On February 24 of this year, in London a part of the Bayswater Road near the Embassy of the Russian Federation was renamed to be called Kyiv Road. About this decision informed the leader of the Council of the Westminster borough in London Adam Hug. Moreover, he pointed out that the Council had done it at the request of representatives of the Ukrainian community of Westminster. Taking into consideration that this is one of the most prestigious districts of London that makes the top three, along with Chelsey and Kensington, with regard to real-estate prices, so, in such a case, it would be extremely interesting to know the name list of Westminster’s Ukrainian community, and this, I think, would be of interest not only to us, but to the Ukrainians as well.
Having studied attentively what Adam Hug is dealing with, it is possible to understand why this petty infamous idea to “Ukrainize’ part of the street in front of the Russian Embassy came to the head of this particular small municipal activist. It turned out that the president of the Westminster Council is carrying out an active globalist activity. For instance, in accordance with the data of the British company registry, he is one of the acting directors of the analytical ‘The Foreign Policy Center’. This center is well-known for a long time for its systematic subversive activity directed against Russia.
CORRUPTION RULES OF THE WORD ORDER
The organization where Adam Hug has been working for many years, was created in 1998 under the auspices of the British prime-minister Tony Blair literary a year after Mr. Blair had moved into his residency on Downing Street 10. This British prime-minister was known for his globalist views which found their reflection in the initial wording of aims and objectives of this center placed on the main page of its website. Current leaders of ‘The Foreign Policy Center’ have ashamedly hidden this colonialist manifesto, but the Internet, as it is known, remembers everything, and in different data bases the initial information have been preserved.
In 1998, members of Tony Blair’s stuff, without any hesitation or embracement, declared that the purpose of this center was ‘To promote the vision of just order based on rules’. We would like to stress that this order is based not on international law, on cooperation within the United Nations, but on some rules that nobody has seen, and to which always appeal leaders of Western countries who want to justify any actions with regard to independent states.
Hardly had the newly created visions center managed to gain its full strength, conflicts of interests started to rattle it, and, to put it simpler, facts started to emerge of lobbying commercial interests for money.
On June 30, 2002, in the popular media outlet ‘The Guardian’ an article publishes an article entitled ‘Labour face ‘cash for access’ claims over think-tanks. The reporter Antony Barnett said that some journalists introducing themselves as representatives of an American company had made a proposal to pay for access services of members of the British cabinet and had received a consent. I.e. ministers agreed to take money for the right of exclusive access to their official bodies.
In particular, the employee of ‘The Foreign Policy Center’ Rachel Briggs said to journalists that her analytical center had ‘very close links with the Foreign Office, Cabinet Office and Home Office’. And another stuffer of the same think-tank told that in case of support of their project amounting to 10 thousand pounds he would guarantee to a sponsor a place near a minister at a ‘Meet the Minister’ event’.
In 2005 took place another scandal connected with murky financial schemes. On January 31, 2005, in the magazine ‘New Statesman’ an article is published of the British journalist Rob Blackhurst under the title ‘The sad decline of the policy wonks’. In this piece, among other aspects of degradation of Britain’s political sphere, the author, who had worked as editorial director in ‘The Foreign Policy Center’ from 2002 to 2005, mentions the following fact: ‘My former employer, the Foreign Policy Center (patron: Tony Bair) has accepted more than 100 000 pounds from an unnamed Russian oligarch to establish a programme on Russian democracy. The money doesn’t come directly; it is channeled through London PR companies presided over by a retinue of former new Labour special advisers. The PR people want to shift public sympathy away from Vladimir Putin who is at odds with several oligarchs’.
Let us see who else, apart from this lover to rename London streets Adam Hug and his patron Tony Blair have dug themselves in this analytical center.
GRANDMOTHER OF BRITISH INTELLIGENCE
In the old days, a more weighty member of the consultative board was Margaret Mildred ‘Meta’ Ramsay, Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale. She is a legend of the British secret services, and she personally took part in organizing the escape of one of the most well-known traitors in the Soviet Union – Oleg Gordiyevsky, a KGB officer, recruited by the MI-6, who betrayed a great number of his colleagues. The baroness is known also as she was the first in history candidate for the head of the British Intelligence, and only gender stereotypes of that time didn’t allow her to take up the position.
Meta Ramsay didn’t become the head of the Secret Service, but, in return, she had been its curator in Parliament for a very long time. Simultaneously with the assignment as a member of the consultative board of ‘The Foreign Policy Center’ she was appointed representative of the Committee on security and intelligence of the British Parliament as a person overseeing activities of British special services MI-5 and MI-6, as well of the governmental communication center GCHQ. About these and other varieties of her fortune Meta Ramsay told the British journalist Brian Beacom in an interview published on September 13, 2013, in the newspaper ‘The Herald’.
The time doesn’t have mercy upon anybody, and baroness Ramsay, due to her age, withdraws from business, but hands over her curator’s place from Secret Services in ‘The Foreign Policy Center’ to Craig Oliphant about whom we will tell later.
AN EXPERIENCED RUSSOPHOBE
On the website of ‘The Foreign Policy Center’, in the section ‘Team’ Craig Oliphant is mentioned as a senior adviser under whose support works the whole structure of the think-tank, including both scientific workers and political councils of the organization.
The biography of Craig Oliphant presented on the website of ‘The Foreign Policy Center’ is rather sparse, but, nevertheless, all his career steps are rather interesting and characteristic, so we would like to highlight the most significant of them: 90s of the XX century – employee of the NATO, then in the line of duty of the British diplomatic service in the department dealing with Russia and Eastern Europe, and simultaneously he held various offices in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and Council of Europe. It seems to be a rather decent career of a European diplomat and officer. But the essence is, as always, in details! Let’s see what exactly Craig Oliphant has been dealing with in the last ten years.
On September 1, 2014, in the well-known mouthpiece of the Anti-Russian propaganda, in the magazine ‘The Atlantic’ an article was published under the title ‘A Ukraine Peace Plan that Excludes Ukrainians is Unacceptable’. The article criticizes in the sharpest way the meeting of Russian and American experts that took place in Finland with its purpose being an effort to work out a peaceful plan to resolve the Donbass conflict in Ukraine and to stop ongoing hostilities. Craig Oliphant and his associates (among them: former US ambassador in Russia Michael McFaul, former US ambassador in Ukraine John Herbst, former US ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker and other not less notorious persons) as a way to resolve the problem of the ongoing conflict in Donbass, apart from sweeping critique of aggression directed against Russia, started to propose to refuse of a non-bloc status of Ukraine on a pretext of impinging its sovereignty.
Forth, the initiative calls for permanent guaranties of Ukraine’s ‘non-bloc status’. Such constrains on Ukraine’s security relationships – including those established under NATO’s Partnership for Peace and the 1997 NATO-Ukraine Distinctive Partnership – are a serious infringement of national sovereignty. They would also give the impression of rewarding the Putin regime for its outrageous actions, and this, too, is wholly unacceptable’.
But even these declarations seemed to be insufficient for the authors of the article in ‘The Atlantic’ magazine, and they passed on to expressing ultimatums at the address of Russia:
«Until Russia does so, the West must ratchet up serious sanctions against the Putin regime and immediately provide Ukraine with the full support, including military equipment and intelligence cooperation, it needs and has requested to defend itself»
We would like to remind that these declarations about providing Ukraine with military equipment and intelligence began not after the start of the Russian special operation in Ukraine, but as early as in 2014. All threats to pump Ukraine with weapons the West started to implement long before February 2022.
And in 2018, a hacker group Anonymous uploaded information about the program of the British government called ‘Integrity Initiative’ which had clear anti-Russian purposes. Apart from that, data on leaders and curators of different ‘clusters’ of this program also ended up on the Web. One of the curators of this program was, naturally, Craig Oliphant.
It’s worth pointing out that Craig Oliphant is present in this list in the company of people who have also come in sight of investigators of the website Prigovor.ru. They are James Nixey and James Sherr, employees of another British think-tank ‘Chatham House’** the activity of which has already been acknowledged as undesirable on the territory of Russia. These two analysts are authors of a report according to which Russia itself is guilty of blowing up the pipeline “North Stream’. We wrote about it in the article entitled 'Mikhail Khodorkovsky has financed the drivel of British analysts’ that “Nord Streams” pipelines were blown up by Russians themselves’.
By the way, the connection of Mikhail Khodorkovsky* with ‘Chatham House’ is not a one-off story, but a rather stable one, and about financing from the part of this fugitive oligarch of his British think-tank we wrote in the piece ‘Khodorkovsky has financed the proposal to ‘increase the U.S. military help to Ukraine up to 1 billion dollars a year’.
It’s like this, unhurriedly, but consistently, we have come up to the facts of close cooperation with and financing of ‘The Foreign Policy Center’ by structure belonging to Mikhail Khodorkovsky. *
THE RUN TOGETHER IN AN ANTI-RUSSIAN ECSTASY
Though seldom, but still possible is a situation when truth lies on the surface. If we look at the section ‘Support’ of the website belonging to ‘The Foreign Policy Center’ we will see that the first troika of sponsors is like this:
On the first place George Soros Foundation ‘Open Society’** (its activities are banned on the territory of the Russian Federation).
Then comes Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s foundation ‘Justice for Journalists – JFJ’, a structure of the fugitive oligarch that he tried in every possible way to hide by creating legal twins in order to change the legal entity and keep the name. We wrote about these schemes of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the article ‘Khodorkovsky has washed clean his ‘Justice for Journalist’ foundation of old sins’.
And the third sponsor is the American foundation ‘National Endowment for Democracy – NED’ the activities of which are also banned on the territory of Russia
Two of these three foundations have been noticed by their bright anti-Russian activities, and their functioning was acknowledged as undesirable on the territory of the Russian Federation, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Foundation carrying out its own Russophobe activities from London, deserves the same mark.
By the way, Khodorkovsky is not simply financing the think-tank which is directly supervised by representatives of the British secret services. He gradually is inserting to ‘The Foreign Policy Center’ employees of his own foundation ‘Justice for Journalists’. In the section ‘Scientific employees’ on the website of ‘The Foreign Policy Center’, we see, among others, Lana Estimirova, and in the section ‘Consultative board’, near the senior adviser and our hero Craig Oliphant, Maria Ordzhonikidze, one of the trustees of the same Khodorkovsky’s foundation ‘Justice for Journalists’.
It’s like this that the little dirty trick announced by the president of the Westminster Council Adam Hug, has led to the understanding of the whole picture of those who are behind the decision to rename the old London street Bayswater Road into Kyiv Road in order to play a nasty trick on the Russian Embassy.
Now it is evident that it was not an emotional decision of Westminster municipal deputies, but a systematic work, a small element of the global strategy for realization of London’s anti-Russian politics.
Author: Alexander Zhelnin
See the Russia version at: «Настоящая история переименования улицы Bayswater road в Лондоне в Kyiv road»
* Mikhail Khodorkovsky – 20.05.2022 was included in the registry of foreign agents with number 289;
** Chatham House – 13.04.2023 was included in the list of foreign and international organizations activities of which were acknowledged as undesirable on the territory of the Russian Federation;
** NED (National Endowment for Democracy) – 29.07.2015 was included in the List of foreign and international organization activities of which were acknowledged as undesirable on the territory of the Russian Federation with No1 by the ruling of the Russian Justice Ministry No 1076-r;
** ‘Open Society’ Foundation – 01.12.2015 was included in the List of foreign and international nongovernmental organizations activities of which was acknowledged as undesirable of the territory of the Russian Federation with No1 by the Ruling of the Justice Ministry of the Russian Federation No 1778-r.
