The US and Poland reached two agreements earlier this week to establish the Warsaw-based “Ukraine Communications Group” (UCG). Its explicitly stated goal is “to coordinate messaging, promote accurate reporting of Russia’s full-scale invasion, amplify Ukrainian voices, and expose Kremlin information manipulation.” Despite being directed against Russia, it’ll likely also be aimed against the West’s conservative-nationalist opposition and could easily grow to involve more subjects than just Ukraine.
The Department of Homeland Security’s infamous “Disinformation Governance Board”, which was briefly established for several months in 2022 with essentially the same mission, was forced to shut down under public pressure due to legitimate concerns that its mandate risked violating Americans’ civil liberties. Its masterminds learned their lesson not to set up another similar institution at home, however, and that’s why they’re finally replicating its functions through the UCG and basing it in Warsaw instead of DC.
Its foreign location and partial foreign composition allow the US Government (USG) to “plausibly deny” accusations that it poses a similar threat to Americans’ civil liberties as its predecessor did, plus any such future violations could be blamed on their foreign partners to deflect blame from the USG. After all, the last of its explicitly stated goals can effortlessly be exploited to target all Westerners on the pretext that they’re either exposed to “Kremlin information manipulation” or peddling it, whether knowingly or not.
From there, it’s just a proverbial hop, skip, and a jump away from weaponizing the UCG against members of the West’s conservative-nationalist opposition, whether to artificially manufacture the “legal” basis for spying on them or to smear these figures in the court of public opinion. This unstated mission takes on a greater urgency than ever for the West’s ruling liberal–globalist elite after some of their rivals’ gains during the latest European Parliamentary elections and ahead of the next US presidential one.
France’s National Rally, Germany’s AfD, and even Poland’s own “Law & Justice” (PiS) and Confederation parties could be targeted, among others. Regarding those last two, it’s suspected that returning Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s decision to hypocritically revive his predecessor’s “Russian influence commission” that he himself criticized last summer is aimed at smearing PiS before next May’s presidential election. His rivals also only narrowly lost the latest European Parliamentary elections by less than 1%.
As for Confederation, it captured more of the under-30 vote than the country’s two main parties to finish in third place despite being smeared by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last month as “friends of Putin” who “want to destroy Europe”. Taken together, PiS and Confederation’s showing proved that the Polish Right is still strong despite Tusk’s liberal-globalists winning the latest European Parliamentary elections, which is precisely why they’ll likely be targeted by the UCG.
Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski’s suggestion last month that anyone who supports traditional values, is against illegal immigration, and questions any aspect of the Ukrainian Conflict might be under Russian influence adds credence to this concern and could become the UCG’s informal standard going forward. As the reader likely intuited, this would guarantee that Trump’s Make America Great Again/America First movement is targeted too, thus resulting in civil liberty violations and election meddling.
Whatever “October surprise” Trump might unveil or could serendipitously occur to further scandalize Biden by then could be designed as an alleged example of “Kremlin information manipulation” to justify the UCG interfering in the elections on the USG’s behalf. No such platform was around in 2016 so that year’s meddling was more or less ad hoc while 2020’s was relatively more organized after “former” Intelligence Community came together to falsely describe Hunter’s laptop as “Russian disinformation”.
Having been formed almost five months ahead of November’s presidential election on foreign soil outside the purview of the US Constitution and partially comprised of foreign governments, the UCG can be wielded by the USG to meddle in the coming vote much more effectively than ever before. In practice, this platform can help the West’s ruling liberal-globalist elite gain an edge in every forthcoming election by coordinating their information warfare campaigns and illegal surveillance schemes.
The reason why it took the USG nearly two years to essentially recreate the “Disinformation Governance Board”, albeit in its new hybrid American-European and putatively Ukrainian-focused rebranded form, is due to the Democrats taking their hoped-for victory over Trump for granted until last fall. It became clear around then during the height of the Congressional deadlock over Ukraine aid that he truly has enough supporters to “beat the cheat” and give him a margin that’s “too big to rig”.
This dawning realization prompted them to create a multilateral platform for bringing together Western propagandists in order to maximize their efforts to defeat Trump and others like him. Although the outcome of the latest European Parliamentary elections went against this same elite’s political interests, that body is largely powerless and mostly symbolic, unlike their national counterparts. Accordingly, there wasn’t any need to publicly unveil the UCG until after the elections ended.
The timing averted the scenario of the conservative-nationalist opposition rallying voters around them in protest against this thinly disguised meddling platform, thus letting the elite obtain a comparatively purer gauge of public sentiment through this mainly symbolic vote instead of influencing it in that way. Now that the results are known, there’s no reason to hide what they’ve been doing all these months, which is why they chose the literal day after the European Parliamentary elections to unveil the UCG.
It can now more openly be wielded by them to interfere in domestic political processes all across the West via the described means, with the top goal being to manipulate American voters’ perceptions of Trump in order to dissuade them from voting for him so that the election is easier to rig. The UCG is therefore just a rebranded version of the “Disinformation Governance Board”, and just like its predecessor, this initiative’s true machinations are easily exposed so its success is also far from assured.
