Corporate media have assured us the war's going well and Ukraine will win. That
now looks like disinformation
By Medea Benjamin - Nicolas J.S. DaviesApril 27, 2023:
Information Clearing House --
The corporate media's initial response to the enormous leak of secret documents
about the war in Ukraine was to throw some mud in the water, declare there was
nothing to see here, and cover it as a depoliticized crime story about a
21-year-old National Guard member who published secret documents to impress his
friends. President Biden
dismissed the leaks as revealing nothing of "great consequence."
What these documents reveal, however, is that the war is going worse for
Ukraine than our political leaders have admitted to us, while going badly for
Russia too, so that
neither side is likely to break the stalemate this year and this will likely
lead to "a protracted war beyond 2023," as one of the documents says.
The publication of these assessments should lead to renewed calls for our
government to level with the public about what it realistically hopes to achieve
by prolonging the bloodshed, and why it continues to reject the resumption of
the promising peace negotiations it blocked
in April 2022.
We believe that blocking those talks was a dreadful mistake, in which the
Biden administration capitulated to the war-mongering, since-disgraced former
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and that current U.S. policy is
compounding that mistake at the cost of tens of thousands more Ukrainian lives
and the destruction of even more of their country.
In most wars, while the warring parties strenuously suppress the reporting of
civilian casualties for which they are responsible, professional militaries
generally treat accurate reporting of their own military casualties as a basic
responsibility. But in the virulent propaganda surrounding the war in Ukraine,
all sides have treated military casualty figures as fair game, systematically
exaggerating enemy casualties and understating their own.
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Publicly available U.S. estimates have supported
the idea that many more Russians are being killed than Ukrainians, deliberately
skewing public perceptions to support the notion that Ukraine can somehow win
the war, as long as we just keep sending more weapons.
The leaked documents provide internal U.S. military intelligence assessments
of casualties on both sides. But different documents, and different copies of
the documents circulating online, show
conflicting
numbers, so the propaganda war rages on despite the leak.
The most
detailed assessment of attrition rates of troops says explicitly that U.S.
military intelligence has "low confidence" in the attrition rates it cites. It
attributes that partly to "potential bias" in Ukraine's information sharing, and
notes that casualty assessments "fluctuate according to the source."
So, despite denials by the Pentagon, a document that shows a
higher death toll
on the Ukrainian side may be correct, since it has been widely reported that
Russia has been firing several times the number
of artillery shells as Ukraine, in a bloody war of
attrition in which artillery appears to be the main instrument of death.
Altogether, some of the documents estimate a total death toll on both sides
approaching 100,000 and total casualties, killed and wounded, of up to 350,000.
Another document reveals that, after using up the stocks sent by NATO
countries, Ukraine is running
out of missiles for the S-300 and BUK systems that make up 89% of its air
defenses. By May or June, Ukraine will therefore be vulnerable, for the first
time, to the full strength of the Russian air force, which has until now been
limited mainly to long-range missile strikes and drone attacks.
Recent Western arms shipments have been justified to the public by
predictions that Ukraine will soon be able to launch new counter-offensives to
take back territory from Russia. Twelve brigades, or up to 60,000 troops, were
assembled to train on newly delivered Western tanks for this "spring offensive,"
with three brigades in Ukraine and nine more in Poland, Romania and Slovenia.
But a leaked document
from the end of February reveals that the nine brigades being equipped and
trained abroad had less than half their equipment and, on average, were only 15%
trained. Meanwhile, Ukraine faced a stark choice to either send reinforcements
to Bakhmut or withdraw from the town entirely, and chose to
sacrifice some of its "spring offensive" forces to prevent the imminent fall
of Bakhmut.
Ever since the U.S. and NATO started training Ukrainian forces to fight in
Donbas in 2015, and during the time it has been training them in other countries
since the Russian invasion, NATO has provided six-month training courses to
bring Ukraine's forces up to basic NATO standards. On this basis, it appears
that many of the forces being assembled for the "spring offensive" will not be
fully trained and equipped before July or August.
But another document says that Ukraine's offensive will begin around April
30, meaning that many troops may be thrown into combat less than fully trained,
by NATO standards, even as they have to contend with more severe shortages of
ammunition and a whole new scale of Russian airstrikes. The bloody fighting that
has already decimated
Ukrainian forces will surely be even more brutal than before.
The leaked documents
conclude that "enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions
supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the
offensive," and that the most likely outcome remains only modest territorial
gains.
The documents also reveal serious deficiencies on the Russian side,
deficiencies revealed by the failure of its winter offensive to take much
ground. The fighting in Bakhmut has raged on for months, leaving thousands of
fallen soldiers on both sides and a burned out city that still is not 100%
controlled by Russia.
The inability of either side to decisively defeat the other in the ruins of
Bakhmut and other front-line towns in Donbas is why one of the most important
documents
predicted that the war was becoming locked into a "grinding campaign of
attrition" and was "likely heading toward a stalemate."
Adding to the concerns about where this conflict is headed is the
revelation in the leaked documents about the presence of 97 special forces
from NATO countries, including the U.K. and the U.S. This is in addition to
previous reports about the presence of CIA personnel, trainers and Pentagon
contractors, and the unexplained
deployment
of 20,000 troops from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Brigades near the border
between Poland and Ukraine.
Worried about the ever-increasing direct U.S. military involvement, Rep. Matt
Gaetz, R-Fla., has introduced a
Privileged Resolution of Inquiry to force Biden to notify the House exactly
how many U.S. military personnel are inside Ukraine and what precise plans the
U.S. has to assist Ukraine militarily.
We can't help wondering what Biden's plan could be, if he even has one. But
it turns out that we're not alone. In what amounts to a second
leak that the corporate media have studiously ignored, U.S. intelligence
sources have told veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that they are
asking the same questions, and describe a "total breakdown" between the White
House and the U.S. intelligence community.
Hersh's sources describe a pattern that echoes the use of fabricated and
unvetted intelligence to justify U.S. aggression against Iraq in 2003, in which
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan
are bypassing regular intelligence analysis and procedures and running the
Ukraine war as their own private fiefdom. They reportedly smear all criticism of
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as "pro-Putin," and leave U.S. intelligence
agencies out in the cold trying to understand a policy that makes no sense to
them.
What U.S. intelligence officials know, but the White House is doggedly
ignoring, is that, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, top Ukrainian officials running
that endemically
corrupt country are making fortunes skimming from the more than $100 billion in
aid and weapons that America has sent them.
According to
Hersh's
report, the CIA assesses that Ukrainian officials, including Zelenskyy, have
embezzled $400 million from money the U.S. sent Ukraine to buy diesel fuel for
its war effort, in a scheme that involves buying cheap, discounted fuel from
Russia. Meanwhile, Hersh says, Ukrainian government ministries literally
compete with each other to sell weapons paid for by U.S. taxpayers to private
arms dealers in Poland, the Czech Republic and around the world.
Hersh writes that in January 2023, after the CIA heard from Ukrainian
generals that they were angry with Zelenskyy for taking a larger share of the
rake-off from these schemes than his generals, CIA director William Burns
went to
Kyiv to meet with him. Burns allegedly told Zelenskyy he was taking too much of
the "skim money," and handed him a list of 35 generals and senior officials the
CIA knew were involved in this corrupt scheme.
Zelenskyy fired about 10 of those officials, but failed to alter his own
behavior. Hersh's sources tell him that White House lack of interest in doing
anything about these goings-on is a major factor in the breakdown of trust
between the White House and the intelligence community.
First-hand reporting
from inside Ukraine by New Cold War has described the same systematic
pyramid of corruption as Hersh. A member of parliament, formerly in Zelenskyy's
party, told New Cold War that Zelenskyy and other officials skimmed 170 million
euros from money that was supposed to pay for Bulgarian artillery shells.
The corruption
reportedly extends to bribes to avoid conscription. The Open Ukraine
Telegram channel was told by a military recruitment office that it could get the
son of one of its writers released from the front line in Bakhmut and sent out
of the country for $32,000.
As has happened in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and all the wars the U.S. has
been involved in for many decades, the longer the war goes on, the more the web
of corruption, lies and distortions unravels.
The
torpedoing of peace talks, the Nord Stream
sabotage, the
hiding of
corruption, the
politicization of casualty figures and the suppressed history of broken
promises and prescient
warnings about the danger of NATO expansion are all examples of how our
leaders have distorted the truth to shore up U.S. public support for
perpetuating an unwinnable war that is killing a generation of young Ukrainians.
These leaks and investigative reports are not the first, nor will they be the
last, to shine a light through the veil of propaganda that permits these wars to
destroy young people's lives in faraway places, so that oligarchs in Russia,
Ukraine and the U.S. can amass wealth and power.
The only way this will stop is if more and more people get active in opposing
those companies and individuals that profit from war — those Pope Francis has
called the "merchants of death" — and boot out the politicians who do their
bidding, before they make an even deadlier misstep and start a nuclear war
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of
CODEPINK for Peace and
author of several books, including "Inside
Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran." She
and Nicolas J.S. Davies are the authors of "War
in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict."Nicolas J.S.
Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for
CODEPINK and the author
of "Blood on
Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq."