Pak Sahafat: Jacques Baud, a former NATO official and former Swiss intelligence officer, reveals a report on the events that led to the Ukraine war.
According to a NATO official the root of the Ukrainian conflict culminated in the two “separatist” provinces in the east of the country, Luhansk and Donetsk, known as the Donbass region. This region is located in eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border.
Prior to the Ukraine crisis, half of the region was controlled by pro-Russian separatists and the other half by the Ukrainian military. The main industries located in this area include coal mines and steel production. The region has a population of more than 3.6 million, most of whom are Russian-speaking.
A large part of the region’s current population is the result of the migration of Russian workers to work in the mines and steel industries there after World War II and during the Soviet era. In recent years, the Russian government has issued more than 720,000 Russian passports to about one-fifth of the population of Donbass, making them Russian citizens, which is why Moscow sees itself as eligible for military intervention there.
Jacques Baud, a senior security official and adviser to NATO, the United Nations and the Swiss military, who was also a former officer in the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service, gave a revealing report explaining the reasons for the Ukraine crisis and its factors:
The path that led to the start of the war
The crisis in the Donbas region began in April 2014, when pro-Russian separatists annexed the Crimean peninsula to Russia, seizing government buildings and calling themselves the “People’s Republic.”
In this regard, the Ukrainian army responded and since then there has been a civil war in the region, which in the past eight years has resulted in the death of more than 14,000 people on both sides.
After the separatists of the two self-proclaimed republics of Luhansk and Donetsk came to power in 2014 they declared independence in a referendum the same year. They said that the result of the referendum was a positive vote of more than 90% of the population of Donbass for independence from Ukraine, but this is wrong and, as some journalists claimed, the referendum was held against the advice of Vladimir Putin. These republics did not seek secession from Ukraine, but sought autonomy to guarantee the use of Russian as their official language.
Immediately after the signing of the Minsk 1 agreement, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko launched a large-scale “counter-terrorism operation” against Donbass. Affected by the weak advice of NATO officers, the Ukrainians suffered a heavy defeat at Debaltsevo; the defeat that led them to the Minsk II agreement. The Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 agreements were in Ukraine’s favor, and the drafters of the agreements said that the agreement was to discuss the status of the republics between Kiev and the representatives of the republics, with the aim of finding an internal solution in Ukraine.
Russia has been refusing to participate in talks with Ukraine since 2014 because it considers the talk’s part of Ukraine’s internal affairs. The French, led by France, on the other hand, are constantly trying to start a war between France and Ukraine.
Until 23-24 February 2022, there was no trace of Russian forces in Ukraine, and observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) did not see the slightest trace of Russian units operating in Donbas; Moreover, even the US intelligence map published by the Washington Post on December 3, 2021 did not show the presence of Russian forces in Donbas.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry has turned to NATO to increase its military capabilities, and the organization has turned to foreign mercenary militias based on far-right activists to make up for the shortage of Ukrainian troops.
According to Reuters, in 2020 (1399) these militants made up about 40% of the Ukrainian forces and their number had reached 102 thousand people. They received military equipment, were funded, and trained by the United States, Britain, Canada, and France.
Western countries create and support Ukrainian far-right militias. In October 2021, the Jerusalem Post condemned the “Santoria” project, and six military units, which originally consisted of 100 people, sounded the alarm.
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These militants, who are no less than the Nazis and are strongly anti-Semitic, have been operating in Donbas since 2014 with the support of the West.
Their hatred of the Jews stemmed from the Great Famine of the 1920s and 1930s in Ukraine, which resulted in the confiscation of products by Joseph Stalin to finance the modernization of the Red Army.
Western support for militant crimes against civilians
The West supports the militants who have committed numerous crimes against civilians since 2014 and continues this deadly process. The Swiss government has been quick to impose sanctions on Russia, but has not imposed any sanctions on Ukraine, which has been slaughtering its population since 2014. The United States has no intention of helping Ukraine, but of fighting Russia.
Zapad 21 Russian military exercises to monitor NATO
On March 24, 2021, the President of the Republic of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelinsky issued an order to reconquer Crimea and began to deploy his forces to the south of the country. At the same time, several NATO exercises were conducted between the “Black Sea” and the “Baltic Sea”, which was accompanied by a significant increase in reconnaissance flights along the Russian border.
Ukraine violated the Minsk agreement in October 2021 using drones, attacked a fuel depot in Donetsk, but no European country condemns these violations.
Ukraine refuses to implement the Minsk agreement
During a visit to Moscow on February 7, 2022, Emmanuel Macron reiterated his commitment to Vladimir Putin to adhere to the Minsk Agreement. But four days later, on February 11 in Berlin, after nine hours of talks, a meeting of political advisers to the leaders of the “Normandy format” ended without a definite result because the Ukrainians, as always, refused to implement the Minsk agreement.
Putin also noted that Macron had made empty promises to him and that the West was not ready to implement the agreements. The Russian parliament called on Putin to recognize the independence of the republics to prevent further war, but he refused.
Covert sabotage of CIA mercenaries in Donbass
As of February 16, artillery attacks against the Donbass population had increased dramatically. Neither the media, nor the European Union, nor NATO, nor any Western government has reacted to these actions.
The European Union and some other countries seem to have deliberately concealed the massacre of the people of Donbas because they knew that the massacre would cut Russia off. At the same time, there are reports of sabotage in Donbass.
All the evidence clearly shows that from February 16 (February 27), Joe Biden knew that the Ukrainians would start firing on Donbass civilians. Putin was well aware of the serious consequences of starting a war for him and his country, because the West was targeting him and Russia anyway, and Russia was undoubtedly under sanctions.
Putin’s goal
Ukrainian artillery attacks on the Donbas population continued, and on February 23, the two republics requested military assistance from Russia. In order to make Russia’s intervention illegal in the eyes of the people, the United States deliberately concealed the fact that the war actually began on February 16.
The Ukrainian army was preparing to attack Donbass in early 2021, as some Russian and European intelligence services were well aware. In a speech on February 24, Putin said he did not intend to occupy or even occupy or destroy Ukraine. Russia has two main goals for fighting Ukraine: “demilitarization” and “de-fascism”: Demilitarization includes the destruction of air power, air defense systems, Ukrainian reconnaissance and tracking towers, as well as the dismantling of command and intelligence structures, as well as key logistical routes and the siege of much of the Ukrainian army stationed in the southeast.
De-fascism, on the other hand, included the dissolution and destruction of volunteer battalions active in the cities of Odessa, Kharkiv, and Mariupol, as well as various military bases.
Russia is not seeking a siege of Kiev
The Russian invasion proceeds in very “classical” ways. The idea that Russia is trying to seize Kiev to oust Zelensky is a Western one. Russia, in turn, sought to keep Zelensky in power by besieging Kiev and at the same time forcing him to negotiate.
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The “demilitarization” operation is almost complete, and the remaining forces no longer have an “operational and strategic command structure.” The Western media reports of repeated bombings of civilians in major cities, especially in Kharkiv, but the fact is that the war is not as they report in the video and images.
The Donbass Republics are liberated and the military fights in the city of Mariupol. Many Western commentators are surprised that the Russians continued to seek a negotiated solution during the military operation. For Westerners, war begins when politics stops. However, Russia’s approach to war and politics is inspired by the thought of the Russian military thinker Clausewitz, which puts more pressure on the adversary and leads him to negotiate.
In cities such as Kharkiv, Mariupol and Odessa, the defense is carried out by militants. They know that “de-fascism” is fundamentally targeting them. For an attacker, fighting and killing ordinary people is an inhumane act. For this reason, Russia seeks to create “humanitarian corridors” to evacuate cities from civilians and only fights militants. On the contrary, the militias are seeking to keep civilians in the cities in order to dissuade the Russian military from fighting.
Facebook considers the Azov Battalion to be like ISIS
On Facebook, the “Azov Battalion” is considered a terrorist group by ISIL and affiliated with dangerous organizations, and any images, videos and posts related to this battalion are prohibited. The Azov Battalion is an extremist right-wing group and neo-Nazi unit of the Ukrainian National Guard based in Mariupol on the shores of the Sea of ​​Azov.
On February 24, Facebook changed its policy and allowed posts to be sent in favor of the militants. In March, the platform issued a call for the assassination of Russian soldiers and leaders in the former Eastern NATO countries. By arming citizens, the European Union is turning them into “belligerents”, as is currently the case.
Mariupol Hospital Scenario
It is good to know that it is not the Ukrainian army that is defending Mariupol, but the Azov Battalion. The Russian delegation to the United Nations in New York stated in a summary of the situation on March 7, 2022:
On March 8, independent Russian media outlets reported that Mariupol civilians had claimed that the hospital had been occupied by Azov militants and that they had evicted civilians. Mariupol Hospital is in a very good position due to the installation of anti-tank weapons and surveillance. Russian forces attacked the building on March 9. According to CNN, 17 people were injured, but the pictures do not show any casualties in the building. There is no evidence linking the victims to the attack.
Western politicians have accepted civilian attacks in Donbas for eight years without imposing any sanctions on the Ukrainian government. Western politicians are sacrificing international law for their goal of “weakening Russia.”
Jacques Baud’s final analysis of the deplorable situation in Russia and Ukraine
As a former intelligence expert, the first thing that comes to mind is the negligence of the Western intelligence services in presenting the exact situation of the last year. In fact, intelligence services around the world seem to be under pressure from politicians.
The problem is that it is the politicians who make the decisions. Even the best intelligence service in the world can be useless if the decision maker does not listen, and this is what happened in a crisis.
The problem is that empirically, I found them at a very weak analytical level. In principle, they lack the intellectual and political independence necessary to assess a military-quality situation. Second, in some NATO countries, politicians seem to have deliberately given an ideological response to this situation. That is why the crisis seemed irrational from the beginning. All the documents that were presented to the people in the midst of the recent crisis were by politicians and based on empirical sources.