US/NATO War on Russia

[Lauren Johnson]

Here is a very interesting interview of Mark Paslawsky, aka Franko, the American who volunteered out of patriotism in honor of his Ukrainian roots. (More on that, later.) Here is a video interview and a link to an article in the NYTimes after his death in Ilovaysk, August 20, as part of the volunteer Donbas Batallion.

His Twitter account starts on May 15 and ends on August 16. Things started falling apart for the entire ATO, around then. Here is a video of the Motorola Battalion cleaning Ilovaysk when Paslawsky died.


But the plot thickens. RT also has an article on Mr. Paslawsky.

On Tuesday, August 20, a US army veteran named Mark Paslawsky was killed during a battle in Ilovyask, near Donetsk, which is currently held by anti-Kiev rebels.

Fighting on the side of pro-government forces, the American had sprung to prominence because of his Twitter feed (@BruceSpringnote), often sharply critical of Ukrainian politicians, and a fawning video interview with Vice News' Simon Ostrovsky shortly before his death.

The 55-year-old West Point graduate, who was also a former investment banker, mainly focused on Moscow, Kharkov and Kiev, claimed he had changed his nationality to Ukrainian to enlist in the Donbass Battalion. Paslawsky fought under the pseudonym Franko' and served in the US army until at least 1991, when he was described as a captain in a New York Times op-ed.

His death inspired uncritical and shoddy obituaries in the popular American press. The NYT, under the headline "An American Voice on Ukraine's Front Lines Goes Silent" used employees of Euromaidan PR as sources, and Vice, rather ridiculously, claimed he was "The Only American fighting for Ukraine." The only small nod to the soldier's background came via a quote attributed by Ostrovsky to a colleague, going by Lex': "He really hated the Russians. We all hate the Russians."

There was a very good reason for Paslawsky's use of a nom-de-guerre like Franko' and the social media handle Bruce Springnote' and for the soft soap in the US media.

Paslawsky was not an "ordinary Joe" from New Jersey with benign family connections to Ukraine who suddenly decided to help defend the motherland, he was the nephew of the notorious Nazi Mykola Lebed who incredibly was employed by the CIA from 1949 to possibly as late as 1991. There is no insinuation that Paslawksy also harbored fascist or anti-Semitic beliefs, but family influences surely played a significant role in the formation of his world view.

Lebed began his terrorist career in 1934 when he was sentenced to death for the murder of Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki later commuted to life imprisonment but he escaped in 1939. He would go on to lead the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Poles in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia (the area around Lutsk and Rivne in modern-day Ukraine).

Instead of facing trial for his vicious war crimes after his fellow fascists in Germany were defeated, Lebed was spirited to America where based in New York he gathered information on the Soviet Union for the CIA (a scheme known as Operation Aerodynamic).

Despite harboring him for decades, the Americans were fully aware of his past and their intelligence services described Lebed as a "Ukrainian fascist leader and suspected Nazi collaborator" and a "well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans."
Of course, sheltering Nazis was a common US practice after the war, as bizarre as it seems today, with the primary reason being their potential usefulness in the fight against the Soviet Union. The best known example is Klaus Barbie who they helped to escape to Bolivia, and later Argentina, but according to a 2009 National Archives report "Hitler's Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, US Intelligence and the Cold War" there were dozens of similar cases. Among them was Rudolf Mildner, who was "responsible for the execution of hundreds, if not thousands, of suspected Polish resisters" and was also involved in the deportation of 8,000 Danish Jews to Auschwitz. The Americans helped Mildner to settle in Argentina. Another was Hans Scholl, a member of Einsatzgruppe B in Belarus, which was blamed for the execution of more than 45,000 people, most of them Jewish.

Mark Paslawsky. Image from facebook.com

The report goes into great detail about the hideous crimes of Paslawsky's uncle. One man extensively quoted is Moshe Maltz, a Jew living in Sokal, a town about 85 kilometers north of Lviv: "When the Bandera gangs (a name inspired by the chief Ukrainian Nazi leader, Stepan Bandera) seize a Jew, they consider it a prize catch. The ordinary Ukrainians feel the same way… they all want to participate in the heroic (sic) act of killing a Jew. They literally slash Jews to pieces with their machetes." Lebed trained at a Gestapo center in Zakopane.

Later, with the Soviet Union's counter-offensive driving their German foes westward, Ukrainians serving as auxiliaries for Hitler's regime joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (from which groups in the current Kiev government like Svoboda and Pravy Sektor claim lineage). Maltz continues: "The Bandera men… are not discriminating about who they kill; they are gunning down the populations of entire villages… Since there are hardly any Jews left to kill, the Bandera gangs have turned on the Poles. They are literally hacking Poles to pieces. Every day… you see the bodies of Poles, with wires around their necks, floating down the River Bug."

On a single day, July 11, 1943, the UIA attacked some 80 localities killing around 10,000 Poles, according to Timothy Snyder in his 1999 "Journal of Cold War Studies."

Interestingly, in 1985 the US Government Accountability Office in Washington mentioned Lebed's name in a public report on Nazis and collaborators who settled in the States with help from US intelligence agencies. The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the Department of Justice began investigating Lebed that year.

The CIA shielded Lebed and, as late as 1991, it dissuaded the OSI from approaching the German, Polish, and Soviet governments for war-related records about Ukrainian fascists. Lebed, Bandera's wartime chief in Ukraine, died in 1998. He is buried in New Jersey.

Leded married Sophia Hunczak, the sister of Taras Hunczak, a professor emeritus of Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he lectures in Ukrainian, Russian and European History. He also teaches at the Taras Shevchecnko University in Kiev. Despite being a child during World War II, his Ukrainian language Wikipedia entry, judging by the links and tone, an official bio, lists his service as a courier for Bandera's forces during the war.

Hunczak has written articlesfor Ukrainian journals whitewashing Roman Shkukhevych and his Nachtigall Battalion, including some heavy duty eulogies obviously intended for internal consumption in the Ukrainian language. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles claims that between June 30 and July 3, 1941, the Nachtgall and their German comrades kidnapped and killed 4,000 Jews in Lviv. In 2007, the pro-NATO Ukrainian government of Viktor Yushchenko issued a postage stamp commemorating Shkukhevych.

So how we do know Paslawsky is the nephew of Lebed after his extensive efforts to hide his true identity? His Ukrainian-language Wikipedia entry refers to him as being the nephew of Hunczak and also mentions a brother, Nestor.

In the September 13, 2009, edition of the US newspaper The Ukrainian Weekly, there is a death notice for Sophia Lebed (this page has been removed from the PDF copy on their website as of August 28, but copies are in circulation, one pictured above) lists all her living relatives, including her brother, Taras Hunczak, and her nephews Nestor and Markian (Mark in English) Paslawsky. While it mentions Nestor's family, it doesn't for Mark he told Ostrovsky in the Vice interview that he was a single man.

A second death notice for Sophia, at the Union Funeral Home in New Jersey, describes her as the "beloved wife of the late Michael (the English form of Mykola) Lebed." Interestingly, this page was removed on August 27 after Ukrainian violinist Valentina Lisitsa questioned the US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty about it on Twitter it now exists as a cached version only.

Somebody has been trying to hide the true story of Mark Paslawsky in recent days and western media have shown no interest in telling it.

The German language has a word for coming to terms with the past: Vergangenheitsbewältigung. English has many but the US press refuses, once again, to use them.

Paslawsky's funeral in Kiev.


And finally, from Gleb Bazov's twitter feed, Paslawsky's Donbass Battalion is having more bad days.

Gleb Bazov ‏@gbazov Aug 30 #ALL - Did I tell you Donbass Battalion is getting eliminated? I misspoke. They are getting exterminated. R.I.H. No pity whatsoever.

[David Guyatt]

Fear of the propagandists leading to a European war leads former in tell types to write an open letter to Chancellor Merkel. Will it be heeded? My guess is that Ukraine will join NATO. Let's hope I'm wrong.

From Consortium News

Warning Merkel on Russian Invasion' Intel

September 1, 2014

Alarmed at the anti-Russian hysteria sweeping Official Washington and the specter of a new Cold War U.S. intelligence veterans took the unusual step of sending this Aug. 30 memo to German Chancellor Merkel challenging the reliability of Ukrainian and U.S. media claims about a Russian "invasion."
MEMORANDUM FOR: Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Ukraine and NATO
We the undersigned are long-time veterans of U.S. intelligence. We take the unusual step of writing this open letter to you to ensure that you have an opportunity to be briefed on our views prior to the NATO summit on Sept. 4-5.
You need to know, for example, that accusations of a major Russian "invasion" of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence. Rather, the "intelligence" seems to be of the same dubious, politically "fixed" kind used 12 years ago to "justify" the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel. (Photo credit: א (Aleph))

We saw no credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq then; we see no credible evidence of a Russian invasion now. Twelve years ago, former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, mindful of the flimsiness of the evidence on Iraqi WMD, refused to join in the attack on Iraq. In our view, you should be appropriately suspicious of charges made by the U.S. State Department and NATO officials alleging a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
President Barack Obama tried on Aug. 29 to cool the rhetoric of his own senior diplomats and the corporate media, when he publicly described recent activity in the Ukraine, as "a continuation of what's been taking place for months now … it's not really a shift."
Obama, however, has only tenuous control over the policymakers in his administration who, sadly, lack much sense of history, know little of war, and substitute anti-Russian invective for a policy. One year ago, hawkish State Department officials and their friends in the media very nearly got Mr. Obama to launch a major attack on Syria based, once again, on "intelligence" that was dubious, at best.
Largely because of the growing prominence of, and apparent reliance on, intelligence we believe to be spurious, we think the possibility of hostilities escalating beyond the borders of Ukraine has increased significantly over the past several days. More important, we believe that this likelihood can be avoided, depending on the degree of judicious skepticism you and other European leaders bring to the NATO summit next week.
Experience With Untruth
Hopefully, your advisers have reminded you of NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen's checkered record for credibility. It appears to us that Rasmussen's speeches continue to be drafted by Washington. This was abundantly clear on the day before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq when, as Danish Prime Minister, he told his Parliament: "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. This is not something we just believe. We know."
Photos can be worth a thousand words; they can also deceive. We have considerable experience collecting, analyzing, and reporting on all kinds of satellite and other imagery, as well as other kinds of intelligence. Suffice it to say that the images released by NATO on Aug. 28 provide a very flimsy basis on which to charge Russia with invading Ukraine. Sadly, they bear a strong resemblance to the images shown by Colin Powell at the UN on Feb. 5, 2003, that, likewise, proved nothing.
[B]That same day, we warned President Bush that our former colleague analysts were "increasingly distressed at the politicization of intelligence" and told him flatly, "Powell's presentation does not come close" to justifying war. We urged Mr. Bush to "widen the discussion … beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic."[/B]
[B]Consider Iraq today. Worse than catastrophic.[/B]
[B]Although President Vladimir Putin has until now showed considerable reserve on the conflict in the Ukraine, it behooves us to remember that Russia, too, can "shock and awe." In our view, if there is the slightest chance of that kind of thing eventually happening to Europe because of Ukraine, sober-minded leaders need to think this through very carefully.[/B]
[B]If the photos that NATO and the U.S. have released represent the best available "proof" of an invasion from Russia, our suspicions increase that a major effort is under way to fortify arguments for the NATO summit to approve actions that Russia is sure to regard as provocative. Caveat emptoris an expression with which you are no doubt familiar. Suffice it to add that one should be very cautious regarding what Mr. Rasmussen, or even Secretary of State John Kerry, are peddling.[/B]
[B]We trust that your advisers have kept you informed regarding the crisis in Ukraine from the beginning of 2014, and how the possibility that Ukraine would become a member of NATO is anathema to the Kremlin. According to a Feb. 1, 2008 cable (published by WikiLeaks) from the U.S. embassy in Moscow to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, U.S. Ambassador William Burns was called in by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who explained Russia's strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine.[/B]
[B]Lavrov warned pointedly of "fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene." Burns gave his cable the unusual title, "NYET MEANS NYET: RUSSIA'S NATO ENLARGEMENT REDLINES," and sent it off to Washington with IMMEDIATE precedence. Two months later, at their summit in Bucharest NATO leaders issued a formal declaration that "Georgia and Ukraine will be in NATO."[/B]
[B]On Aug. 29, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk used his Facebook page to claim that, with the approval of Parliament that he has requested, the path to NATO membership is open. Yatsenyuk, of course, was Washington's favorite pick to become prime minister after the Feb. 22 coup d'etat in Kiev.[/B]
[B]"Yats is the guy," said Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland a few weeks before the coup, in an intercepted telephone conversation with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. You may recall that this is the same conversation in which Nuland said, "Fuck the EU."[/B]
[B][B]Timing of the Russian "Invasion"[/B][/B]
[B][B]The conventional wisdom promoted by Kiev just a few weeks ago was that Ukrainian forces had the upper hand in fighting the anti-coup federalists in southeastern Ukraine, in what was largely portrayed as a mop-up operation. But that picture of the offensive originated almost solely from official government sources in Kiev. There were very few reports coming from the ground in southeastern Ukraine. There was one, however, quoting Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, that raised doubt about the reliability of the government's portrayal.[/B][/B]
[B][B]According to the "press service of the President of Ukraine" on Aug. 18, Poroshenko called for a "regrouping of Ukrainian military units involved in the operation of power in the East of the country. … Today we need to do the rearrangement of forces that will defend our territory and continued army offensives," said Poroshenko, adding, "we need to consider a new military operation in the new circumstances."[/B][/B]
[B][B]If the "new circumstances" meant successful advances by Ukrainian government forces, why would it be necessary to "regroup," to "rearrange" the forces? At about this time, sources on the ground began to report a string of successful attacks by the anti-coup federalists against government forces. According to these sources, it was the government army that was starting to take heavy casualties and lose ground, largely because of ineptitude and poor leadership.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Ten days later, as they became encircled and/or retreated, a ready-made excuse for this was to be found in the "Russian invasion." That is precisely when the fuzzy photos were released by NATO and reporters like the New York Times' Michael Gordon were set loose to spread the word that "the Russians are coming." (Michael Gordon was one of the most egregious propagandists promoting the war on Iraq.)[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]No Invasion But Plenty Other Russian Support[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]The anti-coup federalists in southeastern Ukraine enjoy considerable local support, partly as a result of government artillery strikes on major population centers. And we believe that Russian support probably has been pouring across the border and includes, significantly, excellent battlefield intelligence. But it is far from clear that this support includes tanks and artillery at this point mostly because the federalists have been better led and surprisingly successful in pinning down government forces.[/B][/B]
[B][B]At the same time, we have little doubt that, if and when the federalists need them, the Russian tanks will come.[/B][/B]
[B][B]This is precisely why the situation demands a concerted effort for a ceasefire, which you know Kiev has so far been delaying. What is to be done at this point? In our view, Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk need to be told flat-out that membership in NATO is not in the cards and that NATO has no intention of waging a proxy war with Russia and especially not in support of the rag-tag army of Ukraine. Other members of NATO need to be told the same thing.[/B][/B]
[B][B]For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity[/B][/B]
[B][B]William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)[/B][/B]
[B][B]David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)[/B][/B]
[B][B]Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)[/B][/B]
[B][B]Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East (ret.)[/B][/B]
[B][B]Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (Ret.)[/B][/B]
[B][B]Coleen Rowley, Division Counsel & Special Agent, FBI (ret.)[/B][/B]
[B][B]Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.); Foreign Service Officer (resigned)[/B][/B]

[Magda Hassan]

Great letter and serious experience there in that group. Intel experience of course and plenty first hand experience of political fuckwittery too. I hope some one in Merkel's office is paying attention.

[Magda Hassan]

This a powerful 16 minutes showing the anger, dark humour and, ultimately, humane restraint of a victorious Novorossiyan detachment:

That was a very interesting watch Paul. They could have been quite different given the extreme provocation and it would have been understandable. Far better they restore what they broke. Or at least the material things they broke.

[Drew Phipps]

In Russia, the Ukraine invades you!

[Peter Lemkin]

http://www.corbettreport.com/interview-9...+Report%29

[Paul Rigby]

Mark Lane ripped up his underpants: Tooth, by contrast, appears to have ransacked his samples case. No matter, the effect is the same - a re-traceable trail. Is there no end to this Tory grandee's resourcefulness?

https://twitter.com/EgoRZemtsoV/status/5...28/photo/1

[Magda Hassan]

Mark Lane ripped up his underpants: Tooth, by contrast, appears to have ransacked his samples case. No matter, the effect is the same - a re-traceable trail. Is there no end to this Tory grandee's resourcefulness?

https://twitter.com/EgoRZemtsoV/status/5...28/photo/1

::

[Magda Hassan]

There has been an announcement of an agreed ceasefire in the Eastern Ukraine. The catch is it comes from the press office of Kiev and Putin is in Mongolia and there is no confirmation from the Kremlin.

[David Guyatt]

Mark Lane ripped up his underpants: Tooth, by contrast, appears to have ransacked his samples case. No matter, the effect is the same - a re-traceable trail. Is there no end to this Tory grandee's resourcefulness?

https://twitter.com/EgoRZemtsoV/status/5...28/photo/1

Really Tooth, reading Russian after a skinful of their fine treacly pepper vodka is one step beyond treasonable (er, reasonable). I understand you're busy with your vast publishing empire chasing young Rupert to heel, but can't you have one of your many young beautiful "assistants" translate this back to God's language - or better still, have them stop painting their charming nails and instead paint simple stick figure cartoons to demonstrate what it is those damnable Russkies are are trying to convey?

That St. Cyril has a lot to answer for if you ask me. Not least he could have had his eyesight checked before setting out to create an alphabet other than God's own and creating a paperclip rendition instead? What an arrogant Vlad he was, eh.