While Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is exposing more of his ignorance by defending Vladimir Putin’s threats on the Ukraine by falsely claiming that NATO and the U.S. have stated any intent on absorbing the Ukraine into the organization (they have just not “explicitly” stated to the contrary), U.S. intelligence officials are charging that Russia is sending in operatives to mount “false flag” attacks that Russia will use to rationalize a military incursion in the Ukraine. This is an apparent attempt to preempt any claims by Russia that the Ukrainian military is staging attacks on the pro-Russian separatists in Ukrainian territory that it has been “secretly” assisting. Russian dictator Putin is just dumb enough to believe that his massing of troops on the Ukrainian border is at all justified in the eyes of the international opinion, when the Ukraine has made every effort to avoid confrontation when it is Russia that continues to make aggressive moves inside and outside its territory.
“False flag” operations to justify unjustified military action has a long history, but perhaps its most infamous application was in “Operation Himmler,” whose activities Hitler used to “justify” an attack on Poland. Hitler apparently wanted to absorb the corridor that separated Germany proper from East Prussia; the map in 1939 shows that a tiny sliver of land that included the “free city” of Danzig had been given to Poland so that it could have access to the sea. One might ask why not simply occupy the territory connecting the two parts of Germany, but since Britain and France were going to declare war on Germany anyways, why not just take everything?
Of course Hitler didn’t take “everything,” since he went on a diplomatic blitz to sever Russia from its defensive alliance with France, because his generals were “nervous” about a two-front war. Hitler secretly held out the “carrot” of a piece of the Polish pie to Stalin, as well as a “free hand” in occupying the Baltic States. Only a week before the German invasion of Poland, the German-Russian non-aggression pact was signed. On August 31, “Operation Himmler” was carried out, in which German operatives dressed in Polish army uniforms launched attacks on German soil; the only German civilians who were killed were concentration camp prisoners dressed in Polish uniforms, who were left behind on the streets, apparently drugged and then shot dead. The next day Hitler used these “attacks” to “justify” the German invasion of Poland; the result would be a world war and 50 million dead.
But that is “old” news. Russia, not surprisingly, has learned the trade from Germany but not the lessons. The Russian misadventures in Chechnya is a case in point, where “collateral damage” inflicted on Russian civilians and soldiers by incompetent Russian security forces was a common occurrence. But what happened in September of 1999 was a different matter altogether. In Moscow, Buynaksk and Volgodonsk there was a string of apartment bombings, in which nearly 300 people were killed and over 600 injured. This was all blamed on Chechen separatist guerillas, who were in fact active in Russia for many years and were a convenient target of Putin at the time.
However, not all was as it seemed at first glance. A few days after the attacks it was reported that a resident of an apartment building in Ryazan had “inadvertently” averted a bombing in that city as well when he notified local police of the “suspicious” behavior by two men carrying sacks into the basement. Upon arrival, police found sacks of white powder, in which a timing device and a detonator were discovered armed and ready to ignite an explosion. The bomb was disarmed, and further investigation discovered that it was constructed from material used by the Russian military.
But there was more to suggest that this was a “false flag” operation. A Russian telephone operator claimed to have overheard a conversation between two men who warned each other to “get out of town” fast. Police discovered that on one end of the line the call was from an office of the Russian intelligence agency, the FSB. Thus the “rumor” was that this was a “false flag” event to drum-up support for war against Chechnya. The anger generated by these “suspicions” was such that FSB director Nikolai Patrushev felt obliged to publically issue a statement admitting that the bombs were planted by FSB agents in Ryazan, but only as a “test” of the response by security forces. Nobody believed this “explanation,” and it certainly didn’t “explain” the bombings in the other cities, which Chechen rebels did not admit responsibility for.
In the 2002 theater and the 2004 Beslan school hostage cases, most of the Russian civilians who were killed were by the actions of Russian security forces; 80 percent of the hostages in Beslan were killed by “random” fire from Russian security, which one observer called “a chilling portrait of the Russian leadership and its total disregard for human life.”
Of course, knowing what goes on in Russia today, with all the arrests and murders of Putin’s political opponents and journalists, this kind of thing should hardly be considered “strange.” In her recent press conference with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock—besides pointing out how tiresome Russian complaints were becoming—scolded a reporter from the Kremlin mouthpiece RT that in Germany today, a state-run press delivering propaganda and false information such as RT would itself be considered neither “free” nor legal.
So that is what we are dealing with in Putin’s Russia today. Nothing he does should come as a surprise. He doesn’t care about human life, only the exercise of power and his cult of personality. Putin clearly sees himself as a figure of “greatness”—or at least in Russian history books, although certainly not in the eyes of the rest of the world, which more likely will record him as a authoritarian dictator who engaged in all manner of corruption, including the murder of political opponents.
On the “The Debate” from the English-language news network France24, no one seemed to believe that outside of the UK’s token weapon assistance, NATO is willing to actually do anything to counter a Russian invasion. One guest noted that “on the ground,” most Ukrainians seem to be “fatalistic” about what will happen to them, while another noted that only thing that will hurt Putin is if the oligarchs who are hiding for him in their names the billions of dollars he has stolen from government coffers have their overseas accounts frozen—and in turn Putin’s own ill-gotten wealth.
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