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Scott Ritter

Correspondent

In 1997, I flew into Kiev on-mission with the United Nations Special Commission to seek the assistance of the Ukrainian government in investigating the activities of a Ukrainian citizen suspected of illegally selling ballistic missile components and manufacturing capabilities to Iraq in violation of Security Council-imposed economic sanctions. 

During my visit, I held several meetings with senior officials from the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council, including its Secretary, Vladimir Horbulin. 

I left on good terms, with the Ukrainians agreeing to co-operate (they ultimately did not) and hoping that I would pass on their good attitude to US authorities in hopes that it would assist their desire for NATO membership (I did, in fact, do this.) 

Twenty-five years later, this same National Security and Defence Council, through its “Centre for Countering Disinformation,” has published a blacklist of individuals deemed to be “promoting Russian propaganda.” 

My name is on this list. 

My “crimes” include describing Ukraine as a base of NATO, challenging the narrative surrounding the Bucha massacre, and defining the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia as a “proxy war between NATO and Russia.” 

I am guilty on all three charges, and more. 

But I am no Russian propagandist. 

The Centre for Countering Disinformation was established in 2021 on the order of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

It is headed by Polina Lysenko, a lawyer who received her law degree in 2015, and whose resumé includes time with the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, the Office of the Prosecutor General (where she received a commendation from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation) and, up until her current appointment, as the director of the information policy and public relations department at a state-owned railway operator. 

Lysenko unveiled the work of the Centre for Countering Disinformation to the ambassadors of the G7 countries, as well as to Finland, Israel, and NATO shortly after her appointment. 

Her boss, the Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, Aleksey Danilov, emphasised “the importance of co-ordinating actions with strategic partners in combating hostile information operations and fighting disinformation,” while the head of the office of the president, Andrey Yermak, indicated that he hoped “that the Centre will become not only a Ukrainian centre for countering disinformation, but also an international one.” 

According to Yermak, the centre was “fully operational.”

Polina Lysenko, in outlining the goals and mission of her organisation, emphasised that “the truth will be the main weapon.”

She should have started by fact-checking Yermak — two months after he declared her centre “fully operational,” Ukrainian media was reporting that the centre lacked “premises, funding, and staff.” 

Lysenko was the only employee, and “she has not been paid her salary for several months.” 

The Centre was supposed to have a staff of 52, who were to be paid some $2,000 per month. 

The Ministry of Finance was responsible for finding the funds for the centre, something it had not done as of mid-June 2021. 

Lysenko worked by herself from a “tiny office on the ground floor of the National Security and Defence Council building.”

It is tough to tell the truth when you are not being paid, it seems.

A year later, while funding and staff do not seem to be a problem (thanks in large part to the underwriting of the Ukrainian government payroll by the US taxpayer), quality control is. Take, for example, the case outlined by Lysenko and her new agency on disinformation against me. 

If “describing Ukraine as a base of NATO” makes one a Russian propagandist, then I should have been joined by Ben Watson, an editor with the notoriously pro-Russian (sarcasm emphasised) web-based journal, Defence One, who in October 2017 published an article with the self-explanatory headline “In Ukraine, the US Trains an Army in the West to Fight in the East.” 

The article detailed the work done by US and NATO military personnel at the Joint Multinational Training Group — Ukraine’s Yavoriv Combat Training Center in western Ukraine — literally a NATO base inside Ukraine — where every 55-days a Ukrainian Army battalion was trained to NATO standards for the sole purpose of being deployed into eastern Ukraine to fight Russian-backed separatists in Donbass.

Pro hint, Ms Lysenko — when your country hosts a permanent contingent of NATO troops on its soil, that makes it a base of NATO.

Lysenko’s staff of top-notch disinformation-countering analysts (again, sarcasm) likewise highlighted my assessment of the massacre of civilians in Bucha in late March — early April as having been committed by Ukrainian forces. 

Lysenko was in good company here — I was banned from Twitter for this same analysis. Some four months removed from the atrocities committed in Bucha, I stand by my analysis — the fact set has not changed. 

I am prepared to debate this issue with Polina Lysenko and her entire staff, live on Ukrainian television, anytime she likes. I will debate it with anyone, anywhere — that is how confident I remain in my original analysis. Truth, after all, is my main weapon. 

The last charge levelled against me by Lysenko’s intrepid truth sleuths, that I have labelled the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia as a “proxy war between NATO and Russia,” again brings to question the professionalism of her staff. 

After all, the Moscow-born self-hating Russian, Max Boot, in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post on June 22, called the Ukraine conflict “our war, too.” 

It’s one of the few times I will agree with Max Boot on anything. Boot, however, was merely echoing US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin’s articulation of US policy regarding the Ukraine conflict as being focused on weakening Russia by supporting Ukraine — sort of the textbook definition of a “proxy conflict.”

Do better, Polina Lysenko — at least try to score some cheap points by highlighting the fact that much of my analysis regarding Ukraine is published by Russia Today. 

At least then you could say that I was being paid by Russia. Of course, you would have to wrestle with the fact that my analysis is also published in numerous non-Russian outlets — I mean, what kind of Russian propagandist gets published by American and British publishers? 

All sarcasm aside, the publication by Lysenko’s Centre of a blacklist of so-called “Russian propagandists” should be an insult to anyone who believes in the concepts of free speech. I am proud to be associated with many of those who joined me on that list — Ray McGovern, Tulsi Gabbard, Douglas MacGregor, John Mearsheimer, and others. 

I am confident everyone named here would say that their motivations in taking the stance they have about the Ukraine conflict is to pursue the truth — real truth, not the confused version promulgated by Polina Lysenko and her American-paid analysts. 

None consider themselves to be Russian propagandists, but rather American practitioners of free speech, the kind protected by the same US Constitution many of the named individuals (and myself) have taken an oath to uphold and defend.

If adhering to fact-based analysis that has withstood the test of time is the new definition of “Russian propaganda,” then count me in. It certainly is better than the Orwellian version of free speech being bandied about by the US government and its proxies in Ukraine. 

l Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.