Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog [12],
Appalled doesn’t cover it. Disgusted won’t do either. Angry doesn’t come close. Maybe I have yet to learn of a word that would express my feelings on the following topic. There’s a disease, an epidemic, that spreads through out the western world. We are all turning into accomplices to murder. And I still believe we are better than that. Just perhaps not all of us.
The US, and the rest of the west, have made plenty enemies already without needing to create their own out of thin air – as if there were ever a need to create enemies. But that’s still what we’ve been doing in many places in the world, including Ukraine. And there’s an entire multi-billion machine working just to make us think what someone else wants us to think about these ‘enemies’.
These days, when you call someone ‘pro-Russian’, that’s about on on the same level as ‘murderer’, rapist, things like that. And that must be why the western press once again resorts to ‘pro-Russian’ as a swear word, or even curse, in reporting on the murders of at least 10 people in Ukraine over the past 3 months. As far as we can see, all were considered ‘allies’ of former President Yanukovych (whatever ‘allies’ may mean in this context) and 2 were journalists (of whom at least 1 was also a historian).
Yanukovych was (or is, actually) not a saint. He was the utterly corrupt president of a country that has been utterly corrupt for a very long time. It still is today, and it’s getting worse, fast. Whereas Russia didn’t feel it had the right or need to interfere in the country, the west did. Its interference culminated in the ouster of Yanukovych in late February 2014, and the introduction of a ‘government’ that is extremely pro-western and extremely anti-anything-’that has anything to do’-with Russia (including the language).
First, we saw the US install its puppet Yatsenyuk as PM (we know about this through leaked tapes of US Dep. Secretary Victoria Nuland). ‘Yats’ to this day has never been elected to office by ‘his’ people (or any other people, for that matter) . A few months later came oligarch Poroshenko as president, who was.
Both men have been instrumental in waging a very bloody and deadly war against a significant segment (a third) of their own population, in east Ukraine. This warfare has coincided with an ever more blatant propaganda war against anything-’that has anything to do’-with Russia, both in Ukraine and across the west. Need I repeat not one of the accusations against Russia has, still to date, ever been substantiated, despite the best spy satellites etc. equipment in human history?
Whereas someone who cannot be accused of anything worse than being pro-Russian is merely equal to a murderer or rapist, being – labeled as – pro-Putin is several levels worse than that. Meanwhile, Russian President Putin himself has been compared to the biggest mass-murderers in human history, amongst others by US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
And lest we forget, Yatsenyuk has labeled all east Ukrainians ‘subhuman’. Let’s see any other prime minster in any other country in the world do that and remain in office.
So far, nothing new. Why then get back to this? Because of all those people who are being killed. The Kiev regime for quite a while attempted to label them all ‘suicides’ (something that was eagerly quoted in western media), hindered in this ‘policy’ only by facts getting in the way.
And when these facts get in the way, they blame Russia for the murders. The ‘rationale’ being that Moscow sought to prevent all these now deceased Ukrainians from divulging details about ‘anti-Maidan’ protests they may have been involved in (can’t have that in a democracy).
One western ‘news source’ even quoted an ‘expert’ just the other day as claiming Putin had ordered two of the murders to coincide with his latest yearly phone-in TV show last week: “political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko said the fact that the killings coincided with Vladimir Putin’s annual phone-in “aroused great suspicion”.
What remains most galling – well, other than us supporting cold blooded murder – is the extent to which western media blindly keep reporting whatever Kiev says, despite the fact that it should be clear to every single reporter that neither Poroshenko nor Yatsenyuk has ever been caught saying anything of substance that proved to be true.
Putin did mention the murder of journalist and historian Oles Buzina last week briefly on that show, and added there has been a series of murders recently in Ukraine, which are not being (or don’t seem to be) properly investigated by Kiev. “”This is not the first political assassination. Ukraine is dealing with a whole string of such murders..”
‘The difference with Russia, Vladimir Putin said, was that killings such as that of opposition figure Boris Nemtsov got properly investigated, leading to arrests. “In Ukraine, which pretends to be a democratic state and wants to be part of a democratic Europe, nothing like that is happening. Where are the murderers of these people? They are simply not there, neither those who carried them out nor those who ordered them, But Europe and North America prefer not to notice.“’
While the killing spree is ongoing, US troops arrived last week to ‘train’ the Ukraine government (and oligarchs) army. The British have had ‘instructors’ there for a long time. We know Blackwater aka XE aka Academi has boots on the ground. We also know that Right Sector leader Dmitro Yarosh (known for various photographs with his ‘troops’ which feature swastikas), was appointed to a high post in that same Ukraine army. Yarosh is also an MP. Nice assembly.
And ‘we’ support this? By we, I mean not only the US, Europe is just as hungry for a fight, and just as blind when it comes to facts vs fiction. But what on earth are we doing paying for all this? Have we all completely lost our heads, hearts and minds? We’re supposed to support democracies, not death squads!
Here’s a list of the victims, largely taken from a piece by Justin Raimondo [13] last week, with a few additions on my part. As you can see, most of them would be considered intellectuals. The ‘cream’ of what was left in Ukraine and did not support Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk and their supporters abroad, in the west, is systemically being eradicated and may now be gone.
• January 26 – Nikolai Sergienko, former deputy chief of Ukrainian Railways and a supporter of Viktor Yanukoych’s Party of Regions, reportedly shot himself with a hunting rifle. The windows were all locked from inside, and no note was found.
• January 29 – Aleksey Kolesnik, the former chairman of the Kharkov regional government and a prominent supporter of the now-banned Party of Regions, supposedly hung himself. There was no suicide note.
• February 24 – Stanislav Melnik, another former Party of Regions member of parliament, was found dead in his bathroom: he is said to have shot himself with a hunting rifle. We are told he left a suicide note of “apologies,” but what he was apologizing for has never been revealed, since the note has not been released.
• February 25 – Sergey Valter, former Party of Regions activist and Mayor of Melitopol, was found hanged hours before his trial on charges of “abuse of office” was set to begin. Whoever was responsible neglected to leave a “suicide” note.
• February 26 – Aleksandr Bordyuga, Valter’s lawyer and former deputy chief of Melitopol police, was found in his garage, dead, another “suicide.”
• February 26 – Oleksandr Peklushenko, a former Party of Regions member of parliament and chairman of Zaporozhye Regional State Administration, was found dead in the street with a gun wound to his neck. Officially declared a “suicide.”
• February 28 – Mikhail Chechetov, a professor of economics and engineering, former member of parliament from the Party of Regions, and former head of the privatization board, supposedly jumped from the seventeenth floor window of his Kiev apartment. Another “suicide”!
• March 14 – Sergey Melnichuk, a prosecutor and Party of Regions loyalist, “fell” from the ninth floor window of an apartment building in Odessa. Or was he pushed?
• April 15 – Oleg Kalashnikov, yet another prominent Party of Regions leader, died of a gunshot wound – the eighth since the beginning of the year.
• April 16 – Oles Buzina, historian and journalist, shot dead.
• April 16 – Serhiy Sukhobok, journalist, shot dead.
• April 17? – Olga Moroz, editor-in-chief of the Neteshinskiy Vestnik, found dead in her home. Her body showed ‘signs of violent death’.
Moreover, in a perhaps separate incident, on March 22, Yanukovych’s 33-year-old son Viktor Jr., a former Ukraine MP, died after his car ‘apparently fell through ice on Russia’s Lake Baikal’.
There are also an unknown number of people who simply disappeared. This happened for instance on April 15 with Dr. Skorokhodov Vitali and ‘militiaman’ Alexey Astanin. There may be many more. Which reminds me of an interview that Patrick Smith posted a few days ago in Salon, with Stephen F. Cohen, arguably America’s top expert on Russia. One of the things Cohen said – more of him later – puts a major question mark behind official – UN – numbers of Ukraine civil war casualties:
The horror of this has been Kiev’s use of its artillery, mortars and even its airplanes, until recently, to bombard large residential cities, not only Donetsk and Luhansk, but other cities. These are cities of 500,000, I imagine, or 2 million to 3 million. This is against the law. These are war crimes, unless we assume the rebels were bombing their mothers and grandmothers and fathers and sisters.
This was Kiev, backed by the United States. So the United States has been deeply complicit in the destruction of these eastern cities and peoples. When Nuland tells Congress there are 5,000 to 6,000 dead, that’s the U.N. number. That’s just a count of bodies they found in the morgues. Lots of bodies are never found. German intelligence says 50,000.
We haven’t seen the German data Cohen cites, but we see no reason to doubt him either. It would place the entire matter in a whole different light, however.
There are some details behind the murder spree coming to the surface. There’s a site called ‘Peacemaker’ (psb4ukr.org), supported by Ukraine MP and government advisor Anton Gerashchenko, who has said: “Information from the website of the “Peacemaker” center has long enjoyed the Ministry of Internal Affairs, security service, intelligence, border service to collect information to open criminal cases and obtaining a court decision on the detention and arrest of separatists and terrorists.”. Gerashenko is also involved in financing the operation.
“Peacemaker”
RESEARCH CENTRE FEATURES OF CRIMES AGAINST UKRAINE’S NATIONAL SECURITY, PEACE, SECURITY AND HUMANITY international law
Information for law enforcement authorities and special services about pro-Russian terrorists, separatists, mercenaries, war criminals, and murderers.
The site apparently has a list to download with some 7,700 names of “saboteurs” and “terrorists”. People are invited to post personal information, including addresses and phone numbers, of people deemed hostile to the Kiev regime. Such information for Buzina and Kalashnikov was posted on the site less than 48 hours before they were murdered.
A few people in the west have done some further digging into the site’s origins (with ‘traceroutes’, ‘nslookup’, ‘reverse nslookup’ etc.), and they claim to have found links to Dallas, Texas and Calgary, Alberta, as well as one to a NATO server – located in Dallas. You can find further details at Moon of Alabama [14] and Niqnaq [15].
Meanwhile, the murders were claimed by a group that calls itself Ukrainian Insurgent Army, quoted by the BBC as having written: “We are unleashing a ruthless insurgency against the anti-Ukrainian regime of traitors and Moscow’s lackeys. From now on, we will only speak to them using the language of weapons, all the way to their elimination.”
As far as I can tell, nobody has been arrested for any of the murders to date.
And yes, we are all involved in this. You, me, all of us. How did we get there? Perhaps the second quote from that interview with Stephen F. Cohen serves to explain how we did:
I wrote an article in, I think, 2012 called the “The Demonization of Putin,” arguing that there is very little basis for many of the allegations made against Putin, and that the net result was to make rational analysis in Washington on Russian affairs at home and abroad impossible, because it was all filtered through this demonization. If we didn’t stop, I argued, it was only going to get worse to the point where we would become like heroin addicts at fix time, unable to think about anything except our obsession with Putin. We couldn’t think about other issues.
This has now happened fully. The article was turned down by the New York Times, and an editor I knew at Reuters published it on Reuters.com.
The history of how this came about [begins] when Putin came to power, promoted by Yeltsin and the people around Yeltsin, who were all connected in Washington. These people in Moscow included Anatoly Chubais, who had overseen the privatizations, had relations with the IMF and had fostered a lot of the corruption. He came to United States to assure us that Putin was a democrat, even though he had been at the KGB.
When he came to power, both the Times and the Post wrote that Putin was a democrat and, better yet, he was sober, unlike Yeltsin. How we got from 2000 to now, when he’s Hitler, Saddam, Stalin, Gaddafi, everybody that we have to get rid of, whom we know killed Boris Nemtsov because from the bridge where Nemtsov was killed [on February 27] you can see the Kremlin…. Well, remember, Sarah Palin could see Russia from Alaska! It’s preposterous. But the demonization of Putin has become an institution in America. It is literally a political institution that prevents the kind of discussion that you and I are having.
Kissinger had the same thought. He wrote, last year, I think, “The demonization of Putin is not a policy. It’s an alibi for not having a policy.” That’s half correct. It’s much worse now, because they did have a policy. I think the “policy” growing in some minds was how to get rid of Putin. The question is, “Do they have the capacity to make decisions?” I didn’t think so, but now I’m not so sure, because in a lot of what comes out of Washington, including the State Department, the implication is that Putin has to go.
I asked a question rhetorically several years ago of these regime changers: Have you thought about what would happen in Russia in the event of regime change? If what you say is true, if Putin is the pivot of the whole system, you remove Putin the whole system collapses. Russia has every known weapon of mass destruction in vast quantities. What would be the consequence of that conceit on your part—that we’re going to get rid of Putin—for the rest of the world?
So this Putin phenomenon has to be explained. How did he go from a democrat for sure, now to maybe the worst Russian leader since Ivan the Terrible. How do you explain it? Does that tell us more about Putin or more about us?
I guess the main question is not ‘How did we get here?’, but ‘How do we get out?’.
Here’s the now unfortunately no longer among us Oles’ Buzina talking about the history of Ukraine (don’t forget to turn on subtitles/CC)
