Another revealing and brilliantly informed essay from former US diplomat AJC Boone
23 March 2024
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).
(Source: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/ukraine-lenin-putin/ )
(Source: https://twitter.com/War_Mapper/status/1769666341676388776/photo/1)
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.
(source: https://www.rbth.com/history/333574-soviet-crimea-photos)
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 14 th 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:
The Slog 