He was trained in the American and British intelligence services. He has served as Policy Chief for United Nations Peace Operations. As a UN expert on rule of law and security institutions, he designed and led the first multidimensional UN intelligence unit in Sudan.
He has worked for the African Union and was for 5 years responsible for the fight, at NATO, against the proliferation of small arms. He was involved in discussions with the highest Russian military and intelligence officials just after the fall of the USSR.
Within NATO, he followed the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and later participated in programs to assist the Ukraine.
This guy sounds like an expert except for his association with the UN, where his expertise would have been corrupted by political considerations. I read his analysis staying mindful of that reality.
Why excerpt this article? It is not on the Excerpt list.
Plus, it is quite biased, unlike your characterization of it.
Either way, here’s the article:
The military situation in Ukraine, as seen by an ex-member of the Swiss strategic intelligence
Is it possible to actually know what has been and is going on in Ukraine? Jacques Baud is a former member of the Swiss strategic intelligence and specialist in Eastern countries. He takes a fact-driven down-to-earth approach to analyze the conflict and the role the West plays in it.
By Contributing Reporter -April 18, 2022
, The military situation in Ukraine, as seen by an ex-member of the Swiss strategic intelligence
By Jacques Baud*
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Part One: The Road To War – For years, from Mali to Afghanistan, I have worked for peace and risked my life for it. It is therefore not a question of justifying war, but of understanding what led us to it. [….]
Let’s try to examine the roots of the [Ukrainian] conflict. It starts with those who for the last eight years have been talking about “separatists” or “independentists” from Donbass. This is a misnomer.
The referendums conducted by the two self-proclaimed Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in May 2014, were not referendums of “independence” (независимость), as some unscrupulous journalists have claimed, but referendums of “self-determination” or “autonomy” (самостоятельность).
Is It Possible to Actually Know What Has Been and Is Going On in Ukraine?
Is It Possible to Actually Know What Has Been and Is Going On in Ukraine? (Photo internet reproduction)
The qualifier “pro-Russian” suggests that Russia was a party to the conflict, which was not the case, and the term “Russian speakers” would have been more honest. Moreover, these referendums were conducted against the advice of Vladimir Putin.
In fact, these Republics were not seeking to separate from Ukraine, but to have a status of autonomy, guaranteeing them the use of the Russian language as an official language–because the first legislative act of the new government resulting from the American-sponsored overthrow of [the democratically-elected] President Yanukovych, was the abolition, on February 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law of 2012 that made Russian an official language in Ukraine.
A bit as if German-speaking ‘putschists’ decided that French and Italian would no longer be official languages in Switzerland.
This decision caused a storm in the Russian-speaking population. The result was fierce repression against the Russian-speaking regions (Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk and Donetsk) which was carried out beginning in February 2014 and led to a militarization of the situation and some horrific massacres of the Russian population (in Odessa and Mariupol, the most notable).
At this stage, too rigid and engrossed in a doctrinaire approach to operations, the Ukrainian general staff subdued the enemy but without managing to actually prevail. The war waged by the autonomists [consisted in].… highly mobile operations conducted with light means. With a more flexible and less doctrinaire approach, the rebels were able to exploit the inertia of Ukrainian forces to repeatedly “trap” them.
In 2014, when I was at NATO, I was responsible for the fight against the proliferation of small arms, and we were trying to detect Russian arms deliveries to the rebels, to see if Moscow was involved.
The information we received then came almost entirely from Polish intelligence services and did not “fit” with the information coming from the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe]—and despite rather crude allegations, there were no deliveries of weapons and military equipment from Russia.
The rebels were armed thanks to the defection of Russian-speaking Ukrainian units that went over to the rebel side. As Ukrainian failures continued, tank, artillery, and anti-aircraft battalions swelled the ranks of the autonomists. This is what pushed the Ukrainians to commit to the Minsk Agreements.
But just after signing the Minsk 1 Agreements, the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko launched a massive “anti-terrorist operation” (ATO/Антитерористична операція) against the Donbass.
Poorly advised by NATO officers, the Ukrainians suffered a crushing defeat in Debaltsevo, which forced them to engage in the Minsk 2 Agreements.
It is essential to recall here that Minsk 1 (September 2014) and Minsk 2 (February 2015) Agreements did not provide for the separation or independence of the Republics, but their autonomy within the framework of Ukraine.
Those who have read the Agreements (there are very few who actually have) will note that it is written that the status of the Republics was to be negotiated between Kiev and the representatives of the Republics, for an internal solution within Ukraine.
That is why since 2014, Russia has systematically demanded the implementation of the Minsk Agreements while refusing to be a party to the negotiations, because it was an internal matter of Ukraine.
On the other side, the West—led by France—systematically tried to replace Minsk Agreements with the “Normandy format,” which put Russians and Ukrainians face-to-face. However, let us remember that there were never any Russian troops in the Donbass before 23-24 February 2022.
Moreover, OSCE observers have never observed the slightest trace of Russian units operating in the Donbass before then. For example, the U.S. intelligence map published by the Washington Post on December 3, 2021 does not show Russian troops in the Donbass.
In October 2015, Vasyl Hrytsak, director of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), confessed that only 56 Russian fighters had been observed in the Donbass. This was exactly comparable to the Swiss who went to fight in Bosnia on weekends, in the 1990s, or the French who go to fight in Ukraine today.
The Ukrainian army was then in a deplorable state. In October 2018, after four years of war, the chief Ukrainian military prosecutor, Anatoly Matios, stated that Ukraine had lost 2,700 men in the Donbass: 891 from illnesses, 318 from road accidents, 177 from other accidents, 175 from poisonings (alcohol, drugs), 172 from careless handling of weapons, 101 from breaches of security regulations, 228 from murders and 615 from suicides.
In fact, the Ukrainian army was undermined by the corruption of its cadres and no longer enjoyed the support of the population. According to a British Home Office report, in the March/April 2014 recall of reservists, 70 percent did not show up for the first session, 80 percent for the second, 90 percent for the third, and 95 percent for the fourth.
In October/November 2017, 70% of conscripts did not show up for the “Fall 2017” recall campaign. This is not counting suicides and desertions (often over to the autonomists), which reached up to 30 percent of the workforce in the ATO area. Young Ukrainians refused to go and fight in the Donbass and preferred emigration, which also explains, at least partially, the demographic deficit of the country.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense then turned to NATO to help make its armed forces more “attractive.” Having already worked on similar projects within the framework of the United Nations, I was asked by NATO to participate in a program to restore the image of the Ukrainian armed forces. But this is a long-term process and the Ukrainians wanted to move quickly.
So, to compensate for the lack of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias…. In 2020, they constituted about 40 percent of the Ukrainian forces and numbered about 102,000 men, according to Reuters. They were armed, financed, and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and France. There were more than 19 nationalities.
These militias had been operating in the Donbass since 2014, with Western support. Even if one can argue about the term “Nazi,” the fact remains that these militias are violent, convey a nauseating ideology, and are virulently anti-Semitic…[and] are composed of fanatical and brutal individuals.
The best known of these is the Azov Regiment, whose emblem is reminiscent of the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division, which is revered in the Ukraine for liberating Kharkov from the Soviets in 1943, before carrying out the 1944 Oradour-sur-Glane massacre in France. [….]
The characterization of the Ukrainian paramilitaries as “Nazis” or “neo-Nazis” is considered Russian propaganda. But that’s not the view of the Times of Israel or the West Point Academy’s Center for Counterterrorism. In 2014, Newsweek magazine seemed to associate them more with… the Islamic State. Take your pick!
So, the West supported and continued to arm militias that have been guilty of numerous crimes against civilian populations since 2014: rape, torture, and massacres….
The integration of these paramilitary forces into the Ukrainian National Guard was not at all accompanied by a “denazification,” as some claim.
Among the many examples, that of the Azov Regiment’s insignia is instructive:
, The military situation in Ukraine, as seen by an ex-member of the Swiss strategic intelligence
In 2022, very schematically, the Ukrainian armed forces fighting the Russian offensive were organized as:
The Army, subordinated to the Ministry of Defense. It is organized into 3 army corps and composed of maneuver formations (tanks, heavy artillery, missiles, etc.).
The National Guard, which depends on the Ministry of the Interior and is organized into 5 territorial commands.
The National Guard is therefore a territorial defense force that is not part of the Ukrainian army. It includes paramilitary militias, called “volunteer battalions” (добровольчі батальйоні), also known by the evocative name of “reprisal battalions,” and composed of infantry. Primarily trained for urban combat, they now defend cities such as Kharkov, Mariupol, Odessa, Kiev, etc.
PART TWO: THE WAR
As a former head of analysis of Warsaw Pact forces in the Swiss strategic intelligence service, I observe with sadness—but not astonishment—that our services are no longer able to understand the military situation in Ukraine. The self-proclaimed “experts” who parade on our TV screens tirelessly relay the same information modulated by the claim that Russia—and Vladimir Putin—is irrational. Let’s take a step back.
The Outbreak Of War
Since November 2021, the Americans have been constantly threatening a Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, the Ukrainians at first did not seem to agree. Why not?
We have to go back to March 24, 2021. On that day, Volodymyr Zelensky issued a decree for the recapture of the Crimea, and began to deploy his forces to the south of the country.
At the same time, several NATO exercises were conducted between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, accompanied by a significant increase in reconnaissance flights along the Russian border. Russia then conducted several exercises to test the operational readiness of its troops and to show that it was following the evolution of the situation.
Things calmed down until October-November with the end of the ZAPAD 21 exercises, whose troop movements were interpreted as a reinforcement for an offensive against Ukraine. However, even the Ukrainian authorities refuted the idea of Russian preparations for war, and Oleksiy Reznikov, Ukrainian Minister of Defense, states that there had been no change on its border since the spring.
In violation of the Minsk Agreements, Ukraine was conducting air operations in Donbass using drones, including at least one strike against a fuel depot in Donetsk in October 2021. The American press noted this, but not the Europeans, and no one condemned these violations.
In February 2022, events came to a head. On February 7, during his visit to Moscow, Emmanuel Macron reaffirmed to Vladimir Putin his commitment to the Minsk Agreements, a commitment he would repeat after his meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky the next day.
But on February 11, in Berlin, after nine hours of work, the meeting of political advisors to the leaders of the “Normandy format” ended without any concrete result: the Ukrainians still refused to apply the Minsk Agreements, apparently under pressure from the United States.
Vladimir Putin noted that Macron had made empty promises and that the West was not ready to enforce the agreements, the same opposition to a settlement it had exhibited for eight years.
Ukrainian preparations in the contact zone continued. The Russian Parliament became alarmed; and on February 15 it asked Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of the Republics, which he initially refused to do.
On 17 February, President Joe Biden announced that Russia would attack Ukraine in the next few days. How did he know this? It is a mystery.
But since the 16th, the artillery shelling of the population of Donbass had increased dramatically, as the daily reports of the OSCE observers show. Naturally, neither the media, nor the European Union, nor NATO, nor any Western government reacted or intervened.
It would be said later that this was Russian disinformation. In fact, it seems that the European Union and some countries have deliberately kept silent about the massacre of the Donbass population, knowing that this would provoke Russian intervention.
At the same time, there were reports of sabotage in the Donbass. On 18 January, Donbass fighters intercepted saboteurs, who spoke Polish and were equipped with Western equipment, and who were seeking to create chemical incidents in Gorlivka.
They could have been CIA mercenaries, led or “advised” by Americans and composed of Ukrainian or European fighters, to carry out sabotage actions in the Donbass Republics.
In fact, as early as February 16, Joe Biden knew that the Ukrainians had begun intense shelling of the civilian population of Donbass, forcing Vladimir Putin to make a difficult choice: to help Donbass militarily and create an international problem or to stand by and watch the Russian-speaking people of Donbass being crushed.
If he decided to intervene, Putin could invoke the international obligation of “Responsibility To Protect” (R2P). But he knew that whatever its nature or scale, the intervention would trigger a storm of sanctions.
Therefore, whether the Russian intervention was limited to the Donbass or went further to put pressure on the West over the status of Ukraine, the price to pay would be the same.
This is what he explained in his speech on February 21. On that day, he agreed to the request of the Duma and recognized the independence of the two Donbass Republics, and, at the same time, he signed friendship and assistance treaties with them.
The Ukrainian artillery bombardment of the Donbass population continued, and, on 23 February, the two Republics asked for military assistance from Russia. On 24 February, Vladimir Putin invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which provides for mutual military assistance in the framework of a defensive alliance.
, The military situation in Ukraine, as seen by an ex-member of the Swiss strategic intelligence
In order to make the Russian intervention seem totally illegal in the eyes of the public, Western powers deliberately hid the fact that the war actually started on February 16. The Ukrainian army was preparing to attack the Donbass as early as 2021, as some Russian and European intelligence services were well aware.
In his speech on February 24, Vladimir Putin stated the two objectives of his operation: “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine. So, it was not a question of taking over Ukraine, nor even, presumably, of occupying it; and certainly not of destroying it.
From then on, our knowledge of the course of the operation is limited: the Russians have excellent security for their operations (OPSEC) and the details of their planning are not known. But fairly quickly, the course of the operation allows us to understand how the strategic objectives were translated on the operational level.
Demilitarization:
ground destruction of Ukrainian aviation, air defense systems and reconnaissance assets;
neutralization of command and intelligence structures (C3I), as well as the main logistical routes in the depth of the territory;
encirclement of the bulk of the Ukrainian army massed in the southeast of the country.
Denazification;
destruction or neutralization of volunteer battalions operating in the cities of Odessa, Kharkov, and Mariupol, as well as in various facilities in the territory.
Demilitarization
The Russian offensive was carried out in a very “classic” manner. Initially—as the Israelis had done in 1967—with the destruction on the ground of the air force in the very first hours.
Then, we witnessed a simultaneous progression along several axes according to the principle of “flowing water”: advance everywhere where resistance was weak and leave the cities (very demanding in terms of troops) for later.
In the north, the Chernobyl power plant was occupied immediately to prevent acts of sabotage. The images of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers guarding the plant together are of course not shown.
The idea that Russia is trying to take over Kiev, the capital, to eliminate Zelensky, comes typically from the West…. But Vladimir Putin never intended to shoot or topple Zelensky. Instead, Russia seeks to keep him in power by pushing him to negotiate, by surrounding Kiev. The Russians want to obtain the neutrality of Ukraine.
Many Western commentators were surprised that the Russians continued to seek a negotiated solution while conducting military operations. The explanation lies in the Russian strategic outlook since the Soviet era.
For the West, war begins when politics ends. However, the Russian approach follows a Clausewitzian inspiration: war is the continuity of politics and one can move fluidly from one to the other, even during combat. This allows one to create pressure on the adversary and push him to negotiate.
From an operational point of view, the Russian offensive was an example of previous military action and planning: in six days, the Russians seized a territory as large as the United Kingdom, with a speed of advance greater than what the Wehrmacht had achieved in 1940.
The bulk of the Ukrainian army was deployed in the south of the country in preparation for a major operation against the Donbass. This is why Russian forces were able to encircle it from the beginning of March in the “cauldron” between Slavyansk, Kramatorsk and Severodonetsk, with a thrust from the East through Kharkov and another from the South from Crimea. Troops from the Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (LPR) Republics are complementing the Russian forces with a push from the East.
At this stage, Russian forces are slowly tightening the noose, but are no longer under any time pressure or schedule. Their demilitarization goal is all but achieved and the remaining Ukrainian forces no longer have an operational and strategic command structure.
The “slowdown” that our “experts” attribute to poor logistics is only the consequence of having achieved their objectives. Russia does not want to engage in the occupation of the entire Ukrainian territory. In fact, it appears that Russia is trying to limit its advance to the linguistic border of the country.
Our media speak of indiscriminate bombardments against the civilian population, especially in Kharkov, and horrific images are widely broadcast. However, Gonzalo Lira, a Latin American correspondent who lives there, presents us with a calm city on March 10 and March 11.
It is true that it is a large city and we do not see everything—but this seems to indicate that we are not in the total war that we are served continuously on our TV screens. As for the Donbass Republics, they have “liberated” their own territories and are fighting in the city of Mariupol.
Denazification
In cities like Kharkov, Mariupol and Odessa, the Ukrainian defense is provided by the paramilitary militias. They know that the objective of “denazification” is aimed primarily at them. For an attacker in an urbanized area, civilians are a problem. This is why Russia is seeking to create humanitarian corridors to empty cities of civilians and leave only the militias, to fight them more easily.
Conversely, these militias seek to keep civilians in the cities from evacuating in order to dissuade the Russian army from fighting there. This is why they are reluctant to implement these corridors and do everything to ensure that Russian efforts are unsuccessful—they use the civilian population as “human shields.”
Videos showing civilians trying to leave Mariupol and beaten up by fighters of the Azov regiment are of course carefully censored by the Western media.
On Facebook, the Azov group was considered in the same category as the Islamic State [ISIS] and subject to the platform’s “policy on dangerous individuals and organizations.” It was therefore forbidden to glorify its activities, and “posts” that were favorable to it were systematically banned.
But on February 24, Facebook changed its policy and allowed posts favorable to the militia. In the same spirit, in March, the platform authorized, in the former Eastern countries, calls for the murder of Russian soldiers and leaders. So much for the values that inspire our leaders.
Our media propagate a romantic image of popular resistance by the Ukrainian people. It is this image that led the European Union to finance the distribution of arms to the civilian population. In my capacity as head of peacekeeping at the UN, I worked on the issue of civilian protection. We found that violence against civilians occurred in very specific contexts. In particular, when weapons are abundant and there are no command structures.
These command structures are the essence of armies: their function is to channel the use of force towards an objective. By arming citizens in a haphazard manner, as is currently the case, the EU is turning them into combatants, with the consequential effect of making them potential targets.
Moreover, without command, without operational goals, the distribution of arms leads inevitably to the settling of scores, banditry, and actions that are more deadly than effective.
War becomes a matter of emotions. Force becomes violence. This is what happened in Tawarga (Libya) from 11 to 13 August 2011, where 30,000 black Africans were massacred with weapons parachuted (illegally) by France. By the way, the British Royal Institute for Strategic Studies (RUSI) does not see any added value in these arms deliveries.
Moreover, by delivering arms to a country at war, one exposes oneself to being considered belligerent. The Russian strikes of March 13, 2022, against the Mykolayev air base follow Russian warnings that arms shipments would be treated as hostile targets.
The EU is repeating the disastrous experience of the Third Reich in the final hours of the Battle of Berlin. War must be left to the military and when one side has lost, it must be admitted.
And if there is to be resistance, it must be led and structured. But we are doing exactly the opposite—we are pushing citizens to go and fight, and at the same time, Facebook authorizes calls for the murder of Russian soldiers and leaders.
Some intelligence services see this irresponsible decision as a way to use the Ukrainian population as cannon fodder to fight Vladimir Putin’s Russia…. It would have been better to engage in negotiations and thus obtain guarantees for the civilian population than to add fuel to the fire. It is easy to be combative with the blood of others.
THE MATERNITY HOSPITAL AT MARIUPOL
It is important to understand beforehand that it is not the Ukrainian army that is defending Mariupol, but the Azov militia, composed of foreign mercenaries.
In its March 7, 2022 summary of the situation, the Russian UN mission in New York stated that “Residents report that Ukrainian armed forces expelled staff from the Mariupol city birth hospital No. 1 and set up a firing post inside the facility.”
On March 8, the independent Russian media Lenta.ru, published the testimony of civilians from Mariupol who told that the maternity hospital was taken over by the militia of the Azov regiment, and who drove out the civilian occupants by threatening them with their weapons. They confirmed the statements of the Russian ambassador a few hours earlier. The hospital in Mariupol occupies a dominant position, perfectly suited for the installation of anti-tank weapons and for observation.
On 9 March, Russian forces struck the building. According to CNN, 17 people were wounded, but the images do not show any casualties in the building and there is no evidence that the victims mentioned are related to this strike. There is talk of children, but in reality, there is nothing. This does not prevent the leaders of the EU from seeing this as a war crime. And this allows Zelensky to call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
In reality, we do not know exactly what happened. But the sequence of events tends to confirm that Russian forces struck a position of the Azov regiment and that the maternity ward was then free of civilians.
The problem is that the paramilitary militias that defend the cities are encouraged by the international community not to respect the rules of war.
It seems that the Ukrainians have replayed the scenario of the Kuwait City maternity hospital in 1990, which was totally staged by the firm Hill & Knowlton for US$10.7 million in order to convince the United Nations Security Council to intervene in Iraq for Operation Desert Shield/Storm.
Western politicians have accepted civilian strikes in the Donbass for eight years without adopting any sanctions against the Ukrainian government. We have long since entered a dynamic where Western politicians have agreed to sacrifice international law toward their goal of weakening Russia.
Part Three: Conclusions
As an ex-intelligence professional, the first thing that strikes me is the total absence of Western intelligence services in accurately representing the situation over the past year…. In fact, it seems that throughout the Western world intelligence services have been overwhelmed by the politicians.
The problem is that it is the politicians who decide—the best intelligence service in the world is useless if the decision-maker does not listen. This is what happened during this crisis.
That said, while a few intelligence services had a very accurate and rational picture of the situation, others clearly had the same picture as that propagated by our media… The problem is that, from experience, I have found them to be extremely bad at the analytical level—doctrinaire, they lack the intellectual and political independence necessary to assess a situation with military “quality.”
Second, it seems that in some European countries, politicians have deliberately responded ideologically to the situation. That is why this crisis has been irrational from the beginning. It should be noted that all the documents that were presented to the public during this crisis were presented by politicians based on commercial sources.
Some Western politicians obviously wanted there to be a conflict. In the United States, the attack scenarios presented by Anthony Blinken to the UN Security Council were only the product of the imagination of a Tiger Team working for him—he did exactly as Donald Rumsfeld did in 2002, who “bypassed” the CIA and other intelligence services that were much less assertive about Iraqi chemical weapons.
The dramatic developments we are witnessing today have causes that we knew about but refused to see:
on the strategic level, the expansion of NATO (which we have not dealt with here);
on the political level, the Western refusal to implement the Minsk Agreements;and
operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbass over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022.
In other words, we can naturally deplore and condemn the Russian attack. But WE (that is: the United States, France and the European Union in the lead) have created the conditions for a conflict to break out.
We show compassion for the Ukrainian people and the almost 5 million refugees. That is fine. But if we had had a modicum of compassion for refugees from the Ukrainian populations of Donbass massacred by their own government and who sought refuge in Russia for eight years, none of this would probably have happened.
[….]
Whether the term “genocide” applies to the abuses suffered by the people of Donbass is an open question. The term is generally reserved for cases of greater magnitude (Holocaust, etc.). But the definition given by the Genocide Convention is probably broad enough to apply to this case.
Clearly, this conflict has led us into hysteria. Sanctions seem to have become the preferred tool of our foreign policies. If we had insisted that Ukraine abide by the Minsk Agreements, which we had negotiated and endorsed, none of this would have happened.
Vladimir Putin’s condemnation is also ours. There is no point in whining afterward—we should have acted earlier. However, neither Emmanuel Macron (as guarantor and member of the UN Security Council), nor Olaf Scholz, nor Volodymyr Zelensky have respected their commitments. In the end, the real defeat is that of those who have no voice.
The European Union was unable to promote the implementation of the Minsk agreements—on the contrary, it did not react when Ukraine was bombing its own population in the Donbass.
Had it done so, Vladimir Putin would not have needed to react. Absent from the diplomatic phase, the EU distinguished itself by fueling the conflict. On February 27, the Ukrainian government agreed to enter into negotiations with Russia.
But a few hours later, the European Union voted a budget of 450 million euros to supply arms to Ukraine, adding fuel to the fire. From then on, the Ukrainians felt that they did not need to reach an agreement.
The resistance of the Azov militia in Mariupol even led to a boost of 500 million euros for weapons.
In Ukraine, with the blessing of the Western countries, those who are in favor of negotiation have been eliminated. This is the case of Denis Kireyev, one of the Ukrainian negotiators, assassinated on March 5 by the Ukrainian secret service (SBU) because he was too favorable to Russia and was considered a traitor.
The same fate befell Dmitry Demyanenko, former deputy head of the SBU’s main directorate for Kiev and its region, who was assassinated on March 10 because he was too favorable to an agreement with Russia—he was shot by the Mirotvorets (“Peacemaker”) militia.
This militia is associated with the Mirotvorets website, which lists the “enemies of Ukraine,” with their personal data, addresses, and telephone numbers so that they can be harassed or even eliminated; a practice that is punishable in many countries, but not in the Ukraine.
The UN and some European countries have demanded the closure of this site—but that demand was refused by the Rada [Ukrainian parliament].
In the end, the price will be high, but Vladimir Putin will likely achieve the goals he set for himself. We have pushed him into the arms of China. His ties with Beijing have solidified.
China is emerging as a mediator in the conflict…. The Americans have to ask Venezuela and Iran for oil to get out of the energy impasse they have put themselves in—and the United States has to piteously backtrack on the sanctions imposed on its enemies.
Western ministers who seek to collapse the Russian economy and make the Russian people suffer, or even call for the assassination of Putin, show (even if they have partially reversed the form of their words, but not the substance!) that our leaders are no better than those we hate—sanctioning Russian athletes in the Para-Olympic Games or Russian artists has nothing to do with fighting Putin. [….]
What makes the conflict in Ukraine more blameworthy than our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya? What sanctions have we adopted against those who deliberately lied to the international community in order to wage unjust, unjustified, and murderous wars?
Have we adopted a single sanction against the countries, companies, or politicians who are supplying weapons to the conflict in Yemen, considered to be the “worst humanitarian disaster in the world?”
To ask the question is to answer it… and the answer is not pretty.
*Jacques Baud is a former colonel of the General Staff, ex-member of the Swiss strategic intelligence, and specialist on Eastern countries.
He was trained in the American and British intelligence services. He has served as Policy Chief for United Nations Peace Operations. As a UN expert on rule of law and security institutions, he designed and led the first multidimensional UN intelligence unit in Sudan.
He has worked for the African Union and was for 5 years responsible for the fight, at NATO, against the proliferation of small arms. He was involved in discussions with the highest Russian military and intelligence officials just after the fall of the USSR.
Within NATO, he followed the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and later participated in programs to assist the Ukraine.
He is the author of several books on intelligence, war and terrorism, in particular Le Détournement published by SIGEST, Gouverner par les fake news , L’affaire Navalny . His latest book is Poutine, maître du jeu? published by Max Milo.
This post is mirrored. You can find the original in French here
My gut tells me that Zelensky will not be happy with the end game...and will disappear...with a sh**load of money.
Who knew that the russians were pure as the driven snow? Yeah, totally balanced and unbiased.
“The qualifier “pro-Russian” suggests that Russia was a party to the conflict, which was not the case”
Fourth sentence says Russia was not a party to the conflict?
Say what? I stopped reading right there. Totally garbage article. I guess the Russian tanks and Little Green men didn’t really exist. Wow.
Thanks for posting this
Looks like written by Putin himself.
The Putin fluffers are so desperate for validation they just keep reposting the same nonsense.
“International Marxist Tendency reaches new low, republishes Swiss conspiracy theorist!”
“In a new low for the (International Marxist Tendency), they have just republished some articles by a man named Jacques Baud, a former Swiss army officer and intelligence expert turned conspiracy theorist and Kremlin asset. According to his Wikipedia page, this loon has appeared on far-right conspiracist channels like the French-language Russia Today and the far-right YouTube channel TV Libertés, founded by a former member of the French National Front! His sordid record, which includes Darfur genocide denial and claims that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria are ‘false flags’, have been exposed by the journalist Antoine Hasday. (I do in fact read French – unfortunately for these idiots. I encourage all my readers to put the linked article in Google Translate and read about the false claims of this Kremlin stooge.) The IMT editorial board saw fit to publish, in translation, some of his outlandish claims about what is now going on in Ukraine. I do not have the time or the inclination to read this garbage in full or refute his idiotic claims, as such a source is obviously not trustworthy in any way. To think that this sect has degenerated so far since my departure that it would publish such drivel should not be a source of surprise to me. I cannot believe that people I once looked up to as paragons of rationality and wise leaders and teachers of the working-class could be reduced to this. They are so desperate to dig up dirt on NATO and the Ukrainian government that they are now trawling in the very sewers of public discourse for any village idiot to come forward and confirm their bigoted views – and who fits the bill better than a repentant ‘defector’ from the ruling class?”
Sounds like KGB talking points.
Arnaud Bertrand@RnaudBertrand
Fascinating interview by @gregtabibian
of Alain Juillet, former head of France’s intelligence services DGSE (French CIA equivalent) under Chirac: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AQhGxsprH8A
I’ll translate and summarize what he says about Ukraine, and notably on the origins of the war.
He says everyone saw the Ukraine war coming, that “only those who know nothing about this matter can say it was a surprise”.
To him, the main reason is because the West “refused since 2014 to tell the Ukrainians to respect the Minsk agreements”
He says “the French, the Germans, the Russians and the Ukrainians signed the Minsk agreements in 2014 but the Ukrainians didn’t respect the agreement during the entire period since. And the Russians were telling us all the time to get them to respect the agreement but we didn’t.”
He says it’s unacceptable to invade a country but he also says that “we are co-responsible for it.”
The host notes that “former foreign ministers of France like De Villepin or Védrine are accusing the Americans of being responsible”.
He replies: “yes, that’s what I am saying.”
On the promise made to Russia in the early 1990s not to expand NATO he says that former french Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, who was in the negotiations, is adamant that everyone at the time (including Baker and Kohl) agreed that NATO would not expand East of reunified Germany.
He said the Americans weren’t true to their word and pushed for the eastern expansion of NATO “in total contradiction with what was said [to Russia]”.
He says the long-term origin of the divide in Ukraine dates back from the opposition between the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Russian tsarist empire.
He adds that since then there’s been a divide in Ukraine between those two sides.
He reminds that during WW2 the “Austro-Hungarian side” fought alongside the nazis while the Russian side fought against them.
To him today is “clearly a continuation of this, it’s being going on for 300 years.”
The host asks him if the Maidan revolution in 2014 was organized by the Americans.
He replies: “One thing that particularly caught my attention is Victoria Nuland, who is currently the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, saying that...”
...it cost the U.S. $5bio to get into Ukraine and that they weren’t going to leave now after that. What does that mean, Madame Nuland? She is by the way the same one who, when told the Europeans weren’t happy, said ‘f*ck the EU’. So it’s pretty clear...”
He adds that what happened before the Maidan revolution was Ukraine forbidding the Russian language:
“You have 40% of the population that speaks Russian.
So you forbid a language that large percentage of the population uses under the pretext that you don’t like the Russians.”
He states that it’s “not serious, it’s not possible. That was already a very bad start.”
What happened after is that “they took the Azov battalion and the others and told them to go to Donbass to hit pro-Russian Ukrainians on the head.”
“What they also did was cut the water supply in Crimea. That was before Putin took it back.
So there was a terrible anti-Russophone/anti-Russian population policy in Ukraine. That’s what people don’t realize in the West.
It’s no wonder the Russian side reacted.”
“Putin, seeing that, he isn’t stupid. He sees people who are on his side getting oppressed, he’s not going to go against them...”
The host asks him why the Americans train and maintain close relations with extreme right groups like the Azov.
He replies that “those militia, given their ideology, we could be very confident that they were going to fight against the people in Donbass.”
“They were the perfect representation of the Western side of Ukraine and of course they hated the Russians.”
To him it’s wrong to think there are no nazis in Ukraine. “When Hitler invaded Ukraine, Stepan Bandera, who was a Ukrainian nationalist, saw it as an opportunity to be...
...freed from the Russians by siding with the nazis.”
He adds that “the Das Reich nazi division that committed the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre [a famous massacre in France committed by the nazis during WW2], they were all Ukrainians, 95% of them were Ukrainians.”
He continues: “When they say today ‘there are no nazis in Ukraine’, I say ‘who are you kidding?’.”
He adds: “It’s obvious in Ukraine there is a divide between those with pro-Nazi tendencies - not all of them of course, there are also decent people who are neither nazis nor...
...Russians but simply Ukrainians - but you do have strong tendencies on both sides as well. [...]
He adds that “unfortunately these are things we can’t say on mainstream media because if you say something like this on official TV they cut you and never invite you again.”
On the interdiction of Russian media like RT in France he says: “I thought we were not at war? If we are at war, it’s normal to forbid the enemy’s media on our territory but if we’re not at war, what allows us to ban some media just because we disagree with their views?”
“This is called a thought crime. That’s very serious. In the country of liberty it raises a certain number of issues... I’m not defending RT at all, that’s not the issue, it’s a question of principle.”
That’s the gist of it.
Alain Juillet is an old time “Gaulliste”, which in foreign policy means he is very attached to an unaligned and independent France, i.e. not blindly following the Americans on their crusades like France has done with our latest presidents since Sarkozy.
His uncle Pierre Juillet was Jacques Chirac’s mentor (the last French president faithful to Gaulliste principles in foreign policy, famously refusing the Irak war) and his grandfather was De Gaulle’s classmate so you can hardly find anyone more Gaulliste than him!
His views on the origins of the conflict largely correspond with what the immense majority of top strategic thinkers believe ⬇️
How long can this disconnect between what those “in the know” believe and what the public at large is told continue?
_____________________
February 28, 2022
How Western Strategic Thinkers Warned US-NATO over Ukrainian Conflict
By Prnigeria -March 5, 2022
Russia-Ukraine
How Western Strategic Thinkers Warned US-NATO over Ukrainian Conflict
By Rnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand)
*1. George Kennan,* America’s foreign policy strategist, the architect of the U.S. cold war strategy. As early as 1998 he warned that NATO expansion was a “tragic mistake” that ought to ultimately provoke a “bad reaction from Russia”.
*2. Kissinger, in 2014*. He warned that “to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country” and that the West therefore needs a policy that is aimed at “reconciliation”.
He was also adamant that “Ukraine should not join NATO”
*3. John Mearsheimer -* arguably the leading geopolitical scholar in the US today – in 2015: “The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked […] What we’re doing is in fact encouraging that outcome.”
*4. Jack F. Matlock Jr., US Ambassador* to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991, warning in 1997 that NATO expansion was “the most profound strategic blunder, [encouraging] a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat […] since the Soviet Union collapsed”
*5. Clinton’s defense secretary William Perry* explained, in his memoir, that to him NATO enlargement is the cause of “the rupture in relations with Russia” and that in 1996 he was so opposed to it that “in the strength of my conviction, I considered resigning”.
*6. Stephen Cohen,* a famed scholar of Russian studies, warning in 2014 that “if we move NATO forces toward Russia’s borders […] it’s obviously gonna militarize the situation [and] Russia will not back off, this is existential”
*7. CIA director Bill Burns* in 2008: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for [Russia]” and “I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests”. (He was then Ambassador to Moscow in 2008 when he wrote this memo). He is now director of the CIA. ‘08 memo ‘Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines’
*8. Russian-American journalist Vladimir Pozner*, in 2018, stated that: NATO expansion in Ukraine is unacceptable to the Russian, that there has to be a compromise where “Ukraine, guaranteed, will not become a member of NATO.”
*9. Malcolm Fraser, 22nd prime minister of Australia,* warned in 2014 that “the move east [by NATO is] provocative, unwise and a very clear signal to Russia”. He adds that this leads to a “difficult and extraordinarily dangerous problem”.
*10. Paul Keating,* former Australian PM, in 1997: expanding NATO is “an error which may rank in the end with the strategic miscalculations which prevented Germany from taking its full place in the international system [in early 20th]”
*11. Former US defense secretary Bob Gates* in his 2015 memoirs: “Moving so quickly [to expand NATO] was a mistake. […] Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching [and] an especially monumental provocation”
*12. Pat Buchanan*, in his 1999 book A Republic, Not an Empire: “By moving NATO onto Russia’s front porch, we have scheduled a twenty-first-century confrontation.”
*13. In 1997, a group of individuals including Robert McNamara, Bill Bradley & Gary Hart* wrote a letter to Bill Clinton warning the “US led effort to expand NATO is a policy error of historic proportions” and would “foster instability” in Europe. Today it’s fringe, traitorous position.
*14. Pat Buchanan,* in his 1999 book A Republic, Not an Empire: “By moving NATO onto Russia’s front porch, we have scheduled a twenty-first-century confrontation.”
*15. Dmitriy Trenin* expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the LT, the most potentially destabilizing factor in US-Russian relations, given the level of emotion & neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership.
*16. Sir Roderic Lyne,* former British ambassador to Russia, warned a year ago that “[pushing] Ukraine into NATO […] is stupid on every level.” He adds “if you want to start a war with Russia, that’s the best way of doing it.”
*17. Even last year, famous economist Jeffrey Sachs*, writing a column in the FT warning that “NATO enlargement is utterly misguided and risky. True friends of Ukraine, and of global peace, should be calling for a US and NATO compromise with Russia.”
*18. Fiona Hill* :”We warned [George Bush] that Mr. Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action. But ultimately, our warnings weren’t heeded.”
*19. Aleksandr Dugin*, in 1997, had predicted everything that Putin has done, in his book “Foundation of Geopolitics.”
Everybody knew that trying to rope Ukraine into NATO was crossing Russia’s red line, but now people would like to hold up Russia as a villain. After having done everything to teeter on the redline. And this happened only AFTER Biden came to power.
It provides credible answers to previously head-scratching questions.
It is consistent with views from other objective observers whom I respect (AB Vigano)
This guy conveniently ignores the Crimea annexation by Russia as it never happened and never influenced events that followed said annexation. Here is WIKI quote: “ In late February 2014, following the Revolution of Dignity that ousted the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, Russian troops were deployed to Crimea, occupying government buildings.[7][8] The Republic of Crimea declared its independence from Ukraine following a disputed referendum on 16 March, deemed illegal by Ukraine and most countries,[9][10][11] which was held on the issue of reunification with Russia; its official results showed over 90% support for reunification, but the vote was boycotted by many loyal to Ukraine.”
He might’ve been trained by intelligence services, but his bias is obvious. Militarization of this internal Ukranian political conflict is totally on Putin and his minions.
There is another Ex Swiss Government Insider on Eastern European Affairs (Blog):
thanks for posting this
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