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31

For Your Information / On Lavrov's Spat With Israel - Who Is Right?

« on: May 05, 2022, 03:44:32 PM »

   On Lavrov's Spat With Israel - Who Is Right?
Moon of Alabama

May 4, 2022


   Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is in a spat with Israel over its support for Nazis militia in the Ukraine.

The immediate cause is a passage in an interview Lavrov had with the Italian TV network Mediaset:

Question: This is how you see it, while Vladimir Zelensky puts it differently. He believes denazification doesn't make any sense. He is a Jew. The Nazis, Azov – there are very few of them (several thousand). Vladimir Zelensky refutes your view of the situation. Do you believe Vladimir Zelensky is an obstacle to peace?

Sergey Lavrov: It makes no difference to me what President Vladimir Zelensky refutes or does not refute. He is as fickle as the wind, as they say. He can change his position several times a day.

I heard him say that they would not even discuss demilitarisation and denazification during peace talks. First, they are torpedoing the talks just as they did the Minsk agreements for eight years. Second, there is nazification there: the captured militants as well as members of the Azov and Aidar battalions and other units wear swastikas or symbols of Nazi Waffen-SS battalions on their clothes or have them tattooed on their bodies; they openly read and promote Mein Kampf. His argument is: How can there be Nazism in Ukraine if he is a Jew? I may be mistaken but Adolf Hitler had Jewish blood, too. This means absolutely nothing. The wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews. "Every family has its black sheep," as we say.

The Zionist entity in Palestine reacted with harsh words:

The Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, condemned on Monday a recent claim by the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, that Jews were "the biggest antisemites."

The Israeli Foreign Ministry also summoned the Russian ambassador to Israel to explain Mr. Lavrov's remarks, while the Israeli foreign minister, Yair Lapid, demanded an apology. ... Mr. Bennett said that he viewed Mr. Lavrov's remarks with the "utmost severity," saying that the comments were "untrue and their intentions are wrong."

Mr. Bennett added, "The goal of such lies is to accuse the Jews themselves of the most awful crimes in history, which were perpetrated against them, and thereby absolve Israel's enemies of responsibility."

Separately, Mr. Lapid said that Mr. Lavrov's comments were "both an unforgivable and outrageous statement as well as a terrible historical error."

"Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust," he added. "The lowest level of racism against Jews is to accuse Jews themselves of antisemitism."

Mr. Lapid has a big mouth that hides the whitewashing of Jewish Nazi collaborators in which his own family was involved.

But first let us tackle the question of Adolf Hitler's ancestry. The History channel has a piece on it:

In the decades since Adolf Hitler's death, the Nazi leader's ancestry has been a subject of rampant speculation and intense controversy. Some have suggested that his father, Alois, born to an unwed woman named Maria Schickelgruber, was the illegitimate child of Leopold Frankenberger, a young Jewish man whose family employed her as a maid. (She subsequently married Johann Georg Hiedler–later spelled "Hitler"–whose surname her son adopted.)

In 2019 the Jerusalem Post reported of new research on the issue:

[A] study by psychologist and physician Leonard Sax has shed new light supporting the claim that Hitler's father's father had Jewish roots.

The study, titled "Aus den Gemeinden von Burgenland: Revisiting the question of Adolf Hitler's paternal grandfather," which was published in the current issue of the Journal of European Studies, examines claims by Hitler's lawyer Hans Frank, who allegedly discovered the truth.

Hitler asked Frank to look into the claim in 1930, after his nephew William Patrick Hitler threatened to expose that the leader's grandfather was Jewish.

In his 1946 memoir, which was published seven years after he was executed during the Nuremberg trials, "Frank claimed to have uncovered evidence in 1930 that Hitler's paternal grandfather was a Jewish man living in Graz, Austria, in the household where Hitler's grandmother was employed," and it was in 1836 that Hitler's grandmother Maria Anna Schicklgruber became pregnant, Sax explained. ... Sax writes in the study that according to the letters in Frank's memoir, "Frankenberger Sr. sent money for the support of the child from infancy until its 14th birthday."

"The motivation for the payment, according to Frank, was not charity but primarily a concern about the authorities becoming involved: ‘The Jew paid without a court order, because he was concerned about the result of a court hearing and the connected publicity,'" the letters state.

It seems to me that Lavrov has that one right. It really seems that Adolf Hitler had some Jewish ancestors who even paid for the upbringing of his father.

Now onto the other issue, Lavrov's claim that:

.. the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews. "Every family has its black sheep," as we say.

Yair Lapid does not agree with that. Well, his father didn't either until, to his embarrassment, some new facts proved him wrong. There is for example the well known case of Rudolf Kasztner in which Lapid's father was involved.

As the Times of Israel reported in 2016:

[The British Jewish historian Paul] Bogdanor was "extremely shocked" to find that everything pointed towards Kasztner's having been "a collaborator" with the Nazis, and a "betrayer of the Zionist movement and the Jewish people."

Bogdanor's new book, "Kasztner's Crime," published in October, sets out the case against the Jewish leader in damning detail. Even the most devoted defender might have second thoughts after reading his book. ... Kasztner was a leader of a small Zionist grouping in Budapest towards the end of World War II. He led a Jewish rescue committee which, before the Nazis entered Hungary, did succeed in saving the lives of a number of Jews. But once the Nazis arrived, Kasztner, an ambitious lawyer, became embroiled in prolonged negotiations with the Nazi leadership, particularly Adolf Eichmann.

After complex dealings with Eichmann, Kasztner succeeded in getting the Nazis to agree to the deportation of a group of 1,684 Hungarian Jews, the so-called "Kasztner Train," who eventually ended up in freedom in Switzerland.

But thousands more continued on the doomed path to Auschwitz. Bogdanor says that not only did Kasztner know they were being sent to their deaths, but that he actively kept such information secret from other Jews in Hungary and the wider Jewish world.

Kasztner deliberately put selected strong Zionists who wanted to emigrate to Palestine on his list. Those Hungarian Jews who did not want to emigrate were deceived by him to believe that the Nazis were no danger to them. Kazstner himself later found a role in the Zionist establishment:

Kasztner himself did not get on the train, but survived the war and made his way to Palestine. By 1952 he was a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and a would-be member of Knesset, though he did not succeed in obtaining a place high enough on the Mapai list to become elected.

Nevertheless, when, in 1953, an embittered Hungarian Jew named Malkiel Gruenwald distributed a pamphlet about Kasztner, naming him as a Nazi collaborator, the Israeli government thought highly enough of him to bring a libel suit on his behalf, accusing Gruenwald of defamation.

During the trial, dozens of witnesses testified about Kasztner's actions during the war. The case lasted 18 months and did not end well for him. The presiding judge ruled that Kasztner had indeed collaborated, and in words which echo down the years, said he had "sold his soul to the devil."

The Israeli government of the day fell and Kasztner and his family became virtual prisoners in their home. He resigned from his post, his wife sank into depression and his daughter spoke, years later, of having been ostracized and mocked by other children at school.

On March 3, 1957, right-wing extremists shot Kasztner dead. The following year, too late for him, the court verdict was reversed, suggesting that much of what was claimed against him was not correct. Leading the campaign in ensuing years to rehabilitate Kasztner was journalist and political Tommy Lapid, himself a Hungarian Jew and father of Yair Lapid, the leader of today's Yesh Atid party.

The father of the current Foreign Minister of Israel Yair Lapid tried to rehabilitate Kasztner. But the British historian found that Kasztner was indeed guilty:

"Kasztner didn't start out as someone evil," says Bogdanor. "He started out as someone who wanted to rescue Jews, and before March 1944, he did rescue Jews. But when the Nazis occupied Hungary, he began negotiating with them and, very quickly, I argue, he became a collaborator." ... The central charge made against Kasztner by the surviving Hungarian Jews was, says Bogdanor, "not just that he failed to warn them [of the Nazis' intention]. It was that Kasztner had instructed local Jewish leadership to mislead them, and to deceive them into boarding the trains to Auschwitz. After Kasztner had visited the local communities, the leadership spread false information — which he had given them — that the Jews were going to be resettled inside Hungary. Agranat and the other judges overlooked this matter of deception."

Bogdanor admits to being profoundly shocked by the depth and extent of what he found out about Kasztner. It would have been bad enough, he argues, if Kasztner had passively collaborated with the Nazis. But he actively collaborated, he says, taking steps to mislead both Jews inside Hungary and his Jewish contacts in the outside world.

Yair Lapid, just like his father, is wrong. There were quite a number of Jewish collaborators and some were even officers in Hitlers Wehrmacht.

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to Yair Lapid's false accusations:

Michael Elgort @just_whatever - 9:18 UTC · May 3, 2022 Today Russian @mfa_Russia has officially replied on its telegram channel to @yairlapid statement that you see below and this reply deserves to be translated and posted in full. A long thread with full translation below, link to the source in the end

The complete translation of the Foreign Ministry statement is here. It says (format edited for readability):

We paid attention to the anti-historical statements of Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, which largely explain the course of the current Israeli government to support the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv. The Israeli minister said literally the following: "The Jews did not destroy themselves during the Holocaust. Blaming Jews for antisemitism is a blatant level of racism against Jews".

For some reason, the Western press (and some of our liberals) still argue about whether there are neo-Nazis in Ukraine. The Jewish origin of Vladimir @ZelenskyyUa is given, as one of the "reinforced concrete" arguments. The argument is not only untenable, but also crafty. History, unfortunately, knows tragic examples of cooperation between Jews and the Nazis. In Poland and other countries of Eastern Europe, the Germans appointed Jewish industrialists as heads of ghettos and Jewish councils ("Judenrats"), some of whom are remembered for absolutely monstrous deeds.

Jakub Leikin in Warsaw conducted surveillance of the Jews and reported everything to the German occupation administration, dooming his compatriots to certain, and sometimes painful death, and Chaim Rumkowski generally offered the Jews of Lodz to give their children to the Nazis in exchange for saving the lives of adult residents of the ghetto, there are many evidence of his words. It only remains to agree with H. Dreyfus a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, that the complicity of Jews in the Holocaust is a "marginal phenomenon" (but not a taboo and is the subject of research). ...

The Foreign Ministry then points to Israeli government sources which documented a big increase of antisemitism in Ukraine since the 2014 Maidan coup:

Since the coup in 2014, antisemitism has flourished in Ukraine. The report of the Minister for Relations with the Diaspora of Israel, @naftalibennett (PM now), indicates that in 2017 the number of antisemitic incidents including dozens of acts of vandalism in museums, synagogues and memorials, increased manifold in Ukraine.

Ukraine has become the leader among all the countries of the former USSR in terms of the number of antisemitic incidents, and some publications indicate that Ukraine generally surpasses all the countries of the former USSR combined in their number. One of the prominent representatives of the Jewish movement in Ukraine, Eduard Dolinsky, recently feared the termination of the activities of his organization ("Ukrainian Jewish Committee").

There is a certain tradition of collaboration between Zionists and antisemitic people. Event the founder of the Zionist movement to establish a 'Jewish state', Theodor Herzl, was guilty of it:

[A]s the Austro-Hungarian writer Theodor Herzl was about to publish his manifesto The Jewish State in February 1896, he faced intense pressure from Vienna's Jewish community to halt publication. Herzl rejected the pleas, published the book, and launched a movement that ultimately led to the establishment of modern Israel. Around the same time, the residents of Vienna elected an anti-Semitic mayor. To the relief of Vienna's Jews, the emperor refused to approve Karl Lueger, but Herzl lobbied the prime minister to accept the people's choice, arguing that boycotting the populist leader would only increase hatred of Jews.

Herzl had hoped that the installment of an anti-semitic mayor would push more Jews in Vienna towards supporting his idea of a 'Jewish state'.

Israel's arming of fascist militia in Ukraine may well have a similar motive:

Israel is keen on bringing in Ukrainian Jewish refugees for the purpose of maintaining Jewish demographic "supremacy" over the Palestinian population, academics and analysts say.

Since the outbreak of the war with Russia on February 24, the Israeli government has called on Ukrainian Jewish refugees to immigrate to Israel and removed bureaucratic hurdles to secure their arrival as quickly as possible.

"We call on the Jews of Ukraine to immigrate to Israel – your home," Israel's Ministry of Immigration and Absorption said in a statement on February 26.

Does that also explain why Igor Kolomoiski, the Ukrainian Jewish oligarch who lives in Israel, has financed the Azov battalion and other fascist militia in Ukraine?

32

For Your Information / Why is the U.S. Seeking to Prolong the Ukrainian Crisis?

« on: May 05, 2022, 03:36:40 PM »

   Why is the U.S. Seeking to Prolong the Ukrainian Crisis?
DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs

May 3, 2022


   The prolonged Ukrainian crisis produces complicated international problems.

The world economy is in the grip of depression, and the international relations based on the principles of mutual respect and equality get disintegrated. As a result of this, structure of acute confrontation between the progressive and reactionary forces has been formed.

The chief culprit, which is inciting and fanning up such a situation, is none other than the U.S.

Not long ago, the U.S. defense secretary, during his trip to Kiev, asserted that they want to see Russia weakened through this war. Thus, he revealed once again that the ultimate goal of the U.S. policy towards Russia is to totally collapse it.

The international society can hardly refrain from their consternation at the aggressive and open reckless remarks made by the U.S. defense secretary, imitating what the U.S. president just said that Vladimir Putin should step down from power.

It is not surprising that even BBC news of the UK, an ally of the U.S., criticized the U.S., saying that such a remark can hardly be expected to be coming out from the mouth of the defense secretary.

What the U.S. needs now is only Ukraine which can wear and weaken Russia. Save for this, nothing comes into its consideration.

The experts appraised that the U.S. triggered the present Ukrainian crisis by maximizing the security threat, socio-economic instability and international isolation against Russia under the 2019 strategy of Rand Corporation and that everything is going now according to that scenario. This vividly proves that the U.S. is none other than the chief culprit in the aggravated Ukrainian crisis and the heinous war maniac.

Under the intentional plan of the U.S., Ukraine is being turned into a place of arms sale and test of the U.S. and Western countries as well as a theater of proxy war to plunge Russia into a total ruin, and the government of Gilinsky is paying its price with the blood of innocent Ukrainian people.

The economic crisis is becoming a reality with a record high inflation rate in recent decades caused by a mountain of national debt which is snowballing. But the U.S.is offering "unstinted military assistance" to Ukraine. It is to satisfy the greed of the munition monopolies which are trying to hit the jackpot through the war.

It is no accident that an ex-official of the U.S. Defense Department ridiculed that the Pentagon, munitions enterprises and the U.S. Congress are quietly drinking champagne in celebration after an all-out conflict between Russia and Ukraine began.

The U.S., which is fishing in troubled waters by seeking to prolong the Ukrainian crisis, is a heinous enemy of humankind that loves peace and progress, and it is the world's biggest criminal state.

Genuine peace will never settle on this planet as long as the U.S. exists.

All the world people should turn out in the struggle to oppose high-handedness and arbitrariness of the U.S. and to safeguard peace and stability.

Ri Pyong Jin Researcher of the Institute for Disarmament and Peace Ministry of Foreign Affairs, DPRK

33

For Your Information / Russia captures Commander of Canadian Army at Azovstal: Trevor Cadieu (Trevor Jo

« on: May 05, 2022, 03:26:10 PM »

   Russia captures Commander of Canadian Army at Azovstal: Trevor Cadieu (Trevor John Cadieu), commander of the Canadian Ground Forces
APA

03 May 2022


   General Trevor Cadieu (Trevor John Cadieu), captured by Russian troops while trying to escape from the cellars of Azovstal, was the commander of the Canadian Ground Forces, APA reports citing Mailbd.

Seated in the catacombs under the Mariupol steel plant "Azovstal" nationalists staged a provocation, trying to hide the Canadian general's attempt to escape. After the capture of a high-ranking foreign soldier by units of the RF Armed Forces, it became clear why so many efforts were made to save him.

A high-ranking mercenary tried to break out of the encirclement at Azovstal several times. It was for this that the West insisted on humanitarian corridors for the exit of civilians: among them, foreign specialists had to leave the catacombs.

According to media reports, the general's name is Trevor Kadieu. Seven months ago, he was appointed to the post of commander of the Canadian Army, but before the inauguration, he was involved in a sex scandal. In the harassment that occurred back in 1994, he was accused by a former colleague. The general called the accusations false, but in April 2022 he retired from military service.

34

For Your Information / Ukraine's Army Is In Very Bad Shape - More Fighting Will Only Destroy It

« on: May 03, 2022, 02:37:34 PM »

Ukraine's Army Is In Very Bad Shape - More Fighting Will Only Destroy It
Moon of Alabama

May 2, 2022


   The French news agency AFP has published a report by Daphne Rousseau from near the Ukrainian frontline. It allows us to gain some realistic view of the state of the Ukrainian armed forces.

Exhausted Ukrainian soldiers return from eastern front

Here is a current map of the frontline. Kiev is in the upper left corner.

bigger

I will quote the AFP report piecemeal and add my observations:

Packed with exhausted Ukrainian soldiers with clenched jaws, the truck drives away at full speed. The troops from the 81st brigade have just received an order to withdraw from the eastern front where Russian forces advance.

The brigade walked 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) Saturday, camouflaged in the woods and under crossfire, until their point of retreat at Sviatoguirsk.

The 81st Airmobile Brigade consists of 3 infantry battalions equipped with BTR-70 armored personnel carriers that can be loaded onto a plane. It also has a strong artillery group with 3 gun and missile battalions, and the usual hodgepodge of support units.

As the Ukrainian troops had to walk 12 kilometers a question arises. Where are their armored carriers? Even when infantry is deployed in dugouts and trenches its transport should always be nearby (~3 km) to be able to quickly pick it up when necessary.

The most likely answer is that those BTR-70, as well as the brigade's artillery, no longer exist. From today's 'clobber list' as published by the Defense Ministry of Russia (emphasis added):

In total, 146 aircraft and 112 helicopters, 683 unmanned aerial vehicles, 281 anti-aircraft missile systems, 2,756 tanks and other armored combat vehicles, 316 multiple launch rocket systems, 1,234 field artillery and mortars, as well as 2,563 units of special military vehicles of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were destroyed during the operation.

Those numbers will be, like all such counts, somewhat exaggerated. But they do tell a story.

Sviatoguirsk, the extraction point for the troops, is some 10 kilometers southeast of Izium which the Russian forces have taken a while ago.

More from the AFP piece:

For a month, the 81st -- whose motto is "always first" -- battled to push back the Russian advance in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region where Moscow's troops move forward slowly, taking villages one by one.

"Everyone understands that we must guard the line here, we cannot let the enemy move closer, we try to hold it with all our force," says lieutenant Yevgen Samoylov, anxious that the unit could be hit by Russian fire at any point.

"As you can hear, the enemy is very, very near," he says, pointing to the sky. The line of Russian tanks is on the other side of a hill, around seven kilometres (4.3 miles) away.

The troops walked 12 kilometers and are now on trucks. The enemy is currently 7 kilometers away. Simple math will explain that with a 5 kilometer deep gain by the Russian forces.

At 21 years old, Samoylov, an officer from the Odessa military academy, finds himself managing 130 conscripts, often twice his age.

"It's my first war. I was supposed to graduate in four months, but they sent me here," says the baby-faced officer with a short black beard.

What a disaster. 130 conscripts up to age 40+. These ain't well trained warriors but teachers and car mechanics or farmers drafted into the war. With 130 troops the unit has about the size of a company. Infantry companies in the Soviet/Russian/Ukrainian army are relative big:

[T]he strength of a tank company is 31-40 people, and the number of servicemen of a motorized rifle company ranges from 150 people. Often a company is commanded by an officer with the rank of captain, and only in some units this position is occupied by a major.

The junior lieutenant Samoylov, who did not even finish his officer course, is leading a unit that is usually led by an officer two to three ranks higher than his. Where are the higher officers?

More from AFP:

The unit swung into action on February 23, a day before Russia launched the invasion.

At the start of the war, they spent a month defending Izium, which fell on April 1, before joining the fighting around the village of Oleksandrivka.

"Some really difficult battles," says the quiet Samoylov.

Izium is at the northern front where Russian force press towards the south. There are several Oleksandrivka (Alexandrovka) named settlements in the Ukraine, three of them in the Donetsk oblast. There may be more unofficial ones with that name. Two of the known ones are in the north west of Donetzk Oblast some 20 kilometer southwest and southeast of Izium respectively.

The map shows Izium in the north, the western Oleksandrivka is on the bottom left. The other Oleksandrivka lies on the west periphery of Kramatorsk city, to which it practically belongs. It is not named on the map.

Neither town is directly on the current frontline which runs about 10 kilometer to the north. Sviatoguirsk, the extraction point, is much nearer to the front. That is where the troops likely were before they walked towards the trucks.

bigger

The AFP piece continues:

In this brigade, like the others, they don't say how many people have been killed.

When the subject comes up, Samoylov's gaze becomes misty. The pain is raw.

A deadly silence takes over the military truck during the drive to the abandoned building where the soldiers will stay during their week of rest.

Samoylov's 130 men are unlikely to be from one original company. They are probably all what is left from a battalion that originally had three companies and more than 400 men.

When the convoy passes a truck loaded with long-range missiles dashing to the front, the soldiers automatically make a "V" sign for victory with their fingers before fixing their gaze once more on their feet or the horizon in silence.

Is there still some morale in these men or is that just a routine gesture? I believe it is the later.

On arrival at the base, the soldiers unload their weapons, remove their kit and immediately go into one of the dilapidated rooms without electricity where they undergo a medical examination after returning from the front.

For the survivors, "there are small injuries on the forehead, those who were buried under the rubble during a bombing have fractures and (injuries) linked to shrapnel," says Vadym Kyrylov, the brigade's doctor.

"But we mainly see somatic problems, like hypertension or chronic illnesses that have worsened," the 25-year-old adds.

Each battalion of the 81st brigade should have a doctor with a more senior one serving in the brigade's headquarter company. That a 25 year old one is in the brigade's doctor role again points to a lack of men.

- 'Trench foot' -

The men also greatly suffer from "trench foot" syndrome caused by prolonged exposure to moisture, unsanitary conditions or the cold.

"For a month they are not able to dry their shoes... so there are many feet-related injuries, mainly fungi and infections," the doctor says.

Military boots should be watertight. During my time in the military we trained in some very muddy areas but I never got my feet wet. One wonders what quality Ukrainian army boots have.

After the medical visit, they all have the same reflex: to isolate and use their phone to call a female partner, a child or a parent.

Soldiers cannot use their phones on the front, and any application that requires geolocation is banned.

How strict is the control of those policies? Experience says that if soldiers are allowed to have phones with them they will inevitably use them. That is why Russia prohibits its soldiers to carry phones.

Four soldiers reassemble the rusty metal bed frames and sweep the floor coated with dust to make a semblance of a room.

That does not sound like a fun place for rest and recreation. Are there even mattresses for those metal frames?

"It's the moment for the guys to relax, to take care of their physical and psychological injuries, to regain their strength before returning to battle," Samoylov says.

"They'll sleep warm, eat normal food and try to more or less get back on their feet."

Those troops were nine weeks on the frontline and now only get one week of rest in a miserable place. Samoylov is an optimist. None of those injuries, especially not the psychological ones, will heal within a week. It takes years to overcome the cruelties of war and sometimes more than a lifetime.

The Ukrainian army is obviously in a very bad shape as it pushes barely trained conscripts to the frontline where Russian artillery will eat them up. That it is in such a state is not astonishing though.

The Swiss military intelligence officer Jacques Baud has worked in the Ukraine and has written about the current war (here, here and here). He describes the sorry state the Ukrainian military was in from the get-go:

The Ukrainian army was then in a deplorable state. In October 2018, after four years of war, the chief Ukrainian military prosecutor, Anatoly Matios, stated that Ukraine had lost 2,700 men in the Donbass: 891 from illnesses, 318 from road accidents, 177 from other accidents, 175 from poisonings (alcohol, drugs), 172 from careless handling of weapons, 101 from breaches of security regulations, 228 from murders and 615 from suicides.

In fact, the army was undermined by the corruption of its cadres and no longer enjoyed the support of the population. According to a British Home Office report, in the March/April 2014 recall of reservists, 70 percent did not show up for the first session, 80 percent for the second, 90 percent for the third, and 95 percent for the fourth. In October/November 2017, 70% of conscripts did not show up for the "Fall 2017" recall campaign. This is not counting suicides and desertions (often over to the autonomists), which reached up to 30 percent of the workforce in the ATO area. Young Ukrainians refused to go and fight in the Donbass and preferred emigration, which also explains, at least partially, the demographic deficit of the country.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense then turned to NATO to help make its armed forces more "attractive." Having already worked on similar projects within the framework of the United Nations, I was asked by NATO to participate in a program to restore the image of the Ukrainian armed forces. But this is a long-term process and the Ukrainians wanted to move quickly.

So, to compensate for the lack of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias. They are essentially composed of foreign mercenaries, often extreme right-wing militants. In 2020, they constituted about 40 percent of the Ukrainian forces and numbered about 102,000 men, according to Reuters. They were armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France. There were more than 19 nationalities—including Swiss.

The Ukrainian army will not win the war nor will the fascist militias. The country simply has no chance.

'Western' governments are abusing the Ukraine and its soldiers. They want to 'weaken Russia' and do not allow the Ukraine to sue for peace.

That is criminal.

Jacques Baud again:

[D]espite [President Zelensky's] probable willingness to achieve a political settlement for the crisis with Russia, Zelensky is not allowed to do so. Just after he indicated his readiness to talk with Russia, on 25 February, the European Union decided two days later to provide 450M in arms to Ukraine. The same happened in March. As soon as Zelensky indicated he wanted to have talks with Vladimir Putin on 21 March, the European Union decided to double its military aid to 1 billion on 23 March. End of March, Zelensky made an interesting offer that was retracted shortly after.

Apparently, Zelensky is trying to navigate between Western pressure and his far right on the one hand and his concern to find a solution on the other, and is forced into a " back-and-forth," which discourages the Russian negotiators. ... Today, Zelensky must lead his country under the sword of Damocles, with the blessing of Western politicians and unethical media. His lack of political experience made him an easy prey for those who were trying to exploit Ukraine against Russia, and in the hands of extreme right-wing movements. As he acknowledges in an interview with CNN, he was obviously lured into believing that Ukraine would enter NATO more easily after an open conflict with Russia, as Oleksey Arestovich, his adviser, confirmed in 2019.

The Ukraine has lost the war. All the weapons systems the 'west' is now pushing into it are of no use as the Ukraine obviously lacks the men to field them. They will likely get pilfered and in future some of them may well be used against the 'west' itself.

They would do some bloody justice.

35

For Your Information / A Recap Of The War In Ukraine - by Gonzalo Lira

« on: April 28, 2022, 08:50:03 PM »

A Recap Of The War In Ukraine - by Gonzalo Lira
Moon of Alabama

April 26, 2022 Gonzalo Lira just delivered a decent recap of the war in Ukraine.


   Gonzalo Lira @GonzaloLira1968 - 10:28 UTC · Apr 26, 2022

Quick recap for those who haven't followed what's been going on in Ukraine but want to understand: 02/24: The Russians invaded from the south, south-east, east and north, in a lightning campaign. The Russians invaded with 190K troops—against 250K combat troops from Ukraine.

The RF put 30K troops near Kiev—nowhere near enough to capture the city—but enough to pin down some 100K AFU defenders. The RF also launched several axes of attack, with reinforcements on standby (including a famed 40km long tank column), to see where they might be needed.

Crucially—the Russian's blitz on several axes pre-empted an imminent UKRAINIAN blitzkrieg. The AFU had been about to invade the Donbas. This was the immediate motivation for Russia's invasion: To beat them to the punch and scuttle Ukraine's imminent invasion—which they did.

Also, by attacking from the north and south, the Russians disrupted weapons supply chain from NATO. Had the RF only attacked in the east to prevent the AFU invasion of Donbas, there would have been an open corridor for resupply from the West. Threatening Kiev stopped that.

So the main AFU army was left stranded in east Ukraine, with the rest of the Ukr. forces isolated and pinned down—with no easy resupply from the West. The RF then went about hitting AFU command/control and resupply links, further isolating and immobilizing Ukrainian forces.

The Russians soon nominally controlled land the size of the UK in Ukraine—but it was a tenuous control. The south of Ukraine was more fully in Russia's grip. The AFU around Kherson simply scattered. Mariupol became a clear battleground, as did the Donbas proper.

What the Russians initially wanted was to:

Short-circuit the imminent Donbas invasion - which they did. Scare the Zelensky regime into negotiating a political settlement - which they failed to do.

Kiev had no intention of negotiating a ceasefire because of orders given to them from Washington: "Fight Russia to the last Ukrainian!" Also, the Neo-Nazi goons around Zelensky threatened him if he negotiated and surrendered because they are terrified of the Russians.

So Zelensky launched a massive PR and propaganda campaign, primarily to motivate AFU forces to fight to the death. Myths were created (Ghost of Kiev), false flags were carried out (Bucha, Kramatorsk) and relentless media stories were flogged relentlessly.

The Russians kept negotiating and trying to NOT destroy Ukraine infrastructure. In fact at first they were even trying to minimize AFU casualties. The evidence for this is overwhelming: The RF did not hit civilian infrastructure - water, electric, phone, transportation. They did not hit AFU barracks, command centers, government buildings, etc.

The Russians' initial priority was for a *negotiated settlement*. But by late March, they realized this was impossible.

This is why the RF withdrew from Kiev. There was no sense putting men near the city when they were not doing what they were supposed to do - putting political pressure on the Zelensky regime to negotiate. This withdrawal was claimed as a "victory" in the "Battle of Kiev"! lmao

Starting in late March, the Russians pulled back and solidified their control over the area they had captured, ceding to the AFU areas that were either pointless to or potentially too costly to control. The Ukraine propaganda machine called all these pull- backs "victories".

There was still a glimmer that the war might end in a negotiated settlement but that ended in early April. After the Istanbul talks of 3/30, the Ukraine side gingerly agreed to some compromises but within a week publicly disavowed those concessions.

That's when the Russians realized the Zelensky regime was agreement-incapable: Their Washington masters, Victoria Nuland and Anthony Blinken in particular, wouldn't allow a peace. They want this war to sap Russia dry. It is a classic proxy war and Ukraine will pay the price.

Something else the Russians realized: Sanctions. They hurt but Russia bounced back with remarkable speed. They didn't really hurt that bad. But the theft of Russia's $300 billion in foreign reserves by the West DID hurt - badly. The Russians realized they were in a total war with the West and since their foreign reserves were lost forever (likely to be pilfered by corrupt Western politicos), the Russians now have nothing left to lose. By stealing their reserves, the West lost all power over Russia.

This has sealed Ukraine's fate: The Russians now have no incentive to give up what they have conquered. It has cost them too much in terms of men and treasure. And they know that they can't negotiate a ceasefire. The Zelensky regime will simply break it later.

Which means:

The Russians intend to conquer and permanently annex all the south and east of Ukraine. This is why their strategy on the battlefield has dramatically shifted: Now they are carrying out a slow, methodical grinding down and destruction of the AFU.

The war in the first 30 days was speed, feints, nominally capturing vast swathes of Ukraine territory, with the aim of pressuring the Zelensky regime into a negotiated settlement. But the West's total financial and political break with Russia means they have nothing to lose. And they have a lot to gain: The Donbas is mineral rich, the really productive farmlands of Ukraine are in the east and south, Kharkov is a major industrial city, the Sea of Azov has untold natural gas reserves.

And besides - the people love them. Why would the Russians now give up this hard-won prize?

And they *have* won - make no mistake. Ask any military man who is not a system pig, he'll tell you: There is no way for the AFU to retake their country. They have no armor, no air defense, no fuel, no comms - it's over.

The great tragedy is that so many THOUSANDS of young men will die, and die NEEDLESSLY!!, in order to postpone the inevitable. These brave boys will have fought so valiantly - and died so young, so cruelly -because of the evil of the Zelensky regime.

That's the hard truth.

And in the end, this will be the map that will remain—a bitter image of Ukraine's future. Russia will pour billions into their newly acquired territory. It will prosper and flourish. But the rump-state of Ukraine will be left poor, destroyed, forgotten.

A tragedy.

I concur with the above except for two minor detail. The move on Kiev was not intended to hinder resupply to Ukrainian troops in Donbas but to 'fix' potential reinforcement around the capital. That enabled Russian troops to open the corridor from Crimea to the Russian boarder as well as to cross the Dnieper in the south and to take Kherson. Those were the most important moves for the further development of the war.

I also do not believe that Russia will 'annex' the areas it is liberating from fascist control. Once librated the people in those areas will vote on becoming independent from Ukraine and the various regions, Donbas, Luhansk, Kherson, Odessa, will form states that will become part of the Federal Republic of Novorossia.

That country will be recognized and supported by Russia and its allies.

36

For Your Information / EU morphed into a military organization – Lavrov

« on: April 13, 2022, 08:24:22 PM »

EU morphed into a military organization – Lavrov
RT - Daily news

11 Apr, 2022


   Russia's foreign minister reacts to bloc's foreign policy chief statement that the conflict in Ukraine "will be won on the battlefield"

The EU made a "serious U-turn" by morphing into a military organization acting in the interests of Washington and NATO, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday in an interview with Russian media. He cited a remark that EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell made last Saturday.

The European official said the conflict in Ukraine "will be won on the battlefield" as he announced more European military aid to Kiev. Lavrov called the statement "outrageous."

"When a diplomatic chief says a certain conflict can only be resolved through military action Well, it must be something personal. He either misspoke or spoke without thinking, making a statement that nobody asked him to make. But it's an outrageous remark," Lavrov told Rossiya 24 news channel.

The EU has made a noticeable U-turn in its attitude towards Russia because Western powers are furious at Moscow for defending its vital interests in Ukraine instead of accepting a subservient role in the Washington-dominated "rules-based order", Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

Western nations acting in pursuit of American interests were trying to turn Ukraine into "a foothold for final suppression of Russia," Lavrov said. After Moscow used force to counter that threat, European nations made a rapid shift in their attitude towards Russia. Now it "reflects spite and fury" towards the country. The dramatic change is evidence that the conflict in Ukraine is not about Ukraine, Lavrov believes.

"Western propaganda shifted gear into depicting Russia as pure evil and [Ukraine] as pure good. The current Ukrainian regime is presumably a beacon of democracy, justice, freedom that is drawn to everything European, to the values that Europe claims it always adhered to," the minister said.

Neither is true, Lavrov argued. Ukraine is a hotbed of radical nationalism while Western powers easily break any norms when it fits them, while telling others to comply.

"Kosovo can be recognized as independent without a referendum. Crimea cannot, despite holding a referendum observed by [many international monitors]," he offered as an example of double standards.

"In Iraq, 10,000 kilometers away from the US, they imagined some threat to their national security. They bombed it, found no threat. And didn't even say they were sorry," he added. "But when right at our border they grow neo-Nazi ultra-radicals, create dozens of biolabs working on bioweapons, as documents prove, we are told we are not allowed to react to those threats," he added.

Russia launched a large-scale offensive against Ukraine in late February, following Ukraine's failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements signed in 2014, and Russia's eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French brokered Minsk Protocol was designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.

Russia has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two rebel regions by force.

37

For Your Information / US and UK conducting 'secret war' in Ukraine – Le Figaro RT - Daily news 11 Apr

« on: April 13, 2022, 08:08:15 PM »

US and UK conducting 'secret war' in Ukraine – Le Figaro
RT - Daily news

11 Apr, 2022 10:04

   SAS and Delta Force part of "secret war", a French intelligence source reportedly told Le Figaro

Elite special forces from the UK and the US have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of hostilities with Russia in late February, a source in the French intelligence community reportedly told a Le Figaro reporter, last week.

The claim was reported by the newspaper's senior international correspondent Georges Malbrunot on Saturday, the day when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made his surprise visit to Kiev. The British leader was reportedly surrounded by guards from the elite SAS force, though this claim was not officially confirmed.

UK hopes Ukraine will keep fighting – mediaREAD MORE: UK hopes Ukraine will keep fighting – media SAS units "have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, as did [sic] the American Deltas," Malbrunot tweeted citing a French intelligence source. He added that according to the source Russia was well aware of the "secret war" waged against its troops by foreign commandos. Le Figaro included his report in their updates on Ukraine.

The UK and the US have been among the most active military supporters of Kiev. Johnson reportedly personally urged his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to keep on fighting against Russia and not settle for peace until better terms are offered.

Western pro-fighting consensus was apparently confirmed last week by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who said on Saturday that the "war will be won on the battlefield" as he too was visiting Kiev.

British media earlier reported that dozens of "retired" SAS soldiers had gone or planned to go to Ukraine to contribute their expertise in reconnaissance and anti-tank warfare to Kiev's cause. Their services were allegedly paid for by "a country in Europe, still to be named, via a private military company" rather than by the British government, according to the UK tabloid the Daily Mirror.

The Russian military reported action against what it described as "mercenaries" fighting for Ukraine on several occasions. One of the recent instances was on Saturday, just as Johnson and Borell were in Kiev.

The Russian defense ministry said Kiev attempted to use a civilian ship in its latest failed attempt to evacuate high-value personnel from the port city of Mariupol, which saw some of the most intensive fighting during the conflict. The individuals intended for evacuation were identified as leaders of the ultranationalist Azov battalion and foreign mercenaries. There are unconfirmed reports that hundreds of foreign nationals could be blocked in Mariupol along with several thousand Azov troops.

The US and the UK have publicly stated they had no plans to involve their troops in the fighting in Ukraine. Both are major suppliers of arms to Kiev and were training soldiers in Ukraine before the Russian offensive. The experts were reported pulled out of the country in the run-up to the hostilities.

Britain's Defence Ministry banned active service members from traveling to Ukraine in early March, saying that violating the rule could result in prosecution. Kiev called on volunteers abroad to join the ranks of its newly-created "foreign legion" after the Russian attack.

Russia launched a large-scale offensive against Ukraine in late February, following Ukraine's failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements signed in 2014, and Russia's eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French brokered Minsk Protocol was designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.

Russia has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two rebel regions by force.





RT - Daily news

11 Apr, 2022 10:04

   SAS and Delta Force part of "secret war", a French intelligence source reportedly told Le Figaro

Elite special forces from the UK and the US have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of hostilities with Russia in late February, a source in the French intelligence community reportedly told a Le Figaro reporter, last week.

The claim was reported by the newspaper's senior international correspondent Georges Malbrunot on Saturday, the day when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made his surprise visit to Kiev. The British leader was reportedly surrounded by guards from the elite SAS force, though this claim was not officially confirmed.

UK hopes Ukraine will keep fighting – mediaREAD MORE: UK hopes Ukraine will keep fighting – media SAS units "have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, as did [sic] the American Deltas," Malbrunot tweeted citing a French intelligence source. He added that according to the source Russia was well aware of the "secret war" waged against its troops by foreign commandos. Le Figaro included his report in their updates on Ukraine.

The UK and the US have been among the most active military supporters of Kiev. Johnson reportedly personally urged his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to keep on fighting against Russia and not settle for peace until better terms are offered.

Western pro-fighting consensus was apparently confirmed last week by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who said on Saturday that the "war will be won on the battlefield" as he too was visiting Kiev.

British media earlier reported that dozens of "retired" SAS soldiers had gone or planned to go to Ukraine to contribute their expertise in reconnaissance and anti-tank warfare to Kiev's cause. Their services were allegedly paid for by "a country in Europe, still to be named, via a private military company" rather than by the British government, according to the UK tabloid the Daily Mirror.

The Russian military reported action against what it described as "mercenaries" fighting for Ukraine on several occasions. One of the recent instances was on Saturday, just as Johnson and Borell were in Kiev.

The Russian defense ministry said Kiev attempted to use a civilian ship in its latest failed attempt to evacuate high-value personnel from the port city of Mariupol, which saw some of the most intensive fighting during the conflict. The individuals intended for evacuation were identified as leaders of the ultranationalist Azov battalion and foreign mercenaries. There are unconfirmed reports that hundreds of foreign nationals could be blocked in Mariupol along with several thousand Azov troops.

The US and the UK have publicly stated they had no plans to involve their troops in the fighting in Ukraine. Both are major suppliers of arms to Kiev and were training soldiers in Ukraine before the Russian offensive. The experts were reported pulled out of the country in the run-up to the hostilities.

Britain's Defence Ministry banned active service members from traveling to Ukraine in early March, saying that violating the rule could result in prosecution. Kiev called on volunteers abroad to join the ranks of its newly-created "foreign legion" after the Russian attack.

Russia launched a large-scale offensive against Ukraine in late February, following Ukraine's failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements signed in 2014, and Russia's eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French brokered Minsk Protocol was designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.

Russia has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two rebel regions by force.

38

For Your Information / They Saw and Heard the Truth. Then Lied About it

« on: April 09, 2022, 03:41:43 PM »

They Saw and Heard the Truth. Then Lied About it, media on Donbass delegation omitted mention of Ukraine’s 8 year war on the autonomous republics

by Eva K Bartlett, April 5, 2022

In Gaza*Following is a lengthy overview of my recent re-visit to the Donbass, on a two day media delegation, with a brief critique of some of the media's slanted reporting. It is also a follow up from my 2019 visit to hard hit areas of the Donetsk People's Republic. It is now 8 years of Ukraine's war on the people of the Donetsk & Lugansk Republics.


In the last week of March, I stood on a central Donetsk main street next to two of the impact points of a Ukrainian missile attack that killed 21 civilians and injured nearly 40 more on March 14. The Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) maintains that their military intercepted Ukraine’s Tochka-U ballistic missile, that not all of the cluster munitions inside exploded in the city streets, thereby lessening the already terrible bloodshed it caused. Indeed, if all of the munitions exploded in the streets, it would have been a bloodbath more horrific than the 21 killed.

Near the ATM, flowers and candles laid in memory of the civilians murdered that day, with haunting photos nearby depicting the aftermath of the bombing, the grisly scenes of the dead and the maimed—scenes you will generally never see blasted across Western corporate media, just as the same media were silent when terrorism struck civilian areas of Syria.

I’m intimately familiar with war zones, and with Western corporate media’s white-washing of the perpetrators’ crimes (Israeli crimes against Palestinians; Western-backed terrorists’ crimes against Syrians; Ukrainian military and Nazi crimes against the civilians of the Donbass—and also against Ukrainians proper), so the lack of media coverage on this recent Ukrainian war crime doesn’t surprise me.

They don’t report on it, or the myriad Ukrainian war crimes prior, because it doesn’t suit their narrative, the narrative which erases the eight years of Ukraine’s war against the four million people of the Donbass republics, killing at least 14,000 people, a modest estimate.

War crimes investigator, Ivan Kopyl, spoke about Ukraine’s March 14 attack, noting, “The warhead of a Tochka-U missile contains 50 cassettes of cluster munitions. We managed to find 28 traces of cluster explosions on the soil…A Tochka-U missile changes its orientation just before landing, so after it flies on a trajectory it makes a turn and falls vertically down before detonating at a certain height. The fragments then shower the surface in a radius of approximately 150 meters.”

I have one of those cluster fragments, a twisted and jagged square-shaped piece of metal—seemingly harmless looking on its own, but deadly when flying through the air at high speed, in great numbers.

The attack occurred around noon, when this central city street—not a military area, but a civilian one—would have been busy. Photos show a gutted bus and gutted cars. Pensioners, Koply noted, would have been lined up at the ATM right where the blasts occurred. “There was also damage to a yard where there are two kindergartens – there were several craters there,” he noted.

The strike on the heart of the city is among the latest of Ukraine’s litany of war crimes.

Ukraine again bombed Donetsk following the March 14 attack. Donetsk News Agency reported on March 30 Ukrainian forces’ bombing killed one person and seriously injured four others. Of that attack, the DPR Ombudsman noted that one of the injured, a girl, fell into a coma.

And just now, news of another Ukrainian Tochka-U attack. According to RT, at least 50 people were killed at a railway station in Kramatorsk. Eduard Basurin, a representative of the DPR People’s Militia, stated the attack was a missile containing prohibited cluster munitions.

Gonzalo Lira writes:

“This is a fragment of the missile that hit the Kramatorsk train station, and killed at least 30 civilians who were waiting to evacuate.

The AFU has blamed the Russians, but this picture of the missile shows that it is indisputably a Tochka-U rocket — used exclusively by the Ukrainian side. It’s the same kind of missile that two weeks ago hit the center of Donetsk and killed 27 civilians.

What’s that saying? Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times . . .”

As of March 31, the Ombudsman reported 6,010 deaths, including 96 children, since Ukraine’s war began in 2014. And that’s only with regards to the DPR. In the neighbouring Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), also under Ukrainian fire since 2014, as of late February, 1,762 civilians were killed, including 35 children.

During my 2019 visit to the DPR, I went to the northern city of Gorlovka, of which I wrote:

“Gorlovka was hardest hit in 2014, especially on July 27, when the center was rocked by Ukrainian-fired Grad and Uragan missiles from morning to evening. After the dust settled and the critically-injured had succumbed to their wounds, at least 30 were dead, including five children. The day came to be known as Bloody Sunday.

A monument commemorates the Gorlovka victims of Ukrainian bombings and sniping from 2014-2017. Near a sculpture of an angel, over 230 names fill the marble slabs, the first dedicated solely to children, 20 of them.”

At the site of the March 14 bombing, DPR head Denis Pushilin spoke, outlining the chronology the last 8 years, from the violent coup in Ukraine and subsequent increase in radical Ukrainian nationalism, to the two republics’ decision to push for autonomy, to Ukraine unleashing hell on the 4 million people and continual violations of the (2014 & 2015) Minsk Agreements and the massive amounts of weapons pumped from the West to Ukraine (see also). [*Note: I’ll be adding a subtitled clip of his words in the next day or two.]

School and Hospital shelled by Ukrainian forces
The town of Volnovakha—on the road between Donetsk and Mariupol further south—was secured by DPR forces nearly two weeks prior to our visit. Entering the town, we passed destroyed homes and buildings, expected as there was heavy fighting to liberate the area of the Ukrainian forces.

As they did in their copy-paste reporting on liberated areas of Syria, most Western media reports on Volnovakha focus on the destruction, without any context as to why it occurred—these residential areas were occupied by Ukrainian forces, and not all of the destruction was from DPR forces’ fighting against the Ukrainian forces: the Ukrainian forces themselves fired on homes, and according to hospital staff, on the hospital itself.

In addition to not giving this context, most Western media in general depict the liberating forces as deliberately and wantonly destroying everything in sight. Some media went as far as to claim Putin himself destroyed the town. This cartoonish narrative so prevalent in Western reports whitewashing terrorism in Syria and now in whitewashing Ukrainian forces’ crimes unfortunately does achieve its intended effect: duping Western viewers into believing the opposite of reality: that the liberators are the war criminals.

Again, just as terrorist factions in Syria occupied schools and hospitals, so too did Ukrainian forces, including in Volnovakha. When DPR forces liberated the city, they found foreign weapons used by Ukrainian forces inside the hospital. [See also: Western media quick to accuse Syria of ‘bombing hospitals’ – but when TERRORISTS really destroy Syrian hospitals, they are silent]

In a central area of Volnovakha, Russian soldiers handed out humanitarian aid to lines of residents: bags of canned goods, fresh bread, water.

According to Alexander Yurievich Kachalov, the interim mayor, Ukrainian forces used civilians as human shields. “They made sure to destroy as much infrastructure as possible. They bombed buildings in order to leave ruins after they left, to make harder for us to restore it.”

This was common in Syria, terrorist factions destroying buildings and vehicles when fleeing, also leaving mines and booby traps on streets and in houses, to kill still more civilians and soldiers. A woman waiting in line for humanitarian aid said, “They say Russia did this. This wasn’t Russia, Ukraine did it, destroyed everything here! They shot at our hospital. I work there. The new children’s and infection units have been destroyed. The outpatient clinic was destroyed. And then they left. They took the medical staff’s car and went away.”

At the destroyed hospital, Chief Physician, Viktor Fedorovich Saranov, said:

“[The Ukrainian army] were there. There were tanks on our territory. There were guns and Grads outside the territory. I asked them to act in accordance with the Hague and Geneva conventions. I asked them to leave the hospital. They said it was war.

Many people come to us from nearby houses under fire. About 500-600 people came to our basement. We gave everyone three meals a day.

The second and third floors were occupied here. We were preparing for a long siege, and then it turned out like this: they conducted an attack. They evacuated the soldiers. And they mined the entrance to the intensive care unit. On the last day when they were leaving, they shot at the intensive care unit.” The ICU, he said, had already been evacuated.

A woman who said she had worked at the hospital as a nurse for nearly 58 years said:

“On the 28th I was home alone. They soon started shelling. How can they do it with their native hospital? With patients here. They were laying in corridors, as they had been evacuated. They said there were no one in the hospital, no staff, no patients. This is a lie.”

Later, researching, I came across this news (*warning, graphic video at the link):

“Foreign mercenaries who were wounded in the Volnovakha hospital were shot by their own before leaving the city so that they could not tell anything. All the wounded have a control shot in the temple or the back of the head.”

On the road back towards Donetsk, we stopped at a school that had been shelled in late February.

According to Victoria Terichenko, head of education department of the Dokuchaevsk city administration, the shelling was by Ukrainian forces.

“Of course, Ukraine. There were only Ukrainian troops there. We had no military here, we were only civilians here.”

Fortunately, children weren’t at school at the time of the shelling, but Terichenko said a kindergarten in the area had been shelled, with children inside, but again fortunately, not on the side of the building shelled.

Horrors of Ukraine’s war on the people of the Donbass republics
Ukraine’s relentless bombing and sniping of the Donbass people is bad enough, along with it being ignored by Western press and politicians.

But in its eight years of warring on a people who rejected the rule of ultra-nationalists and Nazis, who just wanted to live autonomously, speak their own language, remember their history (Ukraine has rewritten history to glorify Nazis and Nazi collaborators and to vilify those who defeated Nazism, namely the Soviets), Ukraine has committed war crimes as heinous as ISIS and co-terrorists in Syria, with more and more testimonies coming out of mass graves, rapes, torture of civilians and Donbass soldiers, beheadings…none of this shocking given the crimes these extremists commit against even Ukrainian civilians and journalists.

Along a sidewalk flanking a central park, a row of photos, incredibly disturbing images of murdered LPR civilians.

Elders slaughtered on benches, in wheelchairs. The corpse of an infant. Mass graves. A room used to imprison and torture people. The insignia of the notorious rapists and murderers of the “Tornado” battalion.

One photo shows Nazi graffiti left on a wall.

Similar to what I saw in Gaza in January 2009, graffiti left by Israeli soldiers who occupied the home of a Palestinian family, half of which were killed by Israeli-fired White Phosphorous. One of the slogans written in Hebrew was: “Next time it will hurt more.” This, to the family whose infant had burned alive due to the White Phosphorous bombing and whose surviving family members were badly mutilated from the prohibited weapon. In another house in eastern Gaza, likewise occupied and desecrate by Israeli soldiers, more hate and death graffiti left for the traumatized inhabitants.

Different people and places, same violent hatred of the population being targeted.

In the same park area, a monument to two journalists killed in 2014 by Ukrainian forces. Were these journalists killed by Russia or Syria, their names would have been front page, on TIME magazine covers. In Syria, dozens of journalists have been killed by terrorist forces, to the silence of not only Western media by also the groups supposedly advocating for journalists’ rights and safety.

In Shchastia, north of Lugansk, more civilians received humanitarian aid in the liberated town.

*Humanitarian aid being handed out in Shchastia, a town north of Lugansk, liberated in early March.
Western delivered weapons on display
In the two republics, we saw some of the vehicles and weapons captured from Ukrainian forces. Telesur journalist Alejandro Kirk spoke to me about these weapons and vehicles that have been captured, noting the many foreign made weapons sold to Ukraine. Western countries continue selling weapons to Ukraine.

On March 20, journalist Alexander Rubinstein wrote of the West’s exorbitant shipping of billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine over the years. He noted:

“At least 32 countries have announced their intention to ship billions of dollars in weapons into Ukraine for use against Russian forces in Ukraine. Photographic evidence shows that these weapons have already ended up in the hands of neo-Nazi paramilitaries – units which have already received training and arms the US and its NATO allies.

All of this builds on $3.8 billion in military aid from the United States to Ukraine, the training of 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers by Canada and the United Kingdom, and a longstanding CIA program aimed at cultivating an anti-Russian insurgency.

…weapons furnished by NATO allies have been placed in the hands of the Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi former paramilitary organization incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard.

The governments of Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom have presided over a massive program to train and equip Ukrainian soldiers for a full-scale war with Russia. Trainees have included top commanders of the Azov Battalion.

In late February, the European Union opened the floodgates of weapon shipments to Ukraine, approving financing through the aptly-named “European Peace Facility” to reimburse countries sending weapons to the country to the tune of $500 million USD. Another $55 million USD is earmarked for non-lethal military aid.

This February, the State Department announced $350 million in additional military aid to Ukraine, bringing “the total security assistance the United States has committed to Ukraine over the past year to more than $1 billion.”

Another $200 million was sent in early March, and following Zelensky’s March 16 appeal to Congress for more weapons, Biden is reportedly set to dole out another $800 in military aid including 800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 9,000 anti-tank systems, 5,000 rifles, 1,000 pistols, 400 machine guns, 400 shotguns, 400 grenade launchers, 20 million rounds of ammunition, 100 tactical drones, 25,000 sets of body armor and 25,000 helmets. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

These figures add to the $2.5 billion in military aid the US delivered between 2014 and the summer of 2021, bringing the total to $3.8 billion.”

Missing context: what the Donbass people have endured under 8 years of Ukraine’s war
After my September 2019 visit to the DPR, I wrote about the mostly elderly civilians I met who were living in battered homes damaged by Ukrainian shelling and heavy machine gun fire just 500 metres and 600 metres from Ukrainian forces. They remained there, they told me, mostly because they had nowhere else to go. Some spoke to me on camera, others were afraid of Ukrainian retaliation were they to be interviewed.

But their stories were all pretty much the same: at night, when the observers of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) left, the Ukrainian terrorizing began, with shelling throughout the night.

I also met a couple who had been living for 6 years in the stinking, dank, basement of a battered school, after Ukrainian bombing destroyed their home.

The DPR press officer who accompanied me and provided translations, spoke of how Ukrainian forces use weapons prohibited under the Minsk Agreements.

Irina Dikun, head of the administration of Zaitsevo, another frontline village, spoke at length on the Ukrainian bombing that erupts nearly every night.

“They are destroying street by street in the town. They take one street and destroy it house by house. Then they turn to another street. There was a school, and a kindergarten, before, but they were both destroyed by Ukrainian artillery.”

As in Syria, when schools and hospitals are actually destroyed (in Syria by terrorist factions), the same media that howls over militarized hospitals being targeted, the same media that also manufactures stories that never even occurred, is silent when the destroying is actually done, by Ukrainian forces.

In Zaitsevo, Irina explained fire trucks and medics couldn’t reach targeted homes, because ambulances themselves became targets for Ukrainian forces (as happens in Gaza, medics targeted by Israeli forces, as I myself witnessed).

During that 2019 visit, I also interviewed some of the defenders of the DPR, painted by Western media as “separatists”, “pro-Russian forces” and other such descriptions meant to dehumanize. The same Western media so quick to humanize terrorists, including one who chewed the organ of a dead Syrian soldier.

One more relevant note from that visit: Dmitri asked what people in the west think about the fact there is a Nazi state in Europe. I replied most people don’t know, because of the media whitewashing.

Which brings me to my recent return to the Donbass: I was curious to see whether the journalists on the same delegation reported truthfully, partial truths or fabricated lies. As it turned out, my scepticism was warranted.

Distortions and omissions of some Western media on the ground in the Donbass
Telesur’s report gave historical context needed to understand the present: including the coup in Ukraine, the active neo-Nazis in Ukraine and entrenched in the Ukrainian army, the past eight years of Ukraine’s war on the Donbass and the 14,000 killed during these years, and the media blackout on the suffering of the Donbass people.

Sky News’ report was good, mentioning the civilians killed in the Donbass by Ukraine’s war, including the March 14 attack, the school shelled, as well as giving air time to the DPR’s Pushilin.

Neither of the two French channels’ (FranceInfo and TF1Info) reports on the delegation’s visit mentioned of the March 14 Tochka-U attack, even though we visited the site & Pushilin spoke at length of it, much less mentioned of the roughly 8,000 civilians alone killed in the two republics. I couldn’t find mention of the Azov or other Nazi battalions participating in the atrocities against the Donbass people, even though we heard about them and saw the graphic photo display in Lugansk. Their reports were framed as, “this is what Russia wants us to see,” regarding the humanitarian aid and reclaimed towns.

And of course, they focused greatly on the destruction, but not on the reasons for it, the implications being the Russians and the “pro-Russian separatists” were responsible.

The chief physician of the hospital in Volnokava had spoken at length, and did specifically state the Ukrainian army had occupied the hospital, as did the nurse I cited, both of whom spoke in front of the group of journalists.

FranceInfo’s mention of the hospital was framed as, “The Russians accuse the Ukrainians of having bombed it.” They included a few seconds of the chief physician saying he didn’t know who did it, there were soldiers in the area, he didn’t know who.

But actually, the physician spoke to us for about several minutes, during which—as I wrote earlier—he did specifically address the presence of the Ukrainian army in the hospital.

One journalist: “Why did such destruction happen?” To which the chief physician replied: “I don’t know. They were military. And who they were: military, national battalions, army? I don’t know.”

That’s the bit France TV cherry picked, omitting his previous words about the Ukrainian army occupying the hospital, as well as omitting what he said after: “There was Ukrainian territory on that side and the rockets were from that side. They mined the entrance to the intensive care unit. On the last day when they were leaving, they shot at the intensive care unit.”

Likewise, TF1Info included a few seconds of the physician’s words on Ukrainian cannons and machine guns’ presence at the hospital, but then followed with the presenter’s caveat: it is one of the arguments often presented by the Kremlin—in spite of the fact that not only he, but the nurse and many people I encountered in the town specifically blamed the Ukrainian army for occupying the hospital and further attacking it themselves when leaving.

If there were any further TF1Info reports from their journalist’s visit which might have included mention of Donbass’ dead, I couldn’t find them. Likewise of FranceInfo.

Global media abusing the suffering of the Donbass to further anti-Russia war propaganda, just as they did in Syria…
It is already bad enough that Western media generally don’t report on Ukraine’s relentless bombing of the Donbass. But all the more disgusting when using a scene from the March 14 bombing of Donetsk and depicting it as Lvov under Russian bombing.

At the site of the Tochka-U missile attack in Donetsk, photos of the moments after the bombing, including the scene depicted in Western media as in Lvov. Photo: Eva Bartlett, March 24, 2022.
This isn’t the only instance. More recently, different Western media used the scene of a March 30 Ukrainian bombing of a Donetsk multi-story apartment building to infer the scene depicted areas of Ukraine bombed by Russia. If you followed the war propaganda around Syria, you will be aware that this practise is common, not accidental.

New York post using Donetsk bombing photo to infer the scene was Kiev or elsewhere, under Russian bombing. The article has since been updated, photo removed. They would say it was a mistake. With corporate media, it never is. Luckily, at the time, some observers caught the lie.
And as with war propaganda on Syria, some media will use footage not even from Ukraine:

I could add paragraphs of examples of how Western media did this in Syria, but for the sake of brevity will state simply that this is one of many deceitful and deliberate propaganda tactics used to both downplay the hell the civilians are suffering under Ukraine’s bombing, and instead to pretend Ukraine is the victim. How the journalists that propagate such lies live with themselves, I’ll never understand.

Finally, a note on some in independent media who feel the need to denigrate Russia’s denazification operation in Ukraine by being snidely putting “special operation” in quotation marks, or others who took to social media to tell the world they don’t like war, and denounced Russia for its military operation (to stop a war), the people of the Donbass don’t like war, they didn’t ask for Ukraine to unleash hell upon them. Such posturing disrespects the at least 14,000 killed by Ukraine’s 8 year war (including 8,000 civilians in the Donbass).

As journalist Roman Kosarev, who has covered Ukraine’s war on the Donbass republics for eight years, said: Russia isn’t starting a war, Russia is ending one.

One thought on “They Saw and Heard the Truth — Then Lied About it: media on Donbass delegation omitted mention of Ukraine’s 8 year war on the autonomous republics”

39

For Your Information / Statement by Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia at the UN Security Council Meet

« on: April 09, 2022, 09:54:42 AM »

Statement by Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia at the UN Security Council Meeting April 5
Mme. President,

We would like to express our appreciation and gratitude to the delegation of the UAE for its Presidency in March.

We thank the Secretary-General, Ms.Rosemary DiCarlo and Mr.Martin Griffiths for their briefings.

We also listened to President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky.

We would like to thank Martin Griffiths for his visit to Moscow during which, as we can judge, he had very useful meetings and discussions. He knows better than anyone else what efforts Russia is undertaking every single day to organize humanitarian corridors. However, Ukraine consistently avoids fulfilling its commitments even within the arrangements reached with the help of international mediators.

I am not going to overload you with figures since our Defense Ministry publishes daily reports. I will merely say that we have managed to save 123,686 people from Mariupol, who moved east, without any participation from Ukraine. In all, over 602,000 people, including more than 119,000 children have been evacuated to Russia since the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO). Contrary to the assertions of our Western partners, these people were not coerced to leave or abducted. Numerous video clips, accessible in the social media, show that they made this decision voluntarily.

Mme.President,

I would like to take advantage of the fact that the President of Ukraine is participating virtually in our meeting and address him personally.

Mr. Zelensky,

We will leave to your conscience all unsubstantiated sweeping accusations addressed to the Russian military. Those accusations are not backed by any evidence of eyewitnesses, of which we spoke in detail at yesterday's press conference.

We all remember well the moment you were elected president of Ukraine in 2019. Many people pinned their hopes on you taking office, because you campaigned with the promise of establishing peace and ending the war in Donbass. The Russian-speaking people, whose rights you pledged to protect, had faith in you. It seemed that a historical injustice when, following the Maidan coup in 2014, Ukraine was put on track to become an evil "Anti-Russia" would finally be history.

However, those hopes were in vain. You began contemptuously calling the residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics "species," echoing your predecessor in office who issued threats to the effect that the children of Donetsk and Lugansk "would rot in the basements," and urging them to leave for Russia. And now you are up in arms against your native Russian language, having introduced a "language inquisition" in a country where Russian is the native language to at least 40 per cent of the population.

Today, explosions can be heard almost all over Ukraine, not just in eastern Ukraine, where they have been heard for eight years now. And they can be heard precisely because, unfortunately, there is no other way left to bring peace to Donbas after you and your subordinates vehemently refused to comply with the Minsk Agreements and prepared to resolve the problem of Donbas by force back in March. During our special operation, we have found many secret orders that testify to this.

We are being told that there cannot be any Nazis in Ukraine. However, we know for sure that they not only are there but, unfortunately, they are running the show. How can it be otherwise if Ukraine's national heroes are Nazi accomplices Bandera and Shukevich who bear responsibility not only for the Holocaust, but also for killing hundreds of thousands of civilians among Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews? You prefer to turn a blind eye to the Ukrainian neo-Nazis pretending that they simply do not exist.

Unfortunately, they do exist, and even more regrettably, there are many, with many young people among them. How do we know? They are not concealing it with Nazi tattoos, decorating their clothing with swastikas and other Nazi insignias, and using the Nazi salute to greet each other. They have never tried to conceal themselves on social media. They have thoroughly infiltrated Aidar, the Right Sector and Azov battalions. This would not have been such an issue had they not acted the way Nazis do and perpetrated killings the Nazi way. This was not just about Russian soldiers who were taken prisoner — they would go online to boast about the suffering inflicted on them, but also about their fellow countrymen. Your neo-Nazis and radicals act with unrivalled cruelty when dealing with civilians, use them as human shields and deploy heavy artillery and multiple launch rocket systems near residential buildings.

We have heard huge amounts of lies about Russian military today. We have hundreds if not thousands of video recordings of people who are ready to testify to cruelty of Ukrainian nationalists. Let me read just some of them. Those are tough stories, but you have to hear them.

Natalia Kudinova: "The city mayor was one of the first to flee, and later the Ukrainian authorities lied to us that Russia did not let people use the humanitarian corridors. The Azov nationalist battalion held women and children in basements and robbed civilians at checkpoints. A grandmother with her grandchildren said that Azov fighters did not let them out of the basement and would shoot to kill anyone taking a step towards the exit. Women and girls were stripped naked at an Azov checkpoint, with fighters taking their gold and money, including the last they had".

Valentina Borisenkova said that the Ukrainian military chased a woman with her two children out of their single-family home and used it as a firing position to fire mortars. "She left with tears in her eyes chased from her own house, with two children by these boys with blue armbands (Ukraine's insignia)."

Marina said she was tortured in a Ukraine Security Service basement in Kramatorsk: "They tied me to a sewer pipe. When they learned that I was Russian, they started beating me, electrocuting me, raping, and threatened bringing my underage daughter to do the same with her."

Olga Shapovalova: "We left Mariupol, Mangush, on March 25. The Ukrainian Armed Forces put their firing positions in between residential buildings and in school courtyards, hiding behind civilians. A Ukrainian tank kept driving around the drama theatre and shooting in all directions, targeting residential buildings. Tanks were parked near school numbers 69, 68 and 5. I saw this with my own eyes."

Olga Suportkina: "Mariupol's School No. 15. The Ukrainian Armed Forces took up positions there on February 25 and left on March 7. They fired from there. Our building was hit by gunfire. On March 8 and 9 there was heavy shelling targeting residential housing. When asked why they were doing this, the Ukrainian service personnel replied that they would stay there until they completely eradicate the Russian spirit. They started looting right away, pillaging all the shops. DPR troops helped us get out and took us to Mangush."

There are many more heartbreaking stories about Russians and Ukrainians tortured to death with swastikas branded on their chests, about people killed by plunderers and criminals who were given arms, about peaceful population and foreigners, whose deaths Ukrainian leadership tries to blame on Russian military — contrary to all facts. I said it already and I say it again now — thinking that Russian military are capable of doing what they are accused of is vile.

On top of that, there are outright criminal theatre shows with peaceful Ukrainians killed by their own radicals in order to, in the best Goebbels traditions, blame the Russian army for their deaths. They were killed in the areas the Russian troops left following the peace talks in Istanbul, which gave hope to so many people. As it turns out now, they should not have left it. I am talking primarily about Bucha.

I am aware that you saw the dead bodies and heard the stories. However, you only saw what they wanted to show you. You can't fail to see blatant inconsistencies in the version of the events being promoted by the Ukrainian and Western media, including the fact that there were no dead bodies in the town after the Russian troops left, as evidenced by a number of videos.

There are records where Ukrainian radicals shot those who wear white armbands, that is, civilians. A close look at the video demonstrated today would reveal that people lying on the ground wore white armbands, meaning that they were civilians. And the fact that the bodies in the video do not look like they have been lying out there in the street for three or four days (according to the sensational and scientifically absurd information provided by The New York Times, the bodies have been lying there since March 20). Only complete amateurs or our Western partners who do not want to listen to anything and have long called everything that's black white and vice versa, could fall for this fake show.

Unfortunately, those countries don't care in the slightest about Ukraine. For them, it is and was just a pawn in their geopolitical ploy against Russia, which they will easily sacrifice. For now, though, they will try to prolong this conflict by supplying weapons and ammunition. To reiterate, and most importantly, how did we come to the cruelty that we see from these nationalists, for example, from the Azov battalion? And you, in an interview with the U.S. media, bashfully defend them, saying that "they are what they are."

I just want you to give it a thought and really hope that you will find a solution to this situation, because it depends only on you. We didn't come to you for Ukrainian land. We came to bring a long-awaited peace to a bleeding Donbas. Not a truce, but a genuine lasting peace. To do so, it is necessary to root out the cruelty that I mentioned and remove that Nazi malignant tumour that is devouring Ukraine and would have eventually begun to devour Russia.

We will achieve this goal, hopefully sooner rather than later. There may be no other outcome. We avoid shelling civilian targets in order to save as many civilian lives as possible, and this is why we are not advancing as fast as many expected. We are not acting like the Americans and their allies in Iraq or Syria who wiped out entire cities. They did not care about them, while we do, because those people are our close ones. The radicals, however, have nothing to lose. They can't care less about civilians. They are ready to take all the people of Ukraine down with them into the grave, as the provocation in Bucha clearly showed.

Mr. Zelensky, don't let the West achieve its goals. Make the right decisions for your country, because the West is prepared to fight in Ukraine to the last Ukrainian. Make this decision now. After all, you are well aware of the actual situation at the front. It may be too late after that.

Thank you.

40

For Your Information / Accusations of Russian War Crimes in Bucha

« on: April 09, 2022, 09:49:33 AM »

In the News April 7

Accusations of Russian War Crimes in Bucha

TML

Russia Holds Press Briefing to Denounce Provocation Staged at Bucha

On Sunday April 3 Russia formally requested the holding of an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to discuss what it called the “heinous provocation of Ukrainian radicals” in the town of Bucha, saying such provocations posed a direct threat to international peace and security.

The UK, which holds the presidency of the Security Council for the month of April, refused to grant Russia’s request on Sunday, and again on Monday when it pressed the matter again, telling Russia it could add its concerns to the agenda of an already scheduled meeting on Tuesday, April 5.

In light of that rebuff, The Russian Ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia called an emergency press conference on Monday afternoon at the UN Headquarters. There he denounced what he called the UK’s shameful and unprecedented abuse of the President’s prerogatives. Even if the president disagrees with a member’s request for a meeting they are obliged to call a meeting and put the question to a procedural vote, he said, noting that the meeting Russia called for should have taken place within three hours of being requested.

“You can see clearly now what a ‘rules-based order’ promoted by the UK and other Western countries means in real life,” Nebenzia said. “It means them imposing rules that are comfortable to them with total disregard for the international law and UNSC rules of procedure.”

Ambassador Nebenzia then presented what he said were the real facts about Bucha.

He began saying that on March 30, following a round of talks in Ankara, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced the withdrawal of forces from a number of regions, including Bucha. That fact was confirmed the next day by the mayor of the town. In his video of March 31 Anatoly Fedoruk presented the withdrawal of Russian forces as a victory of the Ukrainian Army. Interestingly, Nebenzia said, he did not mention any mass atrocities, dead bodies, killings, graves or anything like that. It is hard to imagine that a mayor can “forget” to address such a devastating scenario, he said.

Nebenzia then showed a video posted by the Ukrainian National Guard on April 2 showing the Ukrainian military entering Bucha three days after the Russian troops had cleared out. There were no dead bodies in the streets. It also featured interviews with citizens, none of whom spoke of any “massacre” or mass killings. The video that showed dead bodies lying in the streets appeared only on April 3. According to its authors, he said, the bodies were lying on the streets for at least four days by the time the video was filmed. However, they showed none of the telltale signs of a body left outside to decompose for that amount of time. The blood on and around the bodies is fresh, not coagulated and dry. There is no obvious bloating or signs of rigor mortis. In other words, the deaths were recent.

Nebenzia also pointed out that several of the corpses could be seen with white armbands on their sleeves. Others had their hands tied behind their backs with a white cloth that would have been an armband. Nebenzia explained that the Ukrainian forces use either blue or yellow arm bands. Because members of Ukrainian militia do not always wear military uniforms, he said, local civilians in Bucha wore white armbands when the Russian forces were in the town so they would not be mistaken for members of the militia. However Ukrainian forces, especially the virulently anti-Russian members of the Azov regiment and other neo-Nazis would shoot those people as supposed Russian collaborators, he said. As proof, he referred to a video on social media that shows a conversation between members of what he called “a radical nationalist fighting group.” One of them asks his commander if he is permitted to shoot at the people who are not wearing blue armbands, and is told in reply “Of course!”

Nebenzia concluded saying that the video circulated by the Kiev regime is a crude forgery that does not stand up to any scrutiny, and that what took place in Bucha was a false flag attack by Kiev and its Western sponsors.

Asked by a reporter if he considered other videos with footage of people saying their loved ones — Ukrainian civilians — have been killed by Russian troops also to be fake, Nebenzia said that in warfare, anything can happen, including that civilians may die, calling it a sad fact of life. But he insisted that Russian military forces act in strict compliance with international humanitarian law and do not target civilians and civilian objects.

“From the very beginning,” Nebenzia said, “it has been clear that this is nothing else but yet another staged provocation aimed at discrediting and dehumanizing of the Russian military and leveling political pressure on Russia. Not many of you know about the Russian military, but I assure you that Russian military is nothing that it is being accused of, in particular what regards ‘cruel atrocities’ against civil population. It is not the case. It never was, and will never be.

“We have factual evidence that proves this point. We intended to present it to the Security Council as soon as possible so that the international community is not misled by the false narrative promoted by Kiev and its Western sponsors.”

On April 5 the Russian Mission to the UN in New York posted a quote taken from remarks by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov regarding how he saw the situation: “During the military operation in Ukraine there have been many cases of fake information being injected. It is followed instantly by a propaganda campaign and angry condemnation. When the truth surfaces a few days later, nobody in the West wants to speak about it any longer.”

For the entire briefing click here.

TML Daily, posted April 7, 2022.

41

For Your Information / Widespread assassination of leftists and perceived opponents of the pro-fascist

« on: April 08, 2022, 10:09:08 PM »

Widespread assassination of leftists and perceived opponents of the pro-fascist Zelenski regime
American Federation of Teachers AFL-CIO, Professional Staff Congress (PSC), International-Committee, City University of NY (CUNY)

April 7, 2022


   On Apr 7, 2022, at 1:44 PM, via PSC International Committee psc-international-committee@googlegroups.com wrote:

"In the interview, [he] read a list of Ukrainian names, which he said were the names of his friends and acquaintances based in Ukraine, some were Communists, others were labor activists, who have disappeared since 1st of March 2022 from their apartments in Kyiv and Kharkiv, after Ukrainian 'special forces' knocked on their doors."

[UPDATE]The [above] is correct. But it goes much farther. In a zoom conference that I attended on Ukraine organized by the International Action Center several days ago, a Ukrainian leftist named Leonid I. reported that he knows of dozens of murders of leftists and perceived opponents of the pro-fascist Zelensky regime, who were visited in their homes by Ukrainian fascists and killed on the spot. So, yes, the analogy to the death squads in Central America is apropos. Also, we should add that Ukrainian fascists have genocidally murdered and targeted Roma in recent weeks, including in Mariupol, which fortunately is almost entirely liberated. Leonid argued that everyone on the left in Ukraine would welcome the total military defeat of Zelensky's regime by Russia (which surprised even me when he said it, but is totally understandable in light of the fascist atrocities taking place by Ukrainian forces).

*Report from the New York Labor International Committee Post

42

For Your Information / Bucha Massacre Allegations

« on: April 05, 2022, 08:19:17 AM »

Russia to insist on UN Security Council meeting on Bucha situation on April 4 — envoy
TASS

April 4, 2022


   Moscow will insist on holding a UN Security Council meeting on Monday over the provocation in Bucha, despite Britain's attempts to refuse to organize the meeting, First Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Dmitry Polyansky said.

"It is hard to imagine and realize, but the British presidency of the Security Council, which has just begun, is trying to deny us our right to request a separate Security Council meeting on the terrible Ukrainian provocation in Bucha. We requested the April 4 meeting at 3 P.M. (10 P.M. Moscow time - TASS), 24 hours before the scheduled meeting [on Tuesday] in full compliance with the Security Council's rules of procedure," Polyansky said in his Telegram channel.

"We will insist that the meeting be held on Monday, as requested," the diplomat said.

"We are shocked at the scale and brutality of the staging organized in Bucha in the best traditions of 'white helmet cinema,'" Polyansky pointed out, "Today's Ukrainian neo-Nazis are completely faithful to Goebbels' old Nazi school of provocations and are trying to shift the blame to Russia." He noted that "there are striking inconsistencies and mistakes in the production." "It has already been refuted on the Internet," he noted.

Polyansky added that the British are trying to use procedural excuses to reject the Russian initiative because another UN Security Council meeting is scheduled for Tuesday on a broader issue. "They obviously want us not to bring this up separately because it would cause reputational damage to Western countries that have already accused Russia of killing civilians in Bucha. But it won't work, and the world will know the truth," he said.

Polyansky reminded the British that such actions are not worthy of a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and Russia, as chairman of the Council in February, "despite all the Ukrainian provocations and the tense situation on the ground, has not opposed a single meeting on Ukraine, no matter how much time has passed since its request." "London, on the other hand, has now compromised the presidency of the Council from its inception. We hope that the obvious commitment to respect Council traditions will prevail over dishonest tactical calculations," he concluded. Two Security Council meetings

Ukraine on Sunday requested that the UN Security Council meet on Tuesday to consider, among other things, the situation in Bucha. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is expected to speak at it. Later on Sunday, Russia asked the Security Council president to hold a meeting on Bucha.

According to Council procedure, the president is required to convene a meeting no later than 24 hours after receiving the request. However, the president can state that, for various reasons, he received the formal request much later than it was sent. As a result, the president has a formal right to convene a meeting later than the requesting country would like.

In addition, there is a practice where the president can decide to discuss related topics in the framework of one meeting of the Security Council without scheduling a second one within the required procedural time. The last time agendas were merged was in 2018, when Ukraine and Russia also proposed to discuss related topics.

43

For Your Information / Iran Rejects Britain-drafted UN human rights resolution on Iran ‘illegal, spitef

« on: April 02, 2022, 09:47:06 AM »

Iran Rejects Britain-drafted UN human rights resolution on Iran ‘illegal, spiteful': Foreign Ministry
Press TV

Apr 1, 2022


   Iran has categorically rejected a United Nations resolution on the human rights situation in the country, saying it has been drafted by Britain and other Western countries based on groundless claims and incorrect and spiteful information.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran condemns the move by the British government and other founders of this resolution which is a clear example of abusing the transcendent concepts and values of human rights to advance short-sighted political motives and considers it devoid of any legal validity," Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said on Friday.

He added that Western countries are making efforts to continue the spread of Iranophobia and defamation of Iran, emphasizing, "These countries, which themselves have a long history of gross human rights violation, including the sale of weapons to authoritarian, occupying and aggressive regimes, have made human rights as a means to advance their own political aims and ambitions."

The Iranian spokesperson warned that such "immoral and unjustified" moves would not only fail to promote human rights and respect for it globally, but would merely fuel negative stereotypes and political labeling against nations which have seriously tarnished the true meaning of human rights.

Khatibzadeh said the resolution extends the mandate of the Special Rapporteur, who, in recent reports, has shown that he is acting based on the British, American and Zionist directives and is using the UN human rights mechanism as a plaything to achieve their vicious and illegal goals.

"As repeatedly emphasized, the appointment of a special rapporteur on human rights [situation in] a country like Iran is fundamentally unjustified and unconstructive," he added.

Despite oppressive pressure of the US economic terrorism, the spokesman said, Iran has always lived up to its commitments to its citizens and the international community.

Khatibzadeh said Iran is a religious democratic system that takes steps to promote human rights at national, regional and international levels and is committed to observe the issue.

He emphasized that countries which violate nations' rights must be held accountable for their crimes committed in gross violation of human rights.

"Proponents of this [anti-Iran] resolution must first condemn the US administration's measures such as economic terrorism and the intensification of unilateral and cruel sanctions and their destructive impacts on Iranians' access to basic needs, including medical equipment and items during the coronavirus pandemic," Khatibzadeh pointed out.

In a resolution on the situation of human rights in Iran, adopted by a vote of 19 in favor, 12 against and 16 abstentions as orally revised, the Council decides to extend the mandate of the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic for a further period of one year, and requests him to submit a report on the implementation of the mandate to the Human Rights Council at its fifty-second session and to the General Assembly at its seventy-seventh session. It calls upon Iran to cooperate fully with the special rapporteur to permit access to visit the country and to provide all information necessary to allow the fulfillment of the mandate.

44

For Your Information / Russia presents new evidence on Ukraine biolabs, comments on links to Biden and

« on: March 31, 2022, 10:14:37 PM »

 Russia presents new evidence on Ukraine biolabs, comments on links to Biden and US
Documents detail fate of US-funded deadly pathogens that may have been tested on Ukrainians
Russia presents new evidence on Ukraine biolabs, comments on links to Biden and US
© Getty Images / Andrew Brookes

The Russian military has presented documents showing Ukraine’s interest in using drones to deliver weaponized pathogens developed in US-funded biolabs. Names of US officials involved in the biolabs projects, and the role the current US president’s son played in the program, were also made public during the special briefing on Thursday.

One of the key pieces of evidence was a letter from the Ukrainian company Motor Sich to the  Turkish drone manufacturer Baykar Makina – makers of the Bayraktar TB2 and Akinci UAVs – dated December 15, 2021. The Ukrainians specifically asked if the drones could carry 20 liters of aerosolized payload to a range of 300 kilometers – putting them in range of a dozen major Russian cities and almost all of Belarus.

“We are talking about the development by the Kiev regime of technical means of delivery and use of biological weapons with the possibility of their use against the Russian Federation,” said Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, commander of the Russian Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Forces.
RT
©  Russian Ministry of Defense

Kirillov also referenced a US patent (No. 8,967,029) for a mechanism to deploy aerosolized pathogens from a drone. The US response to a 2018 Russian inquiry about this patent did not deny its existence, but claimed that it technically did not violate Washington’s obligations under the treaties banning chemical and biological weapons, he pointed out.

Kirillov showed signed contracts between US government agencies – Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the Pentagon, the Department of State – and the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, as well as the specific facilities inside Ukraine. The Pentagon spent more than $30 million for biological research at just one Ukrainian facility, the Public Health Center of the Ministry of Health, according to the Russian military.
Russia makes new allegations about US-funded biolabs in Ukraine READ MORE: Russia makes new allegations about US-funded biolabs in Ukraine

DTRA official Robert Pope was “one of the key figures” in the program, and “the author of the idea of creating a central depository of especially dangerous microorganisms in Kiev,” Kirillov said. The Pentagon’s biological projects in Ukraine were coordinated by Joanna Wintrol, head of the DTRA office in Kiev, until she left in August 2020. She directly supervised projects UP-4, UP-6, and UP-8 to study deadly pathogens, including anthrax, the Congo-Crimean fever, and leptospirosis, according to Kirillov.

The US agency’s point of contact was Ukraine’s Health Minister (2016-2019) Ulyana Suprun, herself a US citizen, Kirillov noted, while a major go-between was the private contractor Black and Veatch, whose Kiev office was headed by Lance Lippencott. Another Pentagon contractor, Metabiota, also had a role in the project.

Kirillov said that Hunter Biden – son of the current US President Joe Biden – played “an important role in creating a financial opportunity to work with pathogens on the territory of Ukraine,” pointing to several emails between him and executives of Metabiota and Black and Veatch. In particular, he described the Metabiota VP as “a confidant of Hunter Biden,” based on  their correspondence. According to the general, the “Western media” has confirmed the authenticity of these emails – presumably a reference to materials published last week by the British newspaper the Daily Mail.
RT
©  Russian Ministry of Defense

Even Kiev was concerned about the biolabs, according to a memo Kirillov showed. A 2017 letter from the Kherson department of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) said that DTRA and Black and Veach intend to “establish control over the functioning of microbiological laboratories in Ukraine conducting research on pathogens of particularly dangerous infections that can be used to create or modernize new types of biological weapons.”

Pointing to a June 2019 document from the Public Health Center of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, Kirillov wondered why it insisted on secrecy and required that “serious” incidents “including the death of the subjects” had to be reported to the US bioethics authorities within 24 hours – when other documents about that specific program only reference standard blood sampling work.
Russia presents new evidence from US-funded Ukraine biolabs READ MORE: Russia presents new evidence from US-funded Ukraine biolabs

“We do not exclude that the official research program is only the ‘visible part of the iceberg’, while in practice, volunteers were infected with the Congo–Crimean fever virus, hantaviruses and the causative agent of leptospirosis,” the general said, accusing the US of “a dismissive attitude towards the citizens of Ukraine,” and treating them as guinea pigs for biological and medical experimentation.

The US has long claimed that allegations about Pentagon-funded biolaboratories in Ukraine were “Russian disinformation.” Earlier this month, however, US diplomat Victoria Nuland testified before the Senate that “biological research laboratories in Ukraine” did exist, and that Washington was working with Kiev “to ensure that the materials of biological research do not fall into the hands of Russian forces.”

According to Kirillov, all pathogenic biomaterials stored in Ukraine were “transported by military transport aircraft to the United States via Odessa,” in early February 2022. On February 24, as Russian troops entered Ukraine, the ministry of health in Kiev ordered the remaining strains to be destroyed, the general said.

Kirillov said that the Russian intervention halted activities at five Ukrainian biolabs that had been working with anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, cholera, leptospirosis, and African swine fever.
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45

For Your Information / Britain's Interference in Ukraine Can Never Be the Road To Peace

« on: March 31, 2022, 11:50:39 AM »

Britain's Interference in Ukraine Can Never Be the Road To Peace

Workers' Daily News
http://www.johnbucklecentre.org.uk/opensite/wdnews/news.php?xnewsaction=fullnews&newsarch=032022&newsid=3

Whilst today the British state has disengaged from the EU and is now in lock-step with the US it is probably now among European countries the most supportive of Ukraine joining in with the EU, NATO and Western Europe. Whilst this irony following Brexit cannot be lost, it also goes along with the British state and its media being also one of the most hostile to Russia in Europe.

Of course, at the time of Ukraine's independence in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Britain's role was then as part of the EU. The US with Britain as their main ally in the EU, moved to break up the Russian Federation and expand eastwards. As such, Britain has always been interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine from this standpoint of dividing Ukraine from its close relations with Russia. These close relations of Ukraine to Russia spanned centuries and were based on vast areas in Ukraine speaking the same language as Russia and with close cultural ties to all Russians.
 
The aim of the US, Britain and the European powers was not just the liberalisation of Ukrainian state enterprises. It was not just that their private monopolies could try and grab the vast Ukrainian agricultural resources and industries, but equally the aim was geopolitical division of the Russian Federation, to weaken the largest country in the world in the interests of US domination. British European Minster, David Lidington, spelt this out in a statement in 2011 when he said, Ukraine matters [1] “as a growing market for British goods and services; as an investment destination; as an energy transit route and as an energy supplier”. He continued that this is so “because its relationship with the European Union is a test case for the EU’s entire strategy towards its Neighbourhood”. In other words, the EU's strategy towards Russia!

Much has rightly been written about the so-called colour revolutions in Eastern Europe and in Ukraine to effect regime change in favour of the US and its western allies. However, it was the Maidan coup in 2014 in Ukraine which finally brought about a Ukrainian regime hostile to Russia. This is a regime on Russia's borders that would engage with the US, Britain, the EU and with NATO in their preoccupation to isolate and threaten Russia. At the same time, the nature of this stateless and dangerous situation caused by the coup divided Ukraine, and the peoples of Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbas region declared their independent republics through their own referenda, and the people of Crimea also voted to secede from Ukraine to the Russian Federation.

Of course, people of the world know to their cost that divide and rule, was Britain's notorious hallmark in its brutal colonisation of the world, as they divided the people of Ireland, India and Africa in pursuit of world domination in the previous centuries. Today, the British ruling elite still pursue this dangerous policy in their illusions that it will “make Global Britain a force for good in the world”.

Britain's role prior to the Maidan coup is revealing. For example, posts of the British government [2] show that in 2010 “the British Military Advisory and Training Team” started “training officers and senior non-commissioned officers” in the Ukrainian army. This was a move which clearly showed Britain's role in attempting to subvert the army leadership to its own outlook. In 2013, prior to the 2014 coup, the British Embassy in Ukraine launched a project [3] “explaining the benefits for Ukraine of closer European integration” with the aim of determining “how Ukrainians perceive the EU and how one could raise their awareness of the benefits of signing the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement”.

It was also in this context, as one of many examples show, that in 2013 David Lidington met with a pro-EU opposition Ukrainian Party leader, former boxer Vitali Klitschko [4]. The Minister claimed: “The British government remains a firm supporter of Ukraine’s EU aspirations. We want to see them make the necessary reforms to allow the Association Agreement to progress to signature. Mr Klitschko knows that Ukraine has a lot of work to do, and we discussed the role that a pro-active opposition (our emphasis) can play in promoting the implementation of reforms that benefit all citizens.”

This was particularly significant because it was not only empty promises of “benefits of signing up to path of joining the EU” but the aim was also at inciting the opposition politicians against the government of that time and creating illusions among the Ukrainian people. The elected President Viktor Yanukovych of the time as well as the many in the government were opposed to the liberalisation of the Ukrainian economy as a condition of joining the EU and to the hostility of Britain and the EU towards Russia. In 2013, the Ukrainian President was also pursuing closer ties with Russia rather than the EU. It was this contradiction between the interests of the US/EU and the President that was the spark for the US/EU-led Maidan coup in 2014.

Since that time, successive British governments have continued to send troops, military advisers and trainers to Ukraine. Most alarmingly, British governments helped integrate neo-Nazis into the Ukrainian army and state and fuelled Russophobia in Ukraine and in Britain. Last year, in a provocation against Russia, Britain's HMS Defender entered the territorial waters of Crimea, part of the Russian Federation, a hostile move that was aimed at inciting Ukraine against Russia in the Crimea. That was followed by a deal with Ukraine on HMS Defender in Odessa to supply eight new missile vessels to Ukraine, with two of those constructed in Britain. Britain also agreed to "assist in building naval bases around the Azov Sea and the Black Sea regions" with Babcock International, a British Marine, Nuclear, Land and Aviation arms manufacturer "as the prime industrial partner".

Presenting the actions of the US, Britain and others in NATO in continuing to arm Ukraine in its conflict with Russia as peaceful, unprovocative and supportive of a free, sovereign independent and friendly country and choosing their own future is a historical fraud of the first order. This can never be the road to peace.

[1] Britain and Ukraine – Partners for Reform - July 2011
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/britain-and-ukraine-partners-for-reform

[2] British military training team to train Ukrainian Army personnel – October 2010
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/british-military-training-team-to-train-ukrainian-army-personnel

[3] Explaining the benefits for Ukraine of closer European integration – April 2013
https://www.gov.uk/government/case-studies/explaining-the-benefits-for-ukraine-of-closer-european-integration

[4] Minister for Europe meeting with Vitali Klitschko – March 2013
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/minister-for-europe-meeting-with-vitali-klitschko