heart of her government.” This suggests that his self-employed
role has involved significant work on Ukraine for an unknown client.
Perhaps of more relevance
to his actual role is the latter part of that admission: his two years in
Ukraine. What was he doing there, and for whom did he work? It turns out that
he was a British government agent. Perhaps he still is. Smith joined the U.K. Cabinet
Office in April 2016. He gave this account on his LinkedIn page in 2020:
After three months at the Cabinet Office I was asked to travel to
Ukraine to lend communication expertise to the country’s government as
strategic communication advisor to their foreign minister. I was attached to
the British Embassy in Kyiv and became the first foreigner to be embedded in
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) of Ukraine.”
“Over 18 months I was credited with introducing positive changes
to…how the MFA communicated, not just in Kyiv but across the globe. I also
worked with the Ministries of Health, Finance, Education & Science and the
Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration; as well as advising both the
National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine and the NATO mission in Kyiv
on crisis communication.”
Smith’s eighteen months in
Kiev were followed by seven months in London with the National Security
Communications Team (NSCT), a body in the U.K. Cabinet Office. Today, his
LinkedIn page does not mention the NSCT, referring simply to the Cabinet
Office. But back in 2020, it said otherwise.
What is the NSCT? At that
point, the unit had just been set up and focused much of its efforts on
influencing the public on the alleged Russian poisoning of the defector Sergei
Skripal. Smith wrote in his now deleted résumé that “by the end of the Summer
[of 2018], the NSCT had played a pivotal role in a ‘hands down’ victory over
the Kremlin in the information war.” It is instructive to learn from this his
key role in coordinating the lies and misinformation circulated by the British
state in that period.
The Counter Disinformation
and Media Development program in the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO)
was run by an honorary colonel in military intelligence. But The NSCT was funded by the U.K. Foreign
Office’s Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) and, as can be seen in
documents published by the Foreign Office, the identity of the lead agency
(indeed even the “type” of agency) was redacted on “security” grounds. The only
agencies liable to redact in these circumstances are intelligence agencies,
suggesting that it was MI6, the UK’s foreign intelligence agency. NSCT is thus
revealed as a potential MI6-directed op.
Other NSCT personnel have
traveled to Ukraine to advise the government. In 2018, Henry Collis of the NSCT
attended and spoke at “The Hybrid War Decade: Lessons Learned to Move Forward
Successfully,” held between November 7-8 in Kyiv. Unlike Cormac Smith, Collis
also has a known history in military intelligence, having been a reserve
officer in the Honourable Artillery Company, one of the constituents of the
British Army Intelligence Corps.
StopFake – Nazi apologists
While advising the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, Smith became involved with the team at StopFake (created
just after the 2014 coup), including its “co-founder” Yevhen Fedchenko, an
academic. On his return to London in 2018, he posed in his garden with a
StopFake t-shirt. My “gaff [British slang for one’ home] is now full of
memories from Ukraine,” he said. Unsurprisingly, he signs off the exchange with
the Banderite fascist greeting, “Slava Ukraini!” (“Glory to Ukraine.”)
While seen by many
Ukrainians as a hero and the father of the nation (a position the current
government has promoted), Stepan Bandera was a Nazi collaborator whose group,
the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), helped carry out the
systematic extermination of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians during World
War Two. The full slogan originally accompanied by a Nazi salute of the kind
all too familiar to students of Hitler’s Nazi movement was a call and response:
“Slave Ukraini” – “Heroyam Slava!” (Meaning, Glory to Ukraine – Glory to the
heroes!). Thus, endorsing this greeting is an indication of what might be seen
as Nazi apologism.
Also advising StopFake in
2016-17 was the well-known U.S. official Nina Jankowicz, who, according to her
own account, “advised the Ukrainian government on strategic communications
under the auspices of a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship.” Prior to
her Fulbright grant in Ukraine, Jankowicz managed “democracy assistance
programs” to Russia and Belarus at the National Democratic Institute for
International Affairs, a core part of the “CIA sidekick” organization, the
National Endowment for Democracy.
StopFake was created in
March 2014, the same month as InformNapalm, which runs the kill list. It claims
to have “launched as a volunteer project” “not supported financially or
otherwise by any official Ukrainian organization or government agency.” This assertion
is undermined a little by the fact that it does admit to receiving funding from
a host of Western governments and intelligence-linked agencies, such as the
Atlantic Council, the International Renaissance Foundation (the Ukraine branch
of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations), the Foreign Ministry of the Czech
Republic, the Embassy of the United Kingdom, and nearly $250,000 from the
British Foreign Office.
StopFake has also received
funds from the Sigrid Rausing Trust, which states that it paid the Media
Reforms Center (the parent of StopFake) £205,000 (around $250,000) between 2015
and 2019. StopFake does not admit to the money which it received from the
National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA front group.
The claim to be
unaffiliated with the government is also undermined by a leaked Ukrainian
Defense Ministry PowerPoint presentation from 2015 which lists StopFake as one
of their “special projects.”
Support for the idea it is
a government cutout also comes from the fact that both Smith and Jankowicz were
consulting it in their capacity as government advisers.
StopFake has a deserved
reputation for Nazi apologism. For instance, in 2018, the site defended
military boot camps for children run by the Neo-Nazi group, the Azov Battalion.
In 2017, Jankowicz hosted a StopFake video episode about Russian propaganda and
Ukrainian volunteer battalions.
On Jankowicz and StopFake,
The Nation stated:
Painting neo-Nazi paramilitaries with an extensive record of war
crimes as patriots helping refugees, all while working with a ‘disinformation’
group that turned out to run interference for violent neo-Nazi
formations—that’s the experience Biden’s new disinformation czar brings to the
table.”
Multiple established
Western media outlets, including The New York Times, have reported on
StopFake’s ties to white power or Nazi groups. But when local independent
journalist Ekaterina Sergatskova
co-authored a long investigation exploring these links, she received death
threats and was forced to flee Kiev. The intimidation tactics suggest that
StopFake has more than a passing similarity to the work of InformNapalm, which
hosts the kill list Myrotvorets.
Further Nazi connections
are visible in the personage of Irena Chalupa, one of three Ukrainian-American
sisters deeply involved in pro-NATO propaganda networks. The sisters are – so
it is reported – devotees of World War Two-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera
and his OUN-B fascist militia.
Irena works for the U.S.
state propaganda outfit Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty and was also (around
2015) a non-resident fellow at the NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council. In
2016, she regularly hosted debunking posts on StopFake. According to Ukrainian
nationalist sources, both of her sisters, Andrea and Alexandra Chalupa, were
founders of a propaganda outlet Digital Maidan, created in New York in January
2014, which agitated for the coup. Their “closest working partners” included
EuroMaidanPress which was founded by Banderite thugs and regularly publishes
pieces by a wide range of official U.S. propaganda outlets like Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty.
Alexandra was co-chair of
the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC’s) Ethnic Council and her fingerprints
are all over the disinformation that the Russians hacked and leaked the Clinton
and Podesta emails – a core claim of the Russiagate deception. In 2015,
according to her own account, Andrea was close to Michael Weiss of the Atlantic
Council and various other NATO propaganda operations, such as The Interpreter Magazine.
The connection of all three to Banderite propaganda networks and of Irena and
Andrea to the Atlantic Council is illuminating, given the role that it appears
the Atlantic Council played in a further Ukraine related propaganda operation.
Propornot
A supposedly independent
website helping users to differentiate between real and fake news, Propornot
emerged some eighteen months after the Maidan coup. Its domain name was
registered on August 24, 2016, and its first blacklist of websites allegedly
purveying Russian propaganda was circulated in October of that year. It
complemented the kill list on Myrotvorets (the “peacemaker” website), hacking
by the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance and the debunking work of InformNapalm, which
MintPress revealed is the parent of both the former operations. Was Propornot
part of the same op?
Unlike Myrotvorets or
InformNaplam, Propornot redacted the name of the person that registered the
domain. But that did not prevent the persistent Donbass-based journalist George
Eliason from using basic scanning tools to reveal that Propornot was a product
of The Interpreter Magazine.
The Interpreter was set up
by Michael Weiss, a longtime Zionist and Neocon who is close to at least one of
the Chalupa sisters. Weiss was previously been attached to the controversial
U.K. think tank, the Henry Jackson Society – a group that has been widely
accused of promoting Islamophobia.
Between 2013 and 2015, The
Interpreter was run by the Atlantic Council. In January 2016 it became a
project of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a direct U.S. government propaganda
operation. The organization even went so far as to encourage colleagues at the
Atlantic Council to denounce its activities in the hope that they would not
link the two organizations together. The same trick was used on the kill-list
Myrotvorets, from which Bellingcat, for example, attempted to distance itself.
Later Weiss also got
involved with New Lines magazine (described by journalist Max Blumenthal as
hosting “a rogue’s gallery of U.S. regime collaborators, neocons and corporate
media hacks”), where he showcased his investigative prowess reporting from
“inside Ukraine’s psyops”, when he is himself deeply embedded in the psyops
operation.
Propornot, of course, is on
the same page as the other Banderite propaganda efforts discussed here. In
2016, it tweeted a puff piece by Radio Free Europe on the “Ukrainian
‘Hacktivist’ Network Cyberbattling The Kremlin” – referring to the work of
InformNapalm – with the Banderite slogan “Heroyim Slava!” (“Glory to the
heroes.”)
The U.S.-backed coup of
February 2014 came after significant Western involvement in Ukrainian politics.
The Maidan “uprising” began in November 2013, and the government was replaced
by February 2014.
This ushered in a
substantial Western effort to advise the government on propaganda and
“strategic communications” as well as extensive training of both military and
civilian forces in the information and influence operations favored by NATO,
the U.S. and the U.K. The evidence is that some of that advisory effort had
already started in 2012 – well before the coup.
In 2015, a leaked
PowerPoint file titled “Free Russia,” said to be from the Ukrainian Ministry of
Defense, stated there was “co-operation” with two NATO groups (StratCom and
Cyber Defense Centers of Excellence); three American groups (U.S. Special
Operations Command, U.S. Cyber Command and Psyops); and two British units (the
15th (U.K.) Psyops and 77th Brigade).
The 15th Psyops ceased to
exist in April 2015 when it was merged into the 77th Brigade, a grouping
created on 1 January 2015, thus indicating British involvement in early 2015 at
the latest. Amongst the revelations in a separate leaked NATO document from
this period was that the U.K. military had been (prior to February 2015) training
the Ukrainian forces in psyops/propaganda: “Ukrainian MOD [Ministry of Defense]
receiving mentoring from JIAG [Joint Information Activities Group] (U.K. MOD)
was mentioned as a past successful experience.”
The involvement of Western
psyops in Ukraine continued throughout the period, and the U.S. group even
posted images of their Ukraine activities on Instagram in 2019.
A third leaked document
also included references to a U.K. government-funded FCO CSSF project worth
nearly £250,000 (U.S. $315,000). It was to be run in 2014/5 directly with the
Ministry of Defense and the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine,
which expressed full “support” for the project. All activities “will be
coordinated with HQ of armed forces, and will be implemented with the
participation of Ukrainian official representatives.”
The purpose was to “discredit” Russian policy towards Ukraine,
demonstration of “Putin’s regime responsibility for all Donbass people
troubles,” demonstration of “Putin’s inner circle personal interest in
destabilization in Ukraine” and “demonisation” or Russian politicians “that are
most popular in Ukraine.” This project was led by an organization (the
Ukrainian Institute for International Politics) that also claimed a range of
additional Western funders. In 2014, for example, it received funding from the
National Endowment for Democracy.
One Ukraine Ministry of
Defense PowerPoint titled “Free Donbass” referred to “The analysis of NATO’s
actions in the Balkans, as well as the conduct of Operation Iraqi Freedom,”
which “demonstrated the importance of
the so-called ‘perception management.’” This is said to include “public
diplomacy, information and psychological operations (IPO), public information,
disinformation, and covert action.”
In late 2022, Lt. Gen.
Jonathan Braga, Commander of United States Army Special Operations Command,
noted that “Our Psychological Operations combination exercise now incorporates
synthetic internet and real-time sentiment analysis to educate students on the
speed of information.” “The speed of information, the power of information ops,
might be one of the greatest lessons learned from the events unfolding in
Ukraine,” he said, adding that, “Ukrainians spent the past eight years—since
the annexation of Crimea in 2014—learning a lot from special operators and
other U.S. trainers.”
One panelist— “speaking
under Chatham House rules that forbade reporters to attribute remarks” — said,
“We’d spent eight years building rapport… and building deep relationships. And all
of a sudden, when it’s game on,” they were called back to the United States.”
“That did not go over well… We’re seeing a master class on [strategic
communications] and psyops every day. But it started out with our SOF [Special
Operations Forces] guys helping them out,” the panelist added; “Two of the
first strikes on Feb. 24 into the Kyiv area were on the psyop-production
facility…with long-range precision strike missiles. That’s how much value the
Russians put into messaging.”
Western propaganda experts
and intelligence officials have been deeply involved in advising Ukraine on how
best to launder its image. Take the examples of Alicia Kearns, Chris Donnelly,
Gerry Osborne, Ewen Murchison and Phil Jones – all of whom have been involved
in propaganda and/or intelligence with the British state.
Alicia Kearns is a
Conservative MP (since 2019) and was shortly thereafter installed as the
youngest chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee as well as vice-chair of
the All-Party Group on Ukraine.
Kearns has a history as a
British government propagandist, working very closely with (if not in) MI6 at
the Foreign Office. She listed herself as “’Cross-Government lead for Counter
Daesh, Syria and Iraq Effort’ on her LinkedIn page, which indicates she was
running the Counter-Daesh Coalition
Communications Cell at the Foreign Office. There she oversaw overt and, what
she has described in a leaked résumé, as “discreet” propaganda on Syria. The
résumé was submitted in a bid for a government contract. Her activities at the
FCO included working to soften the image of NATO proxy Salafi terror groups and
to falsely implicate the Syrian government in chemical weapons attacks with a
whole host of MI6 contractors, including ARK, Incostrat, CIJA and, most
famously, the White Helmets/May Day Rescue.
She then spent a period
working covertly with MI6 contractors Torchlight in Palestinian refugee camps
in Lebanon. The tender documents issued by the government specifically state
that “you may not mention that the client is HMG [Her Majesty’s Government]”
This latter role was never mentioned on Kearns’ LinkedIn page, and she scrubbed
all mention of her other derring-do once elected to Parliament in 2019.
Among her contributions on
Ukraine, she said, “I remember being stood behind Ukrainian President
Poroshenko at the NATO Summit in 2014 as he discussed the Minsk Protocol, a
ceasefire agreed with pro-Russia separatist leaders. The atmosphere was full of
cautious optimism and hope. Devastatingly, the violence returned.” Notably, She
fails to acknowledge the significant Western involvement in the subsequent
violence.
She also states that “in
2015… I visited Ukraine to support the Ukrainian Government,” where she spoke
at a “Ukraine Government Communications Service” event, according to her leaked
résumé. She went back in
March 2023 to meet Zelensky. She also takes pride in using the full Banderite
slogan, “Slava Ukraini! Heroyim Slava!” on social media.
Chris Donnelly is a former
advisor to the NATO Secretary General and an Honorary Colonel in the British
Army’s shadowy Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI). He was involved
in advising Ukraine from the first moment after the coup, writing a memo on
March 1, 2014 (which was later leaked). “If I were in charge,” he wrote, “I
would get the following implemented asap.” This would include “a cordon
sanitaire” around Crimea with “troops and mines” and “Min[ing] Sevastopol
harbour/bay.” “The government needs a strategic communication campaign,”
Donnelly concluded: “I am trying to get this message across.”
In 2016, he oversaw a visit
of five Ukrainian military intelligence personnel to the U.K. This was as part
of his work with the Integrity Initiative, a Foreign Office-funded project
alleged to focus on countering Russian disinformation. However, one of its
principal targets was British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. The Ukrainian
spooks were hosted and dined at the British government’s expense. Donnelly
billed the Ministry of Defence for £6788 (U.S. $8,500) for the trip. Among
those that they met while there were assorted British military intelligence
operatives, including a day with the SGMI and with the British Army psyop outfit,
the 77th Brigade.
In 2022 Donnelly was
involved in plans to blow up the Kerch Bridge to Crimea (which were leaked
after the bridge was bombed. The leaks were reported by Kit Klarenberg). It is
notable that Donnelly’s Integrity Initiative FCO-funded propaganda project
strayed into both Holocaust revisionism in the Baltics and Nazi apologism in
relation to Ukraine, notably in the significant work it did with StopFake in
2016-18, during which both Jankowicz and Smith were there.
Lt. Col. Ewen Murchison
worked in Military Strategic Effects, in the Operations Directorate of the U.K.
Ministry of Defence, between September 2012 and August 2014. This is the new
name for an MoD propaganda unit which it has adopted in part in order to divert
attention from the fact that its role is propaganda, all the previous
euphemisms (such as “psychological operations”) having been devalued by the
discovery of previous lies. Murchison attended the first NATO Stratcom Center
of Excellence steering group in Latvia in July 2014, at which Ukraine was a
topic of discussion.
Col. Gerry Osborne was
Strategic Communications Manager at the U.K. Ministry of Defence between
December 2012 and August 2014 and then Strategic Communications Director until
December 2014. In the former role, he undertook the following role with regards
to Ukraine: “delivered and ran Strategic Communications campaigns for U.K.
activity”; “Project Director for Strategic Communication capacity building
missions” including to Ukraine and Georgia to address defense priorities and
build governance in pre-post conflict environments.
In order to gain “global
traction for the U.K. Strategic Communication Approach,” he also “took a
leading role as U.K. MoD subject matter expert in the successful brand
development of the Multinational Information Operations Experiment and NATO
StratCom Center of Excellence and was a principal visiting lecturer to
partners,” including in Ukraine. Osborne attended the 1st NATO StratCom Center
of Excellence Steering Committee meeting in Riga, Latvia, on July 24-25, 2014
and contributed to its October 2014 study of “Russia’s Information Campaign
Against Ukraine” along with Steve Tatham of the SCL Group. (Note that Osborne’s
role in relation to Ukraine may have started before the NATO-backed coup in
early 2014.)
Phil Jones – Another British advisor, Jones worked at the
U.K. Ministry of Defence between 2005 and 2018. His last five years at the MoD
were in the post of U.K. Special Defence Advisor to the Ministry of Defence,
Ukraine, 2013 – 2018, in Kiev. We can note that this advisory role began prior
to the 2014 NATO-backed coup in Ukraine.
Jones does not boast any
particular expertise in strategic communications or influence ops on his
LinkedIn page, but he did take part on February 19, 2015, in a NATO StratCom
Center of Excellence (COE) “coordination meeting” to assess the “capacity
building needs of the Ukrainian, Georgian and Moldovan wider security sector in
the area of Strategic Communications (StratCom).”
He was in Kiev through the
entire period of the coup and the development thereafter of Ukrainian
propaganda activities and institutions and appears to have maintained a
connection with the country, including serving as a “personal advisor” to the
Minister of Defense in Ukraine under the aegis of the U.K. Government’s
Stabilization Unit in early 2020 and since October of that year as a Board
Member of the Centre for Defence Strategy, Ukraine.
It is not known how
influential he was or was not in the creation of the Ministry’s kill list or
the other cut-outs it created, including InformNapalm, StopFake and others. The
center is financed by two of its “partners,” the National Endowment for
Democracy and UKAid, a British government operation.
The 2015 NATO StratCom CoE
conference was “part of the larger project to improve the strategic
communications capabilities of … as well as the institutional strategic
communications capacity” of Ukraine and the other countries. Leading that
project were two further Western operatives, both of whom have military and
intelligence experience, Steve Tatham and Nigel Oakes.
The minutes of the meeting
were leaked, and the document was claimed by the chair of the meeting, Steve
Tatham, to have been “subtly doctored” in a Russian “hack and leak” operation.
It was claimed that one bullet point was added and that a contact name was
removed from the document. This statement thus implied that the rest of the
document was genuine.
Tatham was attached to the
NATO center for that year and had previously been the commanding officer of the
15 (U.K.) Psychological Operations Unit in the British military until 2014. He
then joined the MoD propaganda unit called Military Strategic Effects until his
retirement from the service later in 2014. After that, he joined Strategic
Communication Laboratories, a private PR firm that was later implicated in the
Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Oakes had founded the firm
and was thus Tatham’s boss. The import of that scandal was that the firm used a
huge amount of Facebook data to influence the U.S. presidential elections and
also the U.K. Brexit referendum in the interests of Russia. As it turned out,
there was absolutely no evidence that this had happened either in the U.S. or
in the U.K. Back in the real world, this
document and other public information demonstrate that, on the contrary, SCL
Group and its subsidiaries SCL Defence and Iota-Global (led by Tatham) were, in
fact, working closely with Ukraine against Russia. This was even reported in
the mainstream media, though the conclusion that the Russiagate hysteria was
overblown did not percolate through.
So we have established that
Western forces have been training and advising the government of Ukraine from
before the coup, though noticeably more afterward. What did they do with this
advice? They set up a range of cut-outs and front groups which they pretended
were independent of government in order to aid plausible deniability.
Each was marked indelibly
by Nazi apologism, or was run by Banderite ideologues with whom British and
American officials evidently closely co-operated. The prominent role of
Banderite Neo-Nazis in all of these Ukraine government propaganda operations
suggests that Nazi apologism has spread into the core institutions of the
government of Ukraine– perhaps more than the dominant Western view is able to
admit.
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