OMNI
UKRAINE WAR PROVOKED
ANTHOLOGY #1
Compiled by Dick Bennett
for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
https://omnicenter.org/donate
What’s
at Stake: “He who hears one side and
judges is no judge.” Mounir Farah,
Professor, Scholar, Neighbor
CONTENTS
John Pilger. “In
Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia.” 2014.
Robert Parry.
“Who’s Telling the ‘Big Lie’ on Ukraine?” 2014.
John Mearsheimer. Video: “Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? 2015.
Oliver Stone. Video. Ukraine on Fire. 2016
Gilbert Doctorow. “A Look at Ukraine’s Dark Side.” 2016.
Anna Matrango. “Pope
Francis Says the War Provoked or Not Prevented.”
John Mearsheimer. “Blames
US for the Crisis.”
TEXTS
2014
John
Pilger. “In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia.” The Guardian (May 13, 2014). https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/ukraine-us-war-russia-john-pilger
Washington's role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime's
neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world
Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name?
Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our
indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of
hypnosis", as if the truth "never happened even while it was
happening".
Every
year the American historian William Blum publishes
his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy" which shows
that, since 1945, the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many
of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30
countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and
biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.
In many
cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, let alone
criminality, is little acknowledged in the west, despite the presence of the
world's most advanced communications and nominally most free journalism. That
the most numerous victims of terrorism – "our" terrorism – are
Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured
as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is
suppressed. In April the US state department noted that, following Nato's
campaign in 2011, "Libya has become a terrorist safe haven".
The name
of "our" enemy has changed over the years, from communism to
Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of western power and
occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory, or merely offering
an alternative to US domination. The leaders of these obstructive nations are
usually violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran, Arbenz
in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they
are murdered like Patrice Lumumba in
the Democratic Republic of Congo. All are subjected to a western media campaign
of vilification – think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, now Vladimir Putin.
Washington's
role in Ukraine is
different only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since
the Reagan years, the US is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern
Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last "buffer
state" bordering Russia – Ukraine – is being torn apart by fascist forces
unleashed by the US and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-Nazis in a
country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.
Having
masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government
in Kiev, Washington's planned seizure of Russia's historic, legitimate
warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as
they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a
century.
But
Nato's military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated
attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to
their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role will justify a Nato-run
guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.
Instead,
Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an accommodation with Washington
and the EU, by withdrawing Russian troops from the Ukrainian border and urging
ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekend's provocative referendum. These
Russian-speaking and bilingual people – a third of Ukraine's population – have
long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country's ethnic
diversity and is both autonomous of Kiev and independent of Moscow. Most are
neither "separatists" nor "rebels", as the western media
calls them, but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.
Like the
ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park –
run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of
"special units" from the CIA and FBI setting up a "security
structure" that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February
coup. Watch the videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in
Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing
41 people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by.
A doctor
described trying to rescue people, "but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian
Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and
other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate. What occurred yesterday
didn't even take place during the fascist occupation in my town in world war
two. I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent." [see footnote]
Russian-speaking
Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of
Russian troops from the border, the Kiev junta's defence secretary, Andriy
Parubiy – a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party – boasted that attacks
on "insurgents" would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the
west has inverted this to Moscow "trying to orchestrate conflict and provocation",
according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama's grotesque
congratulations to the coup junta on its "remarkable restraint"
after the Odessa massacre. The junta, says Obama, is "duly elected".
As Henry Kissinger once said:
"It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to
be true."
In the US
media the Odessa atrocity has been played down as "murky" and a
"tragedy" in which "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) attacked
"separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a
federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal damned the victims –
"Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels,
Government Says". Propaganda in Germany has been pure
cold war, with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning its readers of
Russia's "undeclared war". For the Germans, it is a poignant irony
that Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century
Europe.
A popular
truism is that "the world changed" following 9/11. But what has
changed? According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a
silent coup has taken place in Washington and rampant militarism now rules. The
Pentagon currently runs "special operations" – secret wars – in 124
countries. At home, rising poverty and a loss of liberty are the historic
corollary of a perpetual war state. Add the risk of nuclear war, and the
question is: why do we tolerate this? www.johnpilger.com
Robert Parry.
“Who’s Telling the ‘Big Lie’ on Ukraine?” Consortium News (September 2, 2014).
https://consortiumnews.com/2014/09/02/whos-telling-the-big-lie-on-ukraine/
Exclusive: Official
Washington draws the Ukraine crisis in black-and-white
colors with Russian President Putin the bad guy and the U.S.-backed
leaders in Kiev the good guys. But the reality is much more nuanced, with the
American people consistently misled on key facts, writes Robert Parry.
If you wonder how the world could stumble into World War III
much as it did into World War I a century ago all you need to do is look at the
madness that has enveloped virtually the entire U.S. political/media structure
over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats vs. black hats took hold
early and has proved impervious to facts or reason.
The original lie behind Official Washington’s latest “group
think” was that Russian President Vladimir Putin instigated the crisis in
Ukraine as part of some diabolical scheme to reclaim the territory of the
defunct Soviet Union, including Estonia and other Baltic states. Though not a
shred of U.S. intelligence supported this scenario, all the “smart people” of
Washington just “knew” it to be true.
Yet, the once-acknowledged though soon forgotten reality
was that the crisis was provoked last year by the European Union proposing an
association agreement with Ukraine while U.S. neocons and other hawkish
politicos and pundits envisioned using the Ukraine gambit as a way to undermine
Putin inside Russia.
The plan was even announced by U.S. neocons such as National
Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman who took to the op-ed page of
the Washington Post nearly a year ago to call Ukraine “the biggest prize” and
an important interim step toward eventually toppling Putin in Russia.
Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress, wrote:
“Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of
Russian imperialism that Putin represents. Russians, too, face a choice,
and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but
within Russia itself.”
In other words, from the start, Putin was the target of the
Ukraine initiative, not the instigator. But even if you choose to ignore
Gershman’s clear intent, you would have to concoct a bizarre conspiracy theory
to support the conventional wisdom about Putin’s grand plan.
To believe that Putin was indeed the mastermind of the
crisis, you would have to think that he somehow arranged to have the
EU offer the association agreement last year, then got the International
Monetary Fund to attach such draconian “reforms” that Ukrainian President
Viktor Yanukovych backed away from the deal.
Then, Putin had to organize mass demonstrations at Kiev’s Maidan
square against Yanukovych while readying neo-Nazi militias to act as the muscle
to finally overthrow the elected president and replace him with a regime
dominated by far-right Ukrainian nationalists and U.S.-favored technocrats.
Next, Putin had to get the new government to take provocative actions against
ethnic Russians in the east, including threatening to outlaw Russian as an
official language.
And throw into this storyline that Putin all the while was
acting like he was trying to help Yanukovych defuse the crisis and even
acquiesced to Yanukovych agreeing on Feb. 21 to accept an agreement brokered by
three European countries calling for early Ukrainian elections that could vote
him out of office. Instead, Putin was supposedly ordering neo-Nazi
militias to oust Yanukovych in a Feb. 22 putsch, all the better to create the
current crisis.
While such a fanciful scenario would make the most extreme
conspiracy theorist blush, this narrative was embraced by prominent U.S.
politicians, including ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and
“journalists” from the New York Times to CNN. They all agreed that
Putin was a madman on a mission of unchecked aggression against his neighbors
with the goal of reconstituting the Russian Empire. Clinton even compared
him to Adolf Hitler.
This founding false narrative was then embroidered by a
consistent pattern of distorted U.S. reporting as the crisis unfolded.
Indeed, for the past eight months, we have seen arguably the most one-sided
coverage of a major international crisis in memory, although there were other
crazed MSM stampedes, such as Iraq’s non-existent WMD in 2002-03, Iran’s
supposed nuclear bomb project for most of the past decade, Libya’s
“humanitarian crisis” of 2011, and Syria’s sarin gas attack in 2013.
But the hysteria over Ukraine with U.S. officials and
editorialists now trying to rally a NATO military response to Russia’s alleged
“invasion” of Ukraine raises the prospect of a nuclear confrontation that could
end all life on the planet.
The ‘Big Lie’ of the ‘Big Lie’
This madness reached new heights with a Sept. 1 editorial in
the neoconservative Washington Post, which led many of the earlier
misguided stampedes and was famously wrong in asserting that Iraq’s concealment of WMD was a “flat
fact.” In its new editorial, the Post reprised many of the key
elements of the false Ukraine narrative in the Orwellian context of accusing
Russia of deceiving its own people.
The “through-the-looking-glass” quality of the Post’s editorial
was to tell the “Big Lie” while accusing Putin of telling the “Big Lie.” The
editorial began with the original myth about the aggression waged by Putin
whose “bitter resentment at the Soviet empire’s collapse metastasized into
seething Russian nationalism.
“In prosecuting his widening war in Ukraine, he has also
resurrected the tyranny of the Big Lie, using state-controlled media to twist
the truth so grotesquely that most Russians are in the dark, or profoundly
misinformed, about events in their neighbor to the west.
“In support of those Russian-sponsored militias in eastern
Ukraine, now backed by growing ranks of Russian troops and weapons, Moscow has
created a fantasy that plays on Russian victimization. By this rendering, the
forces backing Ukraine’s government in Kiev are fascists and neo-Nazis, a
portrayal that Mr. Putin personally advanced on
Friday, when he likened the Ukrainian army’s attempts to regain its own
territory to the Nazi siege of Leningrad in World War II, an appeal meant to
inflame Russians’ already overheated nationalist emotions.”
The Post continued: “Against the extensive propaganda
instruments available to Mr. Putin’s authoritarian regime, the West can promote
a fair and factual version of events, but there’s little it can do to make
ordinary Russians believe it. Even in a country with relatively unfettered
access to the Internet, the monopolistic power of state-controlled media is a
potent weapon in the hands of a tyrant.
“Mr. Putin’s Big Lie shows why it is important to support a free
press where it still exists and outlets like Radio Free Europe that bring the
truth to people who need it.”
Yet the truth is that the U.S. mainstream news media’s
distortion of the Ukraine crisis is something that a real
totalitarian could only dream about. Virtually absent from major U.S. news
outlets across the political spectrum has been any significant effort to tell
the other side of the story or to point out the many times when the West’s
“fair and factual version of events” has been false or deceptive, starting with
the issue of who started this crisis.
Blinded to Neo-Nazis
In another example, the Post and other mainstream U.S. outlets
have ridiculed the idea that neo-Nazis played any significant role in
the putsch that ousted Yanukovych on Feb. 22 or in the Kiev regime’s
brutal offensive against the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine.
However, occasionally, the inconvenient truth has slipped
through. For instance, shortly after the February coup, the BBC described how the neo-Nazis
spearheaded the violent seizure of government buildings to drive Yanukovych
from power and were then rewarded with four ministries in the regime that was
cobbled together in the coup’s aftermath.
When ethnic Russians in the south and east resisted the edicts
from the new powers in Kiev, some neo-Nazi militias were incorporated into the
National Guard and dispatched to the front lines as storm troopers eager to
fight and kill people whom some considered “Untermenschen” or sub-human.
Even the New York Times, which has been among the most egregious
violators of journalistic ethics in covering the Ukraine crisis, took note of
Kiev’s neo-Nazi militias carrying Nazi banners while leading attacks on
eastern cities albeit with this embarrassing reality consigned to the last
three paragraphs of a long Times story on a different topic. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Discovers Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis at
War.”]
Later, the conservative London Telegraph wrote a much more
detailed story about how the Kiev regime had consciously recruited these
dedicated storm troopers, who carried the Wolfsangel symbol favored by
Hitler’s SS, to lead street fighting in eastern cities that were first softened
up by army artillery. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ignoring Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Storm
Troopers.”]
You might think that unleashing Nazi storm troopers on a
European population for the first time since World War II would be a big story
given how much coverage is given to far less significant eruptions of neo-Nazi
sentiment in Europe but this ugly reality in Ukraine disappeared quickly into
the U.S. media’s memory hole. It didn’t fit the preferred good guy/bad guy
narrative, with the Kiev regime the good guys and Putin the bad guy.
Now, the Washington Post has gone a step further dismissing
Putin’s reference to the nasty violence inflicted by Kiev’s neo-Nazi battalions
as part of Putin’s “Big Lie.” The Post is telling its readers that any
reference to these neo-Nazis is just a “fantasy.”
Even more disturbing, the mainstream U.S. news media and
Washington’s entire political class continue to ignore the Kiev government’s
killing of thousands of ethnic Russians, including children and other
non-combatants. The “responsibility to protect” crowd has suddenly lost its
voice. Or, all the deaths are somehow blamed on Putin for supposedly having
provoked the Ukraine crisis in the first place.
A Mysterious ‘Invasion’
And now there’s the curious case of Russia’s alleged “invasion”
of Ukraine, another alarmist claim trumpeted by the Kiev regime and echoed by
NATO hardliners and the MSM.
While I’m told that Russia did provide some light weapons to the
rebels early in the struggle so they could defend themselves and their
territory and a number of Russian nationalists have crossed the border to
join the fight the claims of an overt “invasion” with tanks, artillery and
truck convoys have been backed up by scant intelligence.
One former U.S. intelligence official who has examined the
evidence said the intelligence to support the claims of a significant Russian
invasion amounted to “virtually nothing.” Instead, it appears that the ethnic
Russian rebels may have evolved into a more effective fighting force than many
in the West thought. They are, after all, fighting on their home turf for their
futures.
Concerned about the latest rush to judgment about the
“invasion,” the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of
former U.S. intelligence officials and analysts, took the unusual step of
sending a memo to
German Chancellor Angela Merkel warning her of a possible replay of the false
claims that led to the Iraq War.
“You need to know,” the group wrote, “that accusations of a
major Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable
intelligence. Rather, the ‘intelligence’ seems to be of the same dubious,
politically ‘fixed’ kind used 12 years ago to ‘justify’ the U.S.-led attack on
Iraq.”
But these doubts and concerns are not reflected in the Post’s
editorial or other MSM accounts of the dangerous Ukraine crisis. Indeed,
Americans who rely on these powerful news outlets for their information are as
sheltered from reality as anyone living in a totalitarian society.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke
many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the
1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either
in print here or
as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a
limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and
its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy
includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this
offer, click here.
2015
UnCommon
Core: “The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis,” 2015 Lecture. University of Chicago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
Video: “Why is Ukraine the West's Fault?
Featuring Professor John Mearsheimer.”
John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison
Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and Co-director of the
Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, assesses
the causes of the present Ukraine crisis, the best way to end it, and its
consequences for all of the main actors. A key assumption is that in order to
come up with the optimum plan for ending the crisis, it is essential to know
what caused the crisis. Regarding the all-important question of causes, the key
issue is whether Russia or the West bears primary responsibility.
2016
Documentary Video: Oliver Stone.
Ukraine on Fire. 2016.
Ukraine. Across its
eastern border is Russia and to its west-Europe. For centuries, it has been at the center of a tug-of-war
between powers seeking to control its rich lands and access to the Black Sea. 2014's
Maidan Massacre triggered a bloody uprising that ousted president Viktor
Yanukovych and painted Russia as the perpetrator by Western media. But was it?
"Ukraine on Fire" by Igor Lopatonok provides a historical perspective
for the deep divisions in the region which lead to the 2004 Orange Revolution,
2014 uprisings, and the violent overthrow of democratically elected
Yanukovych. Covered by Western media as a people's revolution, it was in
fact a coup d'état scripted and staged by nationalist groups and the U.S. State
Department. Investigative journalist Robert Parry reveals how U.S.-funded
political NGOs and media companies have emerged since the 80s replacing the CIA
in promoting America's geopolitical agenda abroad.
Watch
Ukraine on Fire (2016).
Amazon.com https://www.amazon.com ›
Ukraine-Fire-Oliver-Stone
Oliver Stone executive-produced
this alternative perspective on Ukraine's history. Features
interviews with Russian President Vladimir Putin, ...
Ukraine on fire - Oliver Stone
YouTube · Silent Eterne 142.6K+ views · 2 years
ago????
Ukraine on Fire (2016)
IMDb https://www.imdb.com ›
title
Ukraine on Fire: Directed by Igor
Lopatonok. With Oliver Stone, Vladimir ... It really
is a fantastic documentary about the events that happened
in Ukraine.
Gilbert Doctorow. “A Look at
Ukraine’s Dark Side.” Consortium News
(February 7, 2016). https://consortiumnews.com/2016/02/07/a-look-at-ukraines-dark-side/
Exclusive: Americans have been carefully shielded from the ugly underbelly
of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising in 2014 that overthrew the elected president and
installed a U.S.-backed, fiercely anti-Russian regime which has unleashed armed
neo-Nazis. But a French documentary has dared to expose this grim reality, as
Gilbert Doctorow describes.
A new French documentary depicts a long-denied truth that
Ukraine is in the grip of extreme right-wing nationalists who seek to impose
what the British scholar Richard Sakwa has called a monist view of nationhood,
one which does not accept minorities or heterogeneity. Rainbow politics is not
what the Maidan uprising was all about.
Like the Communism which held power in Ukraine before 1992, this
new extreme nationalism can impose its will only by violence or the threat of
violence. It is by definition the antithesis of European values of tolerance
and multiculturalism.
This intimidation is what Paul Moreira’s Canal+
documentary, “Ukraine: The Masks of Revolution,” shows us graphically,
frame by frame. That this repression happens to take place under an ideology
that incorporates elements of fascism if not Nazism is incidental but not
decisive to the power of the documentary. [Click here for the documentary
in French; here for a segment with English subtitles.] [Not available. –D]
But what Moreira shows as surprising as the contents may be to a
Western audience actually represents very basic journalism, reporting on events
that are quite well known inside Ukraine even as this dark underbelly of the
Maidan “revolution” has been hidden from most Europeans and Americans.
Moreira is a professional documentary filmmaker, not an area
specialist. He has done films in many countries including Iraq, Israel, Burma
and Argentina. He says at the start of this Canal+ documentary that he was
drawn to the subject of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising because he “felt sympathy for
these people who demonstrated day after day on the streets in winter
conditions.
“They wanted to join Europe, to move away from Russia. They
wanted the corrupt President [Viktor] Yanukovych to leave. They hoped for more
justice, fewer inequalities. But I was struck by one thing the images of the
American diplomat [Victoria] Nuland on Maidan distributing bread. The Free
World, its cameras, sided with the insurgents.”
There were also the discordant images of neo-Nazi symbols and
flags. To assess the post-Maidan Ukraine, Moreira decided to go see for
himself.
The documentary draws upon his interviews with leaders of the
rightist paramilitary groups and extreme nationalist politicians as well as
other Ukrainians on both sides of the conflict. He shows the attacks on police
by Maidan street fighters before Yanukovych’s overthrow on Feb. 22,
2014, and
the May 2, 2014 massacre in Odessa of 46 Russian-speaking demonstrators who
opposed the new regime.
He shows a violent protest by nationalist extremists outside the
parliament in Kiev and the recent blockade by the Right Sektor militias
stopping food and other goods crossing into Crimea, which voted
overwhelmingly after the 2014 putsch to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia. The
Crimean blockade was in violation of Ukrainian government policy but was not
stopped by the Kiev authorities.
Secretary Nuland’s Cookies
During the course of the film, Moreira intersperses footage of the
controlling hand of U.S. officials both before and after the February 2014
coup. Twice we see Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Nuland
handing out cookies on the Maidan to encourage the demonstrators in December
2013. We see U.S politicians including Sen. John McCain with neo-Nazi Svoboda
party leader Oleh Tyahnybok on a podium in Maidan.
In another scene, Nuland testifies before Congress in May 2014
and is asked by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, if she knew there were
neo-Nazis in the street violence that led to Yanukovych’s removal. When Nuland
was evasive, Rohrabacher asked whether besides the popular Maidan images of
mothers and grandmothers with flowers there were very dangerous street fighters
and neo-Nazi groups.
Nuland responded, “Almost every color of Ukraine was represented
including some ugly colors.” Rohrabacher said he took that as a “yes.”
In September 2015, Moreira covered the annual Yalta European
Strategy Meeting in Kiev and tried to get impromptu interviews with prominent
Americans, such as Nuland and former CIA boss General David Petraeus, the
author of the 2007 “surge” in Iraq and currently a strong advocate for sending
offensive weapons to Ukraine.
Moreira succeeded only in getting a sound bite from retired Gen.
Stanley McChrystal, who said the task of the day was to improve the militias
and strengthen their ties to the Ukrainian government. Moreira asked McChrystal
if he knew that the paramilitaries had attacked the Verhovna Rada (Ukraine’s
parliament) the week before. With a dismissive smile before he made his
getaway, McChrystal responded, “That’s a problem”
Though Moreira’s documentary presented material that was undeniably
true much from the public record it was revelatory for many Westerners familiar
only with the pro-Maidan images and commentary carried by the West’s mainstream
news media. Because the documentary clashed with this “conventional wisdom,” it
immediately became “controversial.”
On Jan. 31, one day before the documentary appeared on Canal+,
Le Monde issued a stern rebuke under the title “Paul Moreira gives us a
distorted vision of the Ukrainian conflict.”
Benoit Vitkine, the newspaper’s reporter for Ukraine, wrote that
the extreme nationalists were only one part of the armed uprising and accused
Moreira of focusing too much on their role in the Maidan and its aftermath.
Vitkine noted that the Right’s “electoral results are laughable” and denied
that they are “the new masters of the Ukrainian streets.”
Key Nazi Role
But there is little doubt that the neo-Nazis and other extreme
nationalists played a key role in escalating the Maidan protests into the
violent uprising that drove Yanukovych from office. For instance, Andriy
Parubiy, the commandant of the Maidan “self-defense forces,” was a well-known
neo-Nazi, who founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991. The party
blended radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Parubiy also
formed a paramilitary spinoff, the Patriots of Ukraine, and defended the
awarding of the title, “Hero of Ukraine,” to World War II Nazi collaborator
Stepan Bandera, whose own paramilitary forces exterminated thousands of Jews
and Poles in pursuit of a racially pure Ukraine.
After the Feb. 22 coup, Parubiy was one of four far-right
Ukrainian nationalists given control of a ministry, in his case, national
security, and he integrated many of the right-wing militias into the National
Guard, sending neo-Nazi units such as the Azov Battalion into eastern Ukraine
to crush ethnic Russians who resisted the new order in Kiev.
Moreira’s documentary also shows footage of right-wing
paramilitaries demonstrating aggressively in the streets outside the parliament
and scenes of their illegal blockade at the Crimean border, where they
literally did control the streets and roads.
Le Monde’s other argument about how poorly the rightists have
fared in elections misses the point about the significance of the Right’s
large-scale disruptions and violent attacks thus intimidating the parliament
and the government. But that reality is downplayed in the West.
Vitkine also accuses Moreira of omitting “the Russian
aggression” against Ukraine, which Vitkine says explains the radicalization of
part of the Ukrainian population and the decision of Kiev to arm the battalions
of right-wing volunteers. But the neo-Nazi role in the Maidan protests predated
any Russian intervention in support of the embattled ethnic Russians in eastern
Ukraine and Crimea. Russian President Vladimir Putin held a key strategy
session on how to respond to the Maidan putsch on Feb. 23, 2014, the day after
the coup. Putin and Russia were responding to what they saw as a U.S.-backed
overthrow of a democratically elected government on their border; they didn’t
instigate the crisis.
Similarly Vitkine rejects Moreira’s charge of U.S. complicity in
the rise of the neo-Nazis and Moreira’s acceptance of the Crimean referendum in
which 96 percent of the voters favored leaving Ukraine and rejoining Russia.
But the results of that referendum have been supported by polls both before and
after the referendum, including public opinion samples organized by the U.S.
government. There can be no serious doubt that the vast majority of Crimeans
wanted out of Ukraine and saw practical benefits in rejoining Russia. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Crimeans Keep Saying No to Ukraine.”]
Bolstering Propaganda
In other words, Le Monde’s key reporter on Ukraine is attacking
Moreira from the standpoint of a narrative written in Washington that is more
propaganda than reality. In this sense, the French center left as reflected by
Le Monde is no less under the spell of neoconservative ideology than many
Democrats in the United States.
That being said, Vitkine does toss one bouquet to Moreira for
his treatment of the May 2, 2014 “events” in Odessa, the slaughter of
anti-Maidan protesters who sought safety inside the Trade Union Building, which
was then set ablaze:
“Even if he overestimates the role of Pravy [Right] Sektor and
assigns responsibility for this drama too peremptorily, the film performs a
salutary piece of work by dwelling at length on this episode from the
post-Maidan days that is often neglected.”
But Vitkine condescendingly mocks Moreira’s self-presentation as
“the white knight who is exposing past truths that have been passed over in
silence [which] just doesn’t work. This experienced documentary filmmaker has
taken up a real subject. He has chosen to ‘see for himself,’ as he tells us.
But he only saw what he wanted to see.”
Moreira’s response to Le Monde and two other critics appeared in
French on the site blogs.mediapart.fr and in English translation on the website
of newcoldwar.org. He cited the pressure from the Ukrainian authorities for
Canal+ not to air the documentary.
He also reasserted his thesis that the right-wing paramilitaries
are a great threat to Ukrainian democracy and that to deny their existence and
the danger they pose simply to avoid playing “into Russian propaganda is to
become a propagandist oneself.” Moreira accused Vitkine of “unusually violent
writing.”
After the airing of the documentary, an “Open Letter to Paul
Moreira” was published on the website of the French weekly Nouvel Observateur,
which has been described as “the French intellectuals’ parish magazine.”
Seven of the 17 journalists who signed the Open Letter work for
French state media France 24 and Radio France International. The letter starts
and ends with stinging reproaches to Moreira, but the contents in the middle
are muddled.
For instance, the letter acknowledges the reality of the central
issue raised by Moreira’s documentary: that there is a problem with
paramilitaries in Ukraine. However, like Vitkine, the authors wanted to shift
the discussion from that reality and find excuses in the war that rendered
these paramilitaries heavily armed and a danger to the country’s future, i.e.,
blaming “Russian aggression.”
Rejecting a Referendum
Like Vitkine, the authors reject the results of the Crimean
referendum, pointing to the presence of Russian troops on the peninsula. But
they themselves ignore the repeated polls and news reporting by disinterested
third parties in the past year validating the results of the 2014 referendum.
They acknowledge that the right-wing paramilitaries were a
problem but claim they were brought under control during 2015. This is a
dubious assertion given the continuing political instability in Kiev and the
apparent extremist influence on the parliament, frustrating the government’s
efforts to implement the terms of the Minsk II accords. The authors are silent
about Moreira’s footage of the rightists’ blockade at the Crimean-Ukrainian
border.
Most emphatically, the authors reject the “theory of overthrow
of the government in February 2014 by the paramilitary groups of the extreme
right.” In doing so, these journalists claiming expert knowledge of the recent
history willfully ignore the substantial evidence indicating that the Maidan
snipers who escalated the violence on Feb. 20, 2014, were rightist false-flag
provocateurs intent on enraging both the demonstrators and the government’s
Berkut police, some of whom were also targeted and killed.
The letter writers also overlook the critical role of right-wing
leader Dmitry Yarosh and his forces in shredding the European Union’s Feb. 21,
2014 agreement with Yanukovych in which the embattled president agreed to
reduced powers and new elections.
They do salute Moreira’s coverage of the Odessa massacre, but
say vaguely it was not the only incident in Ukraine that has not been
adequately investigated. And they say that the French and international press
has covered extensively the atrocities in Ukraine, which is not a credible
claim.
We might conclude that these 17 journalists have written their
Open Letter to safeguard their jobs with the French state media and their
continued travel rights to Ukraine, which is essential to their careers. But
the story does not end there.
One of the 17 signatories, Gulliver Cragg, who works for the
France24 television channel, also published a very curious article on the
Moreira documentary in other venues. His side essay was written for the Kyiv
Post and put online by the still more dubious stopfake.org, a website devoted
to the “struggle against fake information about events in Ukraine,” especially
any evidence that puts the U.S.-backed regime in a negative light.
Cragg’s essay opens and closes with harsh words for Moreira.
However, in the middle, he has harsh words for the Ukrainian authorities, whom
he blames for creating their own public relations disasters by misguided
policies, such as: “by naming a suspected neo-Nazi, Vadim Troyan, to be police
chief in Kyiv region in Autumn 2014. Or appointing the Right Sector leader
Dmytro Yarosh an official Defence Ministry adviser.
“Or allowing the Azov battalion, now integrated into the
National Guard, to use the Wolfsangel [neo-Nazi] symbol on their logo. Or
failing, as Moreira points out in his documentary, to punish any Ukrainian
nationalists for their role in the Odessa tragedy.”
Cragg acknowledges that this might lead outsiders to conclude
that the far right has too much influence in Ukraine. Moreover, he blames
directly President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk for
simply not understanding all of this and for not changing their behavior and
appointments.
And while Cragg comes back to his conclusion that Moreira is
blowing things out of proportion, he agrees that far-right groups in Ukraine
wield influence and that their weapons are cause for concern, “a legitimate
topic for foreign reporters.”
Some Criticism of Ukraine
Cragg continues: “Ukraine’s leaders and media should engage with
this issue and encourage a national debate. How do we define far-right? Where
does patriotism end and bigotry begin? Where do we draw the line between
activist and extremist? Politicians should be addressing these questions and
speaking out against those whose views are not compatible with the European
values Ukraine claims to espouse. And, crucially, they should be heard doing so
on foreign media.”
And so, grudgingly, even some of Moreira’s critics have come out
of their crouches and put forward constructive suggestions. By prompting this,
Moreira has performed a praiseworthy service.
[One-sided reporting of the Ukraine War by US mainstream media.{
Yet, while the French mainstream journalists found the need to chastise one of
their own for breaking with the pro-Maidan “group think,” the U.S. mainstream
media simply continues to ignore Ukraine’s ugly realities, all the better to
fit with the State Department’s prescribed narrative.
Nothing like Moreira’s documentary has appeared on U.S.
television or in mainstream U.S. newspapers. The dark side of the Maidan and in
particular the role of neo-Nazi groups and other violent extremists in
fomenting and achieving the coup d’etat have been discussed almost exclusively
at alternative and independent outlets, mostly on the Internet.
The editorial boards of the country’s newspapers of record
The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal ensured
that newspaper columns and op-ed pages set out almost exclusively Official
Washington’s narrative day after day. Opposing views were increasingly choked
off, finally getting no space whatsoever in mainstream outlets.
One of the few exceptions in print media was The Nation,
where contributing editor and Professor of Russian History emeritus at
Princeton and New York University Stephen Cohen delivered detailed
critiques of the factual and interpretational errors of the mainstream
narrative.
Otherwise heterodox views became accessible only to determined
truth seekers exploring the alternative media portals. I name here in
particular one devastating critique of the one-sided mainstream narrative that
Jim Naureckas published at the media criticism site, Fair.
Needless to say, critical views of the Maidan and its neo-Nazi
components got almost no attention in American broadcast media. No American channel so
far has shown the civic courage of a Canal+.
Ukraine’s Diversity
Much as I admire the courage and dedication of Paul Moreira to
produce such a valuable documentary focusing on very troubling aspects of the
post-Maidan political realities in Ukraine, he is an outsider to the subject
matter who has missed some very relevant facts about Ukrainian society before
his eyes. His critics have missed the same points due to their ideological
persuasions or lacking analytical skills.
The fact is that the population of Ukraine is very diverse. The
major split between native Ukrainian speakers in the West of the country and
native Russian speakers in the East of the country remains unchanged. It is
more than ironic that four of the five leaders of extremist Ukrainian
nationalists whom Moreira interviewed or otherwise featured in the documentary
were speaking native Russian. Such was the intermix of family traditions and
ethnicity in Ukraine until recently. Add to this the very many minorities of
other nationalities, including Hungarians and Romanians who are especially
numerous in territorial pockets.
The ambition of the post-Maidan government in Kiev and of the
nationalist extremists who are maintaining pressure on it through intimidation
by their paramilitaries is to forge a monist national identity. This
suppression of non-Ukrainian-ethnic minorities can be achieved only by violence
and threats of violence.
In this sense, the paramilitaries are only the tip of the
iceberg. Violence and intimidation today permeates Ukrainian society
across the whole geography of the country. It takes the form of murder of
journalist and newspaper editors. Meanwhile, there have been changes in the
status of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate as well as
to street and city names. Further demonstrating hostility toward ethnic and
political diversity, Ukraine has witnessed forcible destruction of war memorials
to the “wrong” heroes to erase the shared Russian-Ukrainian traditions and to
impose a new politically correct consciousness on a hitherto diverse country.
Had Moreira sought to document this, he would have needed another one-hour
segment or more.
Instead, Moreira focused on the existence of the aggressive
nationalist and neo-Nazi armed movements in present-day Ukraine, a reality that
his critics in France don’t deny even as they try to forgive it by alluding to
“Russian aggression” and the war in the Donbass.
Their insistence that these extremists are just a small part of
the paramilitary battalions, not to mention the general population, as revealed
by electoral results, is intentionally misleading. That point would have
relevance if Ukraine were a functioning democracy. But the ability of these
nationalist extremists to intimidate parliament and operate illegal blockades
as they do at the Crimean border proves that Ukraine is not a functioning
democracy.
Those are the essential points which emerge from the Canal+
documentary and its aftermath. For this we must express our deep appreciation
to Mr. Moreira and the management of the television channel.
Doctorow is the European Coordinator,
American Committee for East West Accord, Ltd.
His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? (August 2015) is
available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites. For
donations to support the European activities of ACEWA, write to eastwestaccord@gmail.com.
© Gilbert Doctorow, 2015
2022
ANNA MATRANGA. “Pope
Francis says Ukraine war ‘perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented’." JUNE 14, 2022 / 12:45
PM / CBS NEWS.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pope-francis-ukraine-war-russia-putin-perhaps-somehow-provoked-not-prevented/
“Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in .... The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com › News › Ukraine . Mar 1, 2022 — Mearsheimer has
argued that the US, in pushing to expand NATO eastward and establishing
friendly relations with Ukraine, has increased the likelihood of
war.
Sources
Amazon
Canal + (Fr. TV channel)
CBS News
Consortium News
The Guardian
The New Yorker
You Tube
END UKRAINE WAR
PROVOKED #1
