I read this with a hell of a lot of scrutiny.

For one thing, they’re not wrong. Ukraine has been a puppet of conflicting massive powers for so many decades it’s hardly worth counting, and this new thing is obviously a corrupt continuation (although its actual negative impact on Ukraine may be limited, since Ukraine doesn’t have as many valuable minerals as the people who engineered this deal seem to think it does) but not really that surprising.

The anomalously intense scrutiny they’re giving to Hunter Biden in the story, while memory-holing the much more egregious corrupt pressure Trump got impeached for putting them under, is a little weird. And the coverage of Ukraine’s internal politics being messed around with by great powers that doesn’t see fit to talk about any of it happening from the Russian side gets into “very weird” territory. But whatever, even after reading it I still wasn’t really sure if it was a legit thing that just happened to be similar to some propaganda I’ve seen in the past, or it was as it appeared to be, a planted story to spread around pro-Russian and Trump-friendly talking points (“nothing to see here, this kind of thing is perfectly normal, don’t worry”). So I went to the author’s Substack.

infamously corrupt Security Services (SBU)

The OCCRP’s reporting also played a major role in Russiagate. ‘OCCRP’s reporting on Rudy Giuliani’s political work in Ukraine was cited four times in the whistleblower letter that led to President Donald Trump’s impeachment.’

I have written here in detail about how USAID-funded media cooperated with the SBU back in 2016 to ‘spark’ the ‘Russiagate’ saga. Naturally, many in Ukraine believe that these ‘independent journalists’ were simply given orders to set such a fire by their handlers in the Democrat Party.

Journalists at MintPress

Bellingcat was founded in 2014 after the start of the war in Ukraine. It is well known for its role in attempting to prove that pro-Russian forces were responsible for the downing of Dutch passenger plane MH-17 in July of that year.

I was apprehended by a loud young man from the nationalist svoboda party

in 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected on the platform of a peacemaker with Russia

And so on. That’s all from https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/bellingcat-and-the-occrp-regime-change. There are also stories about how Ukraine’s military is collapsing, and they’re about to lose the war, any day now.

I am pretty confident at this point in calling this person a Russian stooge. I am accustomed to seeing this stuff on blogs and in the European press but I am sad to see it has now infiltrated Al Jazeera.