Kiev Defends Its Blacklisting Policy with Call for Purges

The Ukrainian government has followed up the publication of the infamous list of “Foreigners in the service of the Kremlin” (cf. SAS 31/22) with more articles and even calls on Western governments to “purge” persons named. As we reported last week, the first 30 names on the list of over 70 figures targeted by Kiev’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) are speakers at Schiller Institute international conferences.

Andriy Shapovalov is acting director of the CDC in Kiev, which is financed by the U.S. State Department and British government agencies. He penned an article in the July 29 Ukrainian Pravda, in which he takes aim at those he claims have been “broadcasting Russian rhetoric to foreign audiences”. “Speakers sympathetic to the Putin regime,” he writes, “have been operating in the interests of the Kremlin, regularly bringing Russian propaganda narratives to European and American media during academic and public debates.”

Among those who, he says, openly support “the ideas of the Putin regime” are the Schiller Institute (SI) and the French CF2R run by Eric Dénécé, a speaker at SI conferences. The activities of the SI “are carried out in 50 countries of the world”; he writes. In order to motivate his allegations, Shapovalov attributes to blacklisted SI personalities statements never pronounced, such as “freedom of speech exists only in Russia”.

A yet higher official in the Zelensky government, Presidential advisor Mikhailo Podolyak, was quoted in the Indian publication The Print on July 30, on the punishments Ukraine seeks for those on that list. The article is on the subject of the three Indians blacklisted: Sam Pitroda, journalist Saeed Naqvi, and diplomat P.S. Raghavan (cf. below).

The author, one Kapil Komireddi, gives Podolyak’s explanation of the hit list. The Zelenskyy government wants to have the listed prominent individuals “sanctioned” by various countries; treated as though they were “instruments of war”; their influence limited; and to subject them to “military lustration” (lustration meaning, in plain English, purge).

Also relevant in this context is the reaction of President Zelensky to the recent report by Amnesty International documenting the consistent use by Ukrainian Armed Forces of civilian areas, schools and hospitals as locations for military units and heavy weapons, indicating these are war crimes. (Amnesty has leveled the same charge against Russian forces.) In response, Zelensky accused anyone who places any blame on Ukraine of being “a terrorist themselves, and a participant in the killings”.

All this confirms once again that the all-out western support for Ukraine – contrary to the official narrative — is certainly not to defend a democratic, freedom-loving forces, but rather to ruthlessly use the Ukrainian population as cannon fodder in NATO’s proxy war against Russia. NATO General Secretary Stoltenberg has admitted as much on several occasions. At the same time, the seemingly endless amounts of money and weapons allegedly sent to Ukraine serve to prop up the speculative transatlantic financial system and the “military industrial complex”, while feeding black market arms trafficking internationally (cf. SAS 31/22).

(One other point of interest: Thomas Friedman, in an Aug. 1 opinion article in the New York Times, writes that “there is deep mistrust between the White House and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — considerably more than has been reported.” However, he notes, Washington is not ready to look too closely at the “funny business going on in Kyiv”.)

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