Interview with Bruce Gagnon by Finian Cunningham (Strategic Culture Foundation)

The corporate-dominated media (that lied us into the 2003 “shock and awe” attack on Iraq over non-existent WMD) is trotting out the same strategy again to sell war and deceive the public American peace activist, documentary filmmaker and author Bruce Gagnon analyses the current war in Ukraine with a critical bigger picture of political and strategic context that is so woefully – and deliberately – missing in Western media.

In the following interview, Gagnon points out that the Russian military intervention in Ukraine that began on February 24 can only be properly understood by viewing it as a response to eight years of relentless military assault by the NATO-backed Kiev regime against the ethnic Russian population of the Donbass region. Nearly 14,000 people were killed by the NATO-backed Kiev regime and its Russian-hating Nazi regiments. Where were Western government and media condemnations?


Interview

Finian Cunningham: The U.S. Congress is set to pass a Lend-Lease Act that will greatly increase the supply of weapons to Ukraine purportedly to help defend that country from “Russian aggression”. This is while negotiations are underway between Ukraine and Russia to find a peace settlement to the conflict. Is Washington trying to strengthen Kiev’s negotiating hand or is the United States aiming to prolong the war?

Bruce Gagnon: Using the 2019 Rand Corp study called ‘Overextending and Unbalancing Russia’ as a guide, the U.S.-NATO obviously do not want negotiations between Ukraine and Russia to flourish. Their interest is in creating a festering sore along Russia’s border forcing Moscow to spend more of its national treasury on the military and on rebuilding the massively destroyed Russian-ethnic Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. The Donbass destruction was largely due to Ukrainian army shelling for over eight years since the U.S.-orchestrated coup in Kiev in 2014.

Question: In passing the Lend-Lease Act, the U.S. Senate cited allegations of genocide and the massacre of civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bucha by Russian troops as justification for the legislative go-ahead for more American weapons to Ukraine. Russia categorically denies the allegations while several independent analysts have pointed to evidence that the gruesome killings were a false-flag provocation carried out by Ukrainian forces in order to incriminate Russia. What is your view of the Western media reports on the Bucha massacre?

Bruce Gagnon: I have studied the Bucha story quite closely and it is more than obvious that this was one more false flag by the U.S.-NATO-Ukrainian axis. The timelines point to this being such. Russian troops left Bucha on March 30. On March 31, the mayor of Bucha put out a video where he excitedly and proudly proclaimed that Russian troops had left. On April 1, a woman who serves as a Bucha City Council Deputy made a similar video proclaiming victory over the Russians. Neither of those two city leaders made any reference to a massacre or bodies in the streets which would have been more than obvious at that point. On April 2, Ukrainian forces retook control of Bucha. On April 3, Western media began reporting on the alleged massacre.

There have been repeated attempts by the U.S.-NATO-Ukrainian side to claim that Russia was killing civilians but each story has turned out to be lacking a factual basis. The latest attempt was the Ukrainian army shelling Kramatorsk using a Tochka-U missile on April 8. Dozens of civilians were killed and up to 100 wounded. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky was quick to blame Russia although the Tochka-U missile is an outdated technology that is no longer used by Russia and ample evidence shows that it has been a favorite weapon used by the Nazi-led Kiev regime’s army to repeatedly shell the Donbass region.

Additionally, Kramatorsk is in the Russian-ethnic region of eastern Ukraine that Russia is trying to liberate from the Nazi-led army of Kiev. It makes no sense that Russia would kill their own people.

It is said that every criminal has a Modus Operandi (MO) – a way of repeating their bad behavior. I think it is safe to say that Ukraine is losing this war and has resorted to an MO to create false flags in order to turn public opinion against Russia with hopes that U.S.-NATO will then fully enter the war on the Kiev regime’s side. So Ukraine has replaced actual offensive military operations (which they are no longer really capable of) with false-flag events as their primary strategy to vilify and defeat Russia.

Question: You have said that the war in Ukraine is not merely about Ukraine and Russia in isolation, but rather represents a front line in a bigger confrontation between the U.S.-led NATO bloc on one hand and Russia and China on the other. Are you saying this is a proxy war?

Bruce Gagnon: There can be no doubt that this war is being waged on behalf of a larger mission – regime change in Russia that the West hopes would allow for the breaking up of Russia into smaller nations similar to what U.S.-NATO did to Yugoslavia following the 1999 American-led attack on Belgrade. The goal is for Western resource extraction corporations to take control of Russia’s vast landmass and most importantly its huge resource base that includes natural gas, oil, timber, agricultural lands and vital mineral deposits. With the melting of the Arctic ice, it will increasingly become possible to “drill-baby-drill” for offshore resources under the sea that has long been covered in thick layers of ice. It’s no coincidence that at the same time this war started, the U.S.-NATO began holding a war game called ‘Cold Response’ in the north of Norway which borders Russia’s Arctic region.

U.S. President Joe Biden, in one of his confused moments, blurted out in a recent speech in Warsaw that “Putin had to go”. I am more than certain that during many of the National Security Council meetings in Washington this has long been a key agenda item.

Question: Do you think there is an even bigger picture to the U.S.-led NATO confrontation with Russia? That is, the bigger battle is to stave off the historic decline in the American-dominated Western economic system? Russia and China have consistently hailed the advent of a multipolar world based on cooperation and partnership. The United States seems deeply opposed to this vision, claiming that Moscow and Beijing undermine a so-called “rules-based global order”. Why does Washington object to a multi-polar vision? What is it about American power that demands unipolar dominance, fealty, or war?
 

Bruce Gagnon: The U.S. and NATO are an insecure and desperate military war machine. They are the muscle for the Western-run corporate globalization syndicate. They know their days are numbered as the dominant Western imperial powers that have ruled most of the world for hundreds of years.

It reminds me of a drunken riverboat gambler rolling the dice – knowing that he has lost everything but still going for broke one last time. Washington and the EU clearly understand that the rising multi-polar world is unstoppable – when you add up the population numbers this rising tide is the vast majority of the world’s population. So the U.S.NATO know this is their last-ditch chance to try to remain in control of the planet. Washington-London-Paris-Berlin-Brussels want total power and control and are willing to burn any nations to the ground that stand in their way.

Obviously, China, Russia, Iran, India, and others across the global South understand all of this. They have suffered at the hands of the U.S.-Europe long enough. They are moving to help create this multi-polar world – what one Russian leader recently called a “Fair World Order” not run by Wall Street, the Bank of England, the IMF and World Bank. The question for all of us is: will the U.S.-NATO be willing to take this drive to remain in control to World World III that could then quite possibly turn nuclear? Those so-called “peaceniks” out in the streets waving Ukrainian flags ought to ask themselves if they are in fact inadvertently helping to push things in that horrific direction.

Question: In the reporting on the Ukraine war and the prelude to it, would you agree that Western news media seem to have more openly embraced the function of a propaganda system, peddling intelligence disinformation to distort the nature of the conflict with Russia?

Bruce Gagnon: The Western media is all in when it comes to demonizing Russia and helping to escalate this war. Just days ago while driving, I turned on NPR (National Public Radio) and heard one “correspondent” claim that Russian troops had raped young girls in Bucha.

Have we forgotten the groundbreaking U.S. Senate committee hearings in 1975 on the CIA’s control of the media? Those hearings were led by Senator Frank Church (D-ID). At the time, it was disclosed that 400 journalists worldwide were submitting news stories on behalf of the CIA. Operation Mockingbird it was called. Look it up on the internet. I don’t think the videos from those congressional hearings have been removed yet on YouTube. I’d bet my life that the so-called “Bucha rape story” was produced by the agency.

Just last week we learned from an WMD) is trotting out the same strategy again to sell war and deceive the public. And when you factor in all the efforts of corporate-owned social media outlets to take down alternative views on the Ukraine war it becomes clear that the Number One goal is the brainwashing of the public. 

The West has essentially declared an all-out war on Russia. Instead of calling for a negotiated end to the conflict, Washington, London, Berlin, Paris and Brussels are looking to sustain the Ukrainian war effort. 

So, we need to ask: What is the West’s policy goal in all of this?

CrossTalking, with Michael Maloof, Ray McGovern, and Bruce Gagnon.

See the show at any of these sites:

RT, Rumble or Odysee
 

As the Russia-Ukraine-NATO war enters a new phase, we highly recommend this very important article by Jacques Baud who served in a number of senior security, intellegence and advisory positions at NATO, the United Nations, and with the Swiss military.

See Jacques Baud’s article on the Ukraine war here