cubadebate has realigned itself markedly with pro-Russian propaganda this Wednesday by reproducing a text based on the misrepresentation of the words of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel about Ukraine.
The official digital has cataloged in Specials-Politics an article entitled Merkel reveals that the United States and its NATO partners planned the war in Ukraine against Russia, which fully reproduces a text translated by Rebelión into Spanish but whose original source is the Strategic Culture Foundation, a Moscow-based think tank that publishes political analyzes on the Eurasian area. The organization is considered by the US as an ideological arm dedicated to defending Russian interests.
The note, with an apparently informative title, is actually an opinion text that starts, in turn, from another opinion text. The interpretation made by former high-ranking US military officer Scott Ritter – described as an “independent analyst”, although known as a critic of his country’s foreign policy in recent decades – of some words by Angela Merkel.
Ritter recovered an interview granted in November by the former chancellor to Der Spiegel in which Merkel, commenting on the audiovisual distractions she currently has, mentions having seen the film Munich, on the eve of a war and points out the similarities that, like all viewers, he saw with Ukraine.
The so-called Maidan Revolution in 2014 (instigated according to Moscow by the US) ended with an election in which the pro-Russian Petro Poroshenko won the presidency
The German makes a parallel between Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, which did not prevent but did delay the Second World War, with the one she herself defended so that Ukraine would not enter the Atlantic Alliance in 2008 and during the Minsk agreements, in 2014 In his opinion, that has allowed Ukraine to have more defenses against Russia than it had then. In these words, Ritter takes refuge to affirm that the Minsk agreements, far from serving to establish peace, were really a subterfuge to buy time and strengthen the Army.
In turn, this idea is the starting point of the text published today cubadebate to build a fully opinionated note with a bombastic false title, since Merkel at no time talks about NATO plans for a war in Ukraine. The misrepresentation is so evident that the Spanish verification agency Maldita.es He did not hesitate to describe it as a hoax.
“Merkel’s disclosure was inadvertent. Merkel was talking about calming the Ukrainian regime in order to end up strengthening its fighting force against Russia. She mentions this reasoning to justify why she opposed Ukraine joining NATO in 2008: according to Merkel, it is not that this accession was wrong, but that it was not the right time”, says the article, which reinterprets the words of the former chancellor to accuse the West of not being interested in “a peaceful resolution”.
The text describes the Ukrainian government as a “kyiv regime”, further defined as an Executive “installed by the CIA-backed coup in 2014.” The pro-Russian media have spent years trying to eliminate a chapter from Ukrainian history in order to delegitimize the current president.
The so-called Maidan Revolution in 2014 (instigated according to Moscow by the US) ended with an election in which the pro-Russian Petro Poroshenko won the presidency, a position he lost when, in 2019, citizens returned to the polls and supported his opponent. , Volodímir Zelenski, with 73.22% of the votes.
The note accuses Germany of delaying Ukraine to prepare the “planned aggression against Russia”, despite being together with France the guarantor of the Minsk peace agreements and repeats, without any support, the Russian version that the invasion of Ukraine (called military intervention in the article) was a defensive reaction to “safeguard” Donbass, an argument incompatible with the immediate attack on Kherson and kyiv, 700 and 800 kilometers respectively from that territory.
“We have not found a trace of these statements on the website of said newspaper in any of the publications in which Angela Merkel is mentioned since February 24, 2022, the date of the Russian invasion of Ukraine”
The text again uses the argument that Ukraine has armed nazi paramilitaries alluding to the Azov battalion, an extreme right-wing unit of the Ukrainian army that displays Nazi symbols and has been used as an excuse to invade the entire country, ignoring that Putin could be accused of the same, who hires members of the Wagner Group -whose leader he wears the insignia of the SS tattooed – in his international contests.
The article suddenly reminds Poroshenko, the bypassed president of the post-CIA “coup” “regime”, to point him out as the only clairvoyant in this story, for warning that the West accepted the Minsk peace in order to reorganize before a final offensive. This is the source of some modest criticism of Moscow for not having acted before, for allowing itself to be deceived, for inaction that has led to allowing Ukraine to be armed by the US… which lead to “as Merkel’s comments reveal”, of the one that the reader had already forgotten by now.
The text has circulated through different web pages or media outlets calling themselves “alternative”, for which reason the verification agency Maldita.es tried to locate some statements by Angela Merkel in terms that would allow headlines like this. The middle, signer of the code of principles of the International Fact-Checking Network and with declaration of neutrality policyhas different branches dedicated to the analysis of political speeches in order to dismantle misinformation.
“We have not found a trace of these statements on the website of said newspaper in any of the publications in which Angela Merkel is mentioned since February 24, 2022, the date of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Nor have we found these statements in the social media from Der Spiegel, after performing an advanced search for the terms ‘Angela Merkel’, in combination with others such as ‘USA’, ‘NATO’ or ‘interview’ in English and German”.
The German newspaper confirmed that they have only published one interview with Merkel “in the last month” (the one cited by Ritter, in number 48 of November 24) and assured that, as can be seen in the text, he did not make the statement that is attributed to him in the contents that circulate on the internet.
Cubadebate, that this 2023 will celebrate its twentieth anniversary, it has historically had the legend “against media terrorism” and now sports a “for truth and ideas”, but for this reason it does not allow reality to deny it a headline.
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