Loose Lips Can’t Sink This Ship: Propaganda, “Betrayal,” and the West’s Desperate War on Multipolarity

Betrayal as Manufactured Spectacle

On August 26, 2025, Ukrainian National News carried a headline that did all the heavy lifting before a reader even reached the body: Iran accused Russia of “leaking” secrets to Israel, proof that the Moscow–Tehran partnership is fragile and illusory. The report leaned on the words of Seyyed Mohammad Sadr, who claimed Russia slipped Israel coordinates of Iranian air defenses during the June war. That’s it. No evidence, no investigation, just an accusation inflated into revelation. The reader is told what to think: betrayal, collapse, humiliation.

The voice they chose is telling. Sadr comes from Iran’s professional elite, the class of men who built careers in ministries and councils by currying favor with the West and keeping the door open to corporate power. These are the servants of Washington and Brussels inside Tehran, reliable as long as the checks clear. The outlet amplifying him, UNN, isn’t some neutral wire service—it is Kyiv’s megaphone, a business of propaganda disguised as news, paid to make NATO’s stories sound like reporting.

And of course, the chorus follows. Ukrainian intelligence stamps the rumor as “analysis.” Israeli media repeats it, NATO press offices hum in the background, and soon the echo becomes the proof. Each part of the machine knows its role: spies provide the gossip, journalists launder it, and the Western bloc spins it until suspicion hardens into fact.

The tricks are old, but worth naming. The headline performs the first fraud: an accusation presented as truth by sheer assertion. The language of “serious blows” and “fragility” is theater, designed to sting like humiliation, not inform like news. The reference to “historical distrust” resurrects the tired Orientalist fantasy that the East is too irrational to hold a strategy together. Ukrainian intelligence is paraded as a voice of objectivity when it is nothing more than the laundromat for gossip—classic cognitive warfare. And the claim that strong economic ties don’t mean political loyalty? That’s the sleight of hand of every swindler: pretend alliances must be romantic marriages, and if they are not, then they are frauds. The loudest trick of all is silence: nowhere are we told of the larger forces shaping the battlefield, nowhere is context given. In propaganda, the lie is often not what’s spoken but what’s cut away.

What remains once the smoke clears is not journalism but stagecraft, a cheap set built to look like a revelation. The goal is to sow doubt, corrode trust, fracture cooperation where bombs and blockades have failed. UNN sells this story like a hustler moving counterfeit bills—flash it fast, push it hard, and hope nobody stops to check the watermark. The only thing collapsing here is the credibility of a press corps that long ago traded truth for a seat in the empire’s chorus line.

Facts in Shadow, Context in Silence

Let’s begin with the facts: On August 26, 2025, Ukrainian National News ran a piece claiming that Seyyed Mohammad Sadr, a member of Iran’s Expediency Council, accused Russia of handing over the coordinates of Iranian air-defense systems to Israel during the June war. Ukrainian intelligence was offered as the guarantor of truth, and the headline was presented as confirmation that the Moscow–Tehran alliance is an “illusion.” The article restated war details already carried by major outlets: Israeli strikes on Iran beginning June 13, Iranian missile retaliation from June 16–19, a hospital hit in Israel, and finally, on June 22–23, U.S. entry into the campaign with direct strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. This is the skeleton of fact on which the betrayal narrative was hung.

What was missing? First, Sadr’s political location. He is no neutral technocrat but a long-time face of Iran’s reformist current—the camp advocating rapprochement with the West. His remarks ignited backlash inside Iran, with state-linked outlets labeling them divisive and officials clarifying they were personal views, not government policy. Yet UNN elevated them as state revelation. Within hours, the claim was recycled across regional propaganda outlets like Asharq Al-Awsat and Israeli media, illustrating the rapid laundering of factional rhetoric into “geopolitical fact.”

Second, the story ignored the U.S.–Israeli strike capacity that requires no Russian “leak” to explain precision. The United States itself, as noted, bombed Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, proof of direct kinetic involvement. Israel’s intelligence reach into Iran is well documented, from the 2018 nuclear archive heist in Tehran to repeated cyber operations. Analysts tracking June’s strikes noted their consistency with this longstanding penetration. To erase these capabilities is to construct a betrayal where none is needed.

Third, the context of internal subversion. In late August, Al Jazeera reported that Iran arrested eight people accused of transmitting sensitive data to Mossad, part of thousands detained during wartime sweeps—an unmistakable sign that leaks from within Iran are far more plausible explanations for precision targeting than the fantasy of a Russian sell-out. And let’s not forget who’s openly admitting infiltration—not Moscow, but Israel and its Western allies. In June, The Times of Israel itself reported that “guided by spies and artificial intelligence,” Israel orchestrated a nighttime fusillade using armed drones smuggled deep into Iran, invisibly disabling air defenses and missile systems ahead of its blitz on nuclear and military sites. This admission isn’t sneaked into the shadows—it’s bold, broadcast, and framed as proof of technical mastery. Precision was not a gift from Moscow, but the result of Mossad and the CIA cultivating internal collaborators and opposition networks willing to turn against their own nation in service of imperial designs. That is the real betrayal.

Fourth, Russia’s actual posture. Moscow condemned Israeli strikes on June 13 and repeated calls for diplomacy after the U.S. joined, while avoiding concrete military backing. Analysts at institutions like Gulf International Forum and Carnegie Politika underline that Russia’s stance was calibrated to balance support for Tehran with preservation of other equities. To call this “betrayal” is to collapse nuance into caricature.

Finally, the material foundation of Iran–Russia ties contradicts the “illusory alliance” framing. In 2024, bilateral trade hit $4.8 billion, up 16% from the year prior, with further growth in 2025. Their banking systems were linked through SEPAM–SPFS integration and later MIR–Shetab card networks. On May 15, 2025, the EAEU–Iran free trade agreement entered into force. Defense and industrial ties, including UAV co-production and a January 2025 strategic pact, deepen interdependence even amid delivery frictions. These are not illusions; they are structural links forged under sanctions siege.

The wider realignments are just as important. Iran formally joined BRICS in January 2024, and its 25-year cooperation pact with China, signed in 2021, remains a framework for future energy and infrastructure integration. Meanwhile, the West itself has frozen $280–300 billion in Russian sovereign assets, a reminder of the coercive leverage shaping Moscow’s careful diplomacy. Omitted in the betrayal story, these facts make the picture legible: multipolar realignment is not an illusion but a fragile, contested reality born under fire.

The contradiction is clear. Israel and the United States have the strike capacity to hit Iran without Russian help. Russia and Iran have expanding trade, banking, and defense ties that cannot be wished away as “smoke and mirrors.” Inside Iran, arrests show domestic compromise as a source of vulnerability. And Sadr’s reformist remark, amplified abroad, was not the policy of the state. The imperialist media apparatus took a factional soundbite, stripped it of context, and sold it as geopolitical collapse. That is not journalism; it is psychological warfare dressed in the costume of news. And like all imperial narratives, it tells us less about Iran or Russia than about the desperation of a system in decline.

From Crisis of Empire to Cognitive Warfare

Once we situate the UNN story inside the wider terrain, it reveals not a collapsing alliance but the desperate maneuvers of a collapsing empire. The West is locked in a deepening crisis of imperialism: economic stagnation, political fracture, and military overstretch have shattered the illusion of unipolar permanence. To hold the line, U.S. imperialism has recalibrated, adopting the full toolkit of hyper-imperialism: the sanctions architecture that strangles entire economies, financial piracy that plunders sovereign assets, infiltration and sabotage, carrot-and-stick diplomacy, limited warfare through Israeli and U.S. bombings, and, crucially, psychological operations. The betrayal story is one such operation, a strike not with missiles but with narrative.

This is cognitive warfare: a campaign to sow mistrust, corrode alliances, and fracture fragile solidarities. Cast as a revelation of Russian treachery, it functions as counterinsurgency against multipolarity itself. Its aims are threefold. First, to manufacture doubt and hostility inside Iran, making ordinary Iranians question the wisdom of deepening ties with Moscow. Second, to discredit Russia in the eyes of the Global South, especially among nations weighing a turn toward multipolar cooperation. Third, to fracture the emerging blocs—BRICS+, the SCO, regional free-trade pacts—by portraying them as mirages destined to collapse. What masquerades as journalism is in fact a weapon, honed for psychological effect.

Seen from the standpoint of the global proletariat, the betrayal here is not Moscow against Tehran. It is the betrayal of nations whose sovereignty is stripped through blockades and seizures, whose wealth is stolen through the sanctions regime and financial raids, whose futures are targeted by psyops and limited wars, and whose hopes for dignity are mocked as illusion. The UNN article is best understood as counterinsurgency on the ideological front, aimed at strangling anti-imperialist sovereignty before it matures. Empire cannot bomb multipolarity out of existence, so it tries to break it in the mind. That is the real betrayal, and it is global.

Turning Propaganda into Struggle

If the empire fights with psyops, sanctions, and limited wars, our answer cannot be commentary alone. It has to be organization. And the good news is that in the heart of empire, the fight is already underway. Groups like CODEPINK and the Sanctions Kill Coalition are mobilizing directly against the economic war on Iran, Russia, and every nation that dares to step outside Washington’s orbit. Policy outfits like Win Without War, Just Foreign Policy, and the National Iranian American Council push inside the halls of Congress for diplomacy, not bombs. On the ground, the ANSWER Coalition and UNAC keep the streets alive with mobilizations against NATO’s wars and Israel’s bombings.

Workers are stepping up, too. The Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC) and the #BlockTheBoat campaign have shown how community pickets and dockworkers can choke the arteries of empire by refusing to move Israeli and U.S. war cargo. Labor networks like Labor for Palestine and rank-and-file caucuses inside major unions are pushing the movement further, demanding that arms profiteers and complicit banks be cut off. Internationally, dockworkers in Italy and South Africa set the bar in 2024 by refusing to load or unload weapons bound for Zionist wars. This is proletarian internationalism in motion, directly disrupting the war machine’s supply chains.

These campaigns are defended by legal networks like the National Lawyers Guild and Defending Rights & Dissent, and amplified by grassroots media like BreakThrough News, Peoples Dispatch, and the Grayzone. Together, they form the embryo of dual and contending power inside the imperial core: counter-institutions that expose psyops, defend the right to resist, and keep the truth of multipolar solidarity alive.

The UNN article tried to paint multipolarity as illusion. Our task is to prove in practice that multipolarity is reality—not only in Moscow or Tehran, but in the ports of Oakland, in the classrooms of New York, in the streets of London and Berlin, and in the digital commons where workers and colonized peoples build their own channels of truth. Empire’s psyops aim to fracture; our solidarity can fuse. Empire betrays sovereignty; we defend it. Empire recalibrates through hyper-imperialism; we recalibrate through struggle. That is the horizon in front of us: to turn propaganda into practice, and solidarity into power.