Bernie Sanders Disgraces Himself With Russophobic Diatribe Filled With Disinformation

[Source: youtube.com]

On March 4, Counterpunch ran an article by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (D) entitled “Meet Trump’s New Best Friend.”

The image at the top of the article was a mural on a wall with TrumpPutin spray painted below the words: “your bombs create the refugee crisis.”

[Source: counterpunch.org]

Sanders started the article by stating that “Donald Trump’s attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are a gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump is dividing the Western alliance, and undermining Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion. His actions may prolong the war by convincing Putin he can manipulate Trump into a deal with concessions he couldn’t win on the battlefield.”

Sanders went on to write that Trump was “cozying up to Vladimir Putin,” whom he claimed had used his position as Russian president to become “one of the wealthiest people on earth.”

This latter claim has been debunked by investigators who point to the fact that properties allegedly seized by Putin are ones that any Russian President naturally inherits during his time in office.

Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov told me a few years ago that “there is no evidence of Putin’s excessive riches. There is not a single evidence of some bank accounts, or bribe he, or his wife for example, got from an industry, or any such thing. While there is such evidence in the case of quite a few other heads of state [including] evidence in [Boris] Yeltsin’s case, quite specific and direct.”

Sanders’ advances more dubious claims when he says that Putin “directly attacked the United States and its allies, repeatedly hacking our computer systems, attempting to sabotage critical infrastructure, meddling in our elections and harassing our diplomats.”

In 2017, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) carried out an investigation, which determined that Russia had not meddled in U.S. elections by leaking emails designed to discredit Hillary Clinton (Trump’s adversary in the 2016 election).

The speed of the modem determined that the emails had to have been leaked through a domestic server.

The VIP’s and other independent analysts further refuted claims about the hacking of U.S. computer systems and sabotage of critical U.S. infrastructure, which have never been corroborated.

Sander’s lies extend to his attempt to blame Putin for carrying out military aggression in what he calls “four brutal wars: Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and Ukraine (twice).”

Regarding Chechnya, Sanders’ assessment fails to consider the CIA’s support for Chechen extremists with the intent of provoking Russia into a bloody conflict.

In the case of the 2008 Georgian War, an EU report made clear Georgia’s culpability for starting the war after Russian came to the defense of secessionist groups in South Ossetia and Abkhazia that were under attack.

Georgia was led at the time by neoconservative darling Mikhail Sakaashvili, who had been installed as Georgian ruler in a U.S. backed color revolution.

Sanders’ claims about Syria obscure how Russia came to the defense of Syria’s sovereignty in the face of an invasion by multiple different countries backed by the U.S. in support of jihadist extremists who had tried to overthrow Syria’s government.

After helping to trigger the jihadist uprising in March 2011, the Obama administration launched the billion dollar Operation Timber Sycamore to arm and train jihadist rebels from Jordan and Turkey and then began bombing Syrian mercilessly, which Sanders fails to mention.[1]

Sanders is equally delusional about Ukraine as he is about Syria.

He claims the Russians invaded Ukraine twice without provocation, though in 2014 it was the Obama administration that triggered a destabilizing coup in Ukraine and that armed the post-coup regime as it terrorized the people of Eastern Ukraine who voted for their autonomy.

Facing constant shelling and attack by the U.S. subsidized Ukrainian army and its neo-Nazi paramilitary adjuncts, the Eastern Ukrainian people begged for Russian military intervention.[2]

German Premier Angela Merkel admitted later that the peace agreement backed by the Western countries was merely a ruse to buy more time for Ukraine to arm itself to attack Russia—the ultimate goal of the neoconservatives in Washington that Sanders is now firmly in alliance with.

As a history professor, I give Sanders an F on his understanding of modern history and the conflicts he is describing.

While no nation state is innocent, Russia included, the argument that Russia started all of the above conflicts is simply false in light of all that we know.

Sanders also wants to make us believe that Russia is responsible for the all the atrocities in all of those wars.

He writes that “in Syria, Russian aircraft bombed schools, hospitals and crowded markets, killing thousands of civilians to prop up the brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad.” And in Ukraine, he says, “every single day, Russia rains down hundreds of missiles and drones on Ukrainian cities. Putin’s forces have massacred civilians and kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children, bringing them back to Russian “re-education” camps.”

Sanders’ latter comments are misleading on multiple levels:

a) In Syria, while Russian bombing killed civilians, Sanders is silent about U.S. and coalition bombing in support of jihadist elements that killed thousands of civilians. In December 2020, Anand Gopal published an article in The New Yorker, which discussed the methodical devastation resulting from the Trump administration’s dropping of 10,000 bombs on the city of Raqqa in just one operation in a decade long U.S. involvement in Syria.

b) Sanders leaves out that Ukraine has been for years raining down drones and missiles on Eastern Ukrainian and increasingly Russian cities, killing countless civilians. This fact does not make what Russia has done right, however, if Sanders provided broader context for the war and how the U.S. and Ukraine provoked it, Russia would not seem to the reader to be diabolically evil, or unique in its behavior.

c) The claim about Russia kidnapping Ukrainian children has been debunked by independent investigators. When journalist Jeffrey Lofredo visited one of the camps where Ukrainian children had supposedly been sent against their will, he found that their parents had placed the kids there to get out of the war zone and that the camp was a fun place that offered the kids music lessons and sporting activities.

During World War I, the U.S. propaganda agency set up by the Wilson administration (the Committee on Public Information-CPI) tried to blame Germany exclusively for starting the war, just like Russia is being blamed now.

Later on, impartial historians found that Germany had been provoked into invading Belgium and that the war started largely due to British, French and Russian machinations and political scheming—just like with the U.S.-UK and European countries today.[3]

Sanders’ one-sided and childish analysis of world events is perfectly in line with the U.S./Western propaganda system. One hundred and ten years ago, the German Kaiser was presented just as diabolically as Putin is today in order to whip up public hysteria and engender support for a war that financial elites could profit off of.

Half-page newspaper ad for the film, The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. [Source: wikipedia.org]

The names and countries may change, but propaganda techniques remain the same from 110 years ago. [Source: commarts.com]

Yet More Disinformation

Sanders spread further disinformation in his Counterpunch article when he writes that “the bravest and most prominent dissidents [in Russia]—people like Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov and Sergei Magnitsky—are murdered outright.”

However, in April 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported the conclusion of U.S. intelligence that “Putin probably didn’t order Navalny [who died of health problems in a Siberian prison] to be killed.” [4]

Sergei Magnitsky is also believed to have died of a heart condition in a Russian jail—and not at the hands of Russian state agents—and Nemtsov is believed by most Russians to have been killed by the mafia because of his role in defrauding the Russian people while serving as Minister of Fuel and Energy in 1997 and Deputy Prime Minister in 1998-1999.[5]

Like Nemtsov, Navalny and Magnitsky weren’t the “brave dissidents” Sanders portrays them as.

Navalny was widely considered to be a Russian version of Donald Trump because of his right-wing political outlook and anti-immigrant demagoguery.

He was even featured in a video referring to Russian immigrants as cockroaches, and he was implicated in white collar crime with his brother, which led to his arrest.[6]

Sergei Magnitsky was an accountant who specialized in helping billionaires offshore their money. One of his tiop clients, American hedge fund billionaire Bill Browder, was convicted in absentia in a Russian court of tax evasion and sentenced to nine years in prison.

To try and clear his reputation, Browder concocted a false story that the Russian government robbed him of over $200 million when the scheme was in fact masterminded by he and Magnitsky. Afterwards, Browder tried to claim that Magnitsky was a whistleblower who was killed when he tried to expose Russian corruption, which simply is not true.[7]

Sanders’ gross ignorance about the Russia-Ukraine conflict extends to his black and white comparison between Putin and Zelensky, which obscures the fact that political repression in Ukraine appears to be far worse than in Russia.

Zelensky, for example, has not only canceled elections but he has banned twelve political parties, including the Communist Party, which is legal in Russia.

Dissidents in Ukraine further have been hunted down and murdered by the CIA trained Ukrainian intelligence services (SBU), which is notorious for operating torture dungeons.

In December 2023, CovertAction Magazine reported on the murder of Ilya Kyva, the former head of the socialist party in Ukraine’s parliament, who was assassinated in broad daylight in a park in Moscow by SBU agents who afterwards posted a video of their handiwork.

Kyva had opposed official Ukrainian government persecution of Russian speakers in Ukraine following the February 2014 Maidan coup and was given a 14-year jail sentence by Ukrainian authorities on charges of high treason for allegedly calling for Ukrainian troops to surrender after Russian troops entered Ukraine in February 2022.[8]

Ilya Kyva [Source: dailymail.co.uk]

Given his past enthusiasm for socialist ideals, one would have thought that Sanders might tried to raise awareness about Kyva and the injustice directed against him along with other leftists opposing Zelensky in Ukraine.

Sanders of course has done nothing of the sort. His disgraceful Russophobia and pro-war position on Ukraine reflects the moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party and what passes for the American left today.

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[1] For sharp insights on the Syrian conflict contradicting Sanders’ assessment, see A.B. Abrams, World War in Syria: Global Conflict on Middle Eastern Battlefields (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2021).

[2] See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019).

[3] https://peacehistory-usfp.org/ww1/

[4] See Amy Knight, Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2017). Knight is fervently anti-Putin but is an objective reporter who acknoowledges that there was no definitive proof that he had carried out any of the political assassinations for which he has been accused by Western politicians and in the U.S. media.

[5] At that time, Nemtsov was involved in corrupt privatization schemes that resulted in the looting of Russian state resources and enrichment of a clique of corrupt oligarchs that were close to then Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

[6] See Jacques Baud, The Navalny Case: Conspiracy to Serve Foreign Policy (Paris: Max Milo, 2023).

[7] See Jeremy Kuzmarov, and John Marciano, The Russians Are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018).

[8] After fleeing to Russia, Kyva criticized Volodymyr Zelensky and right wingers in the Ukrainian military who had for years staged attacks on the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine. Hours before he died, Kyva had in his final social media post predicted that a defeated Zelensky, whom he had accused of being a British MI6 stooge, would be forced to flee to Britain.