Mira Terada, head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, interviewed Matt Agorist, creator and editor-in-chief of the Free Thought Project, one of the largest American independent news website. The journalist told the head of the Foundation about the true reasons for the interest of the United States in the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, clarified the connection between the American establishment and Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and also explained what benefits the Kiev authorities receive from prolonging the armed conflict. Agorist confirmed the information about secret US biological laboratories in Ukraine and the censorship that seized Western media.
Hi, Matt! I’m glad to get in touch with you again. Let’s move on to the events in Ukraine. In your opinion, was the leadership of Western countries ready for the fact that Russia did not agree to put up with a prolonged escalation of the situation and took the initiative into its own hands by launching a special military operation?
I think it’s a little bit more difficult than just than that one point. This has been building for a decade now, and Russia has been warning against the NATO intrusion on their borders and in the states surrounding Russia and Ukraine was the last holdout. I guess when NATO wouldn’t stop pushing for the Ukraine to join since 2014, Putin has been warning that this is a national security threat to Russia.
Since 2015, the United States has been allocating millions of taxpayer dollars to finance the Ukrainian army, while there are many problems inside the country that require immediate solutions, such as police and penitentiary reform. Why do you think the American establishment puts its interests abroad above the interests of its citizens?
I actually wrote an article about this over the weekend, about that how the United States, we have a roughly 3.6 million children slipping into poverty right now as the Congress and the Senate both voted to send $13.6 billion to Ukraine. And this is hundreds of billions of dollars have flown into that, have been funneled into that region over the last two decades preparing for this very moment which was completely avoidable. We have our infrastructure here in the United States is crumbling. The U.S. is interested in and continue to maintain their empire outside of our own country. And Ukraine is no different. It’s just like the Middle East. We spent billions over there, trillions over there, establishing the U.S. and maintaining the U.S. empire for the benefit of a very select group of people who profit from the slaughter of innocent people.
What has been happening in Ukraine for the past eight years is an operation planned by the United States to destroy the country from within. Anti-Russian propaganda, the sponsorship of neo-Nazis and tens of thousands of civilian casualties are a clear sign of US intervention. What do you think is the true interest pursued by the States?
The true interest is obvious. I think everybody in the West wants Ukraine to join NATO in that way. The West would have Russia completely surrounded on all of the western front. This is this is obvious that this has been going on. We’ve been establishing weapons systems all around the border of Russia for the last ten years.
In November 2017, an American delegation visited the Ukrainian nationalist battalion “Azov” to discuss logistics and strengthen cooperation, after which American intelligence introduced its instructors into the ranks of Ukrainian servicemen who taught the rebels military training and handling weapons. Why is the United States, being on another continent, used to defend its interests in other territories?
I can’t really speak to that. I can’t say that the U.S. has supported the Azov battalion.
We do have pictures that prove that fact, unfortunately.
Right, right. We have heads of state, Senator John McCain, Joe Biden, several other members of Congress with the leaders of the Azov battalion. And then for those who may not be familiar, Azov battalion is a neo-Nazi regime. They came about in 2005 and they have been carrying out violence against minority groups in Ukraine. They have attacked civilians in the Donbas region. They are open about their white supremacist and literal neo-Nazi ties back to Nazi Germany. And unfortunately, right now, it appears that the battalion, which was once just a few hundred people, maybe 900 people is now growing to very high numbers.
So why do you think the United States, being on another continent, used to defend its interests in other territories?
We build empire and that’s why we have over 700 bases in over 100 different countries all over the world. The global the military industrial complex needs to expand empire in order to fund the weapons manufacturers and everybody else who profits from the war or not the war, but more aggression and conflict and invasions.
How true is the statement that Washington’s true goal is not to conquer any territory, but to keep conflicts on the planet in a “hot state” by profiting from the sale of weapons?
I think that both sides obviously profit from this from this conflict right now. Which is why last week when the U.S. stock market was plummeting, we saw the weapons industry stocks, get them have seat record gains. Lockheed Martin was up 10%. Boeing was up another 8%. These were all above their projections for the year. And then it was record breaking, which just shows like there’s some people that actually need this and want this to happen so they can actually profit from it. It’s the same in Russia, I believe. The weapons manufacturers, I know a lot of the weapons are made by the Russian government, but they also export a lot of weapons. And this is also good for the arms export industry in Russia as well. So, yeah, while the common people are using these weapons and dying on the streets, both sides of this war are profiting immensely from there, from their blood.
This is sad.
It’s no secret that the current Ukrainian president is just a puppet of the West. But something went wrong when, at the most inopportune moment, NATO countries turned away from Ukraine, saying they did not want to enter into a direct confrontation with Russia. Why, in your opinion, did the current leadership of Ukraine so blindly trust Western countries?
I don’t know if he blindly trusts the West. But he has a lot to gain from the West. Look at the money flowing into Ukraine from Western countries right now.
It’s insane.
Right. Zelensky could have taken the peace agreement that Russia offered last week and promised to remain neutral by admitting their constitution and relinquishing Crimea. But as far as I know, their administration couldn’t care less about that. They didn’t seek that out. Instead, more people were dying and this could have ended the conflict. We have to question those intentions how many people have to die to try to win a war against a military who is the second largest in the world, going against a country who has a $6 billion annual military budget? We have police departments in the United States. You have larger military budgets than Ukraine as a country. . And if both parties would, which Russia has already put on the plate what they what they require for this war to end. I do not think that Russia has stated multiple times that they are not trying like to conquer any other states. They’re not even trying to conquer Ukraine. They just want to remove the military installations inside Ukraine so it can remain a neutral country that eliminates the security threat to Russia. Zelensky knows that if they don’t pull out, he’s going to have money coming in for a long time, as we’ve proven last week with the House and Senate voting to give them another $14 billion.
Unfortunately and so far it’s only Ukraine who commits war crime. Have you heard about the situation that happened today in Donetsk that the Ukrainian army shot their rockets? It’s been downtown to Donetsk and over 20 people were killed. 28 people were injured and there were dead children. And that type of rocket is prohibited by the international law, so it’s not only a war crime. It’s considered as a terrorist attack. Even more, they planned it in advance. They went into social networks and they put like a chat board or something and they called mostly women to come downtown at noon to find out what’s going on with their sons, their husbands, brothers and so on. So mostly there were women and children. And I find a true war crime.
Wow, that’s horrible. I had not heard about that.
It just happened today at noon so you probably will hear about it in a couple hours due to the time difference. But it’s just crazy. We have seen pictures, videos, people scared. It’s a real tragedy.
It’s kind of in the same vein as what’s been going on for the last eight years. The Donetsk region has been the subject of shellings for the last eight years from Ukraine. Innocent women and children have been killed in the Donbass region because of these largely from what my knowledge, or their unprovoked attacks on the regions, because they declared independence from the Ukrainian regime. It took power in 2014. It wouldn’t be surprising, although that’s very tragic. And it shows the horrors of war on all sides, which is why we need to stop this.
That type of set ups when you call somebody who can’t defend themselves as women and children without any warnings that you are moving or you’re about to shoot as a Russian army does. They say in advance which way they are going and what’s their target. They make sure that innocent people and civilians will evacuate themselves. This is the huge difference that I think represents very well what’s going on, what kind of attitudes Russian and Ukrainian army has, and who has what type of goals and moral and principles.
According to numerous statements by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia is ready to stop the military operation in less than an hour, provided that Ukraine makes amendments to its constitution guaranteeing the security of the Russian Federation. Why do you think the political leadership of Ukraine has not yet taken this step, despite the fact that the Ukrainian leader has repeatedly called the countries of the North Atlantic Alliance weaklings, guilty of what is happening. What are they hoping for?
The motives, I don’t speak for Zelensky or any of that or any of the Ukrainian government, but follow the money. You can see that there’s money pouring in. All these European countries are reaching out to Ukraine. Ukraine is the darling child of the world or the Western world right now. They have everything to gain from keeping this conflict going longer. And which is why I think that the there’s people that are behind funneling all this money to Ukraine, want it to keep going as well. I think that which is why they’re funding insurgencies down, funding all these insurgent groups like Azov battalion. It’s almost a parallel can almost be drawn between what’s went on in Afghanistan and even Syria with the creation of ISIS. The CIA funneled black money into these areas and gave this money to terrorist groups in order to fight the perceived enemy in these areas and it ended up backfiring. And I think that that’s what might be happening right now. They’re holding out on peace and in the meantime, I just read an article this morning about how the Azov battalion is putting out recruitment videos. Their ranks are growing immensely in the region. And this is the Nazis that Putin said he wanted to denazify. These are real Nazis. I think that any time that their ranks are growing is dangerous. It’s sad that the West in general doesn’t understand that these weapons are going into the hands of people that would likely kill them based on their race or religion.
In 2005, then-future US President Barack Obama signed a pact during his visit to the Ukrainian capital, according to which the United States received the green light to study dangerous microbes in Ukrainian laboratories. In your opinion, how likely is it that the American leadership has been funding the Armed Forces of Ukraine for so many years only so that no one will ever find out what really happened in these laboratories?
I’m not sure what exactly they were studying in those labs. This is like a taboo subject right now. Fact checkers are saying, people called it bioweapons. We don’t really have any evidence that they are bio weapons. But we do have Department of Defense has admitted that they have been funding the bio labs in Ukraine, like dozens of them since 2005 as you mentioned. We’re talking $200 million has gone into this region and Ukraine to study different pathogens and potentially world ending viruses that if escaped from these labs, could do devastating consequences for the rest of the world. As far as a weaponized version of any of these, I don’t know. I know that Russia has been making the accusations for years that the U.S. is building the bioweapon labs, are funding bioweapons research in Ukraine and in other states along its border. As far as any type of leak or proof or anything of that, I don’t have any of that. I don’t believe that there’s any available. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that shows it might be that way, but the pathogens that they’re studying right now are enough to worry the World Health Organization and U.S. interests who have already come out and said that this is those areas need to be held off and protected because if some of these pathogens or viruses leak out of there, then we could have some detrimental effects in the region and worldwide, I guess.
Censorship of Western media has not bypassed the Ukrainian conflict. The largest American technology companies independently form the agenda, promoting anti-Russian content and blocking the accounts of Russian journalists criticizing the actions of the West. Do ordinary Americans and Europeans really not notice how they become the subject of manipulation by the media?
I think that they didn’t notice in the beginning. But there’s people who think that it needs to happen. A large portion of the West is supporting this massive censorship of what they consider pro-Russian narratives. The liberal establishment here in America thinks that everything that doesn’t parrot the narrative coming out of the White House makes you a Putin puppet. But last week, we even saw that the censorship has spread to independent outlets like DuckDuckGo. The CEO of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg, had tweeted out last week that the DuckDuckGo, the anti-censorship pro-privacy platform, would now be censoring search results that they deemed to contain misinformation, being that misinformation and disinformation are entirely subjective and being that what was yesterday’s misinformation is today’s fact. This opened up a lot of people’s eyes to the heavy handed censorship that now is expanding into these independent once privacy supporting outlets like DuckDuckGo.
In a private conversation you told me about your friend, journalist, who had some situation on Twitter. Would you allow viewers and readers, please? What happened to her?
Yeah. So actually, she was just the subject of a New York Times article over the weekend.
Oh my God. They made it so big.
Yeah. I guess The New York Times may have tried to make it look like it was Russia’s fault. The RT America largely closed down their operations in Washington, D.C. and laid off everybody in there. Rachel used to be a writer and editor here at the Free Thought Project, and she left in 2019 and went to RT, where she flourished over there. And never once has Rachel ever been told by Russia or anything like that to cover Russia in a positive light or spread any type of propaganda. She was free to cover whatever she wanted over there. They were never told to put out any type of propaganda and that’s what’s important. But it doesn’t matter, it’s called Russia Today, so naturally that was the first place to go down and or the first outlet ever to go down and be largely censored across all of West and including blocked entirely in Europe. I believe you could still watch RT on YouTube and access the website here in the United States.
No, not anymore. Not anymore, unfortunately.
Oh, RT.com is down now for good in the United States?
Not only RT but all Russian news channels, publishers and any type of sources, everything is blocked on YouTube. So, we technically lost an opportunity to put out the news to the rest of the world.
Yeah. This is the depth of discourse is what we’re seeing. And conflicts are not resolved by one side being able to scream at the top of mount without anybody questioning them. Conflicts are resolved with peaceful discourse. And when one person controls that narrative and then we have a much larger problem.
So, back to Rachel.
Rachel was laid off, I guess, it was about ten days ago from RT. And everybody else that at that place, there was a bunch of people who had hundreds and hundreds of videos that they had been making for the last ten years, working these long careers at RT and then all that’s just wiped off the Internet in one day. I know that YouTube purged all that last Friday I guess that’s what you were talking about. I was under the impression that RT was still allowed on there, like their live stream or whatever, which I saw recently. Rachel was attacked. She received so many death threats and she had never once reported on Russia. She was an American correspondent, reported on American issues that affect Americans and not never once was a mouthpiece for Putin or anything. This move was made by the West to demonize all Russian media. Twitter labeled her account as a Russian media asset. And then she was flooded with hate mail and death threats. There was a large group of people even calling the university, which she graduated from in Texas, and demanding they retract her degree. This is crazy. These people are like begging to be censored and begging for one voice to control the entire narrative, which, as I stated, is entirely against any principles of a free society and will only end badly for everybody involved.
Do you think the NATO countries and the United States have begun to realize that because of their failed policies, the lives of thousands of civilians in Ukraine will be like hell in the next few years?
There’s going to be a lot of rebuilding left to be done because some civilian targets were hit. And it sucks for everybody involved. And yeah, it’s going to take years to rebuild. I know that Russia has already been talking about the great rebuild after this conflict is over. And hopefully they stick by that and they to try to build all this back up.