British journalist Peter Hitchens has been covering Russia for 47 years. He’s a critic of Vladimir Putin so nobody can say he’s "echoing Putin’s talking points.” Hitchens writes: “You’ve been fed a steady diet of propaganda rubbish about Ukraine and the invented Russian menace.” In Daily Mail Op-Ed, Hitchens said he learned long ago that governments lie and get mainstream corporate media to lie for them. “It is what they do,” he writes, and yet seldom has he seen such a cloud of lies as we face about the war in #Ukraine: “Seldom in history has a war been more provoked.” Hitchens reminds us that all Russians, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had been shocked and angered when, in 1999, under the leadership of Bill Clinton, NATO launched bombing strikes on Serbia, which had not attacked a NATO member. That same year, despite James Baker’s “not one inch to the East” pledge to Gorbachev, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO - putting #NATO on Russia's doorstep. And Hitches points out that Britain’s MI6 and the CIA had been working on regime change in Ukraine since early 2000. In 2014, Ukraine’s democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych was toppled by the Western intelligence agencies and a local mob. Hitchens concluded, "You just can’t do that and pretend to be the guardians of democracy." [In other words, Team Biden’s “plucky little democracy” was little more than a tool of the NATO gambit to destabilize, overextend, and weaken Russia - now stronger than ever.]