Ukraine’s CCD Hit List Hypes Organizing To Bust Up Russia

March 9, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), a hit list run out of President Zelenskyy’s National Security and Defense Council, enthusiastically reported March 6 on the ostensible results of a “National Online Referendum on Self-Determination of National Republics” of Russia. The Kremlin is “in shock,” the CCD cries, because five populous Russian regions overwhelmingly want to separate from Moscow.

“Votes for secession from the Russian Federation were held from Feb. 16 [-28] in five Russian regions ... in Konigsberg (Kaliningrad and Oblast), Ingria (St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast), Kuban (Krasnodar region), Siberia and the Urals. 5.634 million people took part in the vote, which is a representative sample,” the CCD writes. Among the slogans of the ostensible referendums were “Enough with feeding Moscow!” “Enough of dying for the Kremlin!” “Vote for the Independence of your republic!”

Online referendums are notoriously unrepresentative of anything, and their organizers can claim any results they please, but the intent of the operation is clear. According to the CCD, “the ultimate goal of the ‘Forum of the Free Peoples of Russia’ is to change the administrative and territorial structure of the Russian Federation and the emergence on its territory of a number of free, independent and democratic states.” Organizers will meet within a month to define the next steps for achieving this goal, says the CCD.

So much for Western denials that the goal of NATO’s proxy war against Russia, using Ukraine, is to dismember the Russian Federation. The referendum was announced at the 5th Forum of the so-called Free Nations of Post-Russia, held Jan. 30 on the premises of the European Parliament in Brussels.

Washington’s Brzezinski-minded Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) is actively involved. Its notorious Russia-hating British operative, former Economist senior editor Edward Lucas, took part in a January forum hosted in Brussels by a neocon group in the European Parliament. In his March 5 CEPA piece, titled “Russia’s Collapse: Ringside Seat,” Lucas reports that the forum was titled “Imperial Russia: Conquest, Colonization and Genocide,” with two Polish MEPs also involved in organizing it. He described the Post-Russia Forum as bringing “together the ethnic, linguistic, and regional groupings who are united by dislike for centralized rule from Moscow.... It attracted well-known ethnic minorities such as the Chechens, Tatars, and Ingrians, as well as Cossacks and autonomy campaigners from the Pskov, Smolensk, and Tver regions of Russia.”

Lucas is more realistic than the CCD as to the immediate potential for success of “Post-Russia,” suggesting that a campaign for decentralization may be needed to create conditions for Russia’s disintegration. But, the insistence on “decolonization” is important, too. “That is why I am heading to Brussels this week for another conference, titled ‘Pushing Pushkin: The Imperialism and Decolonization of Russian Culture.’ ”