While the West is finally considering sending the Ukraine fighter aircraft from Poland for its own pilots to fly—since putting NATO pilots in them to fly may start “World War III”—there is also under consideration the banning of oil, gas and raw materials exports from Russia. This would obviously effect prices on such goods, but as former Russian deputy minister of finance Sergey Aleksashenko stated in an op-ed for Aljazeera, the effect of current sanctions against Russia will be limited in the short term by the fact that it still has a significant surplus of funds from oil exports, which it is still allowed to engage in. He also observes that while Russian banks’ access to dollars is being blocked, they nevertheless continue to have free access to the euro—which again shows that the EU’s “cooperation” with the U.S. in sanctioning Russia has come at the price of being less painful for Europe.
Meanwhile, Russia continues to prove that it has no use for democratic values by the recent passage of a law which makes it criminal offense to spread what authorities deem “false information” about the war in the Ukraine—and that includes even calling it a “war.” This law allows prison sentences of up to 15 years for people who think the truth means anything. For anyone who thinks that there are “courageous” politicians in Russia who believe in a free, democratic society should guess again, since this law—which essentially allows the Kremlin to decide what is true and what is false while it actively engages in the latter—was passed unanimously by the Russia’s so-called “parliament,” which in practice is nothing more than a single-party rubber-stamp, after Putin banned many opposition political parties and candidates from running for office in recent elections.
The BBC, the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Deutsche Welle and Latvia’s Meduza have all been limited or banned from broadcasting or being accessed on the Internet in Russia. Russian media “watchdogs”—actually organs of Kremlin censorship—claim that these news outlets are spreading “false” information about Russian combat deaths and Ukrainian civilian casualties, among other things.
Naturally, scenes of devastation in Ukrainian cities and towns have been frowned upon from being aired by Russian television and media reports, and those media outlets that do claim some degree of independence are now being cowed by the “fake news” law. We have heard anecdotes of the effects of this, with people in Ukraine stunned by the level of ignorance of relatives living in Russia, in complete denial about what is happening on the ground.
Interestingly, some have pointed out that Russia is defending these actions by claiming that Western media outlets are also not reporting domestic “corruption” and U.S. military action in places like Iraq. Of course this is just more misinformation from Russia, since the media in the U.S. and Europe see little in the way of laws which restrict the free expression of views—even clearly false ones—and many in the official and amateur media world have nothing better to do but talk about political corruption in the U.S. and abroad.
So while there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around, there shouldn’t be any false notion of “equivalency” here. While it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the U.S. would invade Mexico and bomb its cities, one should a remember that the U.S. tried to start a war in Nicaragua and invaded Panama, neither of which posed a military “threat” to this country; nevertheless Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine is a different “animal.” We know that Putin’s long-term plan is to “absorb” the Ukraine back into a client state of a new Russian empire, which is why it wants regime change and Ukraine’s military decimated, becoming nothing more than a weakened, defenseless puppet of Russia, dependent on Russian “benevolence.”
This is why Putin is enraged at the Ukraine’s stiff resistance (he's really just a "nice" guy), aided by
advanced Western military weaponry and perhaps even aircraft. That is the price
for being an outlier on the world stage—much like North Korea—that has proved
that it cannot be trusted. More proof of this is Putin's impossible "conditions" for a "ceasefire" which essentially is telling Ukraine to lay down its arms so that Russian forces can occupy the rest of the country uninhibited. It is not incumbent on the victim of aggression to stop defending itself, but the aggressor who started it in the first place without cause to stop the violence.
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