By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information
May 27, 2025
Part I – Journalism from the Barrel of NATO’s Gun
Oleksandr Yan is not a journalist in the classical sense. He is a stenographer for empire, writing copy for Militarnyi—a Ukrainian media outfit functioning as an ideological drone base for NATO-aligned narratives. Funded through donor platforms like Patreon and PayPal, and deeply embedded in the Western military-information complex, Militarnyi is no grassroots operation. It is a cog in the imperialist media apparatus, churning out Cold War revivalism for a war-ravaged European periphery conscripted into hyper-imperialist warfare. Yan’s class position is that of a digital foot soldier—servicing a NATO-aligned state apparatus in Ukraine, whose own sovereignty has been eviscerated under IMF tutelage and Pentagon proxy management. His allegiance is to the geopolitical grammar of Western domination, and he writes from the trench lines of cognitive warfare.
In this information war, the U.S. Department of Defense, NATO command, and the United Arab Emirates are not neutral observers—they are the logistical sponsors, weapons suppliers, and regime architects propping up Libya’s ongoing dismemberment. Each of these players has either bombed, sanctioned, or armed Libya into the failed-state hellscape that now hosts foreign mercenaries, drone bases, and open-air slave markets.
The propaganda techniques in Yan’s article are textbook counterinsurgency. The framing of Russia’s support for Khalifa Haftar is constructed as a destabilizing anomaly—never mind that Haftar himself was trained by the CIA and spent decades in Langley before parachuting back into Libya with foreign backing. The author deploys a passive, bloodless tone to describe the “arrival” of Russian weapons, while conveniently ignoring the years of U.S., French, and Emirati arms flooding Haftar’s ranks. In fact, it is Western imperialism that armed all sides—fragmenting Libya into zones of chaos to prevent the reconstitution of a unified, sovereign state.
Nowhere in the article do we find a mention of NATO’s original crime: the 2011 annihilation of the Libyan state—a sovereign, non-aligned African republic that provided free healthcare, universal education, and stood at the helm of pan-African development through the African Investment Bank and gold-backed monetary alternatives to the dollar. This was the Jamahiriya—revolutionary, flawed, and sovereign. And for that reason alone, it was systematically destroyed.
Nor do we hear about the torture and lynching of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi—captured, sodomized, and executed by NATO-backed death squads while Hillary Clinton laughed on camera. Nor the ethnic cleansing of Black Africans in Libya, accused of being “mercenaries,” rounded up in cages and lynched in the streets. Nor the open-air slave markets that emerged in the wake of “liberation.” These are not footnotes—they are the center of the story.
Yet this is the psychic sleight-of-hand of imperialist media: to erase the origin of the wound while blaming the scar on whoever dares walk through the rubble.
Part II – Fragments from a Wreckage NATO Built
Stripped of its ideological scaffolding, the article does offer some hard facts: Russia has delivered significant quantities of military hardware to Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA), including BM-30 Smerch multiple launch rocket systems, Tor short-range air defense systems, BMP-2M infantry fighting vehicles, BTR-82A personnel carriers, and Pantsir-S1E air defense units. The transfer appears to have been facilitated by a steady stream of IL-76 military cargo flights through Turkish airspace to the Al Khadim Air Base in eastern Libya. That same base, according to various reports, serves as a logistics hub not only for weapons but for Wagner-linked gold trafficking from the Central African Republic. Russia is not alone—Haftar continues to enjoy robust backing from the United Arab Emirates, which previously supplied Pantsir systems and coordinates deeply with regional Western-aligned regimes.
But the article never asks: what world made this possible? The answer, buried beneath silence, is the hyper-imperialist devastation of Libya by NATO in 2011. In the name of “humanitarian intervention,” the U.S., France, and the U.K. bombed Libya into non-existence—dismantling state institutions, toppling its leadership, and replacing it with a power vacuum now filled by mercenaries, warlords, and foreign bases. The so-called “civil war” did not emerge organically; it was imposed from the sky.
Haftar is no indigenous rebel. He is a military contractor for empire, formerly stationed just miles from CIA headquarters in Virginia. He was inserted into Libya’s post-Gaddafi wasteland not to restore order, but to prevent the emergence of any unified, pan-African, and sovereign alternative to the puppet regimes now fighting over Tripoli. The rival administration—the UN-recognized Government of National Unity (GNU), backed by Turkey—is not a beacon of freedom either. It is a competing comprador regime serving the interests of global capital and regional realignment, not the Libyan people.
Meanwhile, Sub-Saharan African migrants continue to be detained, sold, and disappeared by militias who rose to power under NATO air cover. The Arab slave trade, once crushed by Libya’s revolutionary state, was resurrected in the rubble. And the African continent, stripped of its strongest advocate for continental independence, now navigates an imperial chessboard where U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), French Special Forces, and EU migration prisons patrol the ruins of sovereignty.
The author of the article frames Russian involvement as a breach of neutrality. But neutrality died the moment Western cruise missiles carved open the sky over Tripoli. There is no neutrality in a battlefield soaked in imperialist blood. There is only alignment—either with the forces of recolonization or with those struggling to reclaim a path forward.
And it is here, in the flicker of resistance amid the devastation, that a new contradiction emerges: will Libya remain a pawn in great power realignments, or will it rise again from the ashes of Jamahiriya to chart its own future, free from both imperialism and reaction?
Part III – From Reaction to Revolution: Reframing the Struggle for Libya
Let us be clear: the Russian arms shipment to Haftar is not liberation—it’s logistics. It is not revolutionary—it’s realpolitik. But to equate Moscow’s tactical maneuvering with Washington’s scorched-earth imperialism is to collapse contradiction into confusion. Russia is not an imperialist core power. It is a semi-peripheral actor operating within an international order still defined by Western supremacy, seeking influence in a terrain NATO itself defiled. That distinction matters—not because Russia is innocent, but because only the imperialist triad destroys entire nations in the name of “human rights.”
The true stakes in Libya are not about East versus West, or Haftar versus GNU. They are about sovereignty versus subjugation, independence versus fragmentation. The real battle is not between Russia and NATO—it is between the legacy of the Jamahiriya and the neo-colonial present imposed by foreign bombs and comprador generals.
Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya was not perfect, but it was sovereign, it was independent, and it was revolutionary. It abolished foreign debt, guaranteed housing and water as rights, and armed the African continent with visions of monetary independence. It was crushed because it dared to build an alternative. That is the wound we must never allow imperialist media to cauterize with euphemisms like “civil war” and “conflict.”
Today, amid the rubble, we must look not to foreign paratroopers but to the possibility of a pan-African reawakening. That possibility has a name: Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. The son of Muammar, Saif represents a living bridge between the unfinished revolution of the Jamahiriya and the future that Libyan people may yet reclaim. Despite legal attacks, assassination attempts, and a Western media blackout, he retains support across tribal and political lines. His potential leadership is not a return to monarchy—it is a return to dignity, to coherence, and to the pan-African project so violently interrupted.
This is not about saviors. It is about trajectories. The trajectory of empire is disintegration. The trajectory of Libya must be reconstruction from below—reclaiming the oil wealth for social development, unifying the people against comprador rule, and asserting anti-imperialist sovereignty on African terms. Libya’s future will not be secured through Russian-made tanks or Turkish drone bases. It will be secured when the people no longer live under foreign command—military, financial, or ideological.
We do not choose sides in this war of warlords. We choose the side of the Libyan masses, the African workers and peasants who have been disappeared from this story, and whose revolutionary will has never truly been extinguished. We choose the side of the unfinished revolution.
Part IV – The Ashes Are Fertile: Mobilizing Revolutionary Solidarity with Libya
We do not write these words for applause. We write them as partisans of the oppressed—those whose voices were silenced by NATO airstrikes, whose bodies were dumped in mass graves, whose future was shattered by technocrats in Brussels and generals in Virginia. We write this to join our voice with the revolutionary African working class and all anti-imperialist forces who refuse to forget what Libya was—and what it could be again.
We affirm without apology that the destruction of Libya was a crime against Africa, a crime against sovereignty, and a crime against humanity. We affirm the right of the Libyan people—not Haftar’s militias, not UN diplomats, not foreign mercenaries—to determine their own future. And we unite with the revolutionary aspiration of a Libya reborn from within, not imposed from without.
In this spirit, we call on comrades across the globe to move beyond commentary and into concrete revolutionary praxis:
- Expose the 2011 NATO War as a war crime. Host teach-ins, film screenings, and political education events in your communities. Center the voices of African and Libyan revolutionaries.
- Amplify the political program and possibility of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and any grassroots Libyan movements advocating for sovereignty and reparative development. Do not let Western media dictate the terms of “legitimacy.”
- Disrupt imperialist narratives online. Use digital platforms to counter the memory-holing of NATO’s crimes and the sanitization of ongoing recolonization efforts.
- Build organizational ties with African diaspora and pan-African organizations demanding reparations, resource control, and the reconstitution of continental independence.
- Pressure political formations in the imperial core to denounce AFRICOM, NATO operations, and all forms of neocolonial interference in the Global South.
Remember: Libya was not destroyed by accident. It was destroyed because it threatened the foundations of hyper-imperialist rule—the rule of the IMF, the petrodollar, the settler West. Its rebuilding will not be permitted by those who profit from its ashes. It must be fought for, reclaimed, and rebuilt by those who believe another world is possible—on African soil, in African hands, under African leadership.
And if we are to be useful at all, let us be useful here: by arming the present with the memory of the past and the vision of a liberated future. Let us remember that beneath the concrete of drone bases and detention centers, the soil of Libya is still fertile. And the people have not forgotten how to grow their own power.
All power to the Libyan people. All power to revolutionary Africa. All power to the future we still have the courage to build.
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