Today’s New York Times “Morning Briefing” distributed by email opens with:

Mariupol refuses to surrender

Residents of Mariupol, Ukraine, braced for renewed attacks after the Ukrainian government rejected Russia’s ultimatum to surrender the besieged and ravaged southern port city. Efforts to reach hundreds of thousands of people trapped there remained fraught with danger

Let us note the contradiction between the headline and the body of the report. It was not the city that refused to surrender but the government of Zelensky in Kiev that did so, even knowing the consequence will be continued suffering and death of the civilian population in the time it takes the Russian forces to “neutralize” the kamikaze Ukrainian militants entrenched in secure hide-outs they have built up over the past eight years. These include underground passages in the city’s many heavy industry manufacturing sites. The militants are still holding more than 100,000 residents hostage and shooting anyone trying to use the humanitarian corridors opened to them by the Russians. This we know from Russian television interviews with arriving refugees from Mariupol who managed to evade their Ukrainian captors by car or on foot. The mopping-up operation is likely to go on for more than a week to come, according to the Donbas military command, which is in charge of the task.

Further down the “Morning Briefing” we find the following:

Kyiv: A missile strike — one of the most powerful explosions to hit the Ukrainian capital since the invasion began — turned a once-bustling shopping mall into a smoldering ruin. Russian forces are aiming artillery, rockets and bombs at civilian as well as military targets, after failing to quickly seize control of Ukraine’s major cities.

Note:  “once bustling shopping mall”.  Here the attentive reader can smell a rat. The propagandist author is speaking about the complex’s function as a commercial hub in the past tense, because he/she knows that it had ceased to be commercial and became a military operations center in time present, and was therefore perfectly acceptable as a target for Russian attack.  All of this is confirmed by the death toll that other mainstream media attribute to the Russian strike:  8 dead.

It is most interesting that this morning’s broadcast of BBC World News presents footage of the proofs from the Russian military command which the official spokesman General Igor Konashenkov showed yesterday on Russian state television:  a reconnaissance drone capturing the arrival and departure of a Ukrainian military vehicle at the shopping center. Today’s BBC report directly acknowledges sotto voce that the center was being used for military purposes.

Lest the reader think that the BBC news writers have just become “agents of Putin,” the fact remains that BBC and other Western reporting retains its absolute blackout on a major feature of current Russian news reporting: the daily devastation and deaths in the Donbas republics of Donetsk and Lugansk caused by Ukrainian artillery and missile strikes from across the line of demarcation. The scenes of artillery strikes on hospitals and residential buildings in Donbas are a mirror image of what we are shown on the BBC and similar in Kiev and other major Ukrainian cities.  Just as in Mariupol, the Ukrainian combatants adjacent to the Donbas are in well fortified positions that they have created over the past eight years in anticipation of this show-down and it may take carpet bombing to destroy them. But that is the subject of another essay I will issue later today.

Nor, to my knowledge, has the BBC or any other mainstream media outlet shown other proofs on Russian television that the supposed bombing damage of the theater in downtown Mariupol was a ‘false flag’ operation prepared by Ukrainian propagandists who had herded the civilians into the bomb shelter basement before blowing up the superstructure and laying the blame at the Russian attackers.

****

 We see the same kind of miniscule death toll from destruction of multistory apartment buildings in Ukrainian cities. In those cases, too, it attests to the fact that the civilian functions of the structures had been replaced by purely military use, meaning for embedding artillery and other strike weapons to attack Russian forces.  All of this belies President Biden’s characterization of Russian military conduct as amounting to “war crimes” by its indiscriminate attack on civilian targets. Indeed, to my knowledge, such use of civilian structures to embed combatant units is itself an egregious war crime under the rubric ‘use of human shields.’

Finally, I note that the American ambassador in Moscow was yesterday called to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to receive written warning that Russia will sever diplomatic relations with the United States if Biden does not retract his words.  The threat is very likely to be implemented, though only after the President’s visit to Brussels ends later this week.  Surely the Russians do not want their cutting diplomatic ties with the United States to result in simultaneous, knee-jerk reaction of European leaders, resulting in severance of ties with all of Europe.  However, that cannot be excluded at this point, when Europe is plotting to stop taking delivery of all Russian hydrocarbons, suicidal as this may be for the economies of the Old Continent.

The old saying that “those whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad” is coming to pass in the capitals of Europe. Anyone who questions my judgment would be wise to watch the video of a high quality analysis of the economic disaster to come as a result of the incompetence of European decision makers with regard to the sanctions they are imposing: “Charles Gave magistral sur les sanctions contre la Russie : ‘C’est l’Europe qui va s’effondrer!’”    –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4fvsFnzg4A&feature=youtu.be

 (received courtesy of Eric Dissy on my LinkedIn account).

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022