Coming Crime against Crimea? Or: What Constrains the Unprincipled?
Mainstream media headlines from the last 24 hours are proclaiming that “ISIS” has taken credit for a mass slaughter at a performance venue in Moscow, killing dozens. Just why ISIS would be moved to strike Russia, perhaps the leading country to unambiguously disapprove the accelerating genocide in Gaza, is either 1) a puzzle wrapped in an enigma, or 2) an operational detail overlooked by the self-styled geniuses of proxy-geopolitics who have so little interest in ethical principles or boundaries that hitting Russia until she finally responds with nuclear strikes on the west is looking like the playbook. Twitter is alive with guesses about the Moscow gunmen’s paymaster: CIA, MI6 or Mossad? The brutality of this new false-flag (if false-flag it is, and I assume it to be), shows how little constrains the unprincipled, and hints at how far they are prepared to go.
CRIMEA IN THE NEWS
Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal uses the striking literary device of reverse-chronology to illuminate the logic that drives events. The play begins with a scene of the denouement toromantic rupture, and moves through to a portentous last/first scene of main characters making electrifying eye-contact for the first time. Reverse-order compels the audience to process each subsequent new scene of before through the filter of what he already knows comes after.
This is very much the sensation of retrospective truth-seeking in our current “low, dishonest decade” in the Empire of Lies, when the glitches-in-the-simulation of the parade of headlines (like ISIS nonsensically attacking Moscow right now) forcing us to work backwards (didn’t the US and UK embassies announce a coming “terrorist attack” two weeks ago?) will reveal the onion-layers of machinations and preparatory propaganda that have brought us to where we are.
That the public largely miss those machinations and brainwash seems to be accomplished through the hypnotic effect of key summary phrases, repeated endlessly (“safe and effective,” “no evidence of fraud,” “love is love”) by Experts, politicians, and media figures until they ring in our own heads as if they originated there.
The below discussion of this pattern centres on Crimea, whose restoration to Russian sovereignty is just marking its ten-year anniversary. Taking a closer look at Crimea is moreover suggested by its recent, “random” triple-mention by the technocracy’s war-making apex.
To neutralise the phony summary phrases that are circulating (e.g., “Crimea is Ukraine”), I will in the following essay first discuss the on-the-ground reality of the place, and then walk us backwards through a case-study of how the sloganizing hypnosis which appears as a disembodied voice-of-truth, is perpetrated in fact by the Narrative-spinners of, in this case, NATO and the Biden White House, and promulgated by conniving news outlets and Experts.
To begin, French President Emmanuel Macron gave a television interview on 14 March 2024 ostensibly to massage the throat of the French public into swallowing indigestible idiocy about a NATO ground-war in Ukraine, into which interview Macron unassumingly dropped the nugget that “lasting peace” required bringing Crimea under the control of (an economically and politically shattered) Ukraine. (Wait, what?)
The purpose of last weekend’s (16 March) Ukraine blitz-visit by UK Defence Minister Grant Schapps and army commander Tony Radakin was “reported” by the anointed Sunday Times: to urge President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (as if it were his decision) to “keep defense in the east, and focus on strikes on Crimea.” (Huh?)
Thirdly came the US chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Rhode Island Democrat Jack Reed, in remarks to the press on 18 March. Jammed into the last paragraph of reportage (whose headline refers to submarine readiness, of all things) was this: “Supplying Ukraine will result in their ability in 2025 to launch ‘another offensive operation which hopefully gets them to the point where they really fully cover Crimea with fires [sic!]’ to ‘hopefully force [the Russians] to the [negotiating] table’.”
No one who’s been paying attention will see this triple-bill of threats to Crimea as events that are unconnected to each other; or will fail to suspect they are a flag run up a pole signalling more, and potentially far more serious, NATO strikes on Crimea (whether nominally executed by the Kiev government or not is immaterial). Below, I will trace the US/UK/NATO fingerprints on the manufacture of ersatz public consent to the false proposition that a non-Russian Crimea is the linch pin to a just resolution of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Crimea’s apparent new prominence could imply something of a shift in p.r. strategy away from the bleak spectacle of the main frontline in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. And by “main front-line,” I do not refer to the info-war frontline — bombardment of western publics with propaganda mythology and relentless demands for “more money!” in the interest of western arms producers and the western politicians who grow fat on them. Rather, I mean the tragic mess on the ground in which Russia is slowly-but-surely meat-grinding through Ukrainian armed forces flung its way, in order to recover what it can of the southeast strip of real estate, populated primarily by ethno-linguistic Russians, that Lenin “gave” the infant state of Ukraine in the 1920s (see pale blue portion in historical map, and March 18, 2024 map of war-progress, both below).
In contrast to the mainland’s ongoing muddy slog of death and dismemberment in suspiciously fortified (if nonetheless fallen) villages like Avdiivka or Bakhmut, the dangling peninsula of Crimea — one can hear the MIC/Cabal cackling in its infinite cynicism — is a bite-sized target whose capture (or obliteration, it’s all the same to them, viz.: “really fully cover Crimea with fires,” wtf) would be a delightful black-eye to Russia precisely when the US/UK election seasons badly need a tonic of just this sort.
CRIMEA, HISTORICALLY AND NOW
And what is “Crimea” to Russia? It, famously, holds the great, deep, and protected warm-water port and Russian strategic asset of Sevastopol, home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet since its 18 th century victory against the Ottoman Empire, providing as well some 30 other deep-water harbours, access to the Mediterranean and Middle East (Syria’s Tartus), and ensured dominance over Russia’s regional sphere-of-influence (from Transdniestria around to the Caucasus).
Imagine the geopolitical power-reshuffle if NATO were able to take over Crimea and become the ruling authority in the Black Sea. Perhaps this sort of day-dream is what gets long-suffering Jens Stoltenberg out of bed in the morning… Historically, in addition to its strategic importance, Crimea was a posh watering hole for the tsarist-era well-to-do and the royal court, a literary backdrop for Pushkin and Chekhov, poignant last redoubt of the White Army resistance to Bolshevism led by General Wrangel, and site of resorts for Soviet workers (photo, below), Young Pioneers, and artists.
Demographically, the traditional Crimea-based Tatar population was gradually equalised by Russian-Ukrainian immigration through the tsarist period. In the mayhem of WWII, the Soviet government, suspecting collaboration with the Germans, abruptly ridded the peninsula of most of its Crimean Tatar inhabitants, who had in any case been treading on thin ice since showing less than full enthusiasm for the Bolshevik project in the late 1920s. Crimean Tatars were finally rounded up en masse in 1944, packed into cattle cars, and sent in the direction of Uzbekistan – see how they disappear off the population chart below. Russian-ethnic and Russian-speaking people have dominated the peninsula numerically since 1917. By 2014, Russian-speaking Russian ethnics were upwards of 75% of Crimea’s roughly 2.25 million population, which has since the end of the USSR voted along with the rest of the southeastern half of Ukraine for Moscow-leaning parties and politicians.
(source: pro-Ukrainian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ygHxZgij9A)
The 1992 dissolution of the Soviet Empire removed Moscow’s ability to dictate terms to vassal states. This gave meaning to the heretofore meaningless fact of the Black Sea Fleet’s base being officially located in Ukrainian territory. Moscow was, post-1992, obliged to negotiate leasing terms with an independent Kiev. While this was complicated enough with successive unreliable Ukrainian governments (the 1997 agreement was supposed to last until 2017 but had to be renegotiated in 2009, for instance), the CIA’s 2014 Maidan coup forced Moscow to confront losing the base entirely. To NATO.
At that moment, as described by editor at then-influential dissident-leaning radio station Ekho Moskvy, Aleksey Venediktov, President Vladimir Putin’s dilemma was simple and stark: to do nothing and let the base potentially pass to new masters, or to see the historical moment for what it was, act in Russia’s national interest, take possession of the base, and, with this, suffer an extended period of withering international opprobrium. Putin chose the latter course, though he also tried to mitigate criticism both within Russia and without by holding a popular referendum on Russian sovereignty. Putin moreover has since 2014 poured into Crimea some $20 bn in infrastructure funding – resources which had not been forthcoming from prior disorganised and corrupt Ukrainian governments — to build the Kerch Bridge to the Russian mainland, a new airport, hundreds of kindergartens, road and train improvements, and water supply. (Ukraine blocked Ukraine-sourced water upon Crimea’s vote for Russian sovereignty.)
In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev notoriously “gifted” Russian Crimea to Ukraine, most plausibly as a backhander to Ukrainian figures (like Oleksiy Kyrychenko) who helped him emerge from the jar of scorpions as primer inter pares of the Communist Party leadership after Stalin’s death. This, combined with the demographic picture and the impact of the post-2014 Russian investment, surely puts the lie to the insistence by Western “authorities” that Crimea is historically or legally or politically Ukrainian. It is not.
Why the potential serious targeting of Crimea alarms me personally, a non-Russian/non-Ukrainian, so viscerally (and why I am alert to hints of its intended doom) is that Crimea, frankly, is a wondrous fairytale place. It is a pearl of the Black Sea, with remnants of an exotic former seat of the Crimean khanate and of extinct Greek and Genoese settlements, its balmy imperial palaces extolled by Mark Twain, its champagne vineyards, its steep hills majestically overlooking the sea, its miniature-valley town of Novy Svet (New World) where three decades ago back-packing friends and I enjoyed delicious mussels plucked from the rocks and poached in sea-brine over a campfire.
But now that Crimea seems to be moving fully into the cross-hairs of an evil force that shrugs at, for instance, culpability for 500K dead Iraqi children, let’s walk backwards, Harold Pinter-fashion, to see how Crimea may have always been in those cross-hairs, but we were not meant to notice.
SMO CASUS BELLI: WEAK, IF AUDACIOUS, UKRAINIAN CLAIMS TO CRIMEA
Let’s examine how Crimea has figured in the course of the current war. The peninsula has already been targeted by Ukrainian/NATO firepower multiple times. Russia’s Sevastopol HQ was hit during a meeting of top-brass just last September (though expectations of important casualties were disappointed). The Kerch Bridge linking the peninsula to the Russian mainland was struck and damaged last July 2023 and before that in October 2022. In the Vilnius NATO Summit’s communiqué issued in the middle of last year, 11 July 2023, ensconced in its seventh paragraph’s laundry-list of bizarrely dishonest and demonising invective (including DeepState favourites: accusations of sex-crimes and crimes against children), we find the following sentence: “We do not and will never recognise Russia’s illegal and illegitimate annexations, including Crimea.” (Mark this wording, you will hear it again.)
Six months before that, in an 18 January 2023 piece, the New York Times (commonly understood to be a channel used for State Department messaging, much as the Washington Post is understood to deliver messages for the CIA into the public discourse), announced a lamentable strategic pivot as it became obvious that a reintegration of Crimea into Ukraine could be impossibly costly, but striking and damaging Crimea to cause pain to Russia remained a cost-effective alternative. The Hill summarises the NYT piece (which is behind a paywall) thusly: “While the U.S. has long held that Crimea is still Ukrainian territory, there has been little appetite to arm [Ukraine] with the resources to mount an offensive to regain control. But now American officials are starting to concede that Ukraine may need to strike Crimea, according to the Times.”
Apparently “American officials” were just catching up, as four months before, in September 2022, Newsweek “reported” that then-Ukrainian head of military forces Valeriy Zaluzhnyi (removed in February 2024) was already keen to make Crimea the physical target of Ukraine’s 2023 offensive.
Further back, right on the brink of the war’s February 2022 outbreak, consider the curious case of German vice-admiral Kai Achim Schnbach. While visiting a defense studies institute in India in late-January 2022, Schnbach made two fairly banal observations in a recorded seminar. These comments created a brief-but-intense diplomatic furore pushing Schönbach not only to walk his comments back and renounce them, but also to tender his resignation, instantly accepted.
Deutsche Welle excerpted Schönbach’s remarks as follows:
“What [Putin] really wants is respect… And, my God, giving someone respect is low cost, even no cost. … It is easy to give him the respect he really demands [as a head of state] — and probably also deserves,” Schönbach said, calling Russia an old and important country. Schönbach… added that “the Crimean Peninsula is gone: It will never come back — this is a fact.”
I find it unlikely in the extreme that Schönbach would have so blithely made the comment about Crimea being now indisputably and irretrievably under Russian sovereignty if he thought it would be career-ending. Moreover, one must assume that the subject would have arisen in conversations between naval head Schönbach and his colleagues, and that his assumption that his views were relatively uncontroversial and broadly-held would have come from such conversations.
If we scroll back further, it is in 2021, the full year before the war, where we see what looks like the new Biden Administration’s low-profile but intense stoking of conflict with Russia over Ukraine, poking the Russian bear using specifically the stick of Crimea. This began with January’s issue of Foreign Affairs magazine (the voice of the Establishment) containing an article by Michael McFaul purporting to outline America’s new, déjà-vu policy towards Russia: neo-containment, with cringeworthy pseudo-butch reference to aiming for Russia’s “soft underbelly.”
Once the post-Trump regime was fully restored to power, within weeks of Biden’s January 20 inauguration, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the actor-comedian drafted into presidential politics on a peace ticket, was moved on 26 February, 2021, to sign a decree “On Certain Measures Aimed at Deoccupation and Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the City of Sevastopol,” (the so-called “Crimea Platform”) followed on 11 March, 2021 by a decree that Ukraine would indeed follow through and “reintegrate” Crimea into its territory.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken backstopped Zelensky’s war-cry with the following press statement (reproduced below in full), cunningly issued on February 25, a day before Zelenskyy signed his own initial decree, and full of ludicrous and easily disproven claims:
As I wrote just before Russia’s 2022 invasion, Zelenskyy’s 2021 out-of-the-blue declaration as a clearly militarily-inferior Ukraine challenging its superpower neighbour to war over a piece of militarised territory whose population has moreover expressed a clear preference against subordination to Ukraine is simply irrational as a unilateral act, nor can it be seen as anything but a declaration of war against Russia. In response – and to guarantee that Zelenskyy’s foolhardy gambit for Crimea would not materialise – Russia dispatched a hundred thousand troops to relevant borders, for which Russia was then roundly castigated by the self-styled defenders of the “rules-based order.”
Here, an excerpt from the June 2021 NATO Summit communiqué (fully eight months before
the onset of armed hostilities):
‘We strongly condemn and will not recognise Russia’s illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea [which had taken place fully seven years before], and denounce its temporary [sic] occupation. The human rights abuses and violations against the Crimean Tatars and members of other local communities must end. Russia’srecent massive military build-up and destabilising activities in and around Ukraine have further escalated tensions and undermined security. We call on Russia to reverse its military build-up and stop restricting navigation in parts of the Black Sea. We also call on Russia to stop impeding access to the Sea of Azov and Ukrainian ports. We commend Ukraine’s posture of restraint and diplomatic approach in this context. We seek to contribute to de escalation. We are also stepping up our support to Ukraine.’
(Seeking to “de-escalate…. [while] stepping up support to Ukraine” would appear to be an inconsistent, not to say incoherent, strategy.)
That June 2021 NATO pronouncement was followed barely three months later, on 1 September 2021 (again, still well before the February 2022 outbreak of hostilities) by the below statement from the Biden White House, which, grotesquely, blames Russia for the casualties that Ukraine’s shelling had inflicted since 2014 on the Donbass civilian population, ridiculously suggests that Russia has “destabilised Europe,” stands by Kiev’s provocative declaration of intent to retake Crimea (hidden now behind the declaration’s obfuscatory “Crimea Platform” nickname), and exercises the categorical and anti-diplomatic phrasing used in the July 2023 Vilnius NATO Summit: “We do not and will never recognize Russia’s…annexation of Crimea”
To fully appreciate how far from common sense the Biden-NATO consensus carries us, it is sufficient to sandwich the above between vice-admiral Schönbach’s 2022 supposed heresies (“the Crimean Peninsula is gone: It will never come back — this is a fact”) for which he was so severely punished, and some private after-dinner remarks made by President Donald Trump in 2018 and leaked to two Buzzfeed writers, one a well-known promoter of the Russia-collusion conspiracy hoax, Julia Ioffe. Trump’s comments were reported with the intention of shaming him for outrageous simple-mindedness, but the effect is rather the opposite:
President Donald Trump told G7 leaders that Crimea is Russian because everyone who lives there speaks Russian, according to two diplomatic sources. Trump made the remarks over dinner last Friday during a discussion on foreign affairs at the G7 summit in Quebec, Canada, one of the diplomats told BuzzFeed News.
The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak on the matter. Russia invaded and then annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, leading to widespread international
condemnation and sanctions. The move also directly led to Russia being kicked out of the then-G8. Russian President Vladimir Putin defended Russia’s intervention in Crimea at the time, saying that he had the right to protect Russian citizens and Russian speakers in Ukraine.
During the dinner, Trump also seemed to question why the G7 leaders were siding with Ukraine. The president told leaders that “Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world,” the source said. It is unclear whether Trump’s comments were throwaway remarks said in jest, or whether he was signaling a radical departure from current US foreign policy….”
The writers cannot resist chortling into their sleeves – imagine a US president thinking Russian-speakers might not choose to submit to rule by a highly corrupt government that is hostile to Russian-speakers! What a clown! Perhaps he only spoke “in jest”…?
Trump in 2018 was repeating a view for whose divergence from the orthodoxy ABC News had previously tried to shame him during election year 2016:
At that point in end-July 2016, pundit Anatoly Karpin wrote a very persuasive piece compiling data from “the most prominent polls and referendums ever held that directly or indirectly queried Crimeans on their attitudes towards Russia and Ukraine, along with the performance of the single most ‘Russophile’ option in each case.” Karpin concluded Donald Trump “is right and cannot be stumped.”
Of course, we can extend this walking backwards business indefinitely (look at how Vladimir Putin, in the famous interview, dragged Tucker Carlson all the way back to – what was it? — the 14th century?) But let’s stop with this 2014 broadcast from just after the 2014 referendum and annexation of Crimea by Russia. Let’s ponder what the journalist calls “NATO and the US’s unhealthy interest in Crimea” while we marvel at a bullet dodged.
Bottom line: the idea that Crimea will be peeled away from Russia and “restored” to Ukraine is idiotic from every angle. Any “expert” or political figure using that plan to hold Crimea hostage to some magic alternative to Ukrainian defeat in its current armed conflict with Russia, and anyone wishing to damage Crimea in pique over what is in fact NATO’s humiliation, is a criminal. The real question to answer is: will these criminals prevail?
That a vast global public, in its ignorance, can be hypnotised into supporting or at least abiding atrocities is proven in the starkest terms at this very moment by events in Gaza. That it will happen again with Crimea is ominously suggested by the three officials quoted at the top of this essay. And that it would be just one element of a truly colossal crime (including the eradication of Russian political independence, and murder of the idea of international justice itself) could be indicated by the below announcement by the hanging judge who will soon preside over the International Criminal Kangaroo Court:
