Russia’s War in Ukraine: Part 2
A just cause in the face of violence and a Neo-Nazi resurgence
Part 1, Is Russia’s cause justified? The historical run-up
Part 2, A just cause in the face of violence and a Neo-Nazi resurgence
Part 3, A just cause in the face of violence, deceit, and a policy of regime change
Part 4, Some history and background on bioresearch
Part 5, Ukrainian biolabs and US attitude towards bioresearch
Part 6, Use of chemical weapons in Ukraine confirmed
Part 7, Russia is NOT the aggressor…
Part 8, …but the US, NATO and EU are!
Part 9, America’s nuclear gambles.
Part 10, Are we the baddies?
I ended my previous article with a reference to ‘The War in Ukraine: Europe’s meddling - An overview of the Ukraine crisis, and the central role of the EU, aided by the US’. I’ll repeat the summary, as we will pick up the story from this point in time.
In short, the president of Ukraine in 2014, Viktor Yanukovych, was in negotiations with the EU about EU membership, and the signing by Ukraine of an ‘Association Agreement’ to commit to take the steps to join the EU. The financial requirements were steep, and Yanukovych asked the Russians if they could lend him the money needed to implement the necessary reforms and measures to qualify. Russia declined, telling him that if he wanted to go the EU, he could, but that Russia would not pay Ukraine so they could sever economic ties with Russia. Yanukovych then faltered in his support for Ukraine’s EU membership (also coming up close to reelections), and those negotiations were put on halt.
That is when trouble started. The EU did not take that rejection kindly, and when Yanukovych was up for reelection, the EU, with help of the US (among others CIA, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Senator John McCain), set in to motion another so-called ‘color revolution’. With the help, ultimately, of brownshirt battalions from Azov and the like, they managed to create such unrest and pressure, that Yanukovych felt the need to flee from Kiev, while his opponent’s party took over the government buildings, and illegally ousted their duly elected president, and installed their own candidate, Yatsenyuk. Who very shortly after having been installed, dutifully signed that Association Agreement to join the EU.
(Notice also the sharp division in linguistic groups, and compare with the current map of actual Russian military operations. This maps explains a lot just by itself!)
Once the Neo-Nazi shock troopers of Azov and Right Sector were unleashed, however, there was no putting that genie back in the bottle. When the eastern part of the country (Russian speaking Ukrainians or ethnic Russians), which had voted overwhelmingly for Yanukovych, protested the illegal coup, more riots broke out. Violence became the norm, aimed at anyone who resisted the new Maidan regime. Attacks on anti-Maidan, pro-Yanukovych Ukrainians increased, such as the ‘Korsun Progrom’, an attack on a convoy of busses that returned from Kiev on Feb 20, 2014, halted by a checkpoint manned by pro-Maidan people. Apart from the busses being torched and the beatings and verbal attacks and abuse, 30 people went missing, 7 were claimed dead. (A video about this event can be seen on YouTube here.)
An article by Kyiv Post attempted to debunk this story, and while they correctly point out that ‘Ukrainian Human Rights’, the group/channel that made/posted this documentary, did not seem to exist, that that other Human Rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International were unable to find this group to contact them, and had never heard of them. Yet where this article alleges to have “debunked” the attack, it ends by citing a local Law Enforcements official admitting the existence of said checkpoint at that time and place, and the burning of at least two busses. So they confirm the story, even if they would claim ‘it wasn’t as bad as those separatists say!’
“Such events didn’t take place then,” Cherkasy region police spokesman Dmytro Hryshchenko said. “There was a checkpoint there and we also know about the burning of two buses. But the information about the activists gone missing or killed is not true.”
Now even if, for the sake of argument, we grant (keeping in mind that the investigations into the fire at the Trade Unions House was marred with serious issues, see the next paragraph) that there are no missing people, and that no one was killed : following busses with opposing protesters, and stopping them at an organized checkpoint at a village well outside of the actual demonstrations in the big cities (this village is almost 100 miles south of Kiev!), to target those opposing protesters? That shows planning and intent. And the torching of those busses shows that this event was anything but peaceful! If anything, it lends credence to the videos and testimony shown!
On May 2nd, 2014, during clashes in Odessa between Ukrainian Maidan protesters and Russian speaking anti-Maidan protesters, the latter took refuge in the Trade Unions House. They were attacked with molotovs, and 46 people died. Police and firemen did not show up until much later, and people who tried to escape the fire either fell to their death, or those who survived, were beaten by the surrounding Maidan protestors. When that event was investigated by the new Ukrainian regime, under pressure by the international community, it was completely bungled, and used to prosecute the anti-Maidan protesters! Even the UN Human Rights office (!!!) could not remain silent, and in a 2016 report stated:
”Deliberate inaction in the face of the violence, ill-preparedness
or negligence on the part of various authorities contributed to this death toll.
[…]
criminal prosecutions ... appear to have been initiated in a partial fashion. Only activists from the 'pro-federalism' camp have been prosecuted so far, while the majority of victims were supporters of 'pro-federalism' movement
[…]
The investigations into the violence have been affected by systemic institutional deficiencies and characterized by procedural irregularities, which appear to indicate an unwillingness to genuinely investigate and prosecute those responsible.”
Once Donetsk and Lugansk declared independence from Ukraine, in protests of the fact that the will of the people had been violated, Ukrainian armed forces that in part consisted of Neo-nazi members of groups such as Azov and Right Sector, did not limit their attacks on legitimate military targets, but used artillery and rocket fire to attack civilian targets. Housing, hospitals, schools, churches, etc. were hit over and over again, in the course of the fighting between 2014 and 2022. Tens of thousands of Donbas civilians died, infamously also many children. The people of the Donbas republics built a memorial park, Alley of Angels. This is not unknown, even if the Media in the West barely ever mentions it. One reason is the constant War for our minds, which dictates, here in the West, what we can and cannot see. And so, the English side of Wikipedia does not have a page devoted to it.
But if you google in French, for example, you DO find that page, and discover it exists in only a handful of languages. The French stub is very short, and manages to omit any mention that the site is a memorial for the children who died specifically because of Ukrainian shelling and dropping of mines over civilian areas (even if it also includes children killed on the other side of the front lines: they get it.). Il faut le faire! A Hebrew page is similarly short, without any mention of the Ukrainian culpability in the deaths of those children, but it does, at least, explain the story of the statue. The Latvian stub is the shortest, again, just as the longer Italian stub, without any mention of the Ukrainian shelling and mines.
The Ukrainian stub is interesting. It starts by telling how the memorial was ‘established in memory of Ukrainian children who died during the invasion and occupation of Donetsk and the Donetsk region by Russia.” And in the same breath, it warns: “This memorial is used by Russian propaganda to provoke and provoke Ukrainian-phobic sentiments.” The next section details children killed by Russians, and how the ‘Occupation Authorities’ had to clean up the names on the plaque to remove ‘false information’.
The Russian language stub is the most extensive. It gives the more detail, but most of the extra information is talking at great length about how ‘Alley of Angels’ is abused by Russian bloggers and propagandists to make claims about genocide.
”After the start of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, videos in support of the war with Ukraine began to be massively distributed on the Internet. In most of the videos, influencers unsubstantiatedly mention the eight-year-long “genocide” in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Ukraine. Tiktokers repeat theses from Putin's speech about the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine at the end of February 2022.” It then mentions a statistic by the “Prosecutor General of Ukraine, since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion in mid-July 2022, at least 338 children have died from Russian shelling, mostly in the Donetsk region” while the monument only has 66 names on it... Yeah, the real culprits of genocide are the Russians! Eat that, you lying Russian-paid propagandist!
But when you track down that reference, you get send to an article that talks about how the war has ruined relationships between families and friends. In one interview, a young woman, Lesya, who was born in Russia but moved to Ukraine and considers herself Ukrainian, recounts how when her brother put up a ‘Z’ on his profile, “she had no brother anymore”. It is from her explanation about why her brother was wrong in his reasons, “standard propaganda language” she called it, that Lesya mentioned what she remembered the Prosecutor General saying. And this is what the Wikipedia stub writer used to make their claim. Yeah. Solid reference!
Not satisfied to leave it at that, I had to try to track down that reference. She must have heard that on the news somewhere! I could not find the exact statement by the prosecutor mentioning 388 children victims, but I did find a more recent report that mentions the Prosecutor General talking about the number of children killed to date, in this article by EuroMaidanPress. It is short, and states in full:
”At least 460 Ukrainian children have been killed and 919 children have been injured as a result of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s General Prosecutor’s Office said on 4 February.
The numbers of casualties are not final, juvenile prosecutors added, because they were still verifying information from zones of active fighting, liberated areas, and territories still occupied by Russian forces.
The eastern Donetsk region was the most affected, with 443 children killed or injured. Russian shelling has also destroyed 337 educational institutions and damaged 3126, the prosecutor’s office said.”
Notice the sly propaganda tricks and spin: he did NOT talk about children killed by Russians, but ‘as a result of of Russia’s invasion’. And he admits that the Donetsk Region is most affected. Yes, indeed, with the large urban centers of Donetsk, Makiivka and Horlivka, in control of the Donetsk Republic, that has been subjected to constant indiscriminate shelling and dropping of petal mines by the Ukrainian forces!
Then another stat is added, to connect the numbers of children victims to the Russians: “Russian shelling has also destroyed 337 educational institutions and damaged 3126”. This is likely true, or somewhat true. But what the Prosecutor general fails to mention, that Ukrainian forces made it a habit to set up near and often also in schools and civilian structures and as such become legitimate targets of Russian fire, as attested to by Amnesty International (see below for more info and a link to their report). In short: a classic example of propaganda.
The sad irony is that the girl from the article, Lesya, “admits that her political beliefs differ so much from her relatives that she is ready to refuse to communicate with them at all,” because they support the war, believing the ‘standard propaganda’ by Russia. “At the same time, Lesya is generally ready to resume communication with her brother, but only if he apologizes to all Ukrainians on social networks.” She has no idea how her own perceptions and ideas about truth have been shaped by ‘standard propaganda’, but this time by Ukraine. This war is indeed breaking families apart, not just there in Europe, but everywhere, in large part due to the Information War that rages for control of our minds.
Yet, if you look at videos such as the one below, it is clear that in the minds of the people in the Donbas Republics the memorial is in large part aimed against Ukraine and their attacks on civilians and children (longer video, for your reference):
A December 2, 2019 article from Unicef did talk about it, titled “430,000 children continue to bear the brunt of eastern Ukraine conflict - UNICEF calls on all parties to end ongoing fighting”.
Unicef stated: “It is unconscionable that children in eastern Ukraine continue to go to schools with bullet holes and bomb shelters and live in neighbourhoods that are intermittently shelled and littered with landmines,” said UNICEF’s Regional Director for Europe and Central Asia, Afshan Khan, who recently returned from meeting children and families in eastern Ukraine.”
The article continues, but in a vague way, without describing exactly which side is mainly responsible for the attacks they mention:
172 children, the youngest a one-year-old girl, have been injured or killed due to mines or other explosive remnants of war.
36 attacks on schools were reported this year alone, including one school being damaged 15 times. Over 750 educational facilities have either been damaged or destroyed since the conflict began.
Vital water and sanitation infrastructure have come under attack 80 times this year. There have been more than 300 of these incidents in the last three years.
430,000 children live with psychological wounds and need ongoing support to address the emotional trauma of growing up in a prolonged conflict.
2 million children, women and men are at risk of death and injury from landmines and other explosive remnants of war, as eastern Ukraine is now one of the most mine-contaminated places on earth.
Then Ukrainian president Petr Poroshenko said the following during a November 2015 speech in Odessa:
“And we win together by means of peace! Because we have jobs, and they have not. We have pensions, and they have not. We have support of children and pensioners, they have not. Our children would go to kindergartens and schools, theirs would be sitting in cellars. Because they do not know anything how to do! That’s how we are going to win this war. Because wars are won in minds, and not on the combat fields!”
Some media claim that this snippet of Poroshenko is taken out of context, when people hold up that video to claim Poroshenko was making a statement on a future, deliberate policy for the Ukrainian army, indicating the Ukrainian government intends to use terror to subdue the will of the ‘separatists’. Yet even when you look at the full context of his speech, he does link the above part to the ‘occupation’ of Lugansk and Donetsk, and understands that this is part of a war for the minds of the people. Knowing what Unicef and other human rights groups have admitted on the knowing and/or deliberate attacks on civilians in the Donbas republics (see here, on the toll on children, and the reports on Ukrainian attacks on civilians, as well as their use of cluster bombs and ‘flechettes’, anti-personnel weapons, in civilian areas! Even the NYT admits this!), it is hard to ignore the direct and unnecessary involvement of the Ukrainian forces in that reality of children in basements. And whose children? Not BOTH ‘our and their children’, but only THEIRS. Spin that however you want, this was a very bad statement.
You will find claims like this: ‘Russia Has Killed Ukrainian Civilians Using "Fléchettes" – A Brutal WWI Technology’, from this header from iflscience.com, stating that it was Russia who killed those Ukrainian civilians in Bucha. But when you look at where the bodies come from that had those flechettes, you see they came from a mass grave that was dug during the fighting, when Russians were already in Bucha/Irpin. The Russian army would not have used such weapons on their own territory, at the front.
Amnesty is aware, and had the courage to speak up against the way the Ukrainian army tries to hide military hardware and troops inside of civilian houses or complexes in a report titled ‘Ukraine: Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians’. They point at the fact that “military bases set up in residential areas including schools and hospitals; [and] attacks launched from populated civilian areas”. They are still quick to add: “Such violations in no way justify Russia’s indiscriminate attacks, which have killed and injured countless civilians”. But it does beg the question: are attacks at Ukrainian military targets, when hidden in or behind or among civilian infrastructure, really ‘indiscriminate’?
From that report: “We have documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General. “Being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law.”
Note also that this is not to justify any use of cluster munition by Russian forces, or attacks on civilian areas, without military justification, when and where that happened. Sadly, there are too many stories where Russians were falsely blamed for attacks to be able to trust new stories about alleged Russian crimes, such as when anti-aircraft missiles missed incoming Russian missiles, or malfunctioned, and came down within civilian areas: instead of accepting responsibility for placing their own anti-aircraft batteries squarely within or very close to civilian areas (as opposed to less densely populated areas outside cities, towards the path of incoming missiles), they hide their own failure, and blame Russians. This was the reason of the anger towards Oleksiy Arestovych, when he dared to puncture one of those false PR stories. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a fairy-tale that had a very precise moral and lesson, that our society has forgotten when it replaced the old fairy-tales with the super-hero tales increasingly pushing ‘modern’ lessons.
The main reason for bringing this up, is the constant attacks by Ukrainian forces (often with embedded soldiers from the Neo-Nazi battalions) on civilian areas, since 2014.
This is one important aspect to keep in mind: targeted violence against non-Ukrainian speaking minorities during and after 2014, even civilians.
On Feb 23, 2014, the very next day after the ouster of President-re-elect Yanukovych, the Ukrainian parliament (at this point in control by the opposition party, with only 73% of the elected members present), votes to repeal the minority language laws (the 2012 law ‘On the principles of the State language’ granted regional language status to Russian and other minority languages within Ukraine), that allowed the use of such minority languages in courts, schools and other government interactions in those regions where that language was spoken by more than 10% of the population. The new acting president, Turchynov, pressured by the West who deemed that too much too soon to survive public opinion, vetoed that bill, but the Ukrainian Supreme Court in 2018 ultimately struck down the 2012 law, stripping the language protections for the minorities. Interestingly, a new law voted on in 2019, aimed to make Ukrainian the state language within Ukraine, across over 30 different spheres of public life. It gave some room for the official languages in the EU and minority languages, but it explicitly excluded Russian and Belarusian. Oh, and Yiddish… But of course, there are no Nazi’s or Neo-Nazi’s in Ukraine!
This violence targeting Russians and Russian speaking Ukrainians, and the state action taken to oppress Russian and Russians, were clear signs as to where this was heading. Remember, back then, everyone knew there was a serious Neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine, even if the government tried to start the obfuscation already in 2014, as this NewsWeek article shows, titled ‘Behind Russia's 'Neo-Nazi' Propaganda Campaign in Ukraine’. It wrote: “The Russian government’s assertions that Ukraine is falling into the hands of violent and widespread neo-Nazi thugs is not just an exaggeration, but entirely baseless, according to observers in Kiev.” Yet even the US Congress openly condemned such antisemitic presence in Poland and Ukraine, just a few years later, and news media all over Europe and the US openly warned about this reality, as well (here, here, here, you get the gist) .
In 2006 President Putin already warned against neo-Nazism in Russia itself, and again in 2014, and it was in 2022 one of the 3 main stated goals for his Special Military Operation: the ‘denazification’ of Ukraine. I chronicled it before on my Substack, how even pro-Western media, otherwise in unison denying a Neo-Nazi presence in Ukraine, linking it to ‘Russian disinformation and fake news’, still can’t help but slip up, when they try to film, for example, a heroic shot of a young boy in fatigues and a wooden rifle saluting a passing convoy of armored trucks on the way to fight the Russians: the background shows 2 young girls, but their salute is not the normal military salute….
(For the video, see this link to Facebook)
If children openly make such salute, you know there is a much wider culture that they are copying from…
This type of Nazi violence and hatred has only gotten worse. There are repeated reports of how the Ukrainian regime is now forcing men into a draft, but focusing heavily on areas with minority groups, such as the ethnic Romanians living in the Chernivtsi region, or ethnic Hungarians in the Transcarpathian region of the country, and sending them to the hottest areas of the front. I could not find independent confirmation, besides mostly pro-Russian Telegram posts or an article from RT (and another Asian one, which likely got it from the same sources I had seen).
Yet when looking at Hungarian media, I found this report from Media outlet Pesti Sracok: “Mi Hazánk: "de-Hungarianization" has reached a higher speed than ever before in Ukraine”
And it details:
“As we reported, there has not been such a mobilization in Transcarpathia since the war broke out, they say. According to estimates, hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and police have taken Transcarpathia by surprise in recent days. They take a census, hand out invitations, and collect them: on the street, in the market, on the bus, at the kindergarten, in press shops. Even in the gypsy settlements. And they are already entering the houses. Rumor has it that the task is to recruit ten thousand people from an area far from the noise of war. They are forming a new brigade - they say, after the largest brigade of professional, trained soldiers, also known as the Münkacsi 128, suffered a huge loss at Szoledar. The occupation of the settlement in eastern Ukraine was announced by the Russians on January 13.”
Look at the reaction of pro-Ukrainian people, when confronted with this plea by Victor Orban to protect minority rights:
The increased attacks on gypsy’s (Roma), is also reflected in this report by the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), that stated “Over the course of 2018, attacks on Roma in Ukraine have escalated dramatically.”
And another 2018 report stated “Three anti-Roma pogroms within a month mark a worrying escalation of racist violence by neo-fascist militias in Ukraine, and evidence of official collusion is a deeply sinister added element.”
Then you have things like this:
Larisa Nitsoy is not unknown. She wrote the in Ukraine famous children’s book ‘Invincible Ants’, a brightly colored book about an ‘invincible ant’. The book is meant for children ages five and up. It’s about a small ant colony, that gets attacked by a neighboring colony, that had earlier sworn fraternal affection. Yet the little ants unite, defeat the invading insects, and drive them off their land.
“Grandfather, let’s take away the weapons from the ants. Why should children learn about such things? We are a peaceful people. Why should they shoot?”
“When I was young”, the old ant said, “we were attacked by enemies”.
“What enemies grandfather? When was this?”
“Ordinary enemies! Ant lions. They were our neighbours, and always looked upon us with envy, and eventually got up and attacked us.”
– Excerpt From Larisa Nitsoy’s ‘Invisible Ants’
The little ants learn to shoot, and the main character, a toddler, always has a machine gun with him, as enemies are always close by… Filling little children with this kind of language and imagery is very dangerous, as they will, black and white, as children do, divide the world in ‘good people’ and ‘the enemy’, who is to be forcibly driven away. This is not unique, either, there are many such examples of ‘children’s books, see this article by Sputnik.
Another report about her shows the following:
Political talk show star Larisa Nitsoy continues to amaze. In her opinion, the language law works poorly. Its norms apply only to professional life, while in private, many continue to speak Russian, and some are frankly burdened by Ukrainian. New provisions are needed, according to which those who "curse the language on the streets" will be punished, whatever that means.
"It (the law - approx.) regulates linguistic relations and the attitude towards the language only of officials and only at work: a seller, a doctor, an official, etc. And if some scoundrel on the street curses or humiliates the Ukrainian language, such people will the law is not provided for, because he is not at work. I appealed publicly to our deputies already of this convocation to correct this flaw and submit an additional bill (amendment), which would contain a line that public trampling of the language or public desecration of the language is punishable by law, " - spoke out Nitsa in an interview with Segodnya.
Extremist language policies, up to and including forbidding people to speak anything but Ukrainian in public or in private. Nazi to the core…
And it only gets worse...
Take a look at this video, less than 4 minutes long. This has been going on, in various forms, for years now. The damage done to these children, many now young-adults, is enormous. How do you reach true peace, when young hearts and minds are infected like this?
It gets harder and harder to disagree with Putin on this point, that there is a serious problem with Nazis in Ukraine…
For many of the older people in Ukraine, hearing talk about Stepan Bandera, Neo-Nazis, and other such things, is bringing back haunting memories from WWII, and has the same effect on them as seeing a cross being burned by white-hooded people has on African Americans. This, for them, is NOT just an old story from some old history book about something that happened on the other side of the world. They all have stories about loved ones they lost, often in the most cruel of ways, to either the invading Nazis or at the hands of Ukrainian collaborators, such as Bandera and the Waffen SS division Galicia.
(Recruitment poster for the '14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician)': Stand up to fight Bolshevism in the ranks of the Galician division.)
(And a poster from the Soviets, already from 1962… What did they see back then?)
This targeting of children at such a young age, has dire impact. It sows the seeds of hatred, and immediately normalizes is. Those kids are scarred for life! And then you hear reports about children manning checkpoints at roads, with toy guns, and flags of Right Sector and Azov, stopping cars, checking the Ukrainian purity of the passengers, and knowing perfectly all the slogans and the responses to the slogans. This is scare stuff, well beyond mere play. Perhaps a coping tactic, as well, but the influence you see of the constant hatred and propaganda, aimed with such vitriol and abject violence against dehumanized ‘orcs’ and such, cannot be denied, either.
This article by Sky News talks about one such checkpoint, ‘manned’ by 3 young boys. “Nazar [10 years old] confided in us that passing cars are stopped and drivers are asked to say two Ukrainian words - words that are difficult to say in Russian - to determine if they can pass. The words are 'Ukrazaliznitsa' and 'Palianitsa'. One is a Ukrainian railway company, the other a type of Ukrainian bread.”
On Telegram and other social media, this type of stories is coming up more and more. From a pro-Russian perspective, that becomes a post like this:
Is it just play? In part, I am sure. But also much more, and something that goes back to way before the start of the invasion in 2022. Ukrainian children have been sent to ‘military camps’, often run by the likes of Azov and Right Sector, where actual weapon training (and a hefty dose of ‘pure doctrine’), was on the schedule. What has been done to this generation?
Then, of course, there is the matter of the Russian Naval Base in Crimea. Putin made it very clear that he would not allow that base to fall into NATO hands.
In his speech on March 18, 2014, President Putin laid out his arguments on why he had annexed Crimea. He talked about the violence against Russians, the Neo-Nazis, the ‘Russophobes’.
“However, those who stood behind the latest events in Ukraine had a different agenda: they were preparing yet another government takeover; they wanted to seize power and would stop short of nothing. They resorted to terror, murder and riots. Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites executed this coup. They continue to set the tone in Ukraine to this day.
The new so-called authorities began by introducing a draft law to revise the language policy, which was a direct infringement on the rights of ethnic minorities. However, they were immediately ‘disciplined’ by the foreign sponsors of these so-called politicians. One has to admit that the mentors of these current authorities are smart and know well what such attempts to build a purely Ukrainian state may lead to. The draft law was set aside, but clearly reserved for the future. Hardly any mention is made of this attempt now, probably on the presumption that people have a short memory.”
Putin then continues:
“Those who opposed the coup were immediately threatened with repression. Naturally, the first in line here was Crimea, the Russian-speaking Crimea. In view of this, the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol turned to Russia for help in defending their rights and lives.”
That is only partially true. Yes, the Ukrainians who opposed the coup were threatened (and attacked, and repressed), but no, they did not ‘turn to Russia for help’. Russia staged their own little coup, sending members of their own military to Crimea, blocking the bases of the Ukrainian army, and setting up checkpoints throughout. Those soldiers, back then Russia denied direct involvement but later admitted those troops were theirs, had no patches or identification, but sported the latest Russian model gear. They were called the ‘little green men’ or the ‘polite people’, as the Russians called them.
(Armed men without insignia (so-called "little green men") at Simferopol Airport, 28 February 2014. Notice how the man on the right has no magazine in his rifle.)
During the night of February 27-28, 2014, those little green men took over the buildings of the Supreme Council of Crimea, the Council of Ministers of Crimea, and other government buildings. Under that protection, the Crimean parliament (which had a semi-autonomous statute in Ukraine) convened, deposed of Prime Minister Anatolii Mohyliov and replaced him with pro-Russian Sergey Aksyonov. They then called for a referendum on April 16 on the status of Crimea, where the people in Crimea voted to become part with Russia again. On 18 March 2014, Russia then formally incorporated Crimea as the Republic of Crimea into Russia. Keep in mind that Crimea was only added to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine on Feb 19, 1954, within the context of the USSR, for ease of administration. This area was never part of Ukraine before, but was developed by Russia. (As were the donbas areas of Donetsk and Lugansk, here built up in that waterless area by British industrialists, where this was before Tatar land).
Putin compared Crimea with Kosovo, which was, as he said: “a precedent our western colleagues created with their own hands in a very similar situation, when they agreed that the unilateral separation of Kosovo from Serbia, exactly what Crimea is doing now, was legitimate and did not require any permission from the country’s central authorities. Pursuant to Article 2, Chapter 1 of the United Nations Charter, the UN International Court agreed with this approach and made the following comment in its ruling of July 22, 2010, and I quote: “No general prohibition may be inferred from the practice of the Security Council with regard to declarations of independence,” and “General international law contains no prohibition on declarations of independence.” Crystal clear, as they say.” And he doubles down: “Declarations of independence may, and often do, violate domestic legislation. However, this does not make them violations of international law.” Very shrewd: he staged a coup himself within Crimea (just as the West did in Kiev), and calls for self-determination (just as the West did in Kosovo): now the West can denounce Russia, and accept they were wrong, or they are forced to accept the precedent they themselves had set.
A very important detail to note: This take-over went incredibly smoothly. No shots were fired, the police and Ukrainian army cooperated very willingly, and then there is that detail of the little green man in that picture with a rifle without a magazine: from the beginning, this was not intended as a violent takeover, but as ‘assistance’ to a Crimean population that actually wanted such help.
And finally, Putin referred to the NATO issue, and what that means for a key naval base of Russia:
“Let me note too that we have already heard declarations from Kiev about Ukraine soon joining NATO. What would this have meant for Crimea and Sevastopol in the future? It would have meant that NATO’s navy would be right there in this city of Russia’s military glory, and this would create not an illusory but a perfectly real threat to the whole of southern Russia.”
Remember, Crimea was added to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine by Khrushchev, and only in 1954! It was Russian since the Czars conquered/liberated it from the Ottomans in the 17th century, and indeed houses the only warm-water sea port Russia has, also a very important naval base. Russia has a very strong claim here, and it makes perfect sense, geopolitically and strategically.
People in Lugansk and Donetsk took note, however, and asked for the same protection, and Russia then similarly sent help in the form of weapons and fighters, none of it in any official capacity at first, as both Oblasts declared independence.
The first few weeks were chaotic. The new government in Kiev was still trying to consolidate control, and was not recognized in most of the Eastern oblasts. In order to regain control, they took a page from the Western playbook, and branded the Ukrainian citizens who protested the ouster of Yanukovych as ‘terrorists’, which would allow them basically free reign to quell this protest. The intent was clear: no negotiations, but ‘destruction’ of those who oppose Kiev. There are several reports of Ukrainian forces who stood down in confrontations, or who flipped sides, surrendering their equipment and weapons to the ‘rebels’. In an article by BBC, an army officer was quoted as saying “he had not "come to fight" and would never obey orders to shoot his "own people".” Orders to shoot his own people? He would not say such if that was not an issue.
“Ukraine's "anti-terrorist" operation is looking more and more a non-event - or worse, an outright fiasco, reports the BBC's David Stern in Donetsk.” This is April 16. Still early on. Other Media report similar things, of army units not daring to resist the civilian protestors, and the surrender of weapons and equipment.
On May 2nd, we had the burning alive of people in the Odessa Trade Unions House, by pro-Maidan forces, including the Neo-Nazi Right Sector. Things went south really quickly after this, the fire had been lit.
A Newsweek article from early 2015 reports that the Ukrainian parliament authorized officers to shoot deserters and those who refused to obey orders. Again: why was there the need to make such a decision at such a high level, if there was no real and widespread problem of army units, consisting of people from the East, who either joined the rebels, or refused to shoot at them? Or handed over equipment without any resistance?
Stepping in to prevent violence and oppression against a minority is another reason Russia had to get into this war. And against neo-Nazi elements, who from early on firmly entrenched themselves in the new Ukrainian government structures. Strangely, if you try to google any news about that, the recent hits won’t show anything but a flood of articles that purport to show how there are no neo-Nazis in Ukraine, and how that is only a Russian desinfo op... Only when you limit the results to articles from 2014, can you find what actually happened. This Channel 4 article is very clear: “In the new Ukrainian government politicians linked to the far-right have taken posts from deputy prime minister to head of defence.” It showed an interview with Associate professor at Lund University Pers Anders Rudling, an expert on Ukrainian extremists: "Two weeks ago I could never have predicted this. A neo-fascist party like Svoboda getting the deputy prime minister position is news in its own right. There are seven ministers with links to the extreme right now. It began with Svoboda getting 10 per cent of the vote in the last election, it is certainly a concern in the long run." Azov, Right Sector and the other shock troops from the Maidan revolution were simply absorbed into the regular army. Now the regime could deny their existence and power, and claim that ‘there might be some members who have such sympathies, but that is only a small part’.
No, even on this point, Russia had a good reason to step in, and put an end to this growing cancer right up on it’s own borders, and constantly directing violence towards ethnic and linguistic Russians within Ukrainian borders.
In part 3, we will look at how the Ukrainian government responded, and how things escalated.
Stay tuned!
Listening to this today on epic threads with Patrick. Thank you ArnGrimR!
Wow, this is a deep dive indeed. Criminally under read, the truth is there are few that’ll make the commitment when tweets exist. Regardless, I appreciate this study and commend you, a precious archive that will stand the test of time. Dropped a few quotes form part 1 at a recent dinner event which quieted some do the more foolish anti-Russian ranting.