Former German Army head exposes lies about Ukraine war.

Valcazar said:

When did I argue that?

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So then all your arguments are moot.
Trying to call out Russia for acts you accept by america is very Wihoit like.

The “Russian hybrid war” narrative: a new NATO strategy of tension?​

Thomas Fazi
Oct 07, 2026

Lately, not a day goes by in Europe without some drone scare, fire or blackout being blamed on Russia. We are told that these incidents are all part of a relentless “hybrid war” that Russia is waging against Europe — one that involves drone incursions, airspace violations, sabotage, arson, cyberattacks and more. We are told this “includes plots to place incendiary devices aboard DHL cargo planes, blow up railroad tracks in Poland, and burn down warehouses and shopping centers all over Europe”, as well as “acts of sabotage against defense companies and the defense industry in Europe”, and “attacks on European critical infrastructure” — but also, apparently, sending secret agents to defecate in the lavatories of Finnish MPs. We are also told that “uch attacks began occurring shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022”, and have escalated in recent months and weeks. According to Kaja Kallas, “Europe faces a fast-proliferation of sabotage attacks and airspace violations”.

Tensions escalated dramatically last month after Germany formally attributed an attempted explosive-drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport to Russia, with subsequent investigations reportedly tracing the operation back to Russian military intelligence. This raised the stakes considerably: it was one of the most serious incidents on German soil ever officially pinned on Moscow by Berlin — albeit a “failed” one. German foreign minister Johann Wadephul said the attack “fits into a broader pattern of Russian hybrid operations in Europe”.

Within hours, EU-NATO leaders across multiple capitals had not only accepted the attribution but agreed on what the incident meant: a piece of a coordinated campaign, with a known motive, requiring a predetermined response, i.e., sanctions and more Ukraine support. “The evidence is clear”, said NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, on the same day as the German government’s announcement — though at that point the Germans hadn’t yet shared any evidence, either with the public or, it would appear, with other EU-NATO governments. French President Emmanuel Macron also said that the attack was clear evidence that “the Russian hybrid threat against Europeans... has intensified”. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski warned that Russia’s confrontation with Europe was becoming increasingly “kinetic”, adding that “Russia is at war with Europe”. “This is the new normal”, said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Seemingly confirming this, just a few weeks later, on September 29, the Estonian government officially accused Russian special services of commissioning an arson attack on the building of the Estonian defence company Milrem — another serious step up from the previous pattern of alleged but unofficial attributions to Russia.

Warnings of worse to come​

Meanwhile, we are also constantly told that Russia intends to escalate even further — i.e., that we should brace for much more serious attacks against Europe, possibly just around the corner. Within the space of a few days, it was reported that “European intelligence officials have raised the possibility of an imminent Russian test of NATO, with one saying a potential attack could come in a matter of ‘months, not years’”; that, according to the FBI, “Russia is plotting targeted assassinations across the US and in European countries”; and that there exists a CIA report warning Italy, France and Spain about a potential Russian operation involving drone attacks launched from merchant ships in the Mediterranean Sea, or so the journalist who published the “scoop” in El Mundo claimed to have been told by an anonymous source close to the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense.

The article received massive global coverage — yet, in less than 24 hours, both Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto and Macron firmly denied receiving any such warning and dismissed the claims as groundless, suggesting that the story was concocted either by the “anonymous source” or by the journalist himself. The episode also shows that such claims, especially when presented with no supporting evidence whatsoever, need to be treated with extreme caution — particularly when they rest on shaky logic to begin with. In this case, for example, one may reasonably wonder what interest Russia would have in attacking Spain and Italy, two of the least enthusiastic supporters of the forever war Ukraine.

But there have been even more bizarre claims. In recent weeks, there has been coordinated messaging across NATO that Russia could be preparing a “false flag attack... in the next few months” — i.e., a drone or missile strike that Russia would then claim was an “accident” or even try to blame on Ukraine. But how would Russia benefit from either of these scenarios? They have both occurred already — there have been several instances of stray Russian and Ukrainian drones entering NATO airspace near the border with Ukraine (see below) — and the only effect has been to harden NATO’s stance. Moreover, if Russia were aiming for plausible deniability, why did it allegedly leave its fingerprints all over the attempted drone attack in Leipzig/Halle? And how do these claims square with the opposite claim that Russia may launch an open attack against a NATO country “within months”, as Danish intelligence recently said? Which one is it? But we are not expected to ask questions or point out inconsistencies in the story; we are simply expected to believe what our media and governments tell us.

Is Russia about to attack? Even NATO isn’t sure​

Of course, none of us has any way of knowing what Russia is planning to do, especially given that this is a dynamic situation in which Russia’s actions are influenced by NATO’s actions and vice versa. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for his part, denies all allegations, and has repeatedly stated — most recently on September 19 — that Russia has “no aggressive intentions towards Europe or European countries” and is ready to restore relations and cooperate with its European neighbours — while at the same time accusing European leaders of using the alleged Russian threat to justify their own policies and seek an escalation with Moscow. Of course, one may argue that if Russia were poised to attack, it wouldn’t tell Europeans in advance, and so its words shouldn’t be taken at face value.

This is true, of course. At the same time, insofar as most states are rational actors that tend to think and act strategically — and Russia certainly fits the description — one may ask what rational or strategic interest Russia would have in launching an attack on Europe that could easily lead to an all-out NATO-Russia war, especially since Russia’s refusal so far to retaliate in kind to NATO-enabled Ukrainian attacks on its territory, including against civilians, has likely been motivated precisely by a desire to avoid such an outcome. Interestingly enough, such scepticism is shared even by some voices within the NATO establishment.

Estonia’s foreign intelligence service, for example, wrote in its 2026 Annual Report, published in February: “There is... no cause for panic. In the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service’s assessment, Russia has no intention of militarily attacking Estonia or any other NATO member state in the coming year. We are likely to reach a similar assessment next year”. Even Finnish President Alexander Stubb, otherwise very hawkish on Russia, has pushed back against warnings from fellow European leaders that Russia could attack NATO in the near future, saying Helsinki’s intelligence sees no evidence of an imminent military threat. “We don’t see the evidence of that”, Stubb said. “In our intelligence we see that there is activity but no imminent military threat right now”. Indeed, as reported by Politico, even NATO’s official assessment remains that there is no imminent threat: “At this time, we see no imminent threat of attack”, said a NATO official speaking on behalf of the organisation. On September 29, at a joint NATO press conference, Lithuanian PM Mindaugas Sinkevičius stated that he asked Mark Rutte for real intelligence evidence of Russia preparing an imminent attack, receiving confirmation that none exists. “I asked [Rutte] is there proof, real proof, that Russia is planning something? But there is actually nothing”, he said.

This shows that even NATO’s own assessments are highly contradictory. In terms of public sentiment, however, it makes little difference, since the imminent-attack claims far outweigh the more cautious assessments, which generally receive hardly any coverage. In any case, in the absence of evidence pointing in one direction or the
other, speculations about future scenarios ultimately remain just that: speculations — especially considering that we have to assume that Russia’s posture isn’t fixed but is inevitably influenced by NATO’s actions. What we can assess with some certainty is what Russia has been engaged in so far — which in turn provides us with the best possible insight as to what it might do next. The question that needs to be asked is thus: does the evidence support Western claims that Russia is engaged in a “hybrid war” against Europe?

The “hybrid war” reports — and its inconsistencies​

There are several databases and reports that purport to quantify Russian hybrid warfare, which are often cited as proof of a coordinated, escalating Russian campaign. These include datasets and reports by the European Repository of Cyber Incidents, which is strictly focused on cyber attacks, Leiden University, the Soufan Center, Associated Press, the US-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the UK-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and the Bratislava-based think tank GLOBSEC. Taken individually and at face value, each of these reports paints an apparently damning picture comprising dozens — and in some cases hundreds — of alleged sabotages, attacks and influence operations spanning several European countries over many years. Worrying indeed. Read side by side and in detail, however, they tell a very different story: the numbers diverge wildly; the central concept is undefined; attribution often rests on nothing more than press reports of official suspicion; and the reports’ own caveats — buried in footnotes, appendices and methodology sections — often undercut the claims made in their executive summaries.

For starters, the numbers don’t add up. Depending on which report you read, Russia carried out somewhere between 52 and 255 hybrid attacks in Europe after February 2022 — a fivefold spread for what is supposedly the same campaign. The Soufan Center, covering just six countries — two of them, Moldova and Georgia, outside the EU — records more incidents for 2025 alone than CSIS does for three years across the whole continent. The numbers diverge because there is no agreed answer to the most basic question: what is a hybrid attack? The IISS paper itself concedes that hybrid warfare is “an amorphous term” with wide variation in definitions. Some reports limit themselves to physical attacks and plots, and even then these range from arson to placing pro-Kremlin stickers, vandalism and spraying graffiti; others include “influence operations” such as monthly peace demonstrations in Amsterdam; and others even include Russian naval passages through the English Channel. Ultimately the term can be used to include almost anything. The biggest difference in numbers is determined by the treatment of (alleged) drone sightings attributed to Russia — numbering in the hundreds but in most cases eventually debunked (see below) — and hence excluded by most reports, despite receiving huge media coverage and being one of the largest contributors to the “hybrid war” hysteria.

Moreover, in most cases, the evidence linking Russia is very weak — or non-existent. Across these reports, the evidence that Russia was behind a given incident usually consists of a news article reporting that officials suspect it. There is no independent verification: if a government says “Russia did it”, it goes on the list — even in the absence of any evidence. Moreover, the Leiden dataset includes incidents that were
linked to Russia by officials or politicians, or uncovered by journalistic investigations — but also those that merely “appeared to fit in a pattern” of similar events. The reports also lean on each other. IISS’s dataset is built on the Leiden dataset; GLOBSEC cites the Leiden figures, IISS and an AP count; CSIS cites the Leiden research; the Soufan Center interviewed the author of the Leiden dataset. Ultimately, most roads lead back to the same pool of media reports of official claims — in most cases of “possible” or “likely” Russian involvement. And those official claims are not neutral. The IISS paper, remarkably, says so itself: decisions about attribution are “rarely made in a political vacuum”, and public statements “reflect broader strategic calculations as much as their confidence in the evidence”.

Nor can many of the organisations behind these reports be considered neutral. The IISS, CSIS and GLOBSEC all have funding ties to American and European arms manufacturers (GLOBSEC counts among its donors the defence company Helsing, which the Ukraine war has turned into Europe’s most valuable startup), as well as to the transatlantic establishment, and are known for their hawkish approach to the Ukraine war and to Russia. The language of the reports themselves betrays their ideological commitment. The CSIS brief argues that NATO should abandon its “mindset of self-deterrence” and launch a “calibrated offensive campaign” against Russia. The IISS urges a “more assertive and proactive stance”, with its chair, Lord Mark Sedwill, saying that Britain was at war with Russia. The GLOBSEC report
speaks of “state terrorism”.

But, in fact, as noted above, the reports themselves contain very little evidence, if any, to support the “Russia is at war with Europe” narrative.

Aside from the handful of sabotages that have resulted in convictions — discussed below — and even then with only tenuous links being drawn to the Russian state, virtually all the incidents logged in these reports are based purely on unsubstantiated claims made by Western officials, security services or media outlets, often without presenting evidence (as we shall see, this also applies to formally attributed actions like the Leipzig/Halle drone incident). As the Associated Press admits, “t is often difficult to prove Russia’s involvement, and the Kremlin denied carrying out a sabotage campaign against the West. But more and more governments are publicly attributing attacks to Russia”. This constant talk of “
possible” or “potential” Russian attacks ultimately generates a public perception of a relentless campaign being waged against Europe, even in the absence of evidence. As Ivo Capaul of ETH Zürich noted, the effect of the media coverage and political climate (a wholly intended one, I would add) is to create “cognitive biases in the form of a clustering illusion” — seeing patterns between data points that are not necessarily connected, or that in some cases don’t exist at all.

The claims don’t stand up to scrutiny​

Indeed, what is astonishing is how many widely reported claims of Russian sabotage ended up collapsing upon basic scrutiny. One of the most infamous cases occurred in

September of last year, when it was widely reported (initially by the Financial Times) that Russia had “recklessly” jammed the GPS of von der Leyen’s airplane over Bulgaria, forcing pilots to land using “paper maps” after “circling the airport for an hour”. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte was quick to suggest that the incident was part of a wider pattern of “hybrid warfare” that included “cyber attacks and severing subsea cables”. Public outcry ensued. However, the story collapsed within hours: a flight tracking service demonstrated that the signal was never lost and the plane was actually only 9 minutes late. Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov stated there was nothing to investigate. This was a significant case of claims promoted by sources close to the top of the European Commission being prominently exposed as false, yet the claims made were never retracted or clarified. Nor did they give rise to wider scrutiny of the “Russian hybrid warfare” narrative.



But this was not an isolated case: there have been countless claims of Russian sabotage or hybrid activity that were massively amplified by the media, only to be subsequently debunked or proven false — the latter going largely unreported. In November 2024, a series of incidents causing damage to cables in the Baltic Sea was widely reported in the media. Coverage was fuelled by European decision-makers openly attributing the incidents to Russia even before the investigations had been concluded. The lack of clear information sparked public speculation about who was responsible for the incidents and how exactly they had come about. Finnish authorities detained a ship, suspected of being part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” used to avoid sanctions, after that cable and others were damaged. It eventually turned out that the damaged undersea cables in the Baltic Sea had been caused by Hong Kong- and China-flagged ships — not by Russian vessels. The Finnish intelligence service SUPO observed that “statistically, the number of cases of cable damage in recent years is quite typical for the Baltic Sea”. Yet again, no apology was issued by European authorities for the false claim.

Is this accurate?

Frankfooter said:

So then all your arguments are moot.
Trying to call out Russia for acts you accept by america is very Wihoit like.

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And when did I do that?
Do you even read the threads you post in?

nottyboi said:

There is a framework of International law, and its applied by the west when it suits itself.

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And you just said above it doesn't exist.
"There is no international law."
I applauded you on being honest about your view.

nottyboi said:

NATO will break up and it will be some sorta EU alliance with Canada. The UK will rejoin the EU.

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"It will be some sorta EU alliance with Canada".

So there will be a new military alliance that Russia will be threatened by?

How CIA used Ukraine as a platform for covert war against Russia

Stephen Kinzer
Nov 12, 2026

The following is an excerpt from Stephen Kinzer's new book: Boiling Point: How America Brought War to Ukraine (Henry Holt and Company, November 2026)


Huddled beside an airstrip in southern Germany, a handful of anti-Communist warriors prepared to fire the first shots of the Cold War. A CIA officer from the Munich Operations Base was in charge. The Hungarian crewmen he had recruited stood nearby in flight suits. With them were two Ukrainian exiles who had volunteered to parachute into their homeland. They were code-named Apostle 1 and Apostle 2. Each carried forged identity papers, a miniature radio transmitter, a pistol, a machine gun, hand grenades, a purse full of gold coins, and a poison pill to be taken in case of capture. An unmarked C-47 transport plane was waiting.

The CIA officer overseeing this operation, a twenty-six-year-old Yale graduate named Stephen Tanner, watched the plane take off and disappear into the night. It flew over East Germany and Poland, then crossed into Soviet airspace. As it approached the Ukrainian city of Lviv, a cargo bay swung open. The two Ukrainians jumped into the darkness. Their mission was to link up with partisan fighters, seize territory, and establish a clandestine base through which the CIA could send them weapons.

That flight, on September 5, 1949, was the first American act of covert war in Ukraine. The two would-be commandos who jumped that night were an advance guard for what became Project Aerodynamic, the most ambitious and furthest-reaching project the CIA ever launched inside the Soviet Union. Its aim was to foment subversion in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Behind it lay a simple calculation: The Soviet Union is America’s mortal enemy; its greatest internal threat comes from Ukraine; the CIA should do everything possible to intensify that threat.

From their base in Munich, Tanner and other CIA officers anxiously awaited messages from the two Apostles. None came. An after-action report concluded tersely that “the Soviets quickly eliminated the agents.” It added, though, that this mission “sparked considerable interest at headquarters.” Losing two agents was hardly enough to derail such a promising project.

On May 19, 1950, another C-47 took off from the same base in Germany. This time it carried four Ukrainian volunteers. They parachuted into western Ukraine with a cargo their CIA overseers had packed. It was enough to arm a potent guerrilla band, including fifty submachine guns, thirty rifles, twenty-five pistols, and a hundred phosphorus grenades. The four volunteers hit the ground. They radioed news of their safe landing with cargo. Then they disappeared.

Later that summer, two more Ukrainian volunteers bade their comrades an emotional farewell. According to a CIA cable, “a round of drinks was served, toasts were made…hands were shaken, tears were shed.” Their plane departed at 6:55 p.m. on August 12. The pilot missed their drop zone in Ukraine, and they jumped twenty miles away. Neither was ever heard from again.

These flights were the centerpiece of a far-reaching operation in which the CIA sought to foment armed uprisings in Soviet-controlled territory. Between 1949 and 1952, the CIA dropped about eighty-five men, all equipped for guerrilla warfare, behind what was then called the Iron Curtain. Three-quarters were quickly captured or shot.

“You’ve got to have a few martyrs,” reasoned Allen Dulles, chief of covert operations for the CIA. “Some people have to get killed.”

Project Aerodynamic was a match made in covert-action heaven. Thousands of Ukrainian partisans had refused to lay down their arms after their Nazi allies surrendered on May 8, 1945. They wanted to keep fighting the Red Army— if they could find a new sponsor. At that same moment, the CIA was looking for a force that it could use to strike against the Soviet Union from within its own territory. Aerodynamic was the progeny of this union. It set off three-quarters of a century of American intervention in Ukraine.


Fear and uncertainty marked the first encounter between Americans and anti- Soviet Ukrainians. In the autumn of 1947, two years before the first CIA airdrop into Ukraine, officers from the Army Counter Intelligence Corps in occupied Germany learned that a band of armed Russians had appeared in the countryside near Munich. At first they thought this might be an advance guard preparing the ground for a Red Army invasion. A patrol was sent to investigate. Soldiers scoured the hills and meadows around the Bavarian village of Waldkirchen. Early on the morning of September 10, they heard voices. They closed in on a campfire around which men wearing military uniforms were singing in what sounded like Russian. After a moment of tension, the soldiers willingly surrendered their machine guns and hand grenades.

These thirty-five men, along with four other members of their band who were picked up nearby, were brought to an American base and debriefed for three weeks. It turned out that they were not Red Army soldiers, but Ukrainians who had consecrated their lives to fighting the Red Army. They belonged to a partisan force that was unknown to most outsiders: the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Their commanders had ordered them to walk westward, find Americans, and seek help for the partisan rebellion.

One of the partisans told an interrogator that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was “engaged in armed combat with Soviet troops in the Ukraine at present” and that more Ukrainians were “ready to revolt” if given support. An officer who helped supervise the interrogations cabled to Washington that the Ukrainians were offering services “which may be of interest to you and may tie into an idea which, I believe, is being worked on at home at the present time.”

“If, as I understand, there is some planning going on with regard to how such groups as referred to above might be best used in our interests,” he suggested, “it might be useful to follow up this matter.”

Americans had just begun fighting the Cold War. Their great handicap was that they knew almost nothing about what was happening inside the Soviet Union. Now they learned that Ukrainians were waging war against the Red Army. This was an intelligence bonanza that opened new landscapes of possibility.

Some of the CIA’s most impassioned Ukrainian agents had fought alongside the Nazis just a few years earlier. Among them were veterans of SS Einsatzgruppen — mobile death squads assigned to massacre Jews and other civilians. This history troubled some of their American handlers, but not enough to disrupt their partnership.

Across Europe, American intelligence officers scoured teeming displaced persons camps looking for Ukrainians who were willing to join a covert anti-Soviet war. Recruitment was easy. Hundreds of thousands of young men — not just Ukrainians but refugees from all over the continent — were huddled in the bleak purgatory of these camps. The best they might hope for was work clearing rubble or picking crops. When men introducing themselves as part of the “American Intelligence Service” offered them paying jobs with good living conditions, plus the prospect of returning to war against Bolshevism, many jumped to accept. Vetting was minimal, so recruits included more than a few who had worked with the Nazis as militia members, police officers, and executioners. One recruiting officer said his job was easy: “You’d go to a refugee camp and say, ‘Here, Joe, you want to join a special project?’ Most of these people were, like, the homeless.”

This recruitment laid the foundation for Project Aerodynamic. Over the following years, it would overlap with other CIA projects using various cryptonyms, among them Acrobat, Androgen, Antler, Cartel, Carthage, Crust, Outbound, PDDynamic (PD was code for the Soviet Union), Plumb, and Red Sox. The goal — using Ukraine as a platform for covert war against Moscow — never changed.

nottyboi said:

NATO will break up and it will be some sorta EU alliance with Canada. The UK will rejoin the EU.

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It wouldn't even matter. Russia is slowly losing a war against Ukraine, a power 1/3 its size and despite the current US administration being so corrupt that it sucks Putin's dick for money.

If Russia were - against all current, existing evidence - to eventually beat Ukraine, Russia would be exhausted. And then it would directly face Poland - another Ukraine-sized country with an army far better trained and more professional than Russia's.

And also Romania's army. And Hungary's army, now that Putin knob-gobbler, Orban has been removed.

Russia is so militarily incompetent that it doesn't need NATO to defeat it.

nottyboi said:

Didn't a hack just claim 400K Russian losses? lol BTW the last body swap with Ukraine was still 11 dead AFU to 1 Red.

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Ukrainian losses are 1/3 Russian losses and in 2026, 1/8 Russian losses.

If Ukrainian losses were 11:1 Russian losses, the war would have ended with a massive Russian victory in 2022 - exactly as you predicted back in 2022. And 2023. And 2024. And 2025. And 2026.

Valcazar said:

And when did I do that?
Do you even read the threads you post in?

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here

Valcazar said:

I love that you just abandoned even pretending you were arguing for it being legal in just two posts.
At least here you are going with "International relations are anarchy", which is more honest.

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Frankfooter said:

here

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I keep forgetting you have trouble with reading.

nottyboi said:

Invasion was not illegal. Its legal under "right to protect" of international law. Ukraine was already murdering its citizens in the east.

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Hahaha, holy shit!