By Scott Ritter
November 07, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- A recent media
expose on the US effort to arm Ukraine looks as
if it’s been curated by the Biden administration
to shape public perception
November 06, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- NBC News has
reported that, according to four people
familiar with the incident, a phone call
between US President Joe Biden and his
Ukrainian counterpart, Vladimir Zelensky,
turned testy after the Ukrainian leader
pressed Biden for more assistance.
On June
15, Biden called Zelensky to inform him of
the recent release of some $1 billion in
assistance (this
included the drawdown of arms and
equipment from US Department of Defense
inventories valued at $350 million, and $650
million in additional assistance under the
department’s Ukraine Security Assistance
Initiative). This type of person-to-person
communication had become commonplace since
Russia’s decision to send troops into
Ukraine in February 2022, with Biden
informing Zelensky of each major assistance
allocation in a program that had, as of June
15, seen the dispatch of some $5.6 billion
in American military aid.
This time, however, rather than thank the
US president, as had been the previous
practice, Zelensky proceeded to ask for more
assistance, citing specific requests for
equipment that had not been included in the
June allocation of aid. At this point, NBC’s
sources say, Biden lost his temper. “The
American people were being quite generous,
and his administration and the US military
were working hard to help Ukraine, he said,
raising his voice, and Zelensky could show a
little more gratitude,” the NBC story
reports.
According to NBC, the source of Biden’s
anger went beyond the lack of gratitude
shown by Zelensky (NBC reports that the two
leaders have since warmed to one another),
but rather the growing realization on the
part of the Biden White House that support
for the blank check being written for
Ukraine’s war effort is waning among members
of Congress on both sides of the aisle. With
the Republicans expected to retake control
of the House of Representatives and
positioned to do the same in the Senate in
the upcoming mid-term elections, the Biden
administration appears poised to try to
squeeze out another $40-60 billion in aid
during the lame duck session between the
election and when the present term of
Congress expires next January. It is
expected that this new aid package will be
challenged by the Republicans, who will seek
to have its consideration postponed until
the new Republican-controlled Congress is
sworn in.
Shortly before NBC News broke the story of
the contentious Biden-Zelensky phone call, The
New Yorker ran a glowing review of the state of
US-Ukrainian military cooperation. Entitled ‘Inside
the US Effort to Arm Ukraine, the piece,
authored by Joshua Yaffa, a contributing writer
for the magazine, provides an expansive and yet
intimate look at the complex interaction between
the US and Ukraine about not only the provision
of military equipment, but also the active
cooperation between US and Ukrainian military
and intelligence officials concerning the actual
conduct of the conflict, including the provision
of targeting data in support of US-provided
artillery systems such as the M777 howitzer and
the HIMARS multiple rocket launch system.
Its two main messages can be summarized as
follows: first, American weapons are helping
Ukraine stand up to Russia and showing the world
Putin can be defeated, and second, the US is
taking every care not to cross any lines that
would escalate the conflict into a direct
confrontation with Moscow.
Based in Moscow for many years, Yaffa is an
experienced writer on Russian affairs. The scope
and scale of the sources he was able to draw
upon in writing his most recent article is a
‘who’s who’ of US and Ukrainian officialdom.
Both named and unnamed, all of them are well
positioned to provide Yaffa with the kind of
inside information that makes his article so
attractive, both from an informational aspect,
and readability.
On the Ukrainian side, Yaffa interviewed
Aleksey Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister;
Mikhail Podoliak, a top adviser to Zelensky;
Aleksey Danilov, Secretary of the Ukrainian
National Security and Defense Council; and “a
senior Ukrainian military official” close
to the commander in chief of the military,
Valery Zaluzhny. Ukrainian officials habitually
interact with Western journalists as part of
their effort to shape the narrative about the
ongoing conflict with Russia. The surprise isn’t
that Yaffa was able to interview these
individuals, but rather what they were willing
to open up about – the hitherto obscure details
of the sensitive cooperation between the US and
Ukraine in the actual conduct of the conflict.
The US is very controlling about the release
of information about classified cooperation with
other nations. This reticence to be transparent
extends not only to the US officials involved,
but also to the foreign nationals participating
in the secret work. In short, there is no way
the three Ukrainians would have agreed to sit
down and talk to Yaffa about these issues unless
their participation had been green-lighted by
the Biden administration beforehand.
The extent to which the Biden administration
was behind the decision to cooperate with Yaffa
on this story becomes clear upon closer
examination of the anonymous sources drawn upon
for the article. “A Biden administration
official involved in Ukraine policy”; “a senior
official at the Defense Department”; “a person
familiar with Biden White House discussions of
Ukraine”; “an administration official”; “a
senior US official”; “a US military official”
close to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff General Milley; “a senior Biden
administration official”; and “a senior
US intelligence official.”
Numerous other sources, both named and
unnamed, were also interviewed by Yaffa.
Anyone with any experience with sensitive
national security activities knows that there
are two hard-fast truths when it comes to such
activities – they are highly classified and
compartmentalized, and any unauthorized release
of information pertaining to such activities is
a serious violation of the law, subject to
prosecution and imprisonment for anyone caught
leaking such information to the press.
Accordingly, either every source cited by
Yaffa had been simultaneously overcome with a
Lemming-like desire to jump off a figurative
cliff, risking losing their careers and going to
prison in order to help the young New Yorker
contributing writer pull off the scoop of a
lifetime, or the Yaffa article was part and
parcel of a Biden administration information
operation designed to inject a positive
narrative about US-Ukrainian military relations
into the mainstream discussion on Ukraine in a
concerted effort to shape public perception in
the lead-up to the mid-term elections.
My money is on the latter.
Good journalism is all about ‘bottom-up’
reporting, where a reporter conceives a story
and then runs it to the ground by seeking out
interviews with relevant sources. Stenography is
about having a story spoon fed to you by sources
for the purpose of serving an agenda that has
nothing to do with the pursuit of fact-based
truth, but rather shaping public opinion about a
matter of importance.
Yaffa’s ‘Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine’
is a clever piece of government-dictated
stenography disguised as journalism and should
be treated as such by all who read it.
Scott Ritter
is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer
and author of 'Disarmament in the Time of
Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the
Soviet Union.' He served in the Soviet Union as
an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in
General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War,
and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Reader financed- No
Advertising - No Government Grants -
No Algorithm - This
Is Independent
