The West Risks Creating A ‘Snow ISIS’ In Europe With Extremists Going To Fight In Ukraine

The West risks creating a ‘Snow ISIS’ in Europe with extremists going to fight in Ukraine, similar to the situation when the US trained and equipped “moderate” Syrian rebels in a failed attempt to overthrow President Bashar Assad, leading to many of these fighters joining al-Qaeda.

A new assassination attempt shook Russia last week, targeting a prominent civilian figure — this time, writer Zakhar Prilepin, whose car was blown up in Nizhny Novgorod region.

The hit, which Prilepin survived, is reminiscent of the incident that killed political scientist and activist Darya Dugina last year near Moscow, and also the bombing that targeted military blogger Vladlen Tartarsky and leveled a Saint Petersburg café. These attacks are similar to those routinely condemned by the West when they’re committed by jihadists. But Western officials’ clear lack of interest in identifying or denouncing the perpetrators of these incidents speaks volumes.

And speaking of sabotage, who’s responsible for launching the drone that blew up over the Kremlin last week? The shrug from Washington is deafening. Classified US documents leaked online last month already fingered Ukrainian agents who “pursued drone attacks inside Belarus and Russia, contrary to US and Western wishes, and leaders in Kyiv have considered further targets outside Ukraine,” according to NBC News. Yet when asked about the incident by the Washington Post, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the incident should be taken with “a very large shaker of salt” – as though US officials weren’t already fully aware of the general intention to pursue precisely such attacks. But Western officials constantly play on plausible deniability. What enables them to do so is their insistence on distinguishing between Ukraine the country, on one hand, and pro-Ukrainian agents and groups on the other.

There sure is a lot of sabotage against Russia happening right now. Some is attributed to Ukraine directly, as France’s Le Monde did recently in the wake of the bombing of a train in Bryansk. Other acts, like the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline network – a centerpiece of Russian-European economic cooperation – have been described by US officials as being perpetrated by undefined “pro-Ukrainian” groups.

Any distinction is really just a minor detail considering that NATO allies can’t even be bothered to make it themselves when it might suit them. They knowingly trained Azov battalion neo-Nazis, as Canada’s Ottawa Citizen and other Western media have documented. Those soldiers had ultimately been folded into the Ukrainian army and their background was conveniently whitewashed.  

A pro-ISIS fighter in Ukraine, who came from a far-right hooligan background named Daniil Lyashuk, said he received missiles and “SAS training” from the UK.

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