All it takes for a war to commence is the executive decision of enough “representatives” to kill millions. A parliamentary or federal system of representative democracy that requires a vote in order to declare war excludes the public, by design. Thus, war remains the indulgent decision of the few who never face the consequences of forcing many others to engage in it. The deliberate use of proxy war strategies further empower that tiny minority to wage unaccountable foreign war via outsourcing that sidesteps their own legal and political processes that would otherwise make them accountable. There is nothing to stop this happening, which is why it constantly happens. International law and the mechanism of the United Nations has zero ability to affect this and is therefore unfit for purpose.
As of now, only Ukraine seems to be At War. Russia isn’t At War with Ukraine and none of Ukraine’s sponsors are At War with Russia. That’s just the first layer of surrealism of the biggest European war since WW2. Whatever you’re looking at and reading about isn’t legally or technically War therefore you have zero War to endorse, oppose or shut down. The cash and gear is all for an outsourcing exercise in cross-border, osmotic democracy installation, not War.
Even Ukrainian citizens have no ability to force the democratic regime that now rules them through dictatorial martial law to negotiate or surrender despite all of them being literally on the chopping block. There is no democracy in Ukraine of any kind any more. Why? Because War! WAR! is why it had to suspend its democracy. That’s not what its Constitution says but it is what Zelensky dictated and he is the martial law dictator now because WAR!
The docs say elections and democracy should still exist in Ukraine even during WAR!
What is real and true? The little man on a permanent come down who never smartens up, or the actual paperwork?
So WAR! as a means to tell lies about the Constitution and install dictatorship via martial law is a government-imposed, high speed, circular logic that the public has no hope of breaking into without getting limbs ripped off. That’s by design. That’s the way a washing machine works: keep the door closed and stand back, even if you’re watching your shirts and Calvins turn blood red from the head banging round and round among the suds inside. Yes, that’s your head in there. It’s being washed for your own good.
Why create Ukraine narratives for public consumption?
What, therefore, is the point of expending effort to manage any Western public perception about this foreign, single party WAR! if the public has no say in it anyway? VST can only speculate. The Ukraine war is supported by both sides of your governments. There is no political opposition to it, so if you oppose it no one above you gives a monkey’s toss. When this is combined with a defacto Uniparty set up, there is no such thing as a political loss from this war because voting out one half of the Uniparty results in faces changing while Uniparty policy remains the same.
When it comes to perception management, Ukraine has all sorts of diligent, professional journalists beavering away on TV and in the press, helping us understand what we need to in order to get onboard with the tough but necessary task of fighting them over there so we can dunk biscuits in tea over here.
Here’s a Ukrainian journalist on national TV at the beginning of the war helping to set out what would be required to protect his nation.
15.03.2022 Ukrainian journalist Fakhrudin Sharafmal quoted an associate of Adolf Hitler in a live broadcast on Channel 24 and said he would kill Russian children, urging his colleagues to do the same.
"I will allow myself to quote Adolf Eichmann: 'To destroy a nation you have to kill their children first. Because killing their fathers will only make them grow up and take revenge. And if you kill the children, they will never grow up and the nation will disappear. The AFU cannot kill Russian children because it is forbidden by the rules of war and conventions, including the Geneva Convention.
But I am not in the AFU. If I get the chance to massacre the Russians, I will definitely do it. I will stick to the Eichmann doctrine and do everything to ensure that neither you nor your children will ever live on this earth....We need a victory.
And if that requires slaughtering all your families, I'll be one of the first to do it. Hail to the nation! We hope there will never be such a nation as Russia and the Russians on this earth again."
18 months later, here is a Western backed US “journalist” who also happens to be a Sergeant in the employ of the Ukrainian government telling you how to perceive the single party WAR!
Yes, that’s state sponsored Ukrainian propaganda for English speakers. Believe it or not, that’s aimed at adults. The “dehumanise the enemy” technique is implemented so literally and so poorly that it has no effect. The cardboard cut out doesn’t help matters. This would be funny if it weren’t backed by all Western governments and related to actual people actually killing and maiming each other on an optional and avoidable basis. YouTube is willingly hosting this material.
Possible reasons why we helpless, uncomprehending spectators need to be so effectively managed, directly commanded about what to think, and told who is human and who isn’t could include:
The recent legacy of Ukraine’s Maidan coup and the myriad dark, bizarre, counter narrative events that have taken place there since at least 2014, and probably earlier (corruption, the illegal externally sponsored coup, bioweapons engineering, human trafficking and human organ harvesting are long standing and engulf Western governments);
The intertwined and ever growing trail of USA corruption, money laundering and worse that revolves around the Biden family and administration, and the Obama administration;
The long standing US foreign policy stance towards Russia of defeat, regime change, proxy control and capture, manifesting as a medium term “overextension” strategy that has itself become overextended;
The next chapter in the US Forever War against the next iteration of “our greatest enemy” to justify the war economy (read “standard money laundering methodology on speedballs”);
Distraction, bait and switch tactics from the true macro economic situation that has built for decades in various cycles and super cycles, combined with the live WEF reset agenda and re-engineering of nations and societies via COVID, Agenda 21/30, Net Zero etc;
The USA’s strategic takedown of the EU to ensure its ongoing vassal status for a few more decades.
VST is now legally obligated to interrupt this message and ensure that you have been served your full daily quota of The NATO Ukrainian Truth. Therefore you must now watch and believe this 56 second, unbacked and bizarrely scripted episode of the equally bizarrely named Russia Hates The Truth:
There are at least three layers of ironic subtext in that segment and zero evidence backing any of its fanatically worded assertions. A fourth layer comprises the obvious fact that the person or persons (it’s likely the work of just one person with a GoPro and a laptop) producing it have literally no idea how poor and even counterproductive their work is, or that it is an indelible record of their desperation and that of the regimes sponsoring and endorsing it. A fifth layer of irony is that this propaganda is more proof that theft and corruption is rampant in Ukraine because despite the money spigot being wide open, clearly none of it made it through to this essential propaganda messaging. Somewhere between NATO coffers and this video’s release, so much money was stolen, embezzled or misappropriated that there was none left to make propaganda good enough to convince infants that Russian people are all inhuman monsters made of cardboard. This is racist in the same way that Nazis calling Jews rats is considered anti-Semitic.
The perception and narrative management isn’t just about the now of WAR! It’s about shaping and containing future mass behaviour and perception post-war on matters that transcend or are separate from war. It is all part of your daily, two minute HATE! that further conditions us.
You have literally zero control over a WAR! (and your government’s part in it) that has been deliberately pursued for many reasons, not just because of a Neocon desire to suppress Russia via combat.
At the same time, this war and modern Western wars in general are created partly because they are a way to literally control the way citizens perceive the world and the powers in it. The USA is perceived to be the dominant force because it wages war. This is the first time in decades that key players in the world are actively destroying that long standing perception by acting outside of and in contradiction to US narrative. The effect is unsettling.
VST is pinning a lot on one WAR! If you think that’s unreasonable how do you explain why the Ukraine proxy war has racked up the largest number of combatant deaths and casualties while attracting more money and resources at greater rate than any WAR! since WW2? Why doesn’t this control you?
Death rate and scale is a metric of importance
The peak in the ‘70s is Vietnam but includes combat and civilian deaths. Rough estimates put total civilian casualties at circa 1.4 million Vietnamese, such is the scale of the horror of that 20 year conflict (it’s sobering to be reminded that Vietnam was as long as Afghanistan Mark 2 and equally pointless). Russia’s invasion, by comparison, has been going for only 18 months but total combat deaths in that period are in the order of:
Ukraine 150 - 400,000 deaths
Russia 50 - 80,000 deaths
The above Ukrainian combat deaths range is so wide because:
the EU and western sources have recognised circa 100,000 deaths in Nov 2022
losses in Bakhmut could be above 60,000
Russia has expressly stated 43,000 Ukraine deaths since June 2023
which gets us to 203,000. Some flaky recent “satellite image analysis” of the growth of Ukrainian cemeteries has resulted in the following conjecture that the upper bound could be as high as 400,000.
⚡️🇷🇺🇺🇦 Another method to assess the real losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are satellite images of cemeteries.
The information was provided by the American blogger "Sanya from Florida", so this can hardly be called a Russian fake. According to US satellites, 123,000 fresh graves have appeared in the country's 7 largest cemeteries alone.
And the total number of new burials is approaching 400,000. That's how many died for the Kiev regime.
VST only references this dodgy conjecture as a vague upper bound. It could be total bullshit but imagine if it was half credible? That’s absolutely horrendous destruction. Factor 3x for casualties:
Ukrainian casualties 450k - 1.2m
Russian casualties 150 - 240k.
Ukraine’s population has nose-dived from 56m in 1994 to 43m in 2021 to 36m now. A lot of people buggered off before the borders were closed but a lot of men, women and children are now rotting before their time.
There is a lot of footage out there of abandoned corpses going right back from now to Azovstal in May last year if not before. The states of decay shown in footage demonstrates that the corpses had been in place for anything from a week to months (literal skeletons in clothing and armour). It’s not confined to Ukrainian corpses. MIAs don’t appear in the kill count. If those corpses are all either completely undeclared or MIA until recovered, where’s all their soldier salary going? You’re paying those salaries, by the way. Ukraine has no independently functioning economy and is bankrupt. Its Western sponsors are totally responsible for all funds that underpin and pay for the operations of the Ukrainian state. But you don’t have any say in what your nation or the Ukrainian state does with the debt you now owe.
Despite these horrific death and casualty numbers the western narrative of this war has long employed a surreally dissociated narrative that literally embodies the saying, “all the gear, no idea.”
All the gear, no idea
If you thought the Gulf War was bad for warping the view of what war is by showing loops of a bomb’s eye view of a bunker ventilation shaft, it’s likely that Ukraine has done something much stranger to the perception of war amongst Western civilians who are not taking part in it.
As VST has said before, the Western narrative is concerned with money and gear, not troop numbers or their capabilities. People come some distant and muted third behind money and things. Why is that?
Stories of how Ukrainian conscripts are barely trained across the EU to then immediately go do heroic, skilful combat feats cycle through the news between increasing admissions of brutal combat losses and horrific intimations or explicit depictions of ruined lives.
We were told to believe that a conscript can go from zero to effective infantry trooper in just 5 weeks of EU/UK training then be expected to maximally perform on the frontline under all circumstances in the kind of war USEUNATO has not engaged in for 50 years or more. We have to believe that and ignore the fact that a UK infantryman’s basic training lasts 26 weeks and a Royal Marine’s lasts 36 weeks. Why is that training so long if Ukroheroes take only 5 weeks? Anyone else spot a massive defence budget saving opportunity that Ben Wallace seems to have missed?
From lawyers to bricklayers, they are flown in from across Ukraine. The aim is to turn the new recruits into soldiers in just five weeks, providing basic military skills — infantry tactics; weapons handling; patroling; first aid; evacuation — before they return to fight on the frontline.
Look at this insight into the quality of a Ukrainian conscript’s UK training:
Think about what you are watching, what you are being told to think and what it actually means.
Why are the faces of all of these troops and instructors hidden, with the exception of the British instructor? It’s almost like they or the people behind this video are ashamed for them to be identified. It’s like these people are being dehumanised. All of them apart from the instructors are being sent to their deaths so their anonymity does not protect them from getting targeted or killed.
Conscription has been active in Ukraine since practically the beginning of the WAR! This means that to claim its army is a volunteer force is a lie that gets bigger on an arithmetic basis the longer the WAR! goes on. This false claim is generally inferred here by using “Felix” who says he was a volunteer (he could be an actor). He might be a volunteer but how many others have been force drafted? Felix claims he and his pals were “small business owners”. Conscripts are from multiple layers of society (richer ones will be more able to bribe their way out of the draft, meaning it is the poor who are more likely to be drafted, killed and injured). As is directly admitted, many of these trainees have no experience, proving VST’s earlier characterisations of “zeroes” to be correct. 70%+ of these people will be killed or injured (as borne out by casualty rates) on the fat end of kill ratios that the West openly admits are anywhere from 5:1 to 7:1 in favour of the Russians. To willingly engage in combat at those ratios as the smaller force is guaranteed suicide that makes for a guaranteed loss in attrition warfare.This all makes for foreseeable and guaranteed decimation of every one of the socioeconomic nodes each of these zero experience people represent. The Ukrainian government has chosen to destroy the nation of Ukraine in a positive feedback loop of simple arithmetic that started at zero and gets more negative day by day, week by week.
The British instructor claims that these dead men walking have “picked it up really, really quickly.” What, exactly, did they pick up and how does that compare to the actual frontline against Russia?
What is depicted in this British propaganda is Fighting In a Built Up Area (FIBUA) training that is clearly unrealistic and impractically short. One glimpse at actual FIBUA footage from either side in Ukraine (or any historical FIBUA footage of an appropriate war type) shows us that infantry Hell is something that cannot be trained for in a five week all expenses paid trip to the UK or EU.
Remember, the Ukrainian WAR! is nothing like any war fought by USEUNATO since Vietnam if not before, so FIBUA training borne out of conflicts post Vietnam does not reflect FIBUA engagements in Ukraine now. Fighting in Ukraine isn’t like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. Here’s proof:
This is real world footage of Bakhmut. How does that environment compare to what you saw in the training depiction? It’s nothing like it, is it? What’s different?
Large amounts of the civilians were evacuated (~55k) but many remained (possibly ~15k) for various reasons and in various circumstances.
The troops were being trained in a pristine environment with zero debris, even ground, structurally intact buildings and no random risk.
The environment and structures are low complexity compared to Bakhmut.
The entire theatre has been decimated by constant heavy external fire, which cannot be simulated. FIBUA fighting here is undertaken while bombs, missiles, artillery and tank fire rained down on troops fighting in streets and buildings. This environment is riddled with physical hazard, toxicity and “stochastic” risks. There is no uniformity in a destroyed environment. Look at the frequency and spacing of shell craters on the ground to get an idea of the volume of fire forces there were under.
Death is random. Listen to any soldier’s account of who gets hit and who survives. Now concentrate that into FIBUA fighting under heavy fire. To simulate this, one would have to constantly just “take out” trainees on a random basis to demonstrate that no matter how they fought, x% of them will be killed or wounded no matter what. Imagine what that would do to your conscripts’ morale at the training stage. “You correctly demonstrated the skills we have taught you but you are all dead just because that’s the way this job you were forced into works. It’s like this because your side has less of everything compared to your enemy. Less of you would have died if different strategy, tactics, timeframes, resources, training and arsenals had been utilised by your commanders. This is something you will never control and cannot change, so 70% of you are guaranteed to die once you get to the front line no matter what you do or how we train you now. If you desert you will be killed, so escape is as risky as fighting. Your Commander in Chief will not negotiate under any circumstances, so he has condemned most of you to certain death or disablement.” How’s that for the terms of a slave’s working conditions?
It is impossible to simulate true fear, true fear of death, true will to live. This means that zero experience conscripts are at an instant disadvantage in CQB/FIBUA to any fighting force with experience of these things, until they have fought and survived long enough to have such experience and the capability that comes from it. This is often described by soldiers as the acceptance of their own deaths, which variously numbs them and liberates them from aspects of fear and morality in order to operate, fight, survive and win.
What can 5 weeks of training do to prepare anyone for circumstances that are outside that tiny training curriculum? How do you fight around, amongst and on top of civilians you know are there? What do you do if your commanders decide to use civilians in human shield tactics?
How do you process civilians in real time if you encounter them during FIBUA fighting? If your chances of dying radically increase by trying to protect civilians or move them to safety but no one will ever really know you didn’t do that, or that you even did things that effectively killed the civilians, how are you compelled to help the civilians? If your commanders order you to ignore those civilians, what do you do?
Watch a little of this aerial footage (below), then ask yourself how a total of 5 weeks of infantry training can be effective under those conditions.
This is your CQB assault in a stairwell. You are the third man in the video. What do you think happens next after the end of the video?
If the two front assaulters were killed or incapacitated by enemy above and you, as the third assaulter, rendered aid while the enemy was still above, what are your chances of being killed next? What happens to you and your remaining squad if the enemy above freely drops frag grenades onto your position because your decision to render aid took pressure off the enemy? Rewind the video. How many men were in your squad to begin with? What was the outcome of this contact and what happened to you?
Your squad encounters this in the basement of a high-rise building. What does it mean?
What weapon system did this? What purpose would such acts serve?
If it was your side’s weapon system and your side committed those acts, what does that mean?
This WAR! is a charity. Give generously
No one seems to ask whether WAR! is ever or should ever be done by charity. Who has ever explained why we should “donate” money and equipment to both national and mercenary forces all in the employ of Ukraine?
The grift and chisel of this non-existent WAR! starts at home. It is a dead cert that the scale of official and unoffical fraud, theft, exploitation and worse “to support Ukraine” is off the charts. Some private individuals have been called out in the press but look through the right channels and you can see more obvious grift and fraud committed by literal zero-hours LARP-ers. It’s nuts
Tony Scott from Garden Grove, California, United States of America.
Former USMC Combat Marksmanship Instructor. Came to Ukraine to shoot TikTok videos and play instructor with Trident Defence initiative. Prior to Ukraine this man was infatuated with Counter Strike and making OPSEC videos. Jokes on him, he's still doing nothing useful, he's force training civilians who don't want to fight. Also trying to sell gear which has been soiled with his comrades blood. Might as well go home and play some more video games.
This mercenary is literally selling scavenged equipment from the dead and injured. Why?
Note: the picture shows a set of Russian aid rations on the left. Transferring or sharing that item with another was classified as a crime in Ukraine in summer 2022 (see below) so this mercenary is engaged in crime and proves his intent to commit crime inside Ukraine.
Beyond individual corruption and grift, there’s the now admitted wholesale fraud, theft, grift and exploitation inside Ukrainian institutions and throughout its sponsors.
Why, for example, are useless M113 APCs that can barely resist 7.62 small arms rounds being sold to Ukraine for use on a battlefield employing mines, 120mm+ artillery and tank rounds, ATGMs, 40mm grenades, and calibres from 30mm upwards? How much are those M113s being sold for, given that they are operationally useless and were known during Vietnam to be mobile coffins?
Luckily, not everyone in the West is grifting, fraudulent scum. Here’s a genuine hero doing the right thing for the right reason and making a real difference to the lives of Ukrainians over there and our lives over somewhere that’s not over there. As The Telegraph showed us back in March 2022, conditions in the first half of the war were as brutal as they ever were and foreign volunteers were selflessly making a difference while risking their lives, largely at their own expense.
These volunteers soaked up as much as they could but everyone has a limit and eventually help is needed. That’s where some access to mainstream outlets with big circulations who were willing to back such brave fighters came in handy. Thank you, Telegraph. VST may not like much of your Ukraine coverage but at least you are doing right by people who genuinely deserve it.
This guy and people behind him were so active that they affected American legislation around ownership and carriage of weapons systems, all while securing funds from private donors for the mercenary and foreign volunteer forces in Ukraine. That does go to show that private actions can make a big difference. If only more people had taken that on board in the pandemic then perhaps the world would be in a better place.
The trouble with GoPro
The problem with people carrying GoPros in war and having an internet connection is that the narrative gets really messed with. There’s two key disruptors: attention-seeking that can stray into narcissism, and the ability to use independent and uncontrolled footage be that one’s own or recovered from others.
Another soldier of fortune was carried out on a stretcher after a meeting with the Russian army. The French mercenary is done fighting.
There’s always the possibility that you’ll film yourself being embarrassed or caught short.
It is in this generation of real footage that the surrealism and horror of the kinetic bits of modern war, or the distant observation of it, begins to crystallise. The fidelity, viewpoints and much of the violence of these videos matches aspects of the raft of modern videogames. In fact, the close up deaths by gunfire are a lot less messy than most Hollywood or videogame depictions, except in some extreme instances which are clear war crimes. When soldiers get shot, they don’t fly back with big blood sprays. Gravity becomes their instant master and they collapse at 9.8 m/s2
Some of the most frightening munitions footage is of the Russian TOS-1A thermobaric MLRS munitions, called “flamethrowers” or “Solntsepek” (“Blazing Sun”). Not only is their kill zone large but the nature of these fuel-air munitions and the massive, visible shockwave front is utterly terrifying. The kinds of deaths that come from such weapons are documented to range from the instant to the horrendously painful and lingering.
The initial explosive charge detonates as it hits its target, opening the container and dispersing the fuel mixture as a cloud. The typical blast wave of a thermobaric weapon lasts significantly longer than that of a conventional explosive… a thermobaric flame front accelerates to a large volume, which produces pressure fronts within the mixture of fuel and oxidant and then also in the surrounding air. Conventional countermeasures such as barriers (sandbags) and personnel armour are not effective against thermobaric weapons. The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique—and unpleasant. ... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs. ... If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as with most chemical agents.
The footage released by both sides is actively used in a next-level form of propaganda that tracks the state of numbness that sophisticated videogaming has clearly instilled in modern society. It is horrific, bizarre, compelling, devastating and almost utterly divorced from some aspects of reality despite it all being the most real and real-time record of modern warfare ever seen. One could be watching clips of Call of Duty or Battlefield being played on low resolution. To even describe it in such inhumane terms is a crime of sorts. We can now directly spectate on live war and watch soldiers die in real time. We just need more Twitch streaming from the field and soldiers would stand a chance of making several bucks if they can live more than the claimed average of 4 hours in Bakhmut.
Much of this footage is not far beyond the gore of the “entertainment” industry. This in itself should be a massive warning sign that gives everyone pause for thought about the mental state of our societies. But it won’t. We are now conditioned to accept, support and fail to oppose our own wars. We are trained to tolerate what war looks like when it is truly revealed to us.
There is literally no such thing as Western media reportage of the Ukraine war. There is only a narrative that is spun remotely. Embedded journalists are propagandists and always have been since the lessons learned in Vietnam. Very few produced candid accounts that were accepted by those they depicted, see Evan Wright’s Generation Kill or Tim Hetherington’s Restrepo.
But what in those two presentations of war - that the subjects seemed to endorse - is true? Tim Hetherington tells you something about what the truth of war reportage (or narrative) is: it is someone intentionally telling you a story.
Restrepo is a distillation of what Sebastian I have really come to understand about young men and war, and we've been doing it for many years. My job as a storyteller is to build a bridge to you, the audience… by kind of making some very complicated political discussion or making a thing where people watch and feel bad because you're showing dead Afghanis, that's not really a constructive way for people to engage in the war and, ultimately, those things are part of the discussion and they can be part of the film. They are shown; we show civilian casualties but it's by focusing on the young men - we take people you know and you can identify with. Maybe you have brothers or fathers or people around there and we make you identify with them.
In a time when GoPros makes soldiers the storytellers of their own truth, it is clear that pro-Ukrainian, Western backed channels contain and promote totally artificial “reality” footage. It is so extreme that the Western press have actively promoted liars, shysters and grifters, and helped to solicit money for them from citizens, which is tantamount to aiding and abetting fraud, illegal combatants (mercenaries) and war criminals. Here is proof.
Remember him? James Vasquez is the guy The Telegraph and US News 12 showcased, promoted and supported as something he was not (see above). What does this tell us? The mainstream press is consciously lying to you and propagandising you using what looks like the most real form of reportage and footage available. It is mentally defrauding you and trying to get you to believe war is a free-for-all charity to which you should give your money and support and bend laws for.
Except even the most real looking footage isn’t real at all. So much so that The Telegraph and News 12 can’t or won’t tell.
Just as The Lancet and the NEJM could not use their professional processes to detect the Surgisphere scientific fraud that killed people, The Telegraph and News 12 along with other professional, mainstream news channels could not detect or would not expose a fraudster when they had direct access to him. They did not subject him to any form of professional, journalistic due diligence, such as a background check and service record validation. It took a year for the New York Times (not official Western government bodies or The Telegraph or News 12) to state that James Vasquez was a total fraud.
‘A Million Lies’
One of the best-known Americans on the battlefield is James Vasquez. Days after the invasion, Mr. Vasquez, a Connecticut home-improvement contractor, announced that he was leaving for Ukraine. His local newspaper told the tale of a former U.S. Army staff sergeant who left behind his job and family and picked up a rifle and a rucksack on the front line.
Since then, he has posted battlefield videos online, at least once broadcasting his unit’s precise location to everyone, including the opposing side. He used his story to solicit donations. “I was in Kuwait during Desert Storm, and I was in Iraq after 9/11,” Mr. Vasquez said in a fund-raising video. He added, “This is a whole different animal.”
Mr. Vasquez, in fact, was never deployed to Kuwait, Iraq or anywhere else, a Pentagon spokeswoman said. He specialized in fuel and electrical repairs. And he left the Army Reserve not as a sergeant as he claimed, but as a private first class, one of the Army’s lowest ranks.
Frontline volunteers said Ripley’s delivered the equipment to Ukraine without required documentation listing the actual buyers and recipients. Recently, the federal authorities began investigating the shipments, U.S. officials said.
In his defense, the group’s founder, a retired U.S. Marine named Lt. Col. Hunter Ripley Rawlings IV, provided deal documents to The Times. But those records show that, just as the volunteers said, Ripley’s was not disclosed to the State Department as the buyer.
Ripley’s says it has raised over $1 million, some of it thanks to the former Connecticut contractor, Mr. Vasquez, who claimed to be the group’s chief strategy officer and promoted Ripley’s to his online audience.
In the days after The Times approached Mr. Vasquez and others, members of the squabbling groups — Ripley’s, the Legion, the dissident Legion members and more — escalated their feud. They accused one another of misappropriating funds and lying about their credentials.
How bad a fraudster do you have to be when none other than the presenter of propaganda-for-braindead-infants, Russia Hates The Truth, starts slagging you off?
On Wednesday, Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, an American journalist who enlisted to fight in Ukraine's armed forces, disputed Vasquez's accounts of combat in the war-torn country. Newsweek has reached out to Vasquez for comment via LinkedIn message.
Writing on Twitter, she said Vasquez "is not and has not been" in Ukraine's armed forces. She provided a link to Vasquez's Twitter account—where he had previously posted war-related content—which has been deleted as of Thursday morning.
In a series of posts, Ashton-Cirillo said she had "stayed out of it while other soldiers, real soldiers, called him out" to avoid "controversy." She said she had met Vasquez three times, during each of which he was a "civilian."
"It was shocking to see him say he was going on a mission to Soledar after we already left," she wrote. Soledar, a town in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine, was the site of heavy fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces earlier this year before Kyiv's fighters pulled back to preserve the lives of its personnel, a Ukrainian military spokesperson said at the time.
In a separate post, also uploaded on Wednesday, Ashton-Cirillo said she had privately communicated with Vasquez, and that he "confirmed to me in writing that he does not and has not had a contract with the Armed Forces of Ukraine."
Newsweek could not independently confirm Ashton-Cirillo's claim of written correspondence.
Vasquez has appeared several times in international media since the start of the Ukraine war in February 2022.
Vasquez's wife, Tina, previously told the Daily Mail in March 2022 that she was "super proud of my husband, he's my hero and he's met a lot of great people over in Ukraine."
In an interview with local outlet News 12 Connecticut in September 2022, Vasquez said he was in Ukraine for a second stint, speaking from a command post in eastern Ukraine. He became visibly emotional in the interview as he discussed his time in the country.
This is the Western press admitting that both it and the US and Ukrainian government have all enabled a fraudster to enter a war zone and illegally take part in combat while defrauding people, the US and Ukrainian governments. If he engaged in any form of actual combat, he would be guilty of criminal offences in the US and Ukraine, up to and including murder. He was not under any form of contract so he is nothing more than a foreign citizen attempting to kill people, while enriching himself by giving the impression he intends to kill people. His supporters, enablers and donors have endorsed all of that. Vasquez is not an isolated case. How can he be if that’s how easy it is in the Western world to defraud your way into murder and theft? There’s loads of people doing this and there’s multiple accessible channels tracking these people, one of which is the Telegram channel, Track a Nazi Merc. It is only our assumption that any of the people appearing in that channel are in Ukraine on a legal basis. There is literally no proof of that. Who is the official body from the mercenaries’ nations responsible for checking the legality of any of their actions? Ukraine isn’t outing illegal foreigner war tourists.
The propagandist, Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, has, in Newsweek (above), literally admitted to knowing that James Vasquez was acting illegally and against US and Ukrainian law but chose to “stay out of it” and was not the source of Vasquez being outed. That makes Ashton-Cirillo an accessory to Vasquez’s crimes in both countries. That admission is an insight into the mind and intelligence of Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, who appears to have decided to tell you what to think while admitting to crimes.
What else can be found in amongst the mercenaries in Ukraine?
Nothing special, just that the lieutenant colonel of the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine, Denis Desyatnik, is photographed with a Nazi and does Nazi salutes himself.
This single example from that channel clearly shows swastikas and Nazism among foreign fighters. But who’s Denis Desiatnik? Probably no one.
Lieutenant Colonel Denis Desyatnik does not rule out that following the results of peace talks with Russia, Ukraine may give up Donbass.
"This is the territory of Ukraine, but the population is completely pro-Russian, people cannot be changed there," the intelligence officer stressed.
According to the Times of Israel, Desiatnik had an interesting reputation before he found gainful employment in Ukraine’s armed forces.
Some mention of him is made in Alexander Portnoy’s blog on the Times of Israel and one can find a page on foreigncombatants.ru that profiles him. Some of the information chimes with Portnoy’s output, which could come from the same source and/or his social media output. Desiatnik appears to be an Uzbek who served in Israel’s IDF but displays Nazi sympathies and is now running a mercenary operation in Ukraine.
Thankfully, it would appear that even a mercenary Ukrainian Nazi commander may be willing to compromise with Russia in the pursuit of eventual peace. How does that compare to the public belief of his Ukrainian masters?
Kyrylo Oleksiyovych Budanov is the Chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. Before the current offensive, he disagreed with his mercenary subordinate’s suggestion to cede territory. He prefers to believe that Ukraine will totally retake Crimea and, having done so, will find among the 3 million Crimeans the people whose psyche and actions mark them out for “physical destruction”. It’s possible that the translation is off. That’s pretty much the only saving grace Budanov may have for suggesting that mass execution of civilians is appropriate justice for unspecified thoughts, attitudes and actions. It’s easier to see how Desiatnik, with his Nazi sympathies, got a job and was promoted to Lt. Colonel under Budanov.
There are other glitches in the matrix in a similar vein. Look at the embedded tweet of the Kyiv Independent, then read its walk back.
Consider what Kyiv Independent is trying to say after its “corrections”. Anyone who took any form of humanitarian aid from any Russian source with the intention at any time of sharing it with one or more other people is guilty of “collaborationism”. So theoretically, if you received a Russian ration pack and ate it all yourself or destroyed it, you’re not a collaborator. But if you shared or gave any of its contents to your baby, infant or child, you have distributed it and are guilty of collaboration. If you are Tony Scott who is literally trying to sell Russian aid ration packs, you are guilty of an offence with a 15 year jail term and you incriminated yourself in your own social media adverts.
Welcome to the world of diktats and propaganda distributed by people who aren’t very clever but are clearly harbouring - at the very least - anger, empathy and control issues. The Kyiv Independent clearly isn’t independent. Tony Scott is clearly a sociopath with narcissistic tendencies.
Now familiarise yourself with a Russian ration kit that is distributed by soldiers.
Rations aren’t the best food in the world, but it looks like the Russian packs contain poison.
Weird, huh? Loads of dead people bearing the white ties that signify Russian citizenship or sympathies, with Russian ration packs nearby. Did Russians:
give sympathetic civilians poisoned ration packs and then allow incriminating photos to be taken after they were dead? Or
hand out rations then kill sympathetic civilians, or vice versa then leave them to be photographed? Or
plant white ties and rations on dead bodies then allow them to be photographed?
These pictures come from the images and footage that Ukraine said was the Bucha massacre that it blamed on Russia. Believe what you want about Bucha. The two things VST has to say about it are:
basic chronological analysis of the Ukrainian version of events creates questions that Ukraine doesn’t try to answer before one gets into any other details.
the subsequent Western presentation of the event doesn’t provide any credible substantiation of Ukraine’s claims, avoids the chronological questions and, in the case of the PBS Frontline programme, had to employ specific, obvious and highly misleading linguistic, presentation and conditioning techniques to convince viewers of the possibility that:
Russia committed a mass murder of sympathetic citizens wearing white armbands days before it abandoned the town; and
left trails of self-incriminating evidence on either side of road; despite
having had time to clean up after itself.
One can contrast the content of PBS’s programme with Scott Ritter’s analysis and ponder what truth could ever be determined to a standard required by any war crimes tribunal, irrespective of whether anyone could be dragged into the dock.
One can then ponder why, given the mountain of evidence that incriminates Russia in Bucha, no war crimes case relating to it has been filed with the ICC by anyone, anywhere. Why is it that the vaunted ICC arrest warrant for Putin and Lvova-Belova relates only to the illegal mass deportation of children from Ukraine, the specific contents of which are wholly secret?
Pre-Trial Chamber II considered, based on the Prosecution’s applications of 22 February 2023, that there are reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population and that of unlawful transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, in prejudice of Ukrainian children… The Chamber considered that the warrants are secret in order to protect victims and witnesses and also to safeguard the investigation.
VST has already highlighted that The Grayzone has investigated “evidence” on which this warrant is based and found it self-contradictory, based on unverified and meaningless open source intel and has no primary testimony whatsoever.
But there was “primary evidence” of a civilian massacre left lying on the streets of Bucha, directly accessed by Ukrainian troops and authorities, yet no one has filed a case and issued an arrest warrant based on that evidence. Why not?
What this Reuters article will tell you is that there are a lot of people beavering away trying to variously invent the legal means to prosecute Putin et al in ways that are basically unconventional and outside the norms of international and national law, in fora that either don’t yet exist and/or will not have meaningful validity. In the meantime, Russia is generally labelled as being guilty of war crimes and even genocide by various voices who fail to provide definitions or logic to back the genocide claim.
This genocide claim is repeatedly made by a NAFO 24/7 talking and grifting shop operating on Twitter. VST recently questioned them on it as follows:
If genocide was occurring, how many non combatant casualties would have occurred by now? Huge amounts because there would be indiscriminate killing of civilians and troops in order to systematically kill all Ukranians. What does the data tell us?
UN civilian casualties Feb 22-Jun 23:
24,862 (9083 killed 15779 injured) of which:
20,073 occurred in territories controlled by the Ukranian government (DPR & LPR 9,966, other areas 10,107)
4,789 occurred in territories controlled by Russian forces (DPR LPR 3239, other areas 1550)
Compare that total number after 18 months of war to 18 months of USA war in Iraq.
First 18 months of Iraq was at least 20051 KILLED. ALL were Iraqi (non US) casualties. This is nearly 3x the above UN Ukrainian killed figure of 7072 in Ukrainian government territory. So, to claim Russia is committing genocide on UN estimates is to definitely state USA committed genocide in Iraq over an equivalent period.
Not a single NAFO participant of 500+ made any attempt to answer that or any of VST’s other questions, verbally or in writing. They did not even refute the logic and the data and did not define “genocide”. It is defined by the UN here but that definition is so problematic that potentially every war prosecuted by the US, EU, NATO and their allies since WW2 constitutes genocide.
Dissociation: provable reality detaches from your state’s prescribed reality
All of the above are literal microcosms of peer-to-peer combat on a real battlefield that refract more and more as they radiate away. The Western narrative has constantly presented and pressed the idea that money, weapons, ammunition and “political support” in the form of mass belief is what will “win” this or any future war by psyching out adversaries and getting them to believe that they can beat you even when your fleet is less than a tenth the size of your adversary and would have to be operating thousnads of miles away from home, and when your own best buddy doesn’t believe your climas:
In his first speech as Air Chief Marsha [RAF], Sir Richard Knighton told the Air Staff’s Global Air & Space Chiefs’ Conference that the UK was prepared to take on adversaries in the wake of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
He said: “What we need to communicate, so that our adversaries comprehend that we have credible capability, is that we’re ready to fly and fight and that they will lose.”
Russia’s not for blinking and so USEUNATO has been called out at last by a peer.
If Western narrative claims about the decisiveness of its money, supplies and training are true and all have been provided at levels never seen before, why did Ukraine lose the battle for Bakhmut against a mixed force of Russian Army and PMC forces denigrated by Western governments and media? What does the current and failed offensive tell us about NATO’s claims to be able to train combined arms warfare that it hasn’t prosecuted for more than 50 years on minimum timeframes during an active conflict? Who is NATO trying to kid? You, Ukraine, Russia or someone else?
Russia has fought barely any wars since the collapse of the USSR so it should be far, far worse at warfighting than USEUNATO, who had 8 years to build defences that Russia managed to penetrate in weeks with an undersized force spread very thin. In less than 6 months Russia has established defences along a 1000km frontline that the West and its proxies cannot penetrate. How could that be? It’s as if we can’t do value for money WAR! with an 8 year head start. That’s nothing if not mass incompetence.
Here is one of the formerly most senior of the UK’s Army staff, committing his opinion and forecast to The Telegraph. If he is wrong, he is incapable of credible tactical or strategic analysis.
VST calls bullshit on what Dannatt himself admits is speculation that needs to play out within a few weeks from publication.
Now your government wants you to believe that Ukraine could have won but it won’t tell you exactly why it didn’t. Ukraine, somehow, had all the gear but not enough of an idea, even though we were giving it all the ideas as well. Dannatt would have us believe that the Ukrainians’ plan is unknown but Zaluzhny stated he’s in constant consultation with NATO and even Robert Clark claims to know its secret plans. This has to be the biggest clown show in the history of war consortia.
NATO is demonstrably lying about what it can do and now everyone knows Schrödinger's cat is dead. There is no more strategic military ambiguity across the whole of NATO. This knowledge is having immediate political and military effects around the world. Niger’s coup is a direct outcome of this knowledge. The Africans know that NATO cannot project force into the continent that will ensure a definite outcome, and modern strategic alliances change the dynamics of war on that continent and economics with it. What is happening in Niger is contingent upon NATO’s actions disarming itself while dropping its pants in Ukraine. It’s ranked 119/145 in the Global Firepower rankings, yet all of a sudden it thinks it can stand up to France, the USA and its adversarial neighbours with the help from some neighbours and maybe distant allies and a PMC.
The reality that your government won’t admit is that Ukraine and its people were never capable of winning. Fundamentally, Ukrainian leadership was always utterly incompetent when it came to either running the country or fighting Russia. Understanding the true nature of a given war and what victory in that war looks like is key. Ukraine failed to understand either despite being explicitly told over and over by Russia. The win in the Ukraine war for Ukraine was to never have fought at all and to have retained control over all the intact wealth and riches of the country so that the incompetent rulers could have siphoned off all the wealth without being disturbed or found out. Now those riches are divided, sullied and destroyed and the Biden administration is in a corner for multiple reasons tracing back to Ukraine. Russia’s backstop objective was to wreck Ukraine out of NATO and the EU. The West chose to help Russia achieve its objectives. In doing so it has wrecked NATO, the EU and itself.
But your government wants to make you dissociate from this reality and attach to some other prescribed reality. Why?
What to believe?
What do you think you should believe?
The information depicting various flavours of reality on the ground has always contradicted the Western narrative and therefore has always betrayed the Western narrative as propaganda before the West was forced to openly admit it.
That’s how ridiculous this war is. Russia doesn’t have to propagandise it to anywhere near the same extent for Westerners to realise it is winning in conventional terms. The West now admits, in its own mainstream and alt channels, that it’s losing and that it has been lying. All Russia needs to do is fight the way it has been and show footage and release statements of actual outcomes.
Despite all of this, you can find people on Twitter who openly believe the old Western propaganda and actively self-propagandise that Ukraine can, will and should win by expelling Russia, while still actively grifting amongst each other for cash and equipment. It’s utterly bizarre but it’s also an exact mirror of the mental mechanisms and belief systems that were active in COVID. Listening to these people talking to each other is incredibly disturbing. What they believe has nothing to do with simple reality. They never talk about the people doing the fighting or Ukrainian troop numbers or quality. They constantly fetishize over gear as if they were Hi-Fi enthusiasts. They cannot answer or address basic logical questions about attrition warfare. When they talk about Russians they speak in unevidenced generalisations, outlandish claims and racist tropes. Even those with military experience who speak still spout clear garbage that doesn’t stand up to events that have already happened.
If VST is telling you to believe anything at all, it’s this:
The Western narrative is Information and Cognitive Warfare that is waged by your government against you. None of it is targeted at Russia or its allies. The Russians aren’t reading our press to make determinations about what the Ukraine war is or how it’s going.
Even though you do not effectively influence your government’s prosecution of war, your government believes it must force your perception of events to align with what it tells you about its wars. Even if you totally reject the narrative, you cannot stop this war. Your government is showing you that you are powerless in the face of nonsense narrative, outright lies and all the pain they cause you in socioeconomic terms.
The mental processes involved and the outcomes of IW and CW serve wider objectives that are of use to your government and those your government serves.
This forcing of perception in relation to Ukraine is an embodiment of Orwell’s Party goal:
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,”
which paves the way for further programming with more IW and CW narrative and propaganda.
A further goal of this kind of IW and CW is Learned Helplessness.
Learned helplessness is the behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control. It was initially thought to be caused by the subject's acceptance of their powerlessness, by way of their discontinuing attempts to escape or avoid the aversive stimulus, even when such alternatives are unambiguously presented. Upon exhibiting such behavior, the subject was said to have acquired learned helplessness.
In humans, learned helplessness is related to the concept of self-efficacy; the individual's belief in their innate ability to achieve goals. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from a real or perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.
If you are repeatedly exposed to unpleasant, harmful, damaging stimuli and degrading conditions but cannot stop or control them, eventually you will stop trying to fight, then you will stop entertaining thoughts about fighting. Mental degradation sets in. Then you will utterly comply because that is the only way to limit or stop the stimuli.
If you can’t stop a war that takes us closer to nuclear destruction and that you know cannot be won by your side despite massive waste of life and money, just what can you stop? What power do you have?
It is your choice to believe that you are helpless. The mark of someone who is in a state of learned helplessness is an absence of belief that they can or should act, and an absence of the will to act.
COVID was IW and CW that forced a faulty perception, drove faulty actions, got people to reinforce this amongst each other and put two thirds of them into a long lasting mental trap that causes them to deny obvious correlation and possible causation. COVID drove two thirds of people into degrees of learned helplessness where they all waited in fear for the next command, even though the commands were nonsensical and harmful.
The Ukraine war is employing the same IW and CW in a different context for the same ends. The climate narrative is another, bigger version of all of this. If you cannot reject the smaller narratives, you cannot reject the larger one.
You choose what to believe. You choose whether to act.
You choose to do what the Uniparty tells you.
It is the Uniparty that gives you its final and most essential command, but it is you who chooses to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
Masterstroke article! Insightful and perturbing. I will share. But I lament and scream that those propaganda examples will have bigger reach than you.
Good grief, man. Prodigious output!