“Operation Cyclone: Ukraine Edition” – is this the real plan?

Gavin O’Reilly

Will far-right Ukrainian militias play the same role as the mujahedeen did in Afghanistan?

For almost three months, the Western mainstream media, in a move not dissimilar to its previous assertions that Saddam Hussein had the capability to launch WMDs within 45 minutes, or that Iran was building a nuclear bomb, has repeatedly claimed that Russia is planning an ‘imminent’ invasion of its Western neighbour Ukraine.

Ukraine has been under the rule of the successive US-EU friendly governments of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky since the 2014 Euromaidan, a CIA and MI6-orchestrated regime change operation launched in response to then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s November 2013 decision to suspend an EU trade deal in favour of pursuing closer ties with the Russian Federation.

With the ongoing collapse of the global COVID-19 media narrative following the highly coincidental timing of last month’s World Economic Forum Davos Agenda virtual event, a hypothetical Russian invasion of Ukraine has now taken centre stage amongst corporate media outlets with a track record of promoting war and regime change in countries refusing to kowtow to the demands of the US-NATO hegemony.

A media narrative which has seen thousands of US and British troops being deployed to Eastern Europe as a result – a highly provocative action and one, that should even a minor miscalculation occur amidst the current tensions, could easily escalate into a full-blown military conflict between East and West.

Recent comments by current Ukrainian President Zelensky however, in which he poured cold water over the idea of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as the recent supply of over 90 tonnes of weaponry to Kiev by the United States amidst the current tensions, and US President Joe Biden stating himself that Washington would not engage militarily with Russia, would suggest that although the possibility of the current crisis inadvertently spiralling into a global conflict between Russia and NATO remains, that that is not the current intention of the West.

Rather, a plan seemingly exists to provoke Russia into intervening in the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine to protect the predominantly ethnic Russian inhabitants of the breakaway Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, before drawing Moscow into a wider guerrilla conflict in the rest of Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe, with the intentions of tying Russia down for the foreseeable future in an Iraq-style military quagmire.

A tactic with previous historical usage against the Kremlin.

In 1978, at the height of the Cold War, both East and West were locked in a battle to prevent their opposing ideologies of Socialism and Free Market Capitalism taking hold in their respective spheres of influence.

With previously Western-friendly Afghanistan having come under control of the pro-Soviet PDPA (People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan) following that year’s Saur Revolution, a plan was quickly hatched by the White House and Downing Street to destabilise the newly-established Left-wing state.

From 1979 until 1989, the CIA’s Operation Cyclone would see the arming, funding and training of Islamist militants known as the Mujahideen, including none other than Osama Bin Laden.

These fighters, adhering to the ultraconservative Saudi Arabia-backed Wahhabi ideology, were trained neighbouring Pakistan, before being sent to wage war on the ‘atheist Communists’ of Afghanistan and their Soviet allies – with Moscow having intervened at the outset of the conflict following an official request for assistance from Kabul.

This decade long intervention by Moscow however, would ultimately fail to shore up their client state, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, with Kabul’s Socialist government lasting a mere three years following the Soviet withdrawal before a civil war would see it replaced by the religious fundamentalist Islamic State of Afghanistan in 1992. A government which would itself be overthrown by the Taliban four years later.

The ten-year-long Soviet effort is also widely seen as a contributing factor to the Bloc’s subsequent breakup in 1991.

Indeed, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to then-US President Jimmy Carter when Operation Cyclone was launched in 1979 and instrumental in its implementation, would later recount in a 1998 interview about how drawing the USSR into a Vietnam-style quagmire in order to drain its resources was a motivating factor.

With Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu recently outlining a plot to stage a Syria-style false flag chemical attack in eastern Ukraine, as well as media reports of the CIA training Ukrainian guerrilla fighters, drawing Russia into a costly military conflict is seemingly a motivating factor of the regime change lobby yet again.

Gavin O’Reilly is an Irish Republican activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism; he was a writer for the American Herald Tribune from January 2018 up until their seizure by the FBI in 2021, with his work also appearing on The Duran, Al-Masdar, MintPress News, Global Research and SouthFront. He can be reached through Twitter and Facebook.

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