Own Goals and MOTD’s Flirt with Fashionable Outrage
The most popular British football television programme, Match of the Day, running since 1964 had recently been ‘Standing with Ukraine.’ The FA, the British Football Association, had been encouraging football fans in the Premier League televised matches to don Ukraine flags and display supportive banners. Each stadium has been flashing supportive statements on their giant displays and Premier League footballers have draped themselves in Ukraine flags before each match. The ritual seamlessly woven into the now regular sacramental of taking the knee. However, on last night’s show I noticed all the flags were gone. No banners in the stands, no announcements and giant displays, no flag draped footballers.
As soon as the herded masses had adopted this the latest ubiquitous display of right think solidarity at what the western media hacks keep calling ‘Putin’s War’ it disappeared like morning mist in the Summer Sun. Why? Putin’s war is still raging, the tanks are rolling inexorably west and 300 sorties a night are flown out over Ukraine destroying military targets with devastating accuracy. But it appears a different type of news is emerging, not blue tick Silicon Valley approved but unedited rough and ready footage with an unmistakable ring of truth that may be redirecting the narrative.
The last week of news has been appalling as it has been revealing. These viral videos and pictures from the gonzo journalists on the ground with harrowing accounts from Ukrainians in Mariupol show a different reality of what the ‘brave’ Ukrainian army have been visiting upon Russian POWs and their own citizens. Could this signal a change in the messaging as Western media turns its fickle gaze elsewhere when their feigned compassion yet again proves empty and false?
Patrick Lancaster’s report from that beleaguered city, going to places where BBC journalists and their mainstream media colleagues fear to tread (or their editors at least), has exposed shocking truth. His footage of the basement of School Number 25 in Mariupol, littered with abandoned Azov and Ukrainian army uniforms and weapons and the tragic sight of a naked blood-stained and bruised corpse of a young woman with a swastika cut into her flesh and painted over in her own blood, told a story the West’s media would rather not tell. Her nakedness respectfully covered with discarded clothing by DPR soldiers except for the bloody swastika painted on her stomach. The DPR soldiers want the world to see who they have been fighting.
This gruesome discovery comes a day after Moscow announced it was looking for the source of graphic videos claiming to show Ukrainians soldiers torturing and executing captured Russian soldiers. The videos emerged last weekend, one of which shows Ukranian militia beating prisoners and then shooting them in the legs at close range. This footage along with Lancaster’s own of street interviews with Mariupol citizens eager to tell their distressing tales of Ukrainian army crimes went viral, especially in Russia where a recent poll by the independent Levada Centre puts Putin’s popularity now at 82% up from 70% the previous week.
An historical video of Oleksiy Arestovych, one of Zelensky’s advisors, has also been doing the rounds. Interviews where he is praising the inhumane methods of ISIS in Syria may indicate that such abuses of Russian POWs and Ukrainian civilians may not be confined to a few rogue elements in the Ukraine army but deliberate strategy.
Interestingly the language has changed over the week in the Russian media. They are no longer talking of the ‘special military operation’ it’s now ‘the war’. Russia’s blood is up and the Russian Ministry of Defense has declared an end to ‘phase one’ and ominously the start of ‘phase two’ of the military campaign. With the methodical elimination of the 14,000 or so Azov Nazis in Mariupol (de-Nazification) by the DPR regulars and their Chechen comrades, a long, hard and bloody house to house, block by block fight, this next phase will mean the demilitarising/elimination of the UA Divisions in the Don Basin. What some have termed the cauldron, where the 60,000 or so of Ukraine’s NATO trained but increasingly isolated troops are being ‘kettled’ to meet their fate.
It is believed by some that the reason for Zelensky’s dismissal of two generals a couple of days ago may have been due to their refusal to carry out orders, he called them traitors. The Ukraine senior command know what’s coming; the end of their army. This unnecessary butchering of tens of thousands of Ukraine’s best trained regiments because of the delusional pride of Kiev’s elites may be hard to swallow for some of Ukraine’s seasoned commanders. What is the point they may be asking? The war has been lost for weeks now, all that is left is destruction and needless death. But egged on by Washington and the EU leaders who seem to have been overwhelmed by some sort of post-Covid suicide bug of their own, Kiev has fed on this irrational momentum and shown it has no reverse gear either despite its obvious frustration at NATO and the EU’s disinclination to get more involved. Washington’s desire for a long war to bog down the Russians may not look so achievable when the Donbas force collapses.
These latest atrocity videos (The criminals filmed themselves and then broadcast their grisly work, faces and all) like so many things in this war is backfiring. The Russians may be losing the will not for fighting but for a peaceful negotiated settlement and with growing public anger at home could now be shifting to a wider more complete victory and humiliating surrender from Zelensky’s regime. Justice may demand no less for the criminals in Kiev.
However, Ukraine’s military and SBU (their secret service) is complicated by the fact that the KGB have never really left Ukraine. The KGB morphed into the SBU and agents loyal to Moscow remained in situ, so accusations of traitors all around might not be the paranoid ravings of Zelensky as his world collapses. It may be a fraught attempt to sure up the cracks of a divided military, a denial of just how desperate the situation is, an attempt to bolster a waning morale amongst the wavering ‘rats’ preparing to jump his increasingly unseaworthy ship. When will he and his circle accept the inevitable? Can they? Or is this the bunker mentality kicking in as he takes the stage for his final curtain call? Arestovych, whose statement on March 15 (Reuters) - that the war in Ukraine is likely to be over by early May when Russia runs out of resources is now ringing hollow even to himself. In a rare moment of candour he more recently stated; ‘Russia has practically destroyed our entire defense industry and are now finishing it off’.
I don’t think there will be a dramatic last stand on the steps of the Verkhovna Rada, ‘Say hello to my little friend’, despite Zelenky’s love of the dramatic. I suspect it will be more of a ‘forget the green screen videos get me to my mansion in Miami’. His presidency has been the billion-dollar earning performance of his life that may in the end cost him just that.
Macron’s recent contact with Putin, in desperation it appears, to appeal for the Ukrainian air force (what’s left of it) to be allowed to extract some important staff from the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol with several helicopters (two were shot down as they were about to take off) has caused rumours to abound. Were they NATO/Foreign Legionnaires cornered with the Nazis in the final hopeless show down? We may never know but for Macron to personally phone Putin for permission to facilitate this ‘humanitarian’ evacuation may indicate a cover up of something potentially very embarrassing about NATO’s direct involvement in the whole ugly affair.
These and other reports pouring out of Ukraine along with the wave of evidence that Russia is presenting on biological weapons labs with ample support from Hunter’s laptop may be the reason that British football’s MOTD has started to experience cold feet along with the rest of the celebrity world and they may be redirecting their focus to a less controversial field of play.
The mother of all sanctions, the US/EU ‘shock and awe’ sanctions have barely touched Russia, they were well prepared but we were not and it is we that will be hurting; the UK population are facing a massive hike in their gas bills this month. The Ruble is rallying and the EU’s intransigence to buy gas from Russia in Russian currency looks churlish and self-defeating in the extreme. As Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar humorously put it:
Now the Premier league has started to move on from Ukraine virtue signalling and some of the elements of the deep state in the US appear to be attempting to reign in Biden and his coterie, can we breathe a sigh of relief? The madcap plan has failed so badly already, the plan to ‘overextend and unbalance’ Russia (As the 2019 Rand Institute report put it) and there doesn’t appear to be a plan B. Or are we now entering a momentous shift in the world’s dynamics that will see the sheltered West exposed like never before? If so, the messaging may need a radical rethink. Hard to imagine with the ability to employ any measure of détente, to step back, lost on the Biden regime as it is with the EU. Difficult to see how they can ‘walk it back’, to use the American phrase, after the years of anti-Russia and anti-China grooming they’ve subjected their populations to and to do it in such a short space of time without complete loss of face.
To the contrary this madness appears to be deepening with Latvia banning the public displays of the letter ‘Z’ and ‘V’, Samsung rebranding their ‘Z’ series phones and Zurich Insurance changing their ‘Z’ logo. It seems funny season has some way to go before the elites in Washington and Europe are prised from their delusion. Like the warring Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels, the collective West is looking mighty small and just a little bit silly.
Unfortunately for Zelensky his initials are ‘V’ and ‘Z’ and his calls for cancelling these letters could turn out to be a weirdly self fulfilling prophecy. The experimental TV performance, Ukraine’s very own Truman Show, the Zelensky experiment may be getting cancelled all too soon. Someone humorously suggested the Russian Military should start putting the whole Latin alphabet on their military vehicles. Then the West can set about cancelling itself completely along with its dying culture. The country that was Ukraine may be the first on the list.