John Wright and Chris Maffei are Putin Apparatchiks: Medium Becomes the new Facebook?
There are numerous Putin apologists on Medium whose essays appear disproportionate to their knowledge of the Ukraine conflict, fact-checking of sources, and denials about funding, or possibly common source writing of their pieces.
The thesis is always the same. NATO provoked the war by expanding membership closer to the Russian Federation's western borders. Ukraine was about to shut off Russian access to the Black Sea. Ukrainians were mistreating Russian-speaking Ukranians which would result in genocide (therefore the Putin objective of “denazification”).
What should trouble Medium editors Russian trollsare manipulating your algorithms. Chris Maffei appeared in my Ukraine feed a dozen times in less than two weeks. I took issue with his neglect of factual sources. He postulated that 14,000 members of the 101st Airborne troops training in western NATO countries would be slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands of Russian troops. The placement of the 101st troops is part of the US “tripwire” strategy — attack any of ours and you are at war with ALL of us. This has kept North Korea from attacking South Korea for seventy years, even though the North has more troops, artillery, and nuclear missiles.
The correct order of battle is 14,000 101st Airborne at the tip of the spear, 3.2 million NATO troops to back them up, and the George H.W. Bush carrier group, carrying enough air power to secure dominance of Russian airspace. The wild card is NATO submarines, whose locations are classified, but would control the sea lanes.
Chris responded by asking if my sources were liberal newspapers. After I mentioned the Fletcher School, Chris went silent and his posts disappeared from my feed; hasn’t darkened my door since.
I woke up this morning to find six posts from John Wright, the most inflammatory claiming Russia lost 20,000 troops while Ukraine has sustained 147,000. His sources were a Russian website, a “Turkish newspaper,” and the Israeli Intelligence agency Mossad, except that Mossad, never discloses its assessment. It’s the equivalent of quoting the Great Sphinx.
Russian casualties are somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There is no centralized casualty count of the policeman, national guard, drone “clubs” members, decentralized combat divisions, and guerilla units. The Ukrainian government has a policy of not releasing data.
