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The Purpose Of The Babchenko Hoax
The Ukrainian secret service SBU claims it plotted the fake murder of the Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kiev to uncover a real murder plot by the Russian state. That makes no sense at all.
The hoax is one of several incidents which dangerously escalate the new cold war.
As former British ambassador Craig Murray comments on the SBU's explanation:
Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg – 19:24 UTC- 30 May 2018
If you believe that particular piece of Ukrainian propaganda you are even more stupid than I had already deduced. I wore a book on my head today to prevent Boris Johnson stealing my fridge. My fridge is so there, which is undoubted proof that my scheme worked and Johnson guilty.
Here is how the BBC presents the Ukrainian fairytale:
Ukrainian security chief Vasyl Hrytsak said a sting had been set up to catch hitmen paid by Russian forces.
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Babchenko said he had been informed a month ago about an alleged Russian plot to kill him. He said he had agreed to co-operate with a counter-operation and had been in constant contact with Ukrainian security services over the course of the past month.
He added that he thought security services had been planning the operation for up to two months.
Mr Hrytsak said the operation had begun after Ukrainian security services were informed about a Russian plot to kill the journalist.
He alleged that Russian security forces had recruited a Ukrainian citizen to find hitmen within Ukraine. He said the citizen had approached several acquaintances, including war veterans, offering $30,000 (£22,600) for the contract killing, one of whom revealed the plot to the security services.
The story as the SBU tells it:
- the Russian secret service FSB hired a Ukrainian citizen to find someone to kill Babchenko
- the Ukrainian citizen hires a killer
- the hired killer tells the SBU about it and cooperates
- the SBU knew from him who the Ukrainian middleman of the plot was and has now arrested him
If that is the story why would the SBU stage the murder hoax? They cooperated with the hired killer and had contact or access to the man who allegedly hired him. What else was there to know to prevent the alleged plot? What is the evidence they gained?
The official reason for the murder hoax was:
… to detain those responsible and prove the direct involvement of the Russian special service in the preparation of attempted murder of Mr. Babchenko.
That first part was achievable without the hoax. What about the second one? Was that achieved?
Mascha Gessen writes in the New Yorker:
Ukrainian security services claim to have proof that the middleman was hired by their Russian counterpart, the F.S.B. Babchenko offered one piece of evidence: the ostensible assassin, he said, had been shown a photograph of Babchenko taken twenty-five years ago, when he obtained his first internal passport (at the time, the document, a sort of universal domestic I.D., was issued three times in a Russian citizen’s life: at sixteen, twenty-five, and forty-five). Babchenko claims that the photo could be obtained only from security-service files.
Babchenko is 41 years old. There were plenty of recent Babchenko pictures on Facebook and the Russian social network Vkontakte as well as in the media. Are we to believe that Russian security services would use a picture of the sixteen year Babchenko dug up from an old passport file when a three seconds search would have found them hundreds of more recent pictures? Even this 'Holy Babchenko' fake is more useful to identify him than a 25 year old passport picture. The claimed 'evidence' makes no sense.
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Babchenko is by no means a holy man. There are reasons why he is despised in Russia:
Дepлorabлe Russian @TeamTrumpRussia – 6:50 UTC – 31 May 2018
Russian opposition journalist who was "killed by Putin" Arcadiy #Babchenko mourning the death of 71 passengers of a small Russian airline domestic flight crash on February 11, 2018.
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While Babchenko was "dead" a staged photo circulated that allegedly showed him killed.
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Where did it come from? Is it another "White Helmets" production?
The U.S. propaganda outlet RFL/RE, seemingly miffed about the Babchenko fake, points to a U.S. connection:
The photo was first published on the Facebook page of a former Ukrainian reporter who says he now works for a shadowy consultancy organization based in the Washington, D.C., area.
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Yevhen Lauer, the reporter who published the photo along with a caption reading “Damn It, Bitches,” told RFE/RL late on May 29 that he received it from a law enforcement source, whom he declined to identify.
Lauer, who has worked for various Ukrainian media outlets in the past, has more recently been affiliated with Trident Group LLC. Based in the Washington suburb of Arlington, the company says it specializes “in law enforcement, investigations, intelligence gathering and analysis, conflict prevention and conflict resolution, international risk control, executive protection and special operations.”
The company’s president, Yuri Koshkin, confirmed to RFE/RL that Lauer had done work for Trident but said he knew nothing of Lauer’s involvement with the SBU sting operation to nab Babchenko’s would-be killers.
Trident Group is a small company of Washington 'beltway bandits' which consults U.S. companies who want to operate in the former USSR. It is run by two former Russian military officers. Does that make it "shadowy"? It says it has offices in Arlington, Moscow and Kiev. Is it involved in the hoax or does it get framed?
The story of the fake murder of Babchenko made a big wave in "western" media. In 2016 alone 14 journalists were killed in the Ukraine after their names were put on a public hit list maintained by some Ukrainian Nazi outlet. The series of murder received less attention than the recent hoax. What drives the extraordinary sensation?
On the John Batchelor Show Professor Stephen F. Cohen points (@8:00+ min) to the accumulation of defaming anti-Russian stories just before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. He sees a parallel to the recent stories and the upcoming soccer Worldcup in Russia.
Russiagate, the deadly Skripal poisoning and their resurrection, the new sanctions against Russian oligarchs and functionaries, the reissuing of the old report accusing Russia for the downing of the MH17 flight over the Ukraine, the same false allegations of Russian hostility towards gays and now the Babchenko hoax all serve the same purpose. To "isolate" Russia in the global public opinion.
This is all part of the new cold war launched in 2014 by then President Obama after his failed attempt to nab the whole Ukraine out of Russia's sphere.
Another aspect of this cold war are the upcoming large NATO maneuvers near the Russian border just in time for the Worldcup start. I plan to detail those in a future post.
Russia is, as Prof. Cohen argues, far from being isolated. Since the launch of the U.S. campaign against it Russia gained more international standing. Despite U.S. sanctions the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) was attended by some 15,000 business people and politicians from over 120 countries. Japan's Prime Minister Abe, France's President Macron and many other high ranking personalities took part. A week before the Indian Prime Minister Modi and the German Chancellor Merkel visited Putin in Sochi.
It is the Ukraine and the U.S. who are losing international support. Even the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and Reporters Without Borders condemned the Babchenko hoax. The new steel and aluminum tariffs against Europe will further split the U.S. from its core allies.
The new cold war propaganda and its various hoaxes have a dangerous aspect. They make it more difficult for the parties to talk. President Trump would be harshly condemned in the cold-war media if he would hold a summit with President Putin. Small incidents, which under normal circumstances would be solved by a phone call and in a peaceful manner, can escalate when the parties don't know and trust each other and no longer talk.
It is in everyone's interest to avoid that.
First:
Modi is India’s prime minister, not president. The president of India is Ram Nath Kovind.
Secondly:
Babchenko is a “journalist” like I am a real jihadi. One only needs to read his book, “One Soldier’s War In Chechnya”, to understand that he has been from the start a professional Russia-hater and fantasist. Here are some excerpts of the review I wrote of this alleged “autobiography”:
“Babchenko’s account of his own experiences, which seem to have included daily beatings that ought to have killed any normal human, allied with starvation (apparently nobody fed his unit) …(is) so obviously a compendium of many individual’s experiences, put together and made his own (and of a few friends, not one of whom is identified fully and completely). It’s impossible to believe that one man could withstand all that hurt without any long term effects – and that day after day, week after week, without medical help or even food. And, also, the soldiers themselves apparently spent all their spare time stealing things from their base to sell to the Chechens across the wire, in return for food and money and booze, all of which was to be handed over to their seniors. I have no problem believing this happened once in a while, but the way he describes it, nothing would have been left.
Babchenko then goes into a brief, very brief account of his service in Chechnya in the first war. It occupies scarcely one chapter, and segues into his service with a penal battalion in Moscow after he was arrested for overstaying his leave (granted on the death of his father) due to illness. And the next we hear of him, he’s back in Chechnya, and it’s 1999, and the Second Chechen War is in full swing….
Babchenko’s account, superficially highly plausible, just doesn’t hold up when you think about it in detail. There are holes; chronological holes, logic holes, contradictions, and all without any particular reason why they should exist.
The chronological problem is great in itself. Babchenko writes in page xi of the Preface, “A few of the stories have been complied from several real episodes that have been compressed into a single period and shifted in time.” (Emphasis mine.) Why shifted? Who knows? Babchenko doesn’t say.
A great part of the book is devoted to the Battle of Alkhan Yurt, where Babchenko played an observer’s role, if one is to believe him, calling in strikes, helping carry out reconnaissance, and the like. All this begins most dramatically on New Year’s Eve, 2000, with our hero, in the ice and mud of Chechnya, thinking of home and so on (there’s also an unexplained misdating of the Russian Orthodox Christmas thrown in for good measure). Then he talks in detail about how they got into their vehicles and moved out and their travails over the next days as the battle of Alkhan Yurt developed around them.
Well, here’s what: the battle of Alkhan Yurt ended on the first of December 1999, a full month before Babchenko claims it even started, and involved claims of a massacre by Russian forces of Chechen civilians – a massacre Babchenko, an alleged witness of everything that happened, completely fails to mention, even to deny that it happened.
Then there are the logical inconsistencies.
Babchenko talks (Page 193) about a captain named Sitnikov, and says right away that he was one of those officers who get decorations but get all their men killed. Dangerous people, as Babchenko says. We follow Sitnikov and Babchenko around for several tens of pages, in and out of battle. In all this time, do we see the captain’s hunger for glory, which Babchenko has told us about at the outset, successfully poisoning our attitudes towards the man? No, we see a man who seems to be a careful, professional officer. Are there two different captains called Sitnikov, and Babchenko has forgotten which one he’s talking about?
Then there is the unnamed mortar battery commander, a man who (page 255) never doubted the correctness of his actions and was prepared to kill readily, and even happily. This man is described as a superb professional, who has total command over his troops, and obeys orders rigidly. So, when his unit is ready to fire on a certain sector of the battlefield, and orders come on the radio from headquarters to cancel the bombardment and withdraw, what does our by-the-book commander do? Does he withdraw? No, he waxes furious, orders his men to load their bombs, and to get ready to launch the bombardment anyway, as though he was some kind of warlord independent of the main command. And yet when another infantry officer informs him that the Russians are now in the target sector, he accepts that and cancels the bombardment – the exact orders he had just refused to obey when conveyed directly from headquarters. Is this professionalism? (Of course, since the bombardment was never launched, and the officer never named, there’s no way to check on whether Babchenko is telling the truth about this episode.)
The third part of the book continues about Chechnya, in the tense peace that followed the formal end of fighting. The same Babchenko who joined the second war of his own free will suddenly can’t wait to go home; but even though he claims that a kontraktnik can demand to be sent home in the middle of the fighting, he apparently makes no attempt to ask to be sent home; the circumstances of his discharge from the army in April 2000 are never explained.
During this period, Babchenko slips back into observer mode; lambasting the corrupt Russian officer corps, where according to him, generals beat colonels, colonels beat majors, majors beat captains, and so on, all the way down the line, and nobody cares about anything but themselves. In true Babchenko fashion, he then describes (page 365) a Captain Vladimir Shabalin, a compassionate, courageous officer, who brings flowers to the grave of a soldier who saved his life in an ambush. Babchenko doesn’t even seem to notice his own self-contradictions….
…in the second part of the book (the section discussing the First Chechen War), the author claims to have been in Mozdok, which is not in Chechnya, unloading corpses and watching necropsies (performed with a bread knife, no less) after the Second Battle of Grozny. And after that, he claims to have been sent off to fight in Chechnya and witnessed at first hand the destruction of Grozny. This is absolutely not possible for a simple reason: the Second Battle of Grozny, as a peek at Wikipedia will inform you, led to the signing of the Khasav Yurt accord and the withdrawal of all Russian units from Chechnya. Babchenko could have been either in Chechnya or in Mozdok; he could not have been in both places at once. Translation: He is either making the whole thing up or passing off someone else’s experiences as his own.
Then there’s the episode in the part of the book set in Mozdok where a senior conscript called Timokha demands Babchenko find 600,000 rubles for him. Babchenko tries to find something to steal and sell to the Chechens for money, but can’t – the only items he does find are cannon shells he fails to sell, though he was offered a million rubles for a rocket launcher. Yet, after a couple of pages, he reports that he was (on alternate days) in charge of the armoury, from which this same Timokha and others could freely steal weaponry and sell for cash, and it was simplicity itself to fudge the accounts. It passeth understanding why Babchenko didn’t steal the weapons himself.
Well, so far, I’ll admit, my suspicions about Babchenko’s account were all subjective. So I decided to do a little checking on Babchenko himself, and there it was; the proof.
In an interview, Babchenko (who wrote on that conflict as well) openly claims that Russia was responsible for the 2008 war between itself and Georgia, which led to the latter’s defeat; even though the US, Georgia’s military and propaganda backer, itself admitted (in the person of Condoleezza Rice, no less) that Georgia had started the war.
In other words, he’s a professional anti-Russian propagandist, the kind who always gets a ready audience in the West, because those of us who keep our eyes open know that anti-Russian propaganda is alive and well among the neo-imperialists in Washington and NATO headquarters in Brussels.”
A better candidate for a false flag you couldn’t find if you tried.
Posted by: Jihadi Colin | Jun 1 2018 15:16 utc | 92
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