The Silence of the Western Press
Militarily, the war in Ukraine is over. The slaughter is underway. Right now, Ukrainian forces are being encircled and annihilated in multiple cauldrons across the eastern front. Russian precision strikes are systematically destroying what remains of Ukraine’s electrical grid, its rail networks, its capacity to sustain resistance. The outcome is not in doubt. It has not been in doubt for months.
The political theater will continue, Zelensky will give speeches, European leaders will pledge “unwavering support,” American officials will insist negotiations remain possible. None of it matters. On the ground, Ukrainian soldiers are dying in positions they cannot hold, cannot reinforce, and cannot escape. This is not a war anymore. It is an execution.
Yet the Western press reports none of this.
The reason is not that editors fear for their reputations. That explanation is naive, a fairy tale that assumes the media operates independently and simply made mistakes. The Western press is not making mistakes. It is performing exactly as designed.
The Names Behind the Narrative
Let us be specific about who built this architecture of lies.
David E. Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, has spent 42 years embedding himself in the national security establishment. He broke the Stuxnet story, leaked to him by the Obama administration, and has been the paper of record’s primary voice on Ukraine, framing every development through the lens of official Washington. When the Times needs to launder intelligence community talking points as journalism, Sanger is the vehicle. His 2024 book New Cold Wars featured General Mark Milley musing about trench warfare while Sanger dutifully transcribed, never questioning why the war America pushed Ukraine into had become a WWI-style meat grinder.
Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic has been the most relentless drumbeater for escalation. Married to Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, himself caught on tape admitting the US blew up Nord Stream, Applebaum has used her platform to demand more weapons, more sanctions, more war. Her coverage frames any negotiation as capitulation, any peace proposal as “preparing the way for a larger war”. In conversation with Bill Kristol, the same neoconservative who championed the Iraq War, she casually claims Ukrainian strikes kill Russians “seven to one” while dismissing the catastrophic losses her advocacy has produced. She has never been held accountable for being catastrophically wrong about the war’s trajectory.
Max Boot, Washington Post columnist and Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow, represents the permanent war establishment’s direct pipeline into mainstream media. A former editor of the Wall Street Journal opinion page who championed the Iraq invasion, Boot seamlessly pivoted to Ukraine hawkishness without ever acknowledging the wreckage of his previous certainties. He assured readers in September 2023 that Ukraine’s counteroffensive could succeed “next year” if only America sent more weapons. It is now February 2026. There was no success. There will be no success. Boot continues writing columns.
Rachel Maddow turned MSNBC into a four-year infomercial for Russiagate, conditioning audiences to view Russia as an existential enemy before a single Ukrainian soldier died. Politico accurately diagnosed her “deep delusion”, feeding liberal “paranoia, stoking unrealistic expectations, and diverting from more politically fruitful paths”. Glenn Greenwald called her “the Judy Miller of the Trump/Russia story,” comparing her coverage to “this generation’s WMD”. When the Mueller investigation collapsed, she faced no reckoning. She simply pivoted to Ukraine, where the same credulity toward intelligence sources and the same appetite for conflict could be repackaged as solidarity.
Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent, exemplifies the revolving door between intelligence community service and “journalism”. Before joining CNN, Sciutto served as Chief of Staff to the US Ambassador to China, a diplomatic position, not a journalistic one. He returned to “reporting” and has since functioned as a reliable conduit for Pentagon and State Department messaging, his coverage indistinguishable from official briefings. His book The Shadow War was praised by the intelligence community it purports to cover independently.
Clarissa Ward, Erin Burnett, Anderson CooperCNN deployed its full roster to Ukraine in 2022, embedding with Ukrainian forces under Kyiv’s information control framework. They reported what they were permitted to report, from locations they were permitted to access, interviewing sources approved by Ukrainian military handlers. This is not journalism. It is war tourism with a narrative predetermined by the host government, ie., propaganda.
The Editors Who Set the Frame
Behind the correspondents sit the editors who determine what stories run and how they’re framed.
The Washington Post appointed Paul Schemm as Russia/Ukraine editor in 2025, formalizing coverage that had already been uniformly pro-escalation. The paper’s editorial board has treated every Russian advance as reason for more weapons, every Ukrainian setback as evidence America hasn’t done enough, never as evidence the policy itself was flawed.
The New York Times editorial page, under Kathleen Kingsbury, has published precisely zero editorials questioning whether NATO expansion provoked this war, whether the Istanbul peace deal should have been accepted, or whether continuing to arm Ukraine serves Ukrainian interests. The range of acceptable opinion runs from “we must support Ukraine” to “we must support Ukraine more.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, platformed Anne Applebaum’s escalation advocacy while traveling to Ukraine for a Zelensky interview that read like campaign literature. The Atlantic (funded in part by Laurene Powell Jobs, whose Emerson Collective has interlocking investments with defense-adjacent tech) has published no serious examination of whether Western policy created this catastrophe.
The Officials Who Fed the Machine
The propaganda apparatus required more than willing journalists. It required officials who understood how to manipulate media.
Victoria Nuland, the State Department’s point person on Ukraine since the Obama administration, was photographed handing cookies to Maidan protesters in 2013, a symbol of American involvement that Russian media exploited but American media ignored. Her intercepted phone call with Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, “Fuck the EU”, revealed the US handpicking Ukraine’s post-coup government. She pushed “European allies to take a harder line on Russian expansionism” while her own department engineered the expansion that Russia warned would mean war. She has never been held accountable. She retired in 2024 to applause from the same media that laundered her policies.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Advisor from 2021-2025, architected the policy of arming Ukraine while refusing to negotiate, the precise combination that maximized Ukrainian deaths while achieving none of America’s stated objectives. Sullivan now gives interviews reflecting on his tenure, treated as an elder statesman rather than as the architect of a catastrophe that killed hundreds of thousands.
The Financial Structure
The journalists, editors, and officials operate within a financial structure that makes dissent professionally suicidal.
Six corporations control over 90% of American media. BlackRock and Vanguard are the two largest shareholders in all six. BlackRock manages over $10 trillion in assets and is among the world’s largest investors in Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. The same financial entity that profits from weapons manufacturing holds controlling stakes in the networks that cover the wars those weapons supply.
The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, whose Amazon holds a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract. The defense establishment is not external to these newsrooms. It is their ownership structure.
When Anne Applebaum demands more weapons, she is amplified by a magazine whose investors profit from weapons sales. When David Sanger transcribes Pentagon talking points, he does so for a newspaper whose parent company’s largest shareholders include defense investors. When CNN sends Jim Sciutto to report from Ukraine, his employer’s ownership is financially entangled with the military-industrial complex his “reporting” serves.
This is not a conspiracy. It is publicly filed ownership data. It is the structure of American media, operating exactly as designed.
Why I Can Report This and They Cannot
I can identify these truths because I am not embedded in this structure. I do not depend on Pentagon sources for access. I am not employed by corporations whose shareholders profit from perpetual war. I am not seeking a book deal that requires flattering the national security establishment. I am not angling for a cable news contributor contract.
The entire Western press establishment cannot or will not publish what I have just written because doing so would require journalists to indict their sources, editors to indict their careers, and corporations to indict their business model.
And so they say nothing. And the killing continues.
The Cauldrons: Annihilation in Progress
Ukrainian forces are not “under pressure.” They are not “facing challenges.” They are being exterminated in place, surrounded, cut off from supply, and systematically destroyed.
The Southeastern Kessel: “Largely Annihilated”
Colonel Douglas MacGregor: “You’ve got another major kessel going on… a large concentration of remaining Ukrainian troops that are being gradually encircled and that circle is tightening rapidly and they’re being largely annihilated with precision strike weaponry, but eventually the Russians will swarm over it”.
This is “perhaps the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance” in the southeast. The circle is closing. The troops inside have no relief coming. They are dying now.
Konstantynivka: 60% Surrounded, Doomed
Stanislav Krapivnik, former US Army officer with sources on the ground: The Slavyansk-Kramatorsk-Konstantynivka triangle, “the last big fortified area” of the Donetsk front, is collapsing. Konstantynivka is “60% surrounded”. Russian forces hold the high ground at Krasny Liman, completing the geometry of entrapment.
The Ukrainians inside cannot be saved. Krapivnik: “If you can’t feed your troops, you can’t arm your troops, you’re not going to have a lot of troops left”.
They cannot be resupplied. They cannot retreat. They will be killed or captured. There is no third option.
Kupyansk: Falling for the Second Time
The geolocated evidence is conclusive: “The Russian military is actually advancing inside of Kupyansk for a second time”. Ukraine threw its reserves into Kupyansk. Those reserves are gone, destroyed.
Northeast of the city, Russian forces are pushing deeper into Kharkiv Oblast. Krapivnik: “Northeast Kharkiv looks like it’s going to get liberated very soon”. Moscow now uses “liberation” language, permanent annexation, not occupation. “There may be a People’s Republic of Kharkiv very soon”.
The West pretends Kharkiv is secure. It is not. It is next.
Zaporizhzhia: 11 Kilometers and Closing
Russian forces are converging on Zaporizhzhia city from multiple directions. When it falls, not if, the entire Ukrainian position east of the Dnieper collapses.
The distances:
- Northeast: 11 kilometers from city outskirts
- West: 7 kilometers out, one town remaining
- Southeast: Russian forces in the outskirts of Orikhiv, towns on the border already taken
- N08 highwaythe last supply line to central Zaporizhzhia, “possibly may be cut within the next week to two weeks”
Ukrainian counterattacks are suicidal: “Basically just throwing people and machinery away because it’s across open area where Russia has air domination, artillery domination. Pointlessly throwing people away to do some kind of PR counterattacks”.
What Happens When Zaporizhzhia Falls
Krapivnik: “Once you cross the Dnieper River at Zaporizhzhia, you get three directions opening up instantly”, north to Dnipro city, direct west, south to Nikopol.
Worse: “You do a deep encirclement of the entire front of what’s left of the Donetsk front for the Ukrainians”.
Blow the bridges at Dnipropetrovsk, and every Ukrainian soldier east of the river is trapped with one escape route, north toward Kharkiv, which is itself under assault.
Spring flooding eliminates even that: “Once spring comes in and the melt starts, you’re not crossing those rivers. No pontoon bridges are going to stand”.
“Anybody trapped west of the Dnieper gets to have their clock punched”.
This is not speculation. This is geometry. The trap is closing.
Infrastructure Destruction: The Gloves Are Off
For nearly four years, Moscow exercised restraint on Ukrainian infrastructure. Military professionals raged at the decision. That restraint is finished.
Krapivnik: “The Russian military is finally being allowed, it’s not that they discovered this. It was a political decision not to go after the electric utilities… Everybody on the military side that I know of, myself included, have been going nuts about this. Why aren’t we taking out the logistics?”.
Moscow’s patience ended: “After three and a half years, the pressure on the government in Moscow has gotten to the point where we need to end this. Stop footing around with the civilians and time to do the hard-hitting hits to Ukraine fully”.
February 3-4: Russia’s most extensive missile and drone assault of the year hit energy infrastructure across Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, and Odesa. 50,000 without power in Odesa. 820 high-rise buildings in Kharkiv losing heat in freezing temperatures.
The logic is simple: no electricity means no trains. No trains means no ammunition. No ammunition means encircled troops die faster.
Russia is now fighting to win, not to negotiate.
Odessa: Already Penetrated
MacGregor: “Russian special ops is already walking around in Odessa at night. Odessa is lightly defended. Most of its air defense capability has been eliminated”.
The city hosts up to 5,000 British operatives running Ukraine’s maritime drone campaign. The drones themselves? “Ukraine doesn’t produce any drones. Let’s be realistic. Ukraine doesn’t have an industry worth anything… They’re British maximum”.
The former head of the German armed forces, who held NATO’s highest military position, warned that failure to reach a deal by March triggers a spring offensive “aimed primarily towards Odessa,” at a scale “not seen since the beginning of the special military operation”.
MacGregor’s assessment of Russian objectives: “Odessa, Kharkiv, and Kyiv… As long as that government under Zelensky exists, there is a facade. That’s really all the Europeans have at this point”.
Odessa is not a future target. It is already being prepared.
Why Russia Will Never Give Territory Back
Western analysts assume negotiation can return captured lands. They ignore what happened last time.
After the Istanbul talks collapsed, Russia withdrew from Kyiv Oblast, Sumy Oblast, and eventually Kherson. What followed was systematic murder.
Krapivnik: “What followed was a genocide by the SBU. They came in and just started massacring anybody that was working with the Russian government. People that had been seen wearing white armbands. They were even killing electricians, technicians (because you were working in an occupied town. People were being shot, tortured, murdered. Videos coming out of bodies with hands tied behind their backs) women, old men, being tossed into mass graves”.
The evidence is still emerging: “Right now, the territories that have been liberated in Lugansk and other areas in Donetsk, there are mass graves being dug up all over the place where the Ukrainians have been massacring the Russian population for the past 8 to 12 years”.
Russia cannot return these populations to a government that will execute them. Moscow knows it. The West pretends otherwise.
The Provocation, the Sabotaged Peace, the Mountain of Dead
The Western press frames this war as unprovoked Russian aggression. This is a lie constructed from omissions.
NATO expanded relentlessly eastward despite explicit warnings from every Russian leader since Gorbachev. The 2014 Maidan coup (backed by Victoria Nuland’s State Department, with Nuland caught on tape selecting Ukraine’s next government) overthrew an elected president and installed a regime hostile to the Russian-speaking east. The Minsk Agreements, which promised autonomy to Donbas, were admitted by Merkel and Hollande to have been a stalling tactic to arm Ukraine for war. The Donbas was shelled for eight years minus 14,000 dead before Russia ever crossed the border.
When peace was within reach in April 2022, Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv and killed it. The terms were favorable to Ukraine: withdrawal to pre-invasion lines, neutrality, and Donbas autonomy. Johnson, acting on behalf of interests that wanted the war to continue, told Zelensky the West would back Ukraine to victory. There would be no victory. There would only be hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians and the destruction of their nation.
The people who made these decisions (Nuland, Sullivan, Johnson, the editors and correspondents who sold the war) face no consequences. They give interviews. They write books. They accept awards. Meanwhile, Ukrainian men are dragged off streets and sent to die in cauldrons that David Sanger will describe as “contested areas” and Anne Applebaum will blame on insufficient Western resolve.
The Outcome Is Decided
MacGregor: “This is going to be ended on Russian terms and the decision is about to be made when, where, and how. What we’re going to see in the future is going to be different from what we’ve seen over the last nearly four years”.
Russia has expanded its force: “They’ve increased the force size. They brought on more reservists and they’re currently training soldiers that came in as part of the regular draft”. The army that struggled in 2022 no longer exists. A larger, better-equipped, battle-hardened force has replaced it.
The balance is not contested: “They know they have effectively a dominating position on ground in Europe and they know that the Europeans have nothing with which to stop them”.
Russian debates concern only the extent of victory: “There are lots of Russians saying we need to go all the way to the Polish border. But I think the predisposition is to go to the Dnieper River, certainly to seize Odessa, and potentially, although it’s not something Putin wants to do, march straight into Kyiv and rid themselves of this government”.
Western Ukraine holds no appeal: “The Russians do not want to govern Western Ukraine. They have a long history of experience with the people there. So do the Poles… It’s kryptonite. Everyone wants to stay away from it”.
What the Western Press Calls a “Stalemate”
Right now:
- Ukrainian forces are encircled and being annihilated in the southeast
- Konstantynivka is 60% surrounded with no relief possible
- Kupyansk is falling for the second time
- Russian forces are 11 kilometers from Zaporizhzhia city
- The last supply highway to central Zaporizhzhia may be cut within days
- Infrastructure is being systematically destroyed in freezing weather
- Russian special operations forces walk freely in Odessa at night
- Spring will bring an offensive aimed at cutting off everything east of the Dnieper
David Sanger calls this “evolving.” Anne Applebaum calls for more weapons. Max Boot urges patience. Rachel Maddow moved on to other content. Jim Sciutto reports what his Pentagon sources tell him to report.
The slaughter continues.
And the Western press (owned by BlackRock, interlocked with Raytheon, staffed by officials who rotate between government and newsrooms, edited by careerists who cannot admit error) says nothing.
Related reading
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- The Censorship Regime: How Dissent on Ukraine Became Career Suicide
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