Terrorism, kidnappings, assassinations and ethnic cleansing are everyday events in post-coup Ukraine
The bleak state of post-coup Ukraine offers little but war,
terrorism, lawlessness and extreme poverty.
by
ADAM GARRIE
September
1, 2017, 20:06
The colossal chaos, economic depression, and everyday
violence that is now part of daily life in Ukraine have defied the expectations
of even some of the most hardened critics of the regime which came to power
during the Kiev coup of February 2014.
Journalists killed and kidnapped:
Two days ago, the Russian journalist Anna Kurbatova who
works for Russia’s prestigious Channel One was kidnapped in the streets of Kiev
by assailants later exposed as working for the Kiev regime’s security service,
the SBU.
She was detained without being allowed to contact anyone
before being deported to the Russian border.
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has
described the egregious incident in the following way,
“We were shocked by the Kiev regime’s actions against Russian
journalists. Qualifying this as something other than a new abduction of a
Russian journalist would be difficult.
Individuals come up and do not introduce themselves. They
take away a phone and documents and do not allow a phone call either to a
foreign mission or relatives or even an employer,” the spokeswoman explained.
Then, the reporter disappears from the information field for
several hours and it is only under huge pressure from the public, journalists,
representatives of Russian state executive bodies that scanty information is
provided that the correspondent was detained by agents of Ukrainian security
services.
We were shocked that we did not hear from any of high-placed
representatives of foreign countries any qualification of such actions by
Kiev”.
Far from being an isolated incident, both local and
international journalists face a deluge of persecution by the Kiev regime. In
some cases, journalists have been assassinated for voicing opinions which contradict
the regime’s narrative.
On the same day that Anna Kurbatova was kidnapped, a
civilian camera crew from Russia-24 were shot at with live rounds by forces loyal to the regime
as they covered the war in Donbass.
In 2015, the local writer and journalist Oles Buzina was assassinated by unknown
individuals. Buzina was targeted as an ‘enemy’ of the regime by the
ISIS-style website Mirotvorets which names and publishes the personal
details of figures deemed non-compliant with the regime and encourages acts of
violence upon them.
In 2014, shortly after the coup, British journalist Graham
Phillips was abducted by
the Ukrainian SBU while covering the Kiev regime’s war on Donbass. After being
held in dangerous conditions he had his possessions stolen and was thrown out
of the country. A fellow journalist who was abducted at the same time as
Phillips, a man called Vadim Aksyonov was savagely beaten by forces loyal
to the Kiev regime.
Political assassinations:
In 2015 Oleg Kalashnikov, a former deputy of the Part of Regions,
the faction which held a legislative majority in the country prior to the coup,
was brutally assassinated. His death is linked with death threats emanating
from the Mirotvorets website.
Other terrorist associations included state-sponsored
killings of Donbass field commanders Motorola and Givi. Motorola was killed in
a bomb planted in his apartment building while Givi was the target of a bomb
blast in his office.
More recently, Ukrainian political assassinations have not
been exclusively limited to regime opponents. In June of 2017, a car bomb
killed Colonel Maksim Shapoval of the regime’s Defence Ministry while in
March Denis Voronenkov, a former Communist Deputy from Russia’s State Duma
was killed in the streets of Kiev.
Ethnic cleansing:
The regime’s war on Donbass is a clear attempt to ethnically
cleanse former regions of Ukraine of a population which has held
democratic votes to codify the self-determination of the peoples of the Donetsk
and Lugansk People’s Republics.
The regime’s economic blockade and frequent sabotage of
infrastructure in Donbass as well as calls for “total war” coming from
prominent politicians in Kiev, makes it clear that Kiev has no intention to
adhere to the protocols of the Minsk II ceasefire agreements which have never
been implemented.
However, the ethnic cleansing and political
disenfranchisement in post-coup Ukraine are not limited to the People’s
Republics in Donbass.
On the 2nd of May, 2014, an armed mod of neo-Nazi regimes
supporters burnt alive, shot and beat to death nearly 50 people and injured
over 200.
Throughout the winter and into the spring of 2014, the
protests in historic Novorossiya were generally peaceful but often turned
violent as fascist thugs from western Ukrainian often visited the protests in
order to beat and kill the protesters.
In May of 2014, in the days prior to the 9th of May Victory
Day celebrations over Hitler’s fascist forces, things started to become tense.
Knowing that the ethnic and cultural Russians of the region
would be honouring their fathers and grandfathers on the 9th of May, the
fascist/ultra-nationalist presence in the region grew.
Many people were severely beaten simply because they were
wearing the Ribbon of St. George, the symbol of Victory Day that had been
adopted by anti-fascist protesters to show solidarity against extremism.
May the 2nd: The Massacre
The 2nd of May, 2014, began as a day like any other. Although
many had seen that in previous days, fascist thugs from the neo-Nazi group
Right Sector, the neo-fascist party Svoboda as well as far-right football
hooligans from outside the region had descended on Odessa. They continued to
pour in on the morning of the 2nd.
By the afternoon, the fascist gangs started violently
attacking the anti-fascist protesters. As the anti-fascists come under
increasingly violent attacks, the peaceful protesters ran into the Trade
Unions House, eventually barricading themselves inside for protection.
As the afternoon wore on, fascists were seen firing shots
into the building and then they began to set the building on fire using a
combination of Molotov cocktail and flaming debris.
As the fire raged, the fascists surrounded the front and back
of the building, prohibiting escape. Many of the protesters, some in their
mid-teens died of asphyxiation. Others jumped to their deaths.
Some who jumped and survived the initial fall were beaten to
death. Others were tortured to the brink of death.
The authorities did nothing.
The events were videoed and I can personally remember
watching as the attack unfolded. It was a barbaric brutality that one had
naively hoped had no place in the 21st century. This after all was the age of
Facebook, not the age of Hitler. But for those who committed the massacre, it
was clearly the age of both.
Aftermath:
Russia immediately condemned the massacre. Russia was joined
by Belarus, Armenia and EU member Bulgaria.
The west remained largely indifferent while the western mainstream media did their best to whitewash the massacre.
There was and still is a kind of unspoken racism that was
inherent in the west’s coverage of The Odessa Massacre. Had the events happened
in the Arab world and under an ISIS flag, things would have doubtlessly got
more coverage.
But because the victims were ethnic and cultural Russians,
things were interpreted through the prism of two paradoxical but equally
potent forms of racism.
On the one hand, European and English-speaking audiences have
been racially conditioned to believe that savage atrocities only happen in the
Middle East, Africa or Asia. This is of course unfair and insulting to the vast
majority of peace loving people in the aforementioned places.
At the same time, Russians, a distinct ethnic group in spite
of their generally white skin, can still be described in racially inflammatory
ways by the west. This does not generally happen to black Africans, white Jews,
African-Americans or Latin Americans in the western mainstream media. The only
other group subject to the same slander as Russians are Serbs, a people who are
an historical ally to Russia”.
In the nearby Black Sea city of Maripoul violence against mainly Russian
speaking/culturally Russian opponents of the regime. According to left-wing
Ukrainian politician Pyotr Simonenko,
“In Maripoul there was a slaughter of civilians, a mass
murder. The number of those killed, first of all among peaceful civilians, is
being concealed. A peaceful demonstration was shot at on May 9 and it was a
show murder carried out by the current regime. There was a shooting of peaceful
civilians, there was no one with weapons there. When you, using armoured
personnel carrier guns, killed a family of three, shot [them] in their kitchen,
this is what you must be held accountable for; there is blood on your hands
today”.
The regime’s acts of violence against civilians is not
however limited to the mobilization of armed militias and thugs. Regime forces
have been documented using chemical weapons against civilian populations, an
act which is illegal according to international law.
A Russian investigation from 2015 found that Kiev’s forces
did indeed drop chemical weapons on Dobass, thus confirming a war crime, in
contravention to the Geneva Conventions. Investigative Committee spokesman
Vladimir Markin reported,
“We have received irrefutable evidence of the use
by the Kiev forces of weaponry similar to phosphorus bombs,”
Markin said, based on the conclusion of a forensic chemical analysis
from soil samples provided by witnesses in the targeted areas.
“The refugees bring in fragments of bombs and
artillery shells, which maim and kill their loved ones. We have conducted more
than a hundred tests, which all attest to (the war crimes committed
by the Ukrainian military)”.
TERRORISM:
Regime forces and paramilitaries loyal to the regime have
also committed acts of international terrorism. In the spring of 2016,
Ukrainian terrorists with connections to the regime in Kiev blew up scores of
power-lines which for decades had delivered electricity to Crimea. The fallout
has led Crimea to hasten a drive to produce its own energy rather
than pay for power-lines originating on Ukrainian territory.
The border between the Russian Republic of Crimea and
Ukrainian terrorist has been rendered impassable due to terrorist activities.
Crimean leader Sergey Aksyonov has described the
situation in the following way,
“They have placed gunmen from the Right Sector (an
neo-fascist Ukrainian group outlawed in Russia) and the so-called Crimean Tatar
Battalion near the Crimean border. The border regions have become a cesspool of
extremism and terrorism”.
Two weeks ago, Russia’s Federal Security Service FSB,
arrested a Ukrainian terrorist who later admitted to acting under orders from
the Kiev regime. He was caught will attempting to conduct an act of violence
against civilians in Crimea.
CONCLUSION:
Ukraine is not only a failed state conducting a war of
aggression against a people’s who have peacefully exercised their legal right
to self-determination, but the regime is attempting to wage war on Russia using
terrorist proxies.
Additionally, the freedom of journalists and political leaders,
both Ukrainian citizens and visitors has been violently repressed, making
Ukraine a country that is unsafe for foreign journalist to operate in without
extreme caution.
The Kiev regime can barely pay its own electricity bills and
all the while the country’s infrastructure, including its nuclear power
stations, is collapsing.
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