Transgender ex-Ukrainian Army spokesperson acknowledges Nazi problem
Sarah Ashton-Cirillo admits many foreign fighters in Ukraine hold far-right views
Kiev has a “terrible problem with most foreign fighters,” former Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces spokesperson Sarah Ashton-Cirillo said in a call with Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus, who were pretending to be former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko.
Sarah Ashton-Cirillo told the ‘president’ that despite publicly defending foreign fighters and going as far as pressuring CNN into calling them ‘Western foreign fighters’ instead of ‘mercenaries,’ privately, she believes that most of them are “just a step above mercenaries.”
The transgender American noted that many of these fighters are only in it for the money and oftentimes come to Ukraine just because “all they know is warfare” and have “no lives in their own countries.”
Furthermore, Sarah Ashton-Cirillo stated that she personally knew for a fact that many of the Western fighters coming to Ukraine have “very far-right leanings” and that there are also “some Nazi groups” among Kiev’s foreign fighter units.
The former spokesperson also stated that foreign volunteers are proving to be a “security risk” and that this has led to moral and psychological issues. Ashton-Cirillo explained that the vast majority of foreign fighters come to Ukraine to make money and that such people are more inclined to use drugs and “willing to engage in fundraising where they’re putting the money in their own pockets.”
Just days after Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine last year, President Vladimir Zelensky put out an appeal for foreigners to join the country’s ‘International Legion’. In less than a week, the Ukrainian president claimed that as many as 16,000 people answered the call, but soon after, stories of ill-prepared recruits, incompetent commanders, and horrific losses started to emerge.
The legion later shifted its recruitment efforts solely to military veterans, but foreign fighters in Ukraine have consistently described conditions on the front line as “hell,” with casualty rates in some units reportedly as high as 85%.
It’s estimated that around 12,000 hired guns have traveled to Ukraine since the start of the conflict, the Russian Defense Ministry estimated in July. Since then, just 2,200 have remained in the country, with 5,000 killed and the rest fleeing Ukraine, the ministry stated.
Consortium News‘ Patrick Lawrence will be daily covering the U.S. House inquiry into the impeachment of President Joe Biden. This is his first report.
Rep. Jim Jordan at impeachment inquiry on Thursday. (PBS/YouTube/screenshot.)
For many weeks the Democratic Party and the media that cravenly serve it have dismissed House investigations into the Biden family’s potentially corrupt overseas business dealings as frivolous, ungrounded, and wholly partisan. Consortium News takes the allegations of presidential involvement in numerous bribery and influence-peddling schemes to be comparable in magnitude with those against President Nixon during the Watergate crisis. With the opening of formal hearings Thursday, CN begins regular coverage and analysis of the proceedings. What follows is our inaugural report.
Ten months after Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives and eight months after the House Oversight Committee began to investigate the Biden family’s foreign business dealings and the president’s role in them, the Committee formally opened an inquiry Thursday into what House Speaker Kevin McCarthy termed at the outset “a culture of corruption” in which, mounting evidence suggests, Joe Biden is in all likelihood criminally implicated.
Thursday’s nearly seven-hour proceedings, which can be viewed here, were a tour d’horizon — introductory as against substantive. Ranking members of the Oversight Committee, chaired by James Comer, the four-term Kentucky Republican, offered an overview of the evidence so far derived from investigators, written records, and witness testimonies. The opening remarks of Comer, Rep. Jason Smith, and Rep. Jim Jordan suggest two things:
One, committee members appear determined to see this process through to its just conclusion. This is unlikely to prove a waste of time.
Two, the House is likely to develop enough evidence in coming months to bring Articles of Impeachment to the floor for a vote, and if passed — underscore “if” — send the Articles on to the Senate.
A Moment in History
What began Thursday is formally named The Basis for an Impeachment Inquiry of President Joseph Biden. Note the nomenclature. This is not in itself an impeachment proceeding.
If the past eight months were preliminary to the start of these hearings, these hearings are preliminary to a finding that there are grounds to impeach Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. An impeachment proceeding would follow when the House sends its Articles to the upper chamber.
If impeached by the House, the Senate would then determine by way of a trial whether or not to remove Biden from office.
Comer and his colleagues presented a compelling review of what Oversight already has in hand — Hunter Biden’s email trails and texts, “the Big Guy’s” long record of lying about his involvement in the family’s grifting, the Justice Department’s coverups and obstructions, the documentary evidence of the Bidens’ shakedown, père et fils, of Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company at the heart of the story.
The Burisma case seems to be the strongest against the dissembling president and, by-all-evidence, his bottomlessly unprincipled son. What happened between the Bidens and Burisma is not merely a matter of impropriety or immorality, or otherwise poor conduct: If proven, and the hard evidence seems to be there, it should be major jail-time against the law.
Comer announced during the hearing that the committee has subpoenaed the banking records of both Hunter Biden and James Biden, the president’s brother. They must be produced by Oct. 12.
New evidence arrives at Oversight’s offices daily now, it seems, and among the more interesting features of Thursday’s opening hearings were broad details of material that came in just the previous few days.
This includes two more incriminating wire communications from Chinese nationals, an email in which Hunter Biden boasts of a deal worth $10 million from one company “for introductions alone,” and more testimony from IRS whistleblowers, saying that one Leslie Wolf, a U.S. attorney, barred the tax agency from mentioning “Political Figure No. 1” as it sought an investigative warrant. Wolf is, with her husband, a longtime Democratic partisan and donor in multiple election cycles.
Reduced to Calling it ‘Foolish’ & ‘Pathetic’
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, bloviated for considerable minutes — not once engaging any of the evidence outlined. The proceedings were “pathetic,” they were “foolishness,” they were “based on a long debunked and discredited lie.” This impeachment inquiry, Raskin said, “is the result, directly or indirectly, of Donald Trumps’s pressure.”
Raskin would not be worth mentioning but for what he implicitly signaled Thursday. Democrats are not going to address the grave matters to hand on the evidence: They seem to know they cannot.
AsThe New York Timesreported a few weeks ago, Democrats will go to the public and wage their war by way of a propaganda blitz of exceptional proportions on the thought — and they are correct in this — that you can fool some of the people all of the time if they are liberal authoritarians, otherwise known as loyal Democrats.
This is what we saw when Raskin spoke Thursday, neither more nor less. He had nothing to offer other than theater and spectacle.
This strategy is all the Democrats seem to have. It will be excruciatingly difficult to carry it out as evidence mounts until it is so high it is impossible for anyone but robotic loyalists to turn their eyes from it. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, after all. Especially, it seems, as Raskin serves as the Democrats’ point man on the House floor.
A Major Battle of the Information War
We have lived through information wars before. The Russiagate years can be so described. But we are in for one now that may prove the most invasive and totalized of all. The question raised is, Can incessant repetition of lies and misrepresentations triumph in the American consciousness over perfectly discernible realities?
Those who follow this process will be invited seven times on seven days a week to read it as sheer partisan politics and nothing more. I consider it imperative, in the cause of clear sight, to set aside all such urgings. The truth does not belong to a political party.
Comer was attentive to this question in his opening statement. “In recent history, Democrats inflicted much damage on the credibility of special investigations by peddling the Russian collusion hoax,” he said. “But this Committee under this majority will not pursue such witch hunts based on unfounded allegations, innuendo, and no real evidence.”
“This majority” is Republican, yes. Republicans, or many of them, are eager to take down Joe Biden, yes. But at the outset, at least, we must set aside party affiliation and ambition and take statements such as this as valid expressions of intent until it is demonstrated otherwise.
The Democrats’ biggest problem after the opening day of hearings: Based on what we have so far seen, what is to come will have a lot more than unfounded allegations and innuendo to it.
The hearings continue.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
As Canada’s top officials express embarrassment for honoring a WWII Nazi collaborator in parliament, the leader of the country’s military, Gen. Wayne Eyre, refuses to apologize for his standing ovation. The Canadian military has trained Ukraine’s notorious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion for years.
Canadian politicians have been in frantic damage control mode since feting a former member of the Waffen-SS during a parliamentary reception for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on September 22. The Speaker of Canada’s House of Commons, Anthony Rota, resigned following the incident, while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lamented it as “extremely upsetting,” and opposition leader Pierre Poilievre branded the affair the “biggest single diplomatic embarrassment” in Canada’s history.
But amid the gratuitous public rites of contrition, one influential official has been conspicuously absent: Canada’s highest-ranking general. According to the Ottawa Citizen, Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre has “declined to apologize for his standing ovation” for Yaroslav Hunka, the now-notorious 98-year-old former member of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, whose members gained international infamy for hunting down anti-Nazi partisans, massacring thousands of civilians, and burning hundreds of Polish villagers alive.
The notion that the Nazi proclivities of figures like Hunka could have escaped Eyre’s notice now appears increasingly remote. In 2017, Ukraine’s Azov Battalion published photos on their website publicizing their meeting with high-level Canadian military officials, who had arrived in Ukraine to help train the notoriously neo-Nazi infested unit, which was officially incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard.
A year later, Azov posted photos on its official social media channels showing Canadian military attaché Col. Brian Irwin meeting with its personnel. Responding to a query from journalist Asa Winstanley, a Canadian military spokesman justified training the fascist military on the grounds that the session “includes ongoing dialogue on the development of a diverse, and inclusive Ukraine.”
A year later, Azov posted photos on its official social media channels showing Canadian military attaché Col. Brian Irwin meeting with its personnel. Responding to a query from journalist Asa Winstanley, a Canadian military spokesman justified training the fascist military on the grounds that the session “includes ongoing dialogue on the development of a diverse, and inclusive Ukraine.”
Just four months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies sent a letter to then-Acting Chief of the Defense Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre and Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan demanding an investigation into the decision to train Ukrainian neo-Nazis. The Jewish group urged them to ensure that such instruction did not continue.
“If Canada is going to be providing military training to foreign forces, then it is our responsibility to know we are not training neo-Nazis,” said Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, policy director of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. “It is our obligation to our Canadian veterans who sacrificed so much defeating fascism in Europe.”
But such warnings apparently went unheeded. The Canadian military not only declined to discontinue its Nazi-training policies, it escalated its program of coaching avowed fascists. Since Russian military operations in Ukraine kicked off in Feb. 2022, Canada has invested a further $1.6 billion USD in the arming and instructing of Kiev’s military.
On the sidelines of Zelensky’s now-infamous address to the Canadian Parliament, Ottawa authorized the further disbursement of another $483 million USD in aid and training on F-16 fighter jets.
Canada’s scheme of funneling weapons to Kiev and coaching Ukrainian forces officially began in 2014, just months after anti-Russian forces toppled the democratically-elected government of Viktor Yanukovych in a brutal US government-backed coup d’etat. Under the auspices of “Operation UNIFIER,” more than 33,000 Ukrainian troops received “advanced combat instruction by Canadian soldiers,” Canada’s state-affiliated CBC reported in 2022.
Ukraine’s ambassador in Ottawa, Yulia Kovaliv, heralded the training initiative as a “very important initiative.”
“It is also important to further provide Ukraine with heavy weapons,” she added.
In the UK, where Canadian forces frequently travel in order to school Zelensky’s army in the art of killing Russians, the program received a similarly warm welcome. An ebullient British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said in a statement at the time that he was “delighted” that “the Canadian Armed Forces will be joining the growing international effort to support the training of Ukrainian soldiers in the UK.”
“Canada’s expertise will provide a further boost to the programme and ensure that the Ukrainian men and women, coming to the UK to train to defend their country, will get a wide pool of experience and skills from both UK forces and our international partners,” Wallace crowed.
Just what exactly the nationalist-leaning members of Ukrainian armed forces did with the training and tacit blessing of Canada has yet to be ascertained. But Azov members have been implicated in a number of war crimes. Despite the unit’s recent push to whitewash its Nazi tendencies, Azov — which has since expanded to a full-fledged brigade under Kiev’s official command — retains as its leader Andrey Biletsky, who once described Ukraine’s role on the global stage as helping to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen.”
Biletsky has taken pains to distance himself from the comment, but the unit has not undertaken similar efforts to distance itself from Biletsky. In September 2023, Biletsky was photographed proudly shaking hands with Zelensky during an intimate meeting with the Ukrainian President on the outskirts of Bakhmut. And Zelensky himself appears to have few problems with publicly associating with the group.
In a post commemorating the encounter with Ukraine’s most celebrated Nazi formation, Zelensky declared: “I am grateful to everyone who defends our country and people, who brings our victory closer.”
More than 10,000 of Kiev’s forces have reportedly laid down arms in recent weeks, using a special radio channel to contact the Russian military
Large numbers of Ukrainian troops have surrendered to the Russian military in recent weeks, using a special radio frequency designed for fighters willing to lay down arms, TASS reported on Wednesday.
The frequency, 149.200 call sign ‘Volga’, was set up by the Russian military during the summer. Thus far, it has been used by more than 10,000 Ukrainian servicemen who were subsequently taken into Russian custody, according to a source with knowledge of the situation cited by TASS. The person added that the radio frequency is active along the entire front line.
“More than 10,0000 Ukrainian soldiers have chosen life and used the 149.200 ‘Volga’ frequency to surrender. The prisoners are well-fed and are provided with all the necessary medical care,” the source stated.
The process has seemingly accelerated recently as Ukrainian troops have surrendered in groups rather than individually, particularly around Rabotino, according to the TASS source. The village in Zaporozhye Region has become the scene of intense fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces in recent weeks.
Rabotino remains one of the major flashpoints of the conflict, with the area repeatedly subjected to attacks during the long-heralded Ukrainian counteroffensive launched in early June. The push has thus far failed to yield any tangible results, while reports have indicated that Ukrainian forces are sustaining heavy personnel and materiel losses in the process.
According to Moscow’s latest estimates, Kiev has lost more than 17,000 servicemen this month alone. The total number of Ukrainian troops killed since the counteroffensive began has now surpassed 83,000, with over 10,000 pieces of heavy military hardware also destroyed, according to the Russian military.
“Using the #FauciLiedPeopleDied trend is a great way to show your friends you’re a conspiracy theorist.” –Dr Anthony Fauci
So, here’s what you might have learned over the weekend if you ventured into the thickets of alt news: in April and May of 2021, the president (“Joe Biden”), the whole White House Covid Response Team (Andy Slavitt & Co), and everyone in the WH communications office, the US Surgeon General (Vivek Murthy), senior officials of the CDC including director Rochelle Walensky, Francis Collins, head of NIH, and Dr. Anthony Fauci of NIAID were all freaking out, holding crisis meetings, and sending blizzards of emails among each other after being informed by a Pfizer safety report that the miraculous new mRNA Covid vaccines produced significant cases of myocarditis and blood-clotting abnormalities.
All these officials proceeded to craft a campaign to tell the public that this myocarditis was mild, extremely rare, and self-resolving (it wasn’t), and urged all Americans over twelve to keep taking the vaxx shots. Later, they expanded the vaccine program to include children down to six months old. By 2022, all of US public health officialdom had to know that the vaxxes were also ineffective at preventing infection and transmission of Covid. Rochelle Walensky kept pushing the vaccines as “safe and effective” until she resigned in June, 2023. Her replacement, Mandy K. Cohen, is still pushing the latest mRNA booster shots in the face of reports (mainly from the UK and other foreign countries) of a shocking rise in all-causes deaths and disabilities from heart and blood disease, neurological injury, and cancers. The CDC refused this month to release updated information on case numbers of myocarditis and pericarditis in the USA.
The record of those frantic 2021 doings in the White House and the CDC came from a document dump prompted by a FOIA request by Edward Berkovich, a lawyer associated with Naomi Wolf’s Daily Clout news organization. He requested emails between February and June, 2021, that included the term “myocarditis.” CDC sent 472 pages, followed by an additional 46 pages, (believed to be sent by a whistleblower) that included emails between White House officials up to the president. Of the 47, 37 were entirely redacted (whited-out, not blacked-out, that is, blank pages). Only two pages of the 46 contained no redactions. The redactions were made, the CDC said, pursuant to Exemptions 5 and 6 under code 5 U.S.C. §552, which protects documents received by the president.
That was a lot to wade through. Apologies. What’s the upshot? From early on, our government lied about the safety of the vaccines, at the same time that they lied and confabulated about the origins of the Covid-19 virus. They continue lying about all of this to this day even as they appear to prepare for a replay of a pandemic. Now that the weekend is over, you will not read about any of this in The New York Times. Why is that? I will offer my theory: that newspaper’s business model, based on pages and pages of print advertising, is completely broken and it is on financial life-support from the CIA and / or DARPA, probably facilitated by private sector cut-outs laundering the money. That’s how dishonorable the flagship of the US news media is.
And, of course, there is the added layer of government-directed censorship, also through private sector cut-outs, that is aimed at suppressing the truth about Covid from every angle, especially the vaccines. Doesn’t all of this look rather sinister? Choose one of two possible explanations: 1) the Covid-19 episode from the beginning was a fantastic fiasco of blundering incompetence by hundreds of officials from many agencies plus elected leaders, and at every stage was made worse by additional incompetent actions aimed at concealing massive chains of prior misdeeds producing more misdeeds resulting in the wholesale collapse of authority in our country. In other words, an epic clusterfuck.
Or 2) The entire Covid episode is a chain of crimes committed deliberately with malicious intent to kill and injure large numbers of people while contriving to deprive the survivors of their basic liberties and their property. Because identical events are seen in all the other nations of Western Civ, it would be reasonable to infer some kind of coordination managed by a supervisory force or entity. What we see is a globalist coalition formed of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization (WHO), The European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN), the pharmaceutical industry, the “Five Eyes” intel alliance, the global banking establishment, The Democratic Party, and scores of well-endowed non-governmental agencies such as the George Soros constellation of councils and foundations. What else is unseen?
One conspicuously strange element of the whole picture is the phantom leadership of the supposed world hegemon USA in the figurehead, “Joe Biden.” Never in history has such a move into tyranny been fronted by such an embarrassingly un-charismatic empty vessel. Never in our country’s history have our affairs whirled in such a mystifying flux of bewildering forces. Even our Civil War was a more straightforward clash of interests. Events are moving quickly now. They’re setting up the steam-table for that banquet of consequences.
