Oliver Boyd-Barrett. Journalism Studies. Volume 18, Issue 8, 2017.
In several recent cases of actual or attempted regime change, Western governments alleged their opponents’ possession of weapons of mass destruction as pretexts for war. Many such allegations are now known to have been false or exaggerated. The Ukraine crisis (since 2013) is arguably of a different order of concern, since it has invoked the participation, in one sense or another, of the United States, the European Union and Russia, each of which possesses abundant nuclear weapons capacity. Can Western consumers of mainstream media news, potentially now more informed of the failures of mainstream media to exercise due caution in the face of their own governments’ propaganda, reasonably expect superior future performance? This paper finds little basis for optimism. Drawing from a broader work that monitors mainstream and alternative media, the study identifies 10 key narratives that together forge the battlefield for information warfare between nuclear powers and, with particular respect to mainstream, Western media coverage, the problematic beliefs, assumptions and presumptions that these media invite their audiences to ingest. One of the narratives is considered in detail: the events that took place in Crimea, Odessa and Eastern Ukraine between February and October 2014.
Introduction: Competing Narratives of the Ukraine Crisis 2014-2015
My overriding interest is in the understanding of contemporary Western propaganda as it has unfolded since 2001, and the associated role of mainstream Western news media. There is an equally imperative task to examine the characteristics of non-Western propaganda, including that of Russia and of pro-Russian media anywhere, but my main focus here is on Western and Western media propaganda.
I shall explore this theme in relation to the Ukraine crisis in the period 2013-2015. My more general purpose, in follow-up to earlier investigations of the propaganda of pretexts for war (in relation to crises in Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria—see Boyd-Barrett 2015) is to argue the importance of reducing news consumer dependency on mainstream for-profit corporate and State media, and enhancing the countervailing influence of alternative news sources that have a demonstrable good-faith track record and capability in the provision of information and opinion, and whose revenues often derive from subscription, non-profit, foundation and other such sources.
The Ukraine crisis encompassed the forced change of the Kiev government in February 2014, and the succeeding escalation of tension between the coup government and Ukrainian (but substantially ethnic Russian) regions of Crimea (whose people later voted for annexation with Russia), Odessa and Eastern Ukraine, and between the United States, the European Union and Russia, each of which professed to have important security interests in the unfolding of the crisis.
The topic informs the study of communications in the context of a multi-polar world shared, on the one hand, between the United States, its traditional allies and vassal states and, on the other, emerging alliances between the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Notwithstanding a still powerful influence of US communications within the overall ambit of international media communication (Boyd-Barrett 2015), there is little evidence of a substantial return flow from leading members of the BRICS alliance to the United States (e.g. Xie and Boyd-Barrett 2015). Analysis of media content flows between the BRICS economies is in its infancy.
The issue of flow may be less significant than the ways in which the contents of international communications represent, reinforce or resist phenomena of imperialism or neo-imperialism (through processes such as indexing [Bennett 1990], framing [Entman 2004] and counter-framing [Boyd-Barrett and Boyd-Barrett 2010]) and the implications for the future of international relations. The focus here on Western media representation of the Ukraine crisis speaks to US and Western attitudes and ambitions in relation to NATO expansion to Russia’s borders and how these in turn relate to perceptions of Russia as a potential aggressor, potential target (with a possible view to the future fragmentation of the Commonwealth of Independent States) or potential competitor in a struggle for influence over the continental land-mass that separates Western Europe and China (EurAsia).
The one-sidedness of corporate mainstream Western media coverage behind official Washington pronouncements speaks not to the alleged media pluralism lauded by celebrants of digital and social media expansion but to a much older narrative of complicity with the propaganda aims of imperial power. Princeton scholar of Russia Stephen F. Cohen commented that whereas in the Cold War “the media were open—the New York Times, the Washington Post—to debate,” today “they no longer are. It’s one hand clapping in our major newspapers and in our broadcast networks” (cited by Smith 2015). Such synchronicity reinforces trends that have been widely observed, including in Western mainstream media coverage of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, the disputed 2009 elections in Iran, claims that Iran’s nuclear energy program constitutes a dangerous nuclear weapons threat, and Western-supported destabilization of Libya and of Syria from 2011.
In my broader work, I identify at least 10 principal plots to the Ukraine crisis, each attached either to a single episode or phase of the crisis, operating as a lightning rod for information warfare. I examine the divergent narrative interpretations of such episodes or phases, between those largely espoused by the Kiev regime and its US and EU allies and their respective media, on the one hand, and those espoused by Russia, many Russian media and by many critical, alternative media in the West, on the other. In making this determination I have been guided by my personal daily monitoring of (1) selective Western, Russian and Ukrainian mainstream media (Independent, Kyiv Post, Los Angeles Times, Moscow Times, New York Times and UNIAN information agency), (2) selective Western alternative media (Antiwar.com, CLG, Common Dreams, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Huffington Post, Truthout.org and the World Socialist Web Site), and selective regular reading of (mainstream) (3) Agence France Presse, Bloomberg, BBC, Economist, Guardian, Reuters, RT, Sputnik and (alternative) (4) Democracy Now!, Fair.org, The Intercept, MediaLens.org, MintPress News, The Real News Network and Vice News. The alternative sites mostly but not exclusively represent a range of loosely progressive perspectives and one or two, such as Anti-War.com and the World Socialist Web Site, are affiliated with political movements (Libertarian Party and Socialist Equality Party, respectively).
From these I have constructed weberian “ideal type” characterizations of the principal divergent narratives (Weber [1904] 1949). I focus particularly on Western media and what we can learn from these about the nature of Western conflict propaganda and the beliefs and presumptions that these invite of audiences amidst the exposure of hypocrisies and contradictions that propaganda so often entails. My methodology stems from grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 967). I work inductively from a range of texts that represent the clash of discourses between mainstream Western media accounts, on the one hand, and competing accounts that come principally from Western alternative media and companion sources that pay sustained attention to the perspectives of ethnic Russians in Ukraine (Laclau and Mouffe 2014), on the other. Such a clash inevitably tends towards the destabilization of the hegemonic Western discourse, not in the sense that it entitles an analyst to declare what is “true” or “false,” but in the sense of being able to detect the play of ideology amidst apparent contradiction, paradox and hypocrisy.
The 10 main sub-plots or media narratives (some of them are several threads) that I examine in my broader work have to do with the following episodes or phases of the conflict:
- Cause of the 2014 Crisis.
- Character of the new regime in Kiev.
- Origin and evolution of the Maidan movement.
- Context, inclusion and exclusion.
- Significance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as source of financial aid.
- The events that took place in Crimea, Odessa and Eastern Ukraine.
- Representing Ukraine(heroic) and Russia (threat) to the world.
- Shooting down of MH17.
- Russiain Ukraine.
- Sanctions against Russia.
Here I shall examine a part of one of these media narratives, namely (6): Crimea, Odessa and Eastern Ukraine. The West and Western media considered that Russia forcibly seized Crimea and assisted local ethnic Russian thugs in the Donbass to establish separatist fiefdoms in Luhansk and Donetsk. Russian and alternative Western media, by contrast, maintained that Crimeans, following long-established historical preference, overwhelmingly voted for annexation by Russia. Russia strategically maintained a cool distance between itself and separatist movements in Eastern Ukraine, other than responding to urgent humanitarian need and protecting ethnic Russian populations from the worst of fascist cruelties, but seeking a political, federalist solution to grant a strong measure of autonomy to the peoples of the Donbass region while preserving it as a component of Ukraine.
My examination in this article extends up to around October 2014. I do not have space here to deal in depth with Western allegations of a Russian “invasion” (deeply problematic). I will identify what appear to be the principal propaganda intentions of Washington, the European Union and NATO, and how these intentions were conveyed through Western mainstream media. Discussing movements within Ukraine that are opposed to Kiev authorities, I generally refer to them as “separatist,” although some would be better described as federalist or pluralist, seeking not independence from Ukraine but a more equitable and autonomous status within it. While many may be ethnic Russians who regard Russian as their first or predominant language, this in itself does not necessarily signify that they are pro-Russia or anti-Ukraine.
Crimea, Odessa and Eastern Ukraine
Crimea
When, at the beginning, it looked as though the coup attempt might fail, mainstream Western media had speculated how Kiev could break off the western part of Ukraine as a separate political entity. They exhibited none of the concerns that caused them such anguish when the Donbass regions sought separation or autonomy from the Kiev government (Nazemroaya 2014a). The New York Times set about smearing the movement for Crimean secession (Parry 2014a, 2014c). It dispatched correspondent C. J. Chivers (who in the previous year had helped make what turned out to be the unfounded case against President Assad of Syria for using chemical weapons), whom it charged to co-author a dispatch with Patrick Reevell entitled “Pressure and Intimidation Grip Crimea,” with the subtitle, “Russia Moves Swiftly to Stifle Dissent Ahead of Secession Vote”. The journalists alleged Russian intimidation, military occupation and electoral manipulation ahead of the referendum on March 16. In various reports, the Times and other Western media suggested that Russia had “invaded” Crimea, without clarifying that Moscow already had some 16,000 troops stationed in Crimea under an agreement with Ukraine that allowed Russia to maintain up to 25,000 troops to protect its historic naval base at Sevastopol. Russian troops did support local Crimean authorities in the form of the Supreme Council of Crimea as these made preparations for a referendum that was to demonstrate overwhelming public support for secession (Chivers and Reevell 2014; Parry 2014d). A much more negative expert account is offered, it is true, by Greta Uehling whose perspective is particularly influenced by her studies of the Crimean Tatars. Uehling claims, without sourcing, that Russian troops were used to “help take over” the Supreme Council, installing pro-Russian Prime Minister Sergei Aksyono whom she asserts had criminal ties (though it is disputed; Speigel first reported mafia connections but based on German intelligence documents; cf. Bidder 2014), and that the Council then held a referendum (Uehling 2015).
Vladimir Putin was quite open at the time, two weeks before the referendum, that the Russian troops present in the Crimea would help prevent Crimea being taken over by the coup regime of Ukraine against the wishes of the Crimean people. Misrepresentation continued into early the following year when the New York Times ran a story based on a report that had appeared in opposition Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta (whose very existence, like that of the English-language Moscow Times amidst others, flew in the face of Western media attempts to represent Russian media as homogeneously coerced into the pro-Putin camp). This claimed that conservative Russian oligarch Konstantin V. Malofeev had advised the Kremlin in advance of the collapse of the Yanukovych government in February 2014 that the government would likely fall and that Russia should exploit the ensuing chaos to annex the Crimea and South-Eastern Ukraine, making use of the European Union’s own rules on self-determination. The report offered no evidence of such a memo, nor evidence that it had been applied for policy purposes. Its existence was denied by both the Kremlin spokesman and by Malofeev. Its contents did not square very well with Russia’s actual behavior: (1) caution on the question of Crimea, where it acted only until after a Crimean referendum confirmed broad popular support for integration of Crimea with Russia, and (2) refusal to annex other regions, despite strong local requests (MacFarquhar 2015).
There should have been no cause for surprise at the evidence of a strong pro-Russian tendency (including also a separatist tendency) in Crimea, where Russia’s presence dates back to the early 1700s. Crimea formally became a part of Russia in 1784. The province had previously formed part of Crimean Khanata of the Tatars, sometimes said by Tatars today to have been one of the strongest and most independent powers of Eastern Europe even though it had been absorbed within the Ottoman Empire. That prior history continues to sustain Tatar ethnic nationalism. This is influenced even more strongly by memory of Stalin’s wholesale deportation of the Tatars to Central Asia in 1946 (40 percent died in the process) as punishment for their alleged collaboration with Germany: they were only able to repatriate in substantial numbers after 1991 and they today represent a struggling minority.
Fifty-seven percent of Crimea’s 2 million people in 2001 claimed to be Russians and 77 percent were registered as native Russian-speakers (Sakwa 2015, 13). Many of these ethnic Russians had long resented Soviet Premier Krushchev’s somewhat arbitrary transfer of their region to Ukraine in 1954. A pro-Russian separatist movement had been strong in the early years of Ukrainian independence. Although overtly pro-Russian separatist organizations such as the Communist Party of Crimea and the Party of Regions did not do very well in the elections of the mid-1990s, some studies suggest that separatism remained a significant possibility. In a 2008 survey by the Razumkov Center, 73 percent of those Crimeans who had made up their minds backed the secession of Crimea and Ukraine with a view to joining with Russia. Various surveys suggested that support for separatism increased after Euromaidan (Katchanovsky 2015, 83-86). In 2015, a poll indicated that 82 percent of Crimean people fully supported their region’s inclusion in Russia while only 4 percent spoke out against it (Kelly 2015).
In the events of March 2014, the Crimean government organized a referendum in which citizens chose between staying in the Ukraine but with greater autonomy or joining with Russia. The voter turnout was reported to be 80 percent, and the vote to return to Russia was 97 percent (Roberts 2014). Following these generous official indications of the results, a report of the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights later estimated the turnout to have been only between 30 and 50 percent, of whom 50-60 percent voted for unification with Russia, with a higher turnout of 50-80 percent in Sevastopol where the overwhelming majority voted in favor (Sakwa 2015, 104). An independent and balanced scholarly expert on Russian and European politics, Richard Sakwa, concludes, nonetheless, that it is reasonable to assume that even in perfect conditions a majority in Crimea would have voted for union with Russia and that in Sevastopol the favorable vote would have been overwhelming. In a Pew Center survey in April 2014, 91 percent of respondents in Crimea stated that the referendum was free and fair (Pew Center, quoted by Katchanovsky 2015, 86). Large sections of Ukrainian military, security service and police forces switched their allegiance to the separatists and then to Russia. In the September 2014 elections, the United Russia party of President Putin won 71 percent of the votes in Crimea although some opposition parties were constrained in how they were able to function at this time (Katchanovsky 2015, 86-87).
The autonomous RADA of the Crimea had historically been at odds with the Kiev government. A movement to unify Russia and Crimea had always existed. In 2006, the RADA had passed anti-NATO legislation banning NATO forces from entering Crimean territory (Nazemroaya 2014b). Writing for Forbes magazine in March 2015, Kenneth Rapoza cited several surveys demonstrating that Crimeans of all stripes—ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Tartars—overwhelmingly wished to belong to Russia rather than be returned to Ukraine. The surveys included a June 2014 Gallup poll sponsored by the US government’s Broadcasting Board of Governors, and a February 2015 poll by Germany’s GfK (Parry 2015; Rapoza 2015). One strong practical reason for loyalty to Russia was that Russian pensions were three times higher than Ukrainian, and that Ukrainian pensions were in the process of being slashed as the Ukrainian government conceded to IMF demands.
A rare mainstream media offer of full historical context appeared in the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, almost a year after Crimea voted for annexation with Russia (Hitchens 2015). It paid particular attention to relevant events around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union. In December 1991, the United Nations formally recognized Russia as the “continuer state,” which technically meant that everything that belonged to the Soviet Union came under Russian jurisdiction, including Sevastopol—“an object of all-union significance.” In January 1991, before Ukraine’s independence in August of that year, the government of Crimea had held a referendum on Crimean autonomy. The vote in favor was 93 percent of an 80 percent turnout. In March, 87 percent of Crimean voters voted to stay in the Soviet Union which they anticipated would allow them far greater independence than incorporation within Ukraine. Crimea’s parliament, shortly before the final collapse of the Soviet Union, approved by 153 to 3 a measure that would enable the region to hold a referendum on its political future. But the newly independent government of Ukraine, once in power, stopped this referendum from taking place, even though it had been requested by 246,000 of Crimea’s 2.5 million people.
Moscow, which had done nothing to prevent Ukraine from declaring its own independence, did not protest Ukraine’s refusal to allow a referendum vote. Russia’s President Yeltsin had indicated that Russia would not let republics with large Russian populations secede from the newly emerging states of the former Soviet Union, but he then backed down. When signatures for a referendum were being collected in 1992, Ukraine offered more autonomy for Crimea. The parliament of Crimea voted 118 to 28 for secession on May 5, subject to confirmation by a referendum. This vote was reversed the following day amidst threats of bloodshed and direct presidential rule from Ukraine, and the carrot of greater autonomy. Ukraine declared the May 5 vote unconstitutional and plans for a referendum were canceled.
Western media largely ignored how the events in Crimea were an inevitable response to the Western meddling that had precipitated the collapse of the Yanukovyich regime on February 22 (Smith 2014). Although Soviet President Khrushchev had reassigned Crimea to the Ukraine in 1954, Crimea had been part of Russia since the 1700s. Khrushchev’s gift did not include Sevastopol, site of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. When Ukraine became independent following the collapse of the Soviet Union, territories that had previously been Russian but then appended to Ukraine by Soviet rulers were retained by Ukraine, under Washington pressure. In compensation, Russia was given a 50-year lease on Sevastopol.
Several legal justifications would support the results of the Crimean referendum to annex with Russia (Sakwa 2015, 108-110). For example, while secession may have been unconstitutional with respect to the constitution in force up to February 2014, that constitution was rendered null and void by the February 2014 coup. Procedurally, the 1954 transfer of Crimea was not correct. There were certainly problems with the circumstances in which the referendum was conducted: the presence of armed troops, the hurry with which the referendum was conducted, the absence of independent international observers and the lack of transparency in counting procedures. But if constitutional behavior had broken down in Kiev there was no reason to preserve it in Crimea. In addition, the West had created numerous precedents that in a less partisan environment would have required their support for the Crimean declaration, e.g. Western support for Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008, which was declared without first staging a referendum.
Whereas Western media had no apparent difficulty in accepting the legitimacy of an Iraqi election in 2005—conducted under violent US-UK military occupation, press censorship and vote-rigging—or Libya’s elections in 2012 amidst the chaotic societal fragmentation that followed NATO bombing, or the Afghan presidential elections in 2014 under equally non-propitious circumstances, they adamantly refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Crimea’s referendum, insisting that it was conducted ‘at [Russian] gunpoint’ (Edwards 2014) or because Crimea was “under military occupation.” They averted comparisons between Russian action in Crimea and Western support for separatism elsewhere. In 1999, as we have seen, NATO had fought a war against what remained of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with the goal of militarily occupying Kosovo province and prying Kosovo away from Yugoslavia. No referendum on Kosovo’s separation from Yugoslavia was held (although, to be sure, the measure was broadly popular in Kosovo). By contrast, in their coverage of Ukraine, the word “unelected” was rarely attributed to the interim Kiev rulers, and the word “coup” was almost always used in quotes.
Certainly there was a heavy price to be paid for Crimean independence. For example, Crimea relied on Ukraine for 85 percent of its water. Ukraine blocked water supplies in 2014, claiming that consumers had not paid their debts. Eighty-two percent of Crimean electricity also came from Ukrainian plants. There were issues as to which country Crimean enterprises should pay taxes and implications for their vulnerability to US and EU sanctions. The infrastructural re-integration of Crimea would be a lengthy process, with cultural and political challenges, including an increasingly intolerant attitude towards dissenting journalistic and other dissident or potentially dissident voices—albeit arguably on a par with Kiev’s attitudes to dissent against the coup regime. The standard of living, employment and pensions in Crimea were many times superior to those of Ukraine, but Uehling’s chronicle of a drift towards authoritarianism under Aksyonov (both Prime Minister and head of the Supreme Council) forced disappearances, searches, and shrinking freedom of the press and speech—and their implications in particular for Ukrainians and Tatars—cannot easily be dismissed (Uehling 2015).
Jonathan Cook, former Guardian correspondent, took the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Shaun Walker, to task for a long article Walker had written on the Crimean situation (Cook 2014). Walker had omitted mention of Russia’s two major concerns, namely Western hypocrisy over Crimea and the threat posed to Russia by NATO expansionism. In place of talking about Russia’s legitimate concerns about NATO bases encircling Russia, Walker quoted US diplomats to invent something called “Eurasianism,” an alleged Russian ambition, for which there was no corroborating evidence, to take over Europe, using Ukraine as the launch-pad.
Odessa
When armed protesters took over government buildings in 10 cities of eastern regions of Ukraine in April 2014, US media repeatedly cited US officials to the effect that Russia was responsible. One of the first acts of these insurgents was to take over regional television stations and restore the broadcasts of Russian television that had been cut by order of Kiev authorities (Sakwa 2015, 150). Ignored were some of the main concerns of the protestors. Among these was the threat of the coup regime in Kiev to abolish the status of Russian as an official language (about 30 percent of Ukrainians consider Russian as their first language and are Russophones). Protestors distrusted the appointment of billionaire “oligarchs” as regional administrators. They rightly worried that a harsh austerity plan would likely accompany the IMF “aid” that would now replace the less onerous loans previously offered by Moscow.
The New York Times released photos in a front-page attempt to prove that Russia was behind the occupations, despite Russia’s denial. Veteran investigative reporter Robert Parry told Aaron Woronczuk on Real News Network that at face value the photos—provided courtesy of the US government—apparently showed fighters who had allegedly been in Russia and who were now present in Eastern Ukraine. But this was hardly proof of Kremlin involvement. Worse, a key photo that the New York Times purported to show how some fighters later seen in Eastern Ukraine had previously been seen in Russia was declared by its photographer to have been taken in Eastern Ukraine! The New York Times was forced to retract (Woronczuk 2014). It began to look as though the “newspaper of record” had not engaged in the most elementary fact-checking of material handed to it by the Kiev regime and the US State Department before plastering its alleged ‘evidence’ on its front page. This raised:
the question of how the Times’ photo report was published in the first place. Either the Times editors rammed through the piece and its blurry photos without any independent examination, or the editors did check the story, saw it was a grotesque falsification, and published it anyway. In either case, the Times functioned not as a legitimate journalistic outlet, but as a propaganda agency of the state. (Lantier 2014b)
Washington Post reporter Lally Weymouth (2014) referred to “Russians” in occupied buildings, and at another point called the protesters “terrorists.” No proof had been presented by the US government that there were Russians taking part in the occupations (Johnson 2014). After several weeks’ assurances by Western media of deep Moscow involvement behind East Ukrainian resistance to the new Kiev regime and of indignant Russian propaganda defending against such assertions, the New York Times, upon sending reporters C. J. Chivers and Noah Sneider into Eastern Ukraine, surprised itself and its readers by not finding much, if any, evidence of Russians (Chivers and Sneider 2014; Parry 2014e). Investigating the 12 Company of the People’s Militia, Chivers and Sneider found what appeared only to be Ukrainians, even if many had affinities, family connections and other ties to Russia. The Ukrainians had many different views as to what might constitute a good outcome to the conflict. Weaponry in evidence appeared not to be the sophisticated Russian equipment that one would expect if Russia had been actively intervening, but was well-worn and dated. Anthony Faiola of the Washington Post reported on April 17 that the East Ukrainians he had interviewed expressed fears of the IMF austerity package to which the new regime was committed (Faiola 2014).
In the tragic events that occurred in Odessa on May 2, so-called local ethnic Russian or separatist protestors against the Maidan coup d’etat were set upon and their tents burned in what now appears to have been a well-organized and provocative action. This involved fascist pro-Kiev paramilitaries from outside of Odessa who had formed units of the National Guard. Many of them were veterans of the violence at Maidan, and included police sympathizers (Zeusse 2015). The action’s leader was interim government minister for security Andriy Parubiy (who had founded the Social National Party of Ukraine in 1991, mixing nationalist with nazi symbology). His men were recruited to undertake the dirty work that regular Ukrainian military would not do. Many of their victims were forced to flee into the Trade Unions building which was then attacked by grenades and set on fire while their attackers sang nationalist songs and shouted “Burn Colorado, burn” the soubriquet for the protestors as “Colorado” beetles, a reference to their flag. Graffiti on the burnt building included swastikas and allusions to the World War Two fascist Galician S.S. Over 40 died inside the Trades Unions building. Those who escaped were severely beaten by neo-nazis. A similar atrocity occurred on May 9, when the same thugs burned down a police station that had been occupied by pro-Russian protestors (these included policemen who were opposed to the coup regime in Kiev). Between 7 and 20 were killed. US mainstream media referred to the killers as “volunteers” or “self-defense” forces (Parry 2014b). Four commissions were established to investigate the Odessa massacre yet much remains unclear (Sakwa 2015, 98). One analyst concluded:
The lack of commiseration, empathy, or compassion in relation to the death of “Colorados” in Odessa, “jokes” on the blood of Russian babies on a school charity fair, the openly Russophobe art exhibition titled “Kill a Coloardo” that took place in Kiev in December—those are not accidental events. They have been prepared by Ukrainian intelligentsia. (Pogrebrinksiy 2015, 97)
In an otherwise anti-Russian speech in June 2015, US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power actually criticized the post-coup regime—noting that
investigations into serious crimes such as the violence in the Maidan and in Odessa [where scores of ethnic Russians were burned alive] have been sluggish, opaque, and marred by serious errors—suggesting not only a lack of competence, but also a lack of will to hold the perpetrators accountable. (cited by Parry 2015)
Writing for alternative media site Global Research, Parsons (2014) observed that “neither the President nor Secretary Kerry see any contradiction in their applause for the Kiev government as representing democracy while it was a neo-Nazi coup that ousted a democratically elected President and that while the President and Kerry were ‘disgusted’ by the violence on the streets of Kiev in mid-February … [they] have no reaction to the deaths in Odessa and other east Ukraine communities.” If the coup was really about democracy, she asked, what was so democratic about violent attacks on the citizens of Odessa who did not favor the coup? Besides, what was so wrong with their protest that it deserved such a vicious response? Had they not employed the very same tactic that the coup leaders themselves had used in Maidan—peaceful occupation of a public building—while insisting on a referendum to consider a more autonomous future? Unlike Crimea and the Donbass, and despite the high proportion of ethnic Russians among its citizens, Odessa remained under the control of Kiev. In June 2015, Ukraine President Poroshenko appointed to the governorship of Odessa the ex-president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili. Saakashvili, a neo-conservative who had dragged his country unsuccessfully into war with Russia in 2008, was wanted in his home country for human rights abuses and abuse of government funds. Disgraced, he had spent the interim period in Brooklyn, New York (Parry 2015).
The New York Times reported on May 23 that buildings in Mariupol Makeyevka had been “recovered” by steel workers and other employees of Ukraine’s richest billionaire, Rinat Ahkmetov—one-time enforcer for a Donetsk crime boss who had used extortion and physical violence to seize control of former state-owned property and whose businesses in 2014 accounted for 25 percent of Ukraine’s Gross Domestic Product. Yet other papers, including the Washington Post and the Financial Times, saw no evidence of this. Rather, as Van Auken argued, the New York Times had gleaned its information from releases issued by Akhmetov’s press agents and that in fact
the occupied administration building in Mariupol was not “recovered” by miners and steelworkers; it was gutted in a brutal assault from the Ukrainian military and Right Sektor fascists in which at least 20 civilians were murdered in a hail of automatic weapons and tank fire. (Van Auken 2014)
Donbass
The Crimean referendum was followed on May 11 by referenda in provinces of Eastern Ukraine, although ultimately Russia discouraged cries for the annexation of these provinces with Russia (where Sakwa [2015] argues the prevailing sentiment was in favor of greater autonomy within Ukraine, not separatism nor annexation) and despite Russian pressure for these to be postponed. In fact, Russia had good reason to tread very carefully with respect to the Donbass. The idea of “Novorossiya,” writes Laruelle, has become the engine of the so-called Russian Spring, a totalitarian movement that proclaims not only revolution against Kiev but also against the existing regime in Moscow (Laruelle 2015).
In Donetsk, protesters had proclaimed the Donetsk People’s Republic on April 7 and a Luhansk People’s Republic was formed on April 27. In the May 11 referenda, turnout in both regions was reported to be 75 percent, with 89 and 96 percent, respectively, voting for independence (Sakwa 2015, 154). A month later, on May 24, the two entities established a union known as the Novorossiya Republic.
Neither Kiev nor the West recognized the May 11 ballots as legitimate. Western sources and media routinely condemned them as farcical. The West now supported the deployment of an “army against their own population,” argued Escobar (2014), the very action used by NATO as pretexts for interventions in Libya and Syria but apparently quite acceptable in Ukraine. Richard Sakwa considers that the ferocity of the Kiev reaction reflected a long-standing prejudice in Western Ukraine that those who lived in the Donbass region were not “real Ukrainians” but were Russians who had been sent in the 1930s, firstly to replace those who had died under Stalin’s collectivization program and secondly to industrialize Ukraine. His analysis suggests that the votes for independence were to be seen not as bids to leave Ukraine (since separatist aspirations were not supported by the majority here as they had been in Crimea) but as claims for a more pluralist, federalist Ukraine. He refers to polls of early 2014 showing that sizable majorities in the west and south supported Ukrainian unity and only small minorities in favor of secession or accession to Russia (Sakwa 2015). But discussion of ideas such as federalization had been dismissed from mainstream discourse in greater Ukraine (Pogrebrinksiy 2015, 97-98).
The challenges were obvious: rush organization amidst violent civil war and threats from the post-coup regime. Yet these circumstances were scarcely less dire than the Western-induced post-Gadhafi elections in Libya in 2012 which Western sources and mainstream media naturally applauded as a fine display of democracy. Despite the challenges cited, turnout in the Donbass was huge and the victory was a landslide. Transparency was impressive: “a public vote, in glass ballot boxes, with monitoring provided by Western journalists—mostly from major German media but also from the Kyodo News Agency (Japanese) or the Washington Post” (Escobar 2014).
War Crimes
When two Russian journalists were killed by mortar shells fired directly at them by Ukrainian government forces attacking the rebel-held town of Metallist, in the Luhansk region, eye-witness reports indicated that the reporters had been deliberately targeted, suggesting, offered Grey (2014), “that their deaths were the latest in a series of anti-Russian provocations carried out by the Western-backed regime in Kiev.” This was shortly after pro-Russian separatists in Luhansk, the easternmost region of Ukraine bordering Russia, shot down a government military transport, killing all 40 soldiers and 9 crew members.
The Kiev government had begun its major offensive in April against regions of the Donbass under the control of the separatists, leading to the deaths of at least 950 civilians in this phase of the conflict. At every stage, the Ukrainian government had been working closely with Berlin and Washington (Dreier 2014). When a missile hit the regional administration building in early June, US mainstream media dutifully reported the Kiev government’s version of events as fact, namely that the anti-Kiev forces had blown up their own headquarters, just as several weeks earlier Kiev had claimed that the anti-Kiev forces in Odessa had set themselves on fire. It is clear, McAdams (2014) wrote, “the Kiev government lied about the attack on Luhansk and that those lies were accepted as fact by the US government and the vast majority of the US mainstream media.” Kiev forces had also bombed hospitals, kindergartens, and residential areas. None of this had been condemned by Washington, which had been so eager in 2003 to berate Saddam Hussein for having purportedly used poison gas on his own people. In July, Human Rights Watch (2014) directly reported war crimes against civilians. Washington called for more sanctions against Russia, which most countries of the European Union, including Germany, willingly joined, even though European economies were negatively impacted by the loss of business and the continent was drifting back into recession (which it touched by January 2015). A financial analyst observed that Kiev’s army would come to an instant halt without access to the $35 billion of promised aid from the IMF, EU and US treasury (Stockman 2014).
Early in July, amid “a virtual blackout in the American media” (Lantier 2014a), and following weeks of artillery bombardment, Ukrainian regime forces retook the cities of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, which occupied strategic positions along roads from Western Ukraine to Donetsk. They then marched on the major cities of South-Eastern Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council spokesman Andrei Lysenko made clear that Kiev did not intend to take any prisoners among opposition fighters and dismissed any possibility of creating a corridor that would allow Donetsk People’s Republic forces to leave the region.
The attacks forced a massive dislocation of citizens. According to UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) figures, as of June 27, 2014, 110,000 people had fled to Russia and 54,000 had been internally displaced within Ukraine. Human Rights Watch condemned the illegality of Ukrainian actions in Eastern Ukraine and blamed Kiev for the rising death toll in the Luhansk Region, which by local estimates had reached 300 since May. Human Rights Watch visited the city on August 20-22, interviewing locals who in one way or another had been impacted by the heavy bombardment, which had people cowering in fear in basements for weeks without water or electricity. Many attacks failed to distinguish between civilians and combatants, as was evident in the use of weaponry not designed for areas where precision was required. Human Rights Watch findings indicated that a large majority of attacks on the city were carried out by Ukrainian government forces, while the insurgents were responsible for far fewer and targeted government positions on the outskirts of Luhansk.
The seriousness of the set-backs to ethnic Russian separatists notwithstanding, the Ukrainian army victories appeared short-lived as, within days, alternative sources were claiming that Kiev’s strategy was in tatters “because a highly-motivated and adaptable militia has trounced Obama’s troopers at every turn pushing the Ukrainian army to the brink of collapse, causing the Ukrainian Army to retreat almost everywhere” (Whitney 2014). This gave rise to rumors of a mooted anti-Poroshenko coup by outraged Nazi nationalists. By the end of October, elections in the eastern oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk created the first parliament of the Donetsk People’s Republic. The republic would serve as the de facto autonomous region, and also the potential government if it were to secede outright. Kiev’s response, in early November, was to order a halt to all transfers of public funds to the areas dominated by separatists in Eastern Ukraine, thus impacting schools, hospitals, government agencies and state enterprises (Schwarz 2014).
Identifying Principles of Western Conflict Propaganda
Typically in Western media, propaganda does not announce itself as such but, as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky among many others have argued, achieves the purposes of propagandists through the ways in which issues are framed; emphasis and omission; privileging of certain sources, perspectives, information over possible alternatives; and in the uses of language (verbal and visual) that assist these effects (Boyd-Barrett 2015; Herman and Chomsky 2002; Jowett and O’Donnell 2015). In this paper, I focus on some of the understandings (propaganda claims) about Russia, Ukraine and the West that the propagandists—the Western powers whose voices, values and preferences are privileged by Western media—hope will prevail among members of the public. Through close reading as illustrated by my treatment of Western coverage of events in Crimea, Odessa and Donbass, I identify preferred understandings—the desired propaganda beliefs—by reference to their principal topics. I do not have sufficient space to incorporate all of the propaganda themes that emerge from examination of this particular narrative, and some of those that I have selected also relate to other narratives. I have attempted to formulate these themes as emergent principles of propaganda as these apply to particular topics, as follows.
Attack by an Army Against its Own People
If a regime that is favored by the West deploys its army against its own people, as happened when the authorities of Kiev attacked and ravaged the separatist movements of the Donbass, then that is perfectly excusable and is also a pretext for Western aid to that regime against regime opponents. If the regime is not favored by the West, as in the case of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Muammar Gadhafi’s Libya or Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, then evidence of such deployment, whether real or fabricated, is an acceptable pretext for Western humanitarian intervention and democracy promotion whose purpose is regime-change.
Context
In covering the official claims of Western governments as to their policies towards countries that have been targeted for cooption into the NATO security sphere, such as post-coup Ukraine, including condemnation of Russian “aggression” and support for democracy, Western media need not consider as relevant the long-standing weaknesses of these countries (including, in the case of Ukraine, its economic basket-case status) and the contribution to them of the excesses and non-democratic instincts of their oligarch classes. Nor need they consider as relevant to Western motivations the loot for Western corporations that are consequent on IMF and other Western loans, involving as these typically do the privatization of infrastructure, shipping and rail, and the legalization of market access for foreign interests in traditional and GMO (genetically modified organism) agribusiness and other spheres.
Democracy
A state that has acquired power by a Western-supported coup, is largely run by oligarchs and whose democracy is based on political parties that are affiliated with the interests of different oligarchs (e.g. Ukraine) should be supported by Western powers so long as it can exhibit the trappings of modern democracy such as regular elections, diversity of choice, etc. A state that has many oligarchs but whose power nonetheless is contested by a strong executive within a democratic, multi-party framework (e.g. Russia) cannot be regarded as an acceptably functioning democracy when Western powers do not like the interests that it represents or advances.
Elections
Elections for independence that take place under the rule of authorities who do not enjoy the approval of Western powers will be considered less than legitimate by those powers and their media, especially when they occur in periods of conflict and unrest (as in Crimea). Elections for independence that take place under the rule of authorities that are approved by Western interests may not even be necessary (as in Kosovo) or, if held, are reassuring signs of democracy even in the most unpromising of circumstances (as in the presidential elections in Ukraine that elected Poroshenko to the Presidency, and the parliamentary elections that were held in August).
Evidence
Events whose status as initially reported by Western media as somewhat uncertain and needing qualification become indisputable “facts” by dint of mere repetition and the slow simplifying conversion from ambiguity to certainty. Thus, there was some dithering, at first, as to the status of Russia’s new influence in Crimea, but soon the dithering was simply replaced by such words as “seized” or “invasion.” Likewise claims that Russia had invaded or was about to invade—the distinction seemed less important over time—Ukraine and that the separatists or independents in Eastern Ukraine were simply proxies for Russia. The absence of evidence is never an insurmountable problem for Western propaganda: it can be construed as the devilish cunning of the enemy’s capacity for subterfuge.
Fascism
Dependence by a Western-supported coup regime on fascist forces backed by corrupt oligarchs—forces whose activities are not subject to control by the political and military mainstream, that are often criminal, and that have links with and support from radical Islamist movements—is not a source of significant concern for Western governments or media. By contrast, alleged criminal links of political and military leaders of resistance to a Western-support coup regime, as in the Donbass, are widely trumpeted as “evidence” of insincerity, corruption and inefficacy, and the entire separatist movement is smeared with frequently contestable claims of its dependence on Russian support and assistance.
Humanitarian Support
Actions taken to provide humanitarian support for the victims of an aggression committed by a party that enjoys the support of Western powers is inherently suspicious, treated as some form of military action in humanitarian disguise. This was the case with Western reaction to Russia’s preparations of aid convoys for desperate peoples in the Donbass.
Invasions
An invasion may be said to have occurred even if the country’s troops were already and legitimately present in a region of the “invaded” country (e.g. Crimea), a substantial majority of whose voting population expressed its fear of aggression from its “own” government—the coup regime in Kiev—and their desire to be taken under Russian protection. Once such an “invasion” has occurred (regardless of how weak the claim or how uninvestigated the actual circumstances), the cry of “invasion,” pending or otherwise, can then be levied against the country in question whenever that country does anything, or perhaps nothing at all, that the Western powers do not like, so that the country in question continues to be vilified and its leaders demonized.
Protests
When protestors take to the streets to demand a change of government and more democracy, they have the support of Western powers when those powers are hostile to the existing regime (as in Kiev in February 2014); when protestors take to the streets to demand a change of government and more democracy, they will be disowned by Western powers when those powers side with the existing regime (as in Western attitudes to the protestors in Odessa in May 2015).
Secession
When a region of an established country wishes to secede from that country, and the leadership of that region enjoys Western favor, then Western powers and their mainstream media will be supportive of secession. This was evident in mainstream contemplation of what might happen if the February 2104 coup failed and Kiev broke off Western Ukraine from the rest. It was evident in Western support for Kosovo’s assertion of independence from Serbia. Because the leadership of Crimea and the Donbass regions did not enjoy Western favor, their respective bids for secession were condemned.
If a region seeks to secede from a coup-installed regime that has the backing of Western powers, even when the regime threatens to criminalize that region’s language and makes evident its disdain for the ethnicity of a large proportion of the region’s population, its aspirations for autonomy are unworthy. They are deemed even less worthy if the region seeks to annex with a major neighboring power with which it is affiliated ethnically and culturally. Western support for such a region is permissible when the region in question (as in the case of Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia) has the support of Western powers and when the country from which it secedes is disliked by Western powers, in which case not even a referendum for secession is deemed necessary.
Suffering
The sufferings of a people which is attacked by a power allied to Western interests attract more attention, are more likely to be ennobled, than the sufferings of people who are attacked by a power that is not allied to Western interests. In this second case, suffering need not invoke intense sympathy, nor be covered in detail, because such people have brought their suffering upon themselves through unwise choice of leaders or alliance. Similarly, killings and assassinations of figures who are opponents of regimes that the West does not like, such as Boris Nemtsov, are automatically to be cast as noble fighters of the good cause. Killings and assassinations of figures who are opponents of regimes that the West likes, such as the dozens killed among opponents to the coup regime of Kiev following February 2014, require little or no attention or sympathy.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have identified leading press frames and discourses of the Ukraine crisis and its associated conflicts between the Kiev authorities and the authorities of separatist movements within Ukraine, Russia, the United States and the European Union. I have noted the Manichean forms that these discourses take. The paper dwells mainly on one of the 10 frames identified and analyzed in my broader work. Guided by my own close reading of press and alternative media sources, I have determined the principal arguments, presumptions and intentions of propaganda as these reflect the interests of Western powers and the forms by which they are conveyed through Western mainstream media. These considerations help demonstrate the propaganda-of-pretext that suffuses Western media accounts of conflicts in which their own countries are engaged or may have incited. It counsels the universal importance for news consumers to attend to a much broader diversity of knowledgeable viewpoints than are typically provided by institutions whose business models and political alliances do not permit them to move beyond a very limited range of discourse.