Alina Lipp has reported from Ukraine since at least 2019
May 27, 2025
The European Union has banned its own citizens from entering Europe, because of their reporting on Ukraine and Gaza.
Journalists Thomas Röper and Alina Lipp were sanctioned on May 20 by the EU, including the freezing of bank accounts.
Others sanctioned include media company AFA Medya and its founder Hüseyin Doğru, a Turkish national who lives in Germany.
Their crime: challenging the official narrative through critical reporting.
It accuses them of “undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine” by "spreading pro-Russian propaganda.” Their reporting thus “destabilises” EU countries.
Their rights of citizenship and property have been sanctioned, not after a trial or even a ruling by a lone magistrate, but by bureaucratic diktat.
Being the EU, the decision is binding on all member states.
As Thomas Fazi points out in a post on X, the EU disregards the separation of powers and the concept of no sanction without the law. It resorts to extra-judicial punishment and uses measures created to target foreign entities against its citizens.
Moreover, coming from a supra-national, intergovernmental institution, it means that individuals persecuted in one European country cannot find political refuge in another.
In its ruling the Council of the European Union announced on May 20:
"Those designated today will be subject to an asset freeze and EU citizens and companies will be forbidden from making funds available to them. In addition, natural persons will also be subject to a travel ban, which will prevent them from entering or transiting through EU territories." [1]
You may not agree with these reporters, your sympathies may lie with a particular country or people, you may regard them as propagandists, but this undemocratic overreach could be turned upon any person or cause, including yours.
Increasingly the EU is acting as censor to the world, threatening Elon Musk and X or allegedly failing to comply with its Digital Services Act (DSA). This allows the intelligence agencies in the U.S. to skirt the First Amendment. [2]
Great reset
A reset is underway with multiple strands: monetary, trade, military, demographic. We may choose to look at these strands in isolation, like one bristle on a brush, at the risk of a poke in the eye, before we are swept away.
Or we may confront the uncomfortable truth that we are being lied to. We might call it a false history in real time, by which a relatively tiny number of rich and powerful keep the rest of the people in the dark, to stop us from uniting or rebelling.
The key to this is nothing so kooky as mind control, which is said to work best on those susceptible to manipulation. Mainly we do it to ourselves through group think and by giving in to fear.
In this article we'll look at confected crises and narrative management.
• • •
In connection with Gaza and Ukraine we have seen the detention of journalists under terrorism laws (Richard Medhurst, Sarah Wilkinson) and on occasion people taken off planes and their passport seized (Scott Ritter) but that at least was the intervention of law enforcement.
What we witness is worse than martial law or the suspension of habeas corpus because those are usually voted by the legislature and are temporary. What we are seeing is the seizure of power by unelected bureaucrats and not only because of war in Ukraine. They did the same during Covid.
Powers were seized, on the pretext of safety during a pandemic, that can apply when any emergency is declared: climate, animal health, food, mass migration, crime, organised crime by government in public partnership, and war...
This is the militarisation of society.
We now know that the Covid response was coordinated through military intelligence and alliances like NATO and the EU.
People who ask questions were treated as a threat to state security. In the U.S., the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, last week declassified a December 13, 2021, memo which declared that criticism of COVID-19 mandates was a doctrine likely to be embraced by violent extremists.
The legislatures, already captured (by pharma and the military industrial complex) were effectively suspended. In subsequent elections politicians brave enough to speak out against these interest groups soon lost their seats.
Policy is being dictated to governments by an unrepresentative and unseen power.
Pandemic treaty
The World Health Organization last week adopted a “pandemic agreement” that is supposed to help it fight future pandemics. This is the long awaited pandemic treaty.
The WHO gained similar powers in April 2024 when it amended the International Health Regulations.
Emergency is not defined and can be declared at the whim of the WHO director general Tedros Ghebreyesus. While the agreement acknowledges nation states, we have seen how they responded during Covid in lock step.
WHO public health emergencies are much the same as declarations of war, including propaganda, censorship and detention.
Behind the WHO and the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are "philanthropies" or foundations in which oligarchs such as Bill Gates shield their corporate wealth, while working with governments on policies that enrich those same corporations.
Made men like Bill Gates are fronts for greater power and wealth, as was J.P. Morgan a century ago. The U.S. intelligence agences emerged out of Wall Street’s lawyers and bankers, the servitors of big money. In turn they were offshoots of European intelligence agencies answering to more ancient interests.
We got an insight into the scale of this network when it was revealed last week that the Department of Energy handed out $93 billion to various entities — with no oversight or accountability — during the 76-day transition of power between the 2024 election and President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
That's twice what the DoE had spent in the previous 15 years, Senate appropriations committee hearing revealed. [3]
The question is who is directing this. Maybe such pools of dark money are a clue.
Military intelligence
The British government had stated on March 19, 2020 that Covid was not a high-consequence infectious disease and that people would gain natural immunity. So why did it do a 180 degree switch just days later and introduce the Coronavirus Act on March 25? This included powers to ban or restrict the freedoms of movement, assembly, and to detain people suspected of Covid infection.
That change coincided with the handing of the Covid response to the UK's Joint Biosecurity Centre and the National Security Council in the U.S.
It was these bodies, in charge of state security, which ordered the social distancing, lock down and quarantine.
In Britain, for example, track and trace during Covid was handed to the military intelligence services and the newly-created Joint Biosecurity Centre. It worked with MI5 and SIS (MI6) under a chief who came from cyber resilience, signals intelligence and security agency GCHQ.
The Joint Biosecurity Centre assessed the threat level in a system modelled on the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre's "traffic light" system.
In London the adviser to prime minister Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings testified to parliament that "a network of Bill Gates-type people" advised him to abandon the traditional approach to disease of treating just the sick.
Instead they used emergency powers and the police to lock everyone down until a vaccine was available.
A chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) emergency allows the use of countermeasures without the usual regulations and oversight because the immediate threat is much greater than any potential risks caused by the countermeasures.
This was repurposed by Bill Gates and network who told Cummings that "the actual expected return on this is so high that even if it does turn out to be all wasted billions, it is still a good gamble in the end."
Likewise they borrowed the immunity from CBRN — in the event of an attack, the risk is so great, that no-one should face legal consequences for their actions.
We know now that there was no Operation Warp Speed to find a cure. The mRNA "safe and effective" had been prepared in advance.
What the lockdown did was to impoverish millions, accelerate the destruction of small business and the middle class and transfer wealth upwards to the few, in preparation for a monetary reset.
In the U.S. and Britain, and across the Five Eyes and every country examined by Sasha Latypova and Debbie Lerman, the organisers of the Covid response were not the public health agencies presented to the public, not even Dr Anthony Fauci, but rather the military industrial complex.
It was never about public health. As we'll see, the pandemic response was always coordinated at the level of military intelligence. [4]
Lest you think this is history, the declaration of a Covid emergency under the PREP Act (Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act) has not been rescinded, even though governments have said the pandemic is over.
Passed in 2005 under president George W Bush, it gives entities and officials immunity for countermeasures.
"The act specifically affords to drug makers immunity from actions related to the manufacture, testing, development, distribution, administration and use of medical countermeasures against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) agents of terrorism, epidemics, and pandemics," per Wikipedia.
It stands ready for the next scare.
The same applies to the Five Eyes countries. Most countries have extended Covid pandemic declarations to 2029; some to 2032.
Hyper militarisation
The UK Border Force is under military control, with the creation of a new post "clandestine Channel threat commander."
It is a sign of the “hyper-militarisation” in policing, according to a report by the Institute of Race Relations.
Meanwhile former prime minister Tony Blair is promoting bio-digital ID as the cure for unregulated mass migration. Blair is a documented functinary of the Rothschild family, as is president Emmanuel Macron of France from which the migrants launch their boats. [5]
Liz Fekete, the director of the IRR and the report’s author, said: “What they have begun at the border does not end at the border.
Plastic bullets, for example, have been cleared for use at Notting Hill carnival since 2017 and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
Narrative manipulation
As with Covid, so with Gaza. The politicians, journalists and influencers who supported the bombing and cut off food are now calling for "restraint.
Feigned ignorance takes the form of waking up fashionably late to issues that were staring us in the face from the start.
If they truly recognised democide — after five years in the one case, a year-and-a-half in the other — they would call it so. They do not.
U.S. and British governments continue to arm Israel. The establishment newspapers are changing the dynamic of the conversation.
The Trump administration made an embarrassing fuss about "white genocide" in South Africa, like a politician plastering his posters over those of a rival.
The plight of many Afrikaners is real but it does not come close to the definition of genocide. The plight of Palestinians in Gaza does, according to the World Court - a ruling which was handed down at the initiative of South Africa.
Israel's army fired on a delegation of diplomats visiting Jenin in the West Bank - warning shots, they called it.
Within 12 hours two Israeli diplomats were shot and killed in Washington. The search engines swapped one group of diplomats for another; one perpetrator for another.
The narrative is being managed in real time, but we should be concerned about more than manipulation or information warfare.
In my former trade of journalism editors and producers are kept on a hamster wheel that keeps them arguably less informed than much of the audience. Those given a platform must stick to the establishment or intelligence agency narrative.
So it is left to independent journalists like Thomas Röper and Alina Lipp to give us a perspective that the security state does not want us to know.
