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“Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
— George Orwell, 1946
EVERYTHING MR. EMORY HAS BEEN SAYING ABOUT THE UKRAINE WAR IS ENCAPSULATED IN THIS VIDEO FROM UKRAINE 24
FTR#1236 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: In the ongoing series about the Ukraine War, Mr. Emory has put forth a metaphor: the war itself and the attendant coverage as a “philosopher’s stone” alchemically changing American and Western institutions and individuals into the same political and intellectual fabric of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.
That institution is an epicenter of Orwellian historical revisionism, rewriting the World War II history of Ukraine in such a way as to whitewash the war crimes of the OUN and UPA. Bandera headed up the OUN/B, the principal Third Reich collaborator during World War II.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi exemplifies that grim political alchemy.
Prior to a video appearance by Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, she greeted Zelensky with the OUN/B salute–which is now the official salute of both the Ukrainian military and police establishments.
” . . . . House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, greet Mr. Zelensky with ‘Slava Ukraini!,’—‘Glory to Ukraine’—a greeting used by Bandera’s troops. . . .”

Oleh Tihanybok, leader of the OUN/B successor organization Svoboda, originally organized by Andriy Parubiy.
Since the Maidan coup in 2014, we have rigorously chronicled the decisive involvement in that event of the Ukrainian fascist milieu that ascended to the pinnacle of power in that benighted country.
The Nazi collaborationist nature of the regime in power in Ukraine is being systematically whitewashed.
Reflecting on the sheer volume of documentation we have presented about the ascent of the OUN/B Nazis collaborators, we present a couple of snapshots from those archives.
First, we note that Andriy Parubiy–founder of the Social National Party of Ukraine (later re-named Svcoboda)–was one of the organizers of the so-called “Orange Revolution” that brought to power Viktor Yuschenko (and his wife, U.C.C.A. operative and Deputy Director of Public Liaison under R0nald Reagan).
His role as “Commander of Maidan” placed him in close contact with then U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. Then Vice-President Joe Biden was networked with Pyatt at the time. Parubiy has been accused of helping to arrange the sniper fire that killed both protesters and police, leading to the ouster of Yanukovych.
” . . . . Parubiy was going in and out of Hotel Ukraina, from where numerous deadly shots were being fired. . . . Parubiy, who, according to former US Vice President Joe Biden, was conferring with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt throughout the upheavals almost on an hourly basis, has never really had his role in the putsch explained. . . .”
Yuschenko elevated Volodymyr Viatrovych to power, eventually becoming head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.
On the subject of propaganda and information war in Ukraine, we note that Zelensky is the point man of that information war and that he is a protege of key Azov financier Igor Kolomoisky.
“Azov” Zelensky is the point element in a—thus far—eminently successful information war. The dimension and success of the propaganda crafted and disseminated OUN/B successor elements in charge of Ukraine’s governmental machinery would make Goebbels proud.
Consummately ironic is the meme resoundingly echoed in this country that PUTIN is waging an information war of lies!
The derisive dismissal of Russian claims concerning animal vectors positioned in Ukraine to deliver biological weapons into Russia ignore critical information.
In addition to the fact that we have developed exhaustive documentation of U.S. authorship of the Covid-19, indicative of a U.S. willingness to employ biological warfare in pursuit of its strategic objectives, Nick Turse chronicled the development of mammalian, reptilian, aquatic and insect life forms as adjuncts to warfare.
This book was published in 2008!
As discussed in FTR#1235, documents removed by the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine–but archived by the Wayback Machine–confirm that the DTRA is among the sources of funding for DOD-financed labs in Ukraine.
We note that there are significant connections between the agency overseeing the Ukrainian projects and institutions implicated in the apparent “bio-skullduggery” surrounding the U.S. biological warfare gambit involving what Mr. Emory has termed “The Oswald Institute of Virology.” This is discussed in: FTR#‘s 1157–1159, 1170, 1183 through 1193, and 1215.
The essence of the “Oswald Institute of Virology” gambit concerns the DTRA and Pentagon funding of bat-borne coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, much of it through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance. Once the research was complete, it resulted in publication which included the genome of the bat viruses being researched. Using technology discussed below, the viruses were then synthesized from scratch and population groups were vectored with the same viral strains being researched by the WIV.
One must ask the question, also, as to why the Embassy suddenly removed these documents?
A critical understanding of the virulent, overwhelming lying in which the Ukrainian government is engaging can be gleaned from Mariupol. That city is in control of the Nazi Azov regiment, who control the flow of information from the besieged metropolis.
With Zelensky—a protégé of major Azov financier Igor Kolomoisky—parroting the Nazi formation’s rhetoric and being uncritically accepted by Ukraine’s, it can be said that the West, Biden’s USA in particular, belongs to the lie.
The pronouncements coming out of Mariupol should be understood in the circumstantial context of the fact that all of the international reporters are out of the city.
In addition, the fact that reportage reaching the West has been buttressed by hand-picked advocates of the Zelensky regime should be factored into analysis of the credibility of the battlefield reportage reaching the U.S.
An excellent piece of reporting by Max Blumenthal for the Gray Zone. Noting “Azov” Zelensky’s hyperbole about the “Russian bombing” of the drama theater in Mariupol—Blumenthal reports on local residents’ voluminous accounts of an Azov provocation. Far from being “indiscriminately” bombed by the Russians, Azov appears to have planted and detonated explosive charges, destroying the theater.
Note that the Ukrainian charge of Russia attacking a Turkish mosque was Azov/Zelensky propaganda as well.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this disinformation is the apparent attempt by “Team Azov” to draw the U.S. and NATO into direct conflict with Russia by creating imaginary atrocities, which—thus far—have been uncritically accepted by the West.
Highlights of Blumenthal’s reportage:
- “ . . . . A closer look reveals that local residents in Mariupol had warned three days before the March 16 incident that the theater would be the site of a false flag attack launched by the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which controlled the building and the territory around it. . . .”
- “ . . . . Civilians that escaped the city through humanitarian corridors have testified that they were held by Azov as human shields in area, and that Azov fighters detonated parts of the theater as they retreated. Despite claims of a massive Russian airstrike that reduced the building to ashes, all civilians appear to have escaped with their lives. . . .”
- “ . . . . Video of the attack on the theater remains unavailable at the time of publication; only photographs of the damaged structure can be viewed. The Russian Ministry of Defense has denied conducting an airstrike on the theater, asserting that the site had no military value and that no sorties were flown in the area on March 16. . . .”
- “ . . . . Kiev’s most emotionally potent allegation so far – that Russia deliberately bombed innocent children cowering inside a theater – has been undercut by testimonies from Mariupol residents and a widely viewed Telegram message explicitly foreshadowing a false flag attack on the building. . . .”
- “ . . . . On March 7, an Azov Battalion commander named Denis Prokopenko appeared on camera from Mariupol with an urgent message. Published on Azov’s official YouTube channel and delivered in English over the sound of occasional artillery launches, Prokopenko declared that the Russian military was carrying out a ‘genocide’ against the population of Mariupol, which happens to be 40 percent ethnic Russian. . . .”
- “ . . . . Prokopenko then demanded that Western nations ‘create a no fly zone over Ukraine support[ed] with the modern weapons.’ It was clear from Prokopenko’s plea that Azov’s position was growing more dire by the day. . . .”
- “ . . . . As Russia’s military rapidly degraded Azov positions throughout the second week of March 2022, Azov soldiers apparently directed elderly civilians as well as women and children into the wardrobe hall of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater in Mariupol. . . .”
- “ . . . . On March 12, a chilling message appeared on the Telegram channel of Dmitriy Steshen, a correspondent reporting from Mariupol for the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. According to Steshen, local residents told him an alleged Russian bombing of the Turkish-built Kanuni Sultan Suleyman mosque in Mariupol that day was a false flag intended to ‘drag Turkey into the war,’ and warned that a false flag attack on the Mariupol Drama Theater was imminent. . . .”
- ” . . . On March 12, Western outlets like the Associated Press repeated Ukrainian government claims that the Turkish mosque in Mariupol had been shelled by Russia with 80 civilians inside, including children. However, Turkish state media revealed that the Ukrainian government had misled Western reporters. The Kanuni Sultan Suleyman Mosque was not only fully intact, it had never been hit by Russian fire. ‘Our mosque remained undamaged,’ Ismail Hacioglu, head of the mosque’s association, told Turkey’s Andalou Agency on March 12. . . .”
- “ . . . . Just hours after Zelensky’s address, news arrived directly from the Azov Battalion’s press department that Russia had bombed the theater in Mariupol. With a monopoly over information from the scene of the supposed attack, with no other news outlets present, Azov’s press department disseminated photos of the destroyed building to media across the world. . . .”
- “ . . . . One day before the bombing, on March 15, a group of military-aged men were photographed in front of the Mariupol theater. No women were visible anywhere in the image. The men can be seen placing pallets against the side of the building, ferrying large objects across the theater grounds, and cutting down a fir tree. . . .”
- ” . . . . According to Human Rights Watch’s report on the theater incident, which contained no local testimony gathered after the attack, the men were ‘cook[ing] food on an open fire and collect[ing] water in buckets.’ As seen below, pallets and other objects were piled against the same area of the building hit by an explosive charge the following day. . . .”
- “ . . . . While the theater appeared to have been heavily damaged – ‘they bombed the building to ashes,’ claimed Ponomarenko – it turned out that not one person was killed by the blast. ‘It’s a miracle,’ the Kyiv Independent reporter chirped. . . .”
- “ . . . . Further, ABC claimed the theater had been hit by Russian artillery shelling, not an ‘air dropped Russian bomb’ as Ponomarenko and many others have claimed. Ukrainian media, meanwhile, has expressed confusion over the incident. The outlet 0629 has attempted to explain away the mysterious disappearance of the thousand civilians said to have been in the theater by claiming they were evacuated to the city of Zaporozhye a day before the supposed attack. ‘we are waiting for the official verified information and do not rush to conclusions,’ the paper declared. . . .”
- “ . . . . ‘When [Azov soldiers] were leaving, they destroyed the drama theater’ The Azov fighters were simply hiding behind us,’ she told a reporter. ‘We were their human shields, that’s it. They were breaking everything, all around us, they were not letting us outside. We spent 15 days in a basement, with kids… They gave us no water, nothing.’ . . .”
- ” . . . . Describing how the Azov Battalion placed its tanks in front of local bomb shelters, the woman offered a revealing detail: ‘When they were leaving’ she said, referring to the Azov Battalion, ‘they destroyed the drama theatre. People with shrapnel were brought to us.’ . . . .”
- “ . . . . Numerous evacuees echoed the woman’s testimony about Azov holding Mariupol civilians as hostages, and said they were targeted with gunfire as they escaped through humanitarian corridors. ‘They burned everything,’ an elderly woman recalled to Russian media. ‘They bombed [my] whole apartment…. They broke in and are sitting there, making Molotov cocktails. I wanted to come in, to take my things, but they told me: ‘No, you have no business here.’ . . . .”

Geetings archway “Glory to Hitler! Glory to Bandera! Long live the Ukrainian Independent State! Long live our leader S. Bandera” at Zhovkva Castle, Western Ukraine, July–August 1941.
1. In the ongoing series about the Ukraine War, Mr. Emory has put forth a metaphor: the war itself and the attendant coverage as a “philosopher’s stone” alchemically changing American and Western institutions and individuals into the same political and intellectual fabric of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.
That institution is an epicenter of Orwellian historical revisionism, rewriting the World War II history of Ukraine in such a way as to whitewash the war crimes of the OUN and UPA. Bandera headed up the OUN/B, the principal Third Reich collaborator during World War II.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi exemplifies that grim political alchemy.
Prior to a video appearance by Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, she greeted Zelensky with the OUN/B salute–which is now the official salute of both the Ukrainian military and police establishments.
” . . . . House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, greet Mr. Zelensky with ‘Slava Ukraini!,’—‘Glory to Ukraine’—a greeting used by Bandera’s troops. . . .”
. . . . House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, greet Mr. Zelensky with “Slava Ukraini!,”—“Glory to Ukraine”—a greeting used by Bandera’s troops. . . .

Oleh Tihanybok, leader of the OUN/B successor organization Svoboda, originally organized by Andriy Parubiy.
2. Since the Maidan coup in 2014, we have rigorously chronicled the decisive involvement in that event of the Ukrainian fascist milieu that ascended to the pinnacle of power in that benighted country.
The Nazi collaborationist nature of the regime in power in Ukraine is being systematically whitewashed.
Reflecting on the sheer volume of documentation we have presented about the ascent of the OUN/B Nazis collaborators, we present a couple of snapshots from those archives.
First, we note that Andriy Parubiy–founder of the Social National Party of Ukraine (later re-named Svcoboda)–was one of the organizers of the so-called “Orange Revolution” that brought to power Viktor Yuschenko (and his wife, U.C.C.A. operative and Deputy Director of Public Liaison under R0nald Reagan).
His role as “Commander of Maidan” placed him in close contact with then U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. Then Vice-President Joe Biden was networked with Pyatt at the time. Parubiy has been accused of helping to arrange the sniper fire that killed both protesters and police, leading to the ouster of Yanukovych.
” . . . . Parubiy was going in and out of Hotel Ukraina, from where numerous deadly shots were being fired. . . . Parubiy, who, according to former US Vice President Joe Biden, was conferring with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt throughout the upheavals almost on an hourly basis, has never really had his role in the putsch explained. . . .”
Yuschenko elevated Volodymyr Viatrovych to power, eventually becoming head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.
Key points of interest:
- Parubiy was in charge of security for the Maidan forces and was in close contact with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. He has also been accused of helping to arrange sniper provocations at the Maidan. Note then Vice-President Joe Biden’s close interaction with the Pyatt/Parubiy liaison: ” . . . . Following his retirement from the party, this experienced protest activist became one of the main organizers of the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution.’ In 2013, he assumed the same function at the Maidan, where he was responsible for none other than security and the ‘self-defense units,’ which were often made up of heavily armed thugs. In the Italian TV documentary, it was reported that Parubiy was going in and out of Hotel Ukraina, from where numerous deadly shots were being fired. Parubiy, claims that the hotel from which these shots were being fired — which was firmly under the Maidan demonstrators’ control — had been taken over ‘by snipers who arrived from Russia and who were controlled by Russia.’[5] Parubiy, who, according to former US Vice President Joe Biden, was conferring with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt throughout the upheavals almost on an hourly basis, has never really had his role in the putsch explained. Following the putsch, he was first appointed to the post of head of the National Security and Defense Council. Since April 14, 2016 he has been serving as President of Ukraine’s Parliament. . . .”
3a. On the subject of propaganda and information war in Ukraine, we note that Zelensky is the point man of that information war and that he is a protege of key Azov financier Igor Kolomoisky.
“Azov” Zelensky is the point element in a—thus far—eminently successful information war. The dimension and success of the propaganda crafted and disseminated OUN/B successor elements in charge of Ukraine’s governmental machinery would make Goebbels proud.
Consummately ironic is the meme resoundingly echoed in this country that PUTIN is waging an information war of lies!
“ . . . . neo-Nazis. Genocide. American biological weapons factories. Birds and reptiles trained to carry pathogens into Russia. Ukrainian forces bombing their own cities, including theaters shelling children. . . .
. . . . By most accounts, Ukraine has so far been winning the information war, led by a powerful social media operation that flooded the internet with its own jumble of anecdotes and myths, bolstering morale among Ukrainians and uniting the Western world behind its cause. The most central figure in their campaign has been President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, whose video messages to Ukrainians and the world have combined bravery with the stage presence of the television performer he once was. . . .”
3b. The derisive dismissal of Russian claims concerning animal vectors positioned in Ukraine to deliver biological weapons into Russia ignore critical information.
In addition to the fact that we have developed exhaustive documentation of U.S. authorship of the Covid-19, indicative of a U.S. willingness to employ biological warfare in pursuit of its strategic objectives, Nick Turse chronicled the development of mammalian, reptilian, aquatic and insect life forms as adjuncts to warfare.
This book was published in 2008!
4. As discussed in FTR#1235, documents removed by the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine–but archived by the Wayback Machine–confirm that the DTRA is among the sources of funding for DOD-financed labs in Ukraine.
We note that there are significant connections between the agency overseeing the Ukrainian projects and institutions implicated in the apparent “bio-skullduggery” surrounding the U.S. biological warfare gambit involving what Mr. Emory has termed “The Oswald Institute of Virology.” This is discussed in: FTR#‘s 1157–1159, 1170, 1183 through 1193, and 1215.
The essence of the “Oswald Institute of Virology” gambit concerns the DTRA and Pentagon funding of bat-borne coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, much of it through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance. Once the research was complete, it resulted in publication which included the genome of the bat viruses being researched. Using technology discussed below, the viruses were then synthesized from scratch and population groups were vectored with the same viral strains being researched by the WIV.
One must ask the question, also, as to why the Embassy suddenly removed these documents?
https://web.archive.org/web/20170130193016/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-kharkiv-eng.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20210511164310/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-luhansk-eng.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170221125752/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-dnipropetrovsk-eng.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20210506053014/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-vinnitsa-eng.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170221125752/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-dnipropetrovsk-eng.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170207122550/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-kherson-fact-sheet-eng.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170223011502/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-ternopil-fact-sheet-eng.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170208032526/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-zakarpatska-fact-sheet-eng.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170208032526/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-zakarpatska-fact-sheet-eng.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170202040923/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-lviv-dl-eng.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170201004446/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-lviv-rdvl-eng.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20161230143004/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-eidss.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20210506212717/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-pathogen-asset-control.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170207153023/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-dnipropetrovsk-rdvl_eng.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170211022339/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/kiev-ivm-fact-sheet-eng.pdf
6. A critical understanding of the virulent, overwhelming lying in which the Ukrainian government is engaging can be gleaned from Mariupol. That city is in control of the Nazi Azov regiment, who control the flow of information from the besieged metropolis.
With Zelensky—a protégé of major Azov financier Igor Kolomoisky—parroting the Nazi formation’s rhetoric and being uncritically accepted by Ukraine’s, it can be said that the West, Biden’s USA in particular, belongs to the lie.
. . . . On Sunday morning, the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian regiment that has drawn far-right fighters from around the world and is charged with the city’s defense, said four Russian naval vessels had shelled the city. Largely cut off from the outside world, the toll on civilians there is difficult to assess.
Last week, a Mariupol theater shielding hundreds of people was reduced to rubble. The word “children” was written in huge letters on the pavement, clearly visible from the air. Even now, the fates of most of those people remains unknown.
“The besieged Mariupol will go down in the history of responsibility for war crimes,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a speech to the country late Saturday night.
“The terror the occupiers perpetrated on this peaceful city will be remembered for centuries to come.”
In a video address on Sunday to Israeli lawmakers, Mr. Zelensky seemingly compared the suffering of his people to those of the Jews during the Holocaust—an analogy some Israeli lawmakers criticized as going too far.
“Our people are now wandering in the world, seeking security,” the Ukrainian president said in the address, broadcast to crowds in a public square in Tel Aviv, “as you once did.” . . . .
. . . . As Russian forces pushed into the center of Mariupol, some 4,500 residents were forcibly taken across the nearby Russian border, according to Pyotr Andryuschenko an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor. With no resources in Russia to rely on, they would be at the mercy of people who had taken the across the border he said. . . .
. . . . “What the occupiers are doing today is familiar to the older generation, who saw the horrific events of World War II, when the Nazis forcibly captured people,” said Mariupol’s mayor Vadym Boychenko. . . .
7a. The pronouncements coming out of Mariupol should be understood in the circumstantial context of the fact that all of the international reporters are out of the city.
In addition, the fact that reportage reaching the West has been buttressed by hand-picked advocates of the Zelensky regime should be factored into analysis of the credibility of the battlefield reportage reaching the U.S.
MARIUPOL, Ukraine (AP) — The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.
We were the only international journalists left in the Ukrainian city, and we had been documenting its siege by Russian troops for more than two weeks. We were reporting inside the hospital when gunmen began stalking the corridors. Surgeons gave us white scrubs to wear as camouflage.
Suddenly at dawn, a dozen soldiers burst in: “Where are the journalists, for fu ck’s sake?”
I looked at their armbands, blue for Ukraine, and tried to calculate the odds that they were Russians in disguise. I stepped forward to identify myself. “We’re here to get you out,” they said.
The walls of the surgery shook from artillery and machine gun fire outside, and it seemed safer to stay inside. But the Ukrainian soldiers were under orders to take us with them.
___
Mstyslav Chernov is a video journalist for The Associated Press. This is his account of the siege of Mariupol, as documented with photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and told to correspondent Lori Hinnant.
7b. An excellent piece of reporting by Max Blumenthal for the Gray Zone. Noting “Azov” Zelensky’s hyperbole about the “Russian bombing” of the drama theater in Mariupol—Blumenthal reports on local residents’ voluminous accounts of an Azov provocation. Far from being “indiscriminately” bombed by the Russians, Azov appears to have planted and detonated explosive charges, destroying the theater.
Note that the Ukrainian charge of Russia attacking a Turkish mosque was Azov/Zelensky propaganda as well.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this disinformation is the apparent attempt by “Team Azov” to draw the U.S. and NATO into direct conflict with Russia by creating imaginary atrocities, which—thus far—have been uncritically accepted by the West.
Highlights of Blumenthal’s reportage:
- “ . . . . A closer look reveals that local residents in Mariupol had warned three days before the March 16 incident that the theater would be the site of a false flag attack launched by the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which controlled the building and the territory around it. . . .”
- “ . . . . Civilians that escaped the city through humanitarian corridors have testified that they were held by Azov as human shields in area, and that Azov fighters detonated parts of the theater as they retreated. Despite claims of a massive Russian airstrike that reduced the building to ashes, all civilians appear to have escaped with their lives. . . .”
- “ . . . . Video of the attack on the theater remains unavailable at the time of publication; only photographs of the damaged structure can be viewed. The Russian Ministry of Defense has denied conducting an airstrike on the theater, asserting that the site had no military value and that no sorties were flown in the area on March 16. . . .”
- “ . . . . Kiev’s most emotionally potent allegation so far – that Russia deliberately bombed innocent children cowering inside a theater – has been undercut by testimonies from Mariupol residents and a widely viewed Telegram message explicitly foreshadowing a false flag attack on the building. . . .”
- “ . . . . On March 7, an Azov Battalion commander named Denis Prokopenko appeared on camera from Mariupol with an urgent message. Published on Azov’s official YouTube channel and delivered in English over the sound of occasional artillery launches, Prokopenko declared that the Russian military was carrying out a ‘genocide’ against the population of Mariupol, which happens to be 40 percent ethnic Russian. . . .”
- “ . . . . Prokopenko then demanded that Western nations ‘create a no fly zone over Ukraine support[ed] with the modern weapons.’ It was clear from Prokopenko’s plea that Azov’s position was growing more dire by the day. . . .”
- “ . . . . As Russia’s military rapidly degraded Azov positions throughout the second week of March 2022, Azov soldiers apparently directed elderly civilians as well as women and children into the wardrobe hall of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater in Mariupol. . . .”
- “ . . . . On March 12, a chilling message appeared on the Telegram channel of Dmitriy Steshen, a correspondent reporting from Mariupol for the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. According to Steshen, local residents told him an alleged Russian bombing of the Turkish-built Kanuni Sultan Suleyman mosque in Mariupol that day was a false flag intended to ‘drag Turkey into the war,’ and warned that a false flag attack on the Mariupol Drama Theater was imminent. . . .”
- ” . . . On March 12, Western outlets like the Associated Press repeated Ukrainian government claims that the Turkish mosque in Mariupol had been shelled by Russia with 80 civilians inside, including children. However, Turkish state media revealed that the Ukrainian government had misled Western reporters. The Kanuni Sultan Suleyman Mosque was not only fully intact, it had never been hit by Russian fire. ‘Our mosque remained undamaged,’ Ismail Hacioglu, head of the mosque’s association, told Turkey’s Andalou Agency on March 12. . . .”
- “ . . . . Just hours after Zelensky’s address, news arrived directly from the Azov Battalion’s press department that Russia had bombed the theater in Mariupol. With a monopoly over information from the scene of the supposed attack, with no other news outlets present, Azov’s press department disseminated photos of the destroyed building to media across the world. . . .”
- “ . . . . One day before the bombing, on March 15, a group of military-aged men were photographed in front of the Mariupol theater. No women were visible anywhere in the image. The men can be seen placing pallets against the side of the building, ferrying large objects across the theater grounds, and cutting down a fir tree. . . .”
- ” . . . . According to Human Rights Watch’s report on the theater incident, which contained no local testimony gathered after the attack, the men were ‘cook[ing] food on an open fire and collect[ing] water in buckets.’ As seen below, pallets and other objects were piled against the same area of the building hit by an explosive charge the following day. . . .”
- “ . . . . While the theater appeared to have been heavily damaged – ‘they bombed the building to ashes,’ claimed Ponomarenko – it turned out that not one person was killed by the blast. ‘It’s a miracle,’ the Kyiv Independent reporter chirped. . . .”
- “ . . . . Further, ABC claimed the theater had been hit by Russian artillery shelling, not an ‘air dropped Russian bomb’ as Ponomarenko and many others have claimed. Ukrainian media, meanwhile, has expressed confusion over the incident. The outlet 0629 has attempted to explain away the mysterious disappearance of the thousand civilians said to have been in the theater by claiming they were evacuated to the city of Zaporozhye a day before the supposed attack. ‘we are waiting for the official verified information and do not rush to conclusions,’ the paper declared. . . .”
- “ . . . . ‘When [Azov soldiers] were leaving, they destroyed the drama theater’ The Azov fighters were simply hiding behind us,’ she told a reporter. ‘We were their human shields, that’s it. They were breaking everything, all around us, they were not letting us outside. We spent 15 days in a basement, with kids… They gave us no water, nothing.’ . . .”
- ” . . . . Describing how the Azov Battalion placed its tanks in front of local bomb shelters, the woman offered a revealing detail: ‘When they were leaving’ she said, referring to the Azov Battalion, ‘they destroyed the drama theatre. People with shrapnel were brought to us.’ . . . .”
- “ . . . . Numerous evacuees echoed the woman’s testimony about Azov holding Mariupol civilians as hostages, and said they were targeted with gunfire as they escaped through humanitarian corridors. ‘They burned everything,’ an elderly woman recalled to Russian media. ‘They bombed [my] whole apartment…. They broke in and are sitting there, making Molotov cocktails. I wanted to come in, to take my things, but they told me: ‘No, you have no business here.’ . . . .”
Testimony by evacuated Mariupol residents and warnings of a false flag attack undermine the Ukrainian government’s claims about a Russian bombing of a local theater sheltering civilians.
Western media have reported that Russia’s military deliberately attacked the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, claiming that it was filled with civilians and marked with signs reading “children” on its grounds.
The supposed bombing took place just as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to US Congress for a no fly zone, fueling the chorus for direct military confrontation with Russia and apparently inspiring President Joseph Biden to brand Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, as a “war criminal.”
A closer look reveals that local residents in Mariupol had warned three days before the March 16 incident that the theater would be the site of a false flag attack launched by the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which controlled the building and the territory around it.
Civilians that escaped the city through humanitarian corridors have testified that they were held by Azov as human shields in area, and that Azov fighters detonated parts of the theater as they retreated. Despite claims of a massive Russian airstrike that reduced the building to ashes, all civilians appear to have escaped with their lives.
Video of the attack on the theater remains unavailable at the time of publication; only photographs of the damaged structure can be viewed. The Russian Ministry of Defense has denied conducting an airstrike on the theater, asserting that the site had no military value and that no sorties were flown in the area on March 16.
While the Russian military operation in Ukraine has triggered a humanitarian crisis in Mariupol, it is clear that Russia gained nothing by targeting the theater, and virtually guaranteed itself another public relations blow by targeting a building filled with civilians – including ethnic Russians.
Azov, on the other hand, stood to benefit from a dramatic and grisly attack blamed on Russia. In full retreat all around Mariupol and facing the possibility of brutal treatment at the hands of a Russian military hellbent on “de-Nazification,” its fighters’ only hope seemed to lie in triggering direct NATO intervention.
The same sense of desperation informed Zelensky’s carefully scripted address to Congress, in which he invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech and played a heavily produced video depicting civilian suffering to make the case for a no fly zone.
By instigating Western public outrage over grisly Russian war crimes, Ukraine’s government is clearly aiming to generate enough pressure to overcome the Biden administration’s reluctance to directly confront Russia’s military.
But Kiev’s most emotionally potent allegation so far – that Russia deliberately bombed innocent children cowering inside a theater – has been undercut by testimonies from Mariupol residents and a widely viewed Telegram message explicitly foreshadowing a false flag attack on the building.
Azov Battalion fighters grow desperate in Mariupol, plea for Western military intervention
The strategic southeastern port city of Mariupol has been held by the Azov Battalion since 2014. Since its seizure, it has served as a political and military base for the ultra-nationalist paramilitary as it launched assaults on pro-Russian separatists in the breakaway republic of Donetsk.
Gathered from the ranks of extreme right activists that provided protesters with street muscle during the 2013–14 Euromaidan coup, the Azov Battalion has been formally incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard by the country’s Interior Ministry. It was founded by the openly fascist organizer Andriy Biletsky, who has vowed to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen.”
With the Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel symbol emblazoned on their uniforms and flags, Azov fighters make no secret of their ideological goals. Despite having been identified by the FBI, US Congress, and its own fighters as a neo-Nazi unit, and implicated in an array of sordid human rights violations, Azov has collaborated openly with US and Canadian military trainers.
Having accused Azov of seeking to exterminate the ethnic Russians of Donbas, Putin has marked its base in Mariupol as the front line of his stated campaign to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. Since Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine, the city become the site of ferocious urban fighting, with Russian special forces and Donetsk People’s Republic People’s Militia forces waging a block-by-block fight for control as artillery rained down on Azov positions.
On March 7, an Azov Battalion commander named Denis Prokopenko appeared on camera from Mariupol with an urgent message. Published on Azov’s official YouTube channel and delivered in English over the sound of occasional artillery launches, Prokopenko declared that the Russian military was carrying out a “genocide” against the population of Mariupol, which happens to be 40 percent ethnic Russian.
Prokopenko then demanded that Western nations “create a no fly zone over Ukraine support[ed] with the modern weapons.” It was clear from Prokopenko’s plea that Azov’s position was growing more dire by the day.
As Russia’s military rapidly degraded Azov positions throughout the second week of March 2022, Azov soldiers apparently directed elderly civilians as well as women and children into the wardrobe hall of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater in Mariupol.
A video filmed inside the dimly lit building on March 11 featured a local man claiming that one thousand civilians were trapped inside and demanding a humanitarian corridor to allow them to escape. Only a small group of civilians could be seen in the video, however.
“I’m begging you to stop all this, give us the corridor to get people out, to get out women, kids, the wounded…” a bespectacled narrator (seen below) declared in the video.
Since Russia launched its invasion, Azov Battalion soldiers have been filmed preventing civilians from leaving Mariupol – even forcing men out of their cars and brutally assaulting them while they attempted to break through the paramilitary’s checkpoints. If testimony from many Mariupol residents was to be believed, Azov had used many of them as human shields.
Ukrainian neo-Nazi in Mariupol tells girl about cancellation of evacuation, “say thank you for not being shot” Azov’s battalion hiding behind civilians pic.twitter.com/2ypQwr4t9J— ZOKA (@200_zoka) March 5, 2022
Days before Mariupol theater incident, chilling warnings of a false flag “provocation”
On March 12, a chilling message appeared on the Telegram channel of Dmitriy Steshen, a correspondent reporting from Mariupol for the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.
According to Steshen, local residents told him an alleged Russian bombing of the Turkish-built Kanuni Sultan Suleyman mosque in Mariupol that day was a false flag intended to “drag Turkey into the war,” and warned that a false flag attack on the Mariupol Drama Theater was imminent.
The Telegram message read as follows:
“Look at what our readers from Mariupol sent us. If the information can be verified, it needs to be highlighted [for the media]:
‘Zelensky prepares two [false flag] provocations in Mariupol!!! One of the [false flag] provocation is against the citizens of Turkey, who hid in the mosque built by Akhmetov, and this provocation has already begun by the Ukrainian artillery gunners shelling the grounds of the mosque, from their positions at [Zinsteva] Balka in Nizhniaya [Lower] Kirvoka. Zelensky was unable to drag the EU, USA and UK into the war against the Russian Federation. Now, Zelensky is trying to drag Turkey into the war, pinning his hopes on the explosive emotional character and the love the faithful feel for their sacred shrines.
The second [false flag] provocation Zelensky is preparing for use by Western media, after unsuccessful provocation with the [Mariupol] maternity hospital, Ukrainian soldiers, together with the administration of the Drama Theater, gathered women, children, and the elderly from Mariupol in the Drama Theater building, so as to – given a good opportunity – detonate the building and then scream around the world that this was by the Russian Federation air force and that there should be an immediate ‘no fly zone’ over Ukraine.’”
Steshin’s message recounting the warnings from Mariupol residents has been seen by over 480,000 Telegram users. It is below and can also be viewed here.
[see screenshot of Telegram post]
On March 12, Western outlets like the Associated Press repeated Ukrainian government claims that the Turkish mosque in Mariupol had been shelled by Russia with 80 civilians inside, including children.
However, Turkish state media revealed that the Ukrainian government had misled Western reporters. The Kanuni Sultan Suleyman Mosque was not only fully intact, it had never been hit by Russian fire.
“Our mosque remained undamaged,” Ismail Hacioglu, head of the mosque’s association, told Turkey’s Andalou Agency on March 12.
Still filled with civilians, the Mariupol theater was next on somebody’s target list.
As Zelensky begs Congress for military intervention, news of a theater attack
Less than 48 hours after the debunked claims of a Russian attack on the mosque in Mariupol were introduced, humanitarian corridors finally opened up around the city. The flight of thousands of civilians toward Russian military positions further weakened the Azov Battalion, which was using Mariupol’s residents as collateral in its bid to compel a no fly zone.
On March 16, with his military collapsing under the Russian onslaught, the Ukrainian president and famed comedian-actor Zelensky appeared by video for a carefully scripted, elaborately produced presentation before an assembly of awestruck US members of Congress.
“I have a dream. These words are known to each of you today. I can say I have a need. I need to protect our sky,” Zelensky proclaimed. The Ukrainian president thus invoked the most famous words of America’s most revered antiwar activist, Martin Luther King Jr., to appeal for a no fly zone that would bring the nuclear-armed militaries of the US and Russia into direct confrontation.
Just hours after Zelensky’s address, news arrived directly from the Azov Battalion’s press department that Russia had bombed the theater in Mariupol.
With a monopoly over information from the scene of the supposed attack, with no other news outlets present, Azov’s press department disseminated photos of the destroyed building to media across the world.
The Azov Battalion’s watermark can be seen clearly in the lower right hand corner of the image below. Azov’s photo was republished by international outlets including Sky News, but with the paramilitary’s brand cropped out. When South China Morning Post ran the image, it removed the watermark and credited “Azov Battalion via AP.”
Among the first English language media figures to convey the Ukrainian government’s narrative of the incident to a mass audience was Illia Ponomarenko, a Kiev-based, US-trained reporter who has managed to rack up over a million Twitter followers since Russia’s invasion began.
The famous Drama Theater in Mariupol.De-nazified by a Russian air-dropped bomb today, on March 16, 2022. Fu ck you Russia. You’re going to pay for this. pic.twitter.com/ZQuGW6hL55— Illia Ponomarenko ???? (@IAPonomarenko) March 16, 2022
See this red roof? It’s a drama theater in Mariupol, we called it “the Dram.” See those little letters on the square? They read “KIDS” in Russian. That was a message to Russian bomber crews. But you know what – they bombed the building to ashes anyway. Because they’re animals. pic.twitter.com/xYOkC7CPm5— Illia Ponomarenko ???? (@IAPonomarenko) March 16, 2022
Ponomarenko happened to work for the Kyiv Independent, an outlet that has functioned as one of the most potent US information weapons in Ukraine. The paper had been set up with assistance from the National Endowment for Democracy, a US intelligence cut-out, and an “emergency grant” from its EU-funded cousin, the European Endowment for Democracy.
For his part, Ponomarenko has referred to the Azov Battalion as his “brothers in arms”, and boasted of “chilling out” with its fighters near “enemy lines.”
Seemingly swept up in the emotional maelstrom inspired by the news from Mariupol, President Joseph Biden blasted his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, as a “war criminal,” a “murderous dictator,” and a “pure thug.”
Next, Human Rights Watch issued a hastily composed press release headlined, “Mariupol Theater Hit By Russian Attack Sheltered Hundreds.” The billionaire-backed NGO acknowledged it had not interviewed any Mariupol residents after the attack, and provided no evidence to demonstrate Russian responsibility. Indeed, HRW’s lone source fingering Russia as the culprit was the Ukrainian governor of Donetsk.
Was Russia’s military so bloodthirsty – and politically self-destructive – that it had deliberately targeted a building that was known to be filled with children? Or had the Mariupol residents’ prediction of a false flag from four days before come true?
Suspicious signs, holes in the Ukrainian government’s narrative emerge
Though Azov boasts a sophisticated press unit which films its exploits in the field, and soldiers are publishing even the most banal video of themselves on social media, footage of the theater bombing was nowhere to be found.
Photos supplied by Azov to media in Ukraine and abroad invariably depict the bombed-out theater without any people in sight, living or dead.
One day before the bombing, on March 15, a group of military-aged men were photographed in front of the Mariupol theater. No women were visible anywhere in the image. The men can be seen placing pallets against the side of the building, ferrying large objects across the theater grounds, and cutting down a fir tree.
According to Human Rights Watch’s report on the theater incident, which contained no local testimony gathered after the attack, the men were “cook[ing] food on an open fire and collect[ing] water in buckets.”
As seen below, pallets and other objects were piled against the same area of the building hit by an explosive charge the following day.
[see photo of objects piled next to theater before the bombing]
[see photo of same location afte the bombing]
While the theater appeared to have been heavily damaged – “they bombed the building to ashes,” claimed Ponomarenko – it turned out that not one person was killed by the blast.
“It’s a miracle,” the Kyiv Independent reporter chirped.
It’s a miracle – civilians that were hiding in a basement at the Drama Theater in Mariupol survived the air strike.Now they are getting evacuated from underneath the ruins.— Illia Ponomarenko ???? (@IAPonomarenko) March 17, 2022
In a 7‑minute-long March 17 package blending news and agitprop, ABC News claimed that all civilians had been saved from the theater, but that “hundreds were still missing.” Data on the modest-sized theater reproduced on its Ukrainian Wikipedia page puts its maximum seating capacity at 680, which raises questions about how “hundreds” could have fit in its basement.
Further, ABC claimed the theater had been hit by Russian artillery shelling, not an “air dropped Russian bomb” as Ponomarenko and many others have claimed.
Ukrainian media, meanwhile, has expressed confusion over the incident. The outlet 0629 has attempted to explain away the mysterious disappearance of the thousand civilians said to have been in the theater by claiming they were evacuated to the city of Zaporozhye a day before the supposed attack. “we are waiting for the official verified information and do not rush to conclusions,” the paper declared.
As Mariupol residents poured out of the city through the Russian military’s humanitarian corridors, testimonies began to emerge of ruthless Azov attacks on the fleeing civilians – and of a major deception at the local theater.
“When [Azov soldiers] were leaving, they destroyed the drama theater”
On March 17, a young woman delivered an eye-opening account of the situation inside Mariupol to ANNA, the Abkhazian Network News Agency.
“The Azov fighters were simply hiding behind us,” she told a reporter. “We were their human shields, that’s it. They were breaking everything, all around us, they were not letting us outside. We spent 15 days in a basement, with kids… They gave us no water, nothing.”
Describing how the Azov Battalion placed its tanks in front of local bomb shelters, the woman offered a revealing detail: “When they were leaving,” she said, referring to the Azov Battalion, “they destroyed the drama theatre. People with shrapnel were brought to us.”
Multiple people from #Mariupol said that Azov Nazis held civilians as human shields in the local theater. When the Russian advance forced them to retreat, they blew up the theater to frame Russian forces. This plan was published 3 days in advance by an Azov deserter. pic.twitter.com/Xh3C9vWNbC— Jake Morphonios ?? Blackstone Intelligence (@morphonios) March 17, 2022
Numerous evacuees echoed the woman’s testimony about Azov holding Mariupol civilians as hostages, and said they were targeted with gunfire as they escaped through humanitarian corridors.
“They burned everything,” an elderly woman recalled to Russian media. “They bombed [my] whole apartment…. They broke in and are sitting there, making Molotov cocktails. I wanted to come in, to take my things, but they told me: ‘No, you have no business here.’”
Asked by a reporter who attacked her and invaded her home, the woman replied, “Well, the Ukrainians, of course.”
#MARIUPOL—#2—Interviews with #Ukraine|ian refugees evacuating to #Russia-controlled zones.
[Transcript in 2nd tweet] 1/2#UkraineRussia #RussiaUkraine #UkraineRussiaWar #RussianUkrainianWar #MariupolDramaTheatre #UkraineCrisis #UkraineWar #UkraineUnderAttack #UkraineRussie pic.twitter.com/9JE3c0wrCX— Gleb Bazov (@gbazov) March 17, 2022
A man intercepted by an ANNA reporter after escaping Mariupol fought back tears as he pointed back to the Ukrainian military’s positions. “Azov, those bitches… people tried to evacuate… Azov… they executed the people… the monsters, scum… they shot them up, entire buses.”
“The Ukrainian army was shooting us, shooting at people,” said another man who fled Mariupol. “Right at our house.”
“Ukraine didn’t let us leave the city, we were blocked,” another evacuee stated. “The Ukrainian military arrived and said, under no circumstances are you to leave the city if the Russian Federation opens a humanitarian corridor for you. We want to continue to use you as a human shield.”
“We hate Ukraine! Thank you very much to the Russian army” Refugees from Mariupol tell how the Ukrainian army refused to open humanitarian ‘corridors’ from the city and shot at civilians.” pic.twitter.com/cYmpUBmKoX— Drebonacci (@andre_mihaescu) March 17, 2022
…
There was an interesting admission in a report in the Daily Mail on the situation in Mariupol: eye-witness confirmation that the Azov Battalion is indeed using civilians as human shields. That was the testimony we got from a British professor, Charlie Gilkeson, who was lecturing at a university in Mariupol and ended up recently escaping to Russia. According to Gilkeson’s description of the Azov Battalion, “Some of them were drunk. People on our block had Azov shooting at anything, using local people as human shields.’”
It’s the kind of report that shouldn’t surprise us at all at this point, and raises the big question of how many more people fleeing out of Mariupol will end up making the same human shield claims and the bigger question of how the Western press is going to handle those reports. It’s the kind of story that deeply complicates the prevailing narrative about what’s actually taking place in that city. A narrative that’s already been challenged by all of the questions still swirling around what actually cause the explosion at the Mariupol drama theater. Including questions about how many people were killed or even at the theater at the time.
And as we’re going to see in an important Grayzone article below, those questions become even more compelling when we look at the backgrounds of some of the people generating the reports about what happened in that attack and what is still going on in that city. Questions that include the mystery of what we still have no video footage showing any bodies being extricated from the rubble. Yes, getting footage out of Mariupol is exceptionally difficult. But it’s been happening and we have yet to see any bodies. It’s more than a little curious given the immense propaganda value that such videos would provide.
It’s a mystery that got a little more mystery last week with a report in The Economist that included an eyewitness who claimed to have seen severed arms, legs and heads everywhere immediately after the explosion. Again, no video or photos of those bodies were provided, although photos of the blown up buildings were in the report.
And that’s all why one of the growing dark questions swirling around what’s happening in Mariupol is the question of why, in an era of ubiquitous hand-held videos, are we not getting video confirmation of the large number of people we are told were killed in that theater? Along with the follow up question of how this story will be handled by the western press should that evidence never arrive.
Ok, first, here’s that Daily Mail piece featuring an eye witness refugee from Mariupol with some interesting details to share. Details like the Azov Battalion using his neighbors as human shields:
“He was also critical of the Azov battalion, a former militia that is now part of the Ukrainian army: ‘Some of them were drunk. People on our block had Azov shooting at anything, using local people as human shields.’”
And that’s one more witness testimony about Azov shooting at locals and using civilians as human shields. Keep in mind that there’s nothing contradictory about Azov both shooting at locals if and using them as human shield. Shooting at civilians when they flee is one way to convince them to decide to stay and remain human shields.
It’s also the kind of behavior that would be consistent with blowing up a theater as part of a false flat operation. Although let’s recall part of what makes the Mariupol drama theater bombing so strange: the initial reports were that were there no deaths. At least no readily discoverable deaths. Anyone killed would have had to have been buried under the rubble.
But then the story of the drama theater bombing got stranger. Stranger in the sense that, almost two weeks after the bombing, there is still no actual evidence that anyone has been killed, like videos of bodies being discovered under the rubble. Yes, getting footage of anything out of Mariupol is difficult right now. But considering the immense propaganda value that such footage would provide to the Azov Battalion operating there, it’s hard to imagine that such footage would still be effectively withheld from the world if it existed. And in an era of ubiquitous camera phones, it’s hard to imagine that such videos wouldn’t have been created if indeed bodies were being discovered in that rubble. But at this point, we’re still trying to get some sort of confirmation that anyone was killed in that event.
And that brings us to the following Grayzone piece about the coverage of the Mariupol drama theater bombing. Specifically, coverage by the BBC led by Orysia Khimiak, an individual who describes herself as a “a fixer in Lviv for journalists for reporters who show honest image of Russian war against Ukraine. Ukraine will resist.” She previously worked as the director of public relations for Reface, an app currently used in Ukraine’s propaganda battle with Russia. Oh, and she’s been tweeting things out like, “I just can’t accept opinion that not all Russians are bad. All I feel is pain and hate, because their silence is a consequence of this war.” And that’s the person leading the BBC’s coverage of the Mariupol drama theater bombing. So when we’re trying to understand the spotty nature of the coverage of that attack and all of questions surrounding what exactly happened, this is the kind of background info that we unfortunately have to digest:
“As The Grayzone reported in February 2021, the British broadcaster’s non-profit arm, BBC Media Action, participated in a covert UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) program explicitly designed to “weaken Russia.””
The BBC is certainly intent on covering events in Ukraine. It’s the editorial slant of that coverage that the problem. An editorial slant that appears to be guided by a covert policy of coverage intended to “weaken Russia”. So it should come as no surprise to learn that the figure providing the BBC with their coverage of the bombing of the Mariupol drama theater appears to be part of that same covert agenda:
And it’s that covert agenda, coupled with the fact that there’s no video evidence of actual deaths at the theater, that raises so many questions about caused the explosion. We were told there were likely hundreds dead, buried under the rubble, despite the simultaneous reports that everyone survived in the basement. It was an explanation for a lack of observable bodies that was plausible initially. But the longer this goes without some video of bodies being recovered from the rubble, the more likely it is that few, if any, people were killed in the attack. At the same time, we’re being told that the vast majority of the people left the theater in the days before the attack. It’s this constellation of facts that paints a picture of a manufactured narrative by reporters executing a covert agenda. Or not-so-covert agenda in the case of Khimiak:
We have reports from witnesses of “plenty of people bleeding”, which certainly sounds plausible. And yet, 12 days after the attack, there’s still no footage even of bloodied survivors. The Fog of War is remarkably persistent in this case.
But, of course, the BBC isn’t the only publication that’s been covering the Mariupol drama theater bombing. Nor is it the only publications to provide what appears to be eye witness testimony of a survivor from that attack. An eye witness account that raises all sorts of questions. Because as we’ll see in the following report in another UK publication, The Economist, there is indeed a man who claims to have been inside the theater at the time. And according to this man, there were likely less than 300 people in the theater at the time of the attack, which is in keeping with the reports we’ve gotten about the vast majority of the people leaving before the attack. He also speculated that perhaps 100 people died, “and almost all of them were in the less protected spaces above ground.” Beyond that, the man asserts that he saw body parts everywhere, including severed heads: “There were people with broken legs who we had to help walk. If we could we took them out on stretchers. But there were also severed arms, legs and heads all around. There was nothing we could do there.” So if this report is true, we have to ask the question even more: why are the no videos showing this carnage? And if the eye-witness account isn’t true, we have to ask a number of other questions. The same questions raised by the last article:
“Velychko can’t say for certain how many people died, but he is sure the widely reported figure of thousands is an exaggeration. There were over 1,000 people in the theatre on March 10th, he says. But by the time the bomb fell six days later, the vast majority had left for Zaporizhzhia, a city 225km inland, via an unofficial humanitarian corridor.”
Dmytro Velychko is the latest witness to confirm that, yes, the drama theater was largely emptied. The fears that the 1,300+ people inside the theater days earlier could at least be alleviated. But there were still quite a few potential deaths, and Velychko appears to confirm those deaths. He literally saw severed arms, legs, and heads all around:
And again, where’s the video? If there were severed heads in that wreckage, that’s kind of the best possible propaganda the Azov Battalion could deliver. Imagine how much more intense the global outrage would have been. But this story in the Economist, which includes photos of the wreckage, doesn’t show any images with any body parts, blurred or unblurred. Is such evidence eventually going to be revealed? We’ll see, but it’s going to be worth keeping in mind that even if such evidence that people were indeed killed in that theater is eventually produced, it doesn’t actually verify the narrative of a Russia bombing. It just confirms that people were killed. And if it was indeed an Azov-orchestrated false flag event that would simply mean Azov is willing to kill and terrorize innocent people to get its way. Which wouldn’t really be news. At least not new news.
Here’s a pair of articles that, taken together, serve as great example of the kind of ‘Don’t worry too much about the Nazi problem’ two-step underway in the Western press in response the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The first article is from a few days ago about the growing concern among national security experts and extremism experts on how the conflict in Ukraine could serve as a global networking and military training opportunity for extremist groups around the world, analogous to the role the war in Afghanistan played with the development the jihadist networks that morphed into groups like al Qaeda. All in all, it’s a reasonably responsible article on the topic.
The second article, published today in the Financial Times, is the other side of that coin: it’s a puff piece basically trying to make the case that, yes, there are some Nazis in groups like the Azov Battalion, but we shouldn’t get too hung up on that because there are lots of other members of these groups who are merely patriotic nationalists. The interviewed figures making this case include Azov’s Nazi co-founder Andriy Biletsky. It’s the kind of message that is both deceptive but also points at what is ultimately the strategy of groups like Azov. A strategy of mainstreaming their extremist Nazi ideology under the guise of patriotic nationalism. And a strategy that includes the mainstream of Azov not just in Ukraine but the rest of the world. It’s those global propaganda ambitions that are part of what make these journalistic template — of articles warning about Nazis in Ukraine being published alongside puff pieces — such a dark trend. Because it’s been very obvious for a while now how successful groups like Azov have been in mainstreaming themselves inside Ukraine. But we’re now getting a much clearer idea of how Azov is going to succeed in mainstreaming itself with the rest of the world: through the ‘Don’t worry too much about the Nazi problem’ two-step:
“Azov’s prominence presents problems for Western powers. “These people should not be presented as hero figures, nor should they become the new normal,” said a Western intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to address sensitive details. “It is giving Putin an excuse to speak about fighting extremists, but it is also endangering stability long term.””
Wise word from this anonymous Western intelligence official. An anonymous official who apparently didn’t feel comfortable being identified with these concerns over how groups like Azov were being elevated to hero status. These groups destabilize both the short term and long term situation:
And note the interesting idea floated about steps Western governments can take to keep a check on the long-term dangers posed by Ukraine becoming a global extremist military training hub: since the Ukrainian government is formally incorporating these extremist foreign fighters into the Ukrainian military, will Ukraine be willing to share the names of these individuals with their home governments? We’ll see:
Ok, so that was an example of the kind of article we’re going to be seeing more and more examples of as this conflict plays out. Articles warning about the growing danger these groups pose and the long-term dangers of infusing them with advanced weapons and training. The repeated warnings are guaranteed. But there’s no guarantee they’ll be heard. Quite the contrary. What we can instead be guaranteed of is even more articles like the following dedicated to convincing the readers that there’s hardly a Nazi problem at all. The real problem is all these people confusing Nazism with patriotic nationalism:
““Azov’s history is rooted in a volunteer battalion formed by the leadership of a neo-Nazi group. But it is certain that Azov has depoliticised itself,” said Anton Shekhovtsov, a Vienna-based Ukrainian expert on Russia’s connections to Europe’s far-right. “Its history linked to the far-right movement is pretty irrelevant today.””
Azov’s history of being a hub of far right activity “is pretty irrelevant today”. That was the message from a Ukrainian expert, based in Vienna, on Russia’s connections to Europe’s far-right. A message that resonated remarkably well with the same message coming out of the Azov movement’s own spokespeople. The way they put it, the National Corps is just like any other European conservative party and all those Nazi symbols are actually pagan symbols. It’s literally a “don’t believe your lying eyes and ears” message being delivered by both the Nazis themselves and the media outlets across the world. It’s a near full-spectrum whitewashing of white-supremacism:
But perhaps the most chilling take is the spin we get from Azov founder Andiry Biletsky: the way Biletsky sees it, the ‘nationalism’ embraced by the group isn’t really extremist by contemporary Ukrainian standards because “the majority of Ukrainians today are nationalists.” Whether or not Biletsky’s statement is an exaggeration today, fears that this could be true by the end of this conflict are no exaggeration:
These Nazis aren’t so bad. They just really, really, really hate Russians, and that’s a good thing, right? That’s the underlying message readers got out of reading this article, which is just the latest in this mold. And the longer this conflict goes, the more receptive people are going to be to that message. Inside and outside of Ukraine. So should Ukraine indeed end up handing the names of the foreign fighters over to their home governments, don’t be super shocked if many of those governments end up using that list to hand out medals of honor.
Remember how Facebook changed its rules against the promotion of extremist groups and calls for violence when it decided to allow for calls of violence against Russians and the promotion of Azov Battalion? Well, there was a recent piece in the Washington Post that gives us a clue about one of the potential, and predictable, long-term repercussions from this policy: advocates are now questioning Facebook’s consistency when it comes to other conflicts and asking that parity be applied elsewhere too. So, for example, if a group of Nazis like the Azov Battalion can now be promoting on Facebook, what about other extremist groups involved in conflict zones around the world? Like Hamas, which was already been banned by Facebook for its promotion of violence. Why doesn’t Hamas get the same treatment? These are just some of the questions Facebook is being forced to ask in the wake of Facebook’s ‘Azov exception’ policy of coddling some extremist groups, but not others.
And as the following article describes, this is far from a Facebook-only story. All of the major social media platforms have been tweaking their rules in response to war in Ukraine. Tweaks that double as precedents that can be applied in future conflicts. That’s all part of why there are growing calls for the social media companies to do better in preparing their policies for conflicts in advance, instead of just reacting after conflicts break out. So the social media giants are going to going to be expected to hammer out ‘extremist loophole’ rules to be applied in future conflicts, with the the current ‘Azov exception’ acting as the template:
“It isn’t just Facebook that’s rewriting its rules in response to Russia’s bloody, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. From Google barring ads in Russia and taking down YouTube videos that trivialize the war, to Twitter refusing to recommend tweets that link to Russian state media and TikTok suspending all video uploads from the country in response to its “fake news” law — each of the largest social media platforms has taken ad hoc actions in recent weeks that go beyond or contradict its previous policies.”
Yes, it’s not just Facebook scrambling to adjust its policies in response to the war in Ukraine. It’s the whole social media ecosystem that’s been devising these policy tweaks, and have been doing so in a highly opaque manner. Neither is it the first time the social media giants have been forced to carve out loopholes during a war. But it’s much more noticeable now that openly Nazi groups like Azov are the beneficiaries of these loopholes. So for some observers, like Emerson T. Brooking of the Atlantic Council, the big problem with these war-time policy tweaks wasn’t the policy changes themselves. Instead, it was the fact that these changes become public through leaks to the media, prompting the Kremlin to label Facebook a Russiaphobic company. The bad look from having these policies leaked was the apparent problem here, according to the Atlantic Council. Not the actual policies. Quite the contrary, Brooking stated he agreed with the policy change:
And then we have all of the advocates for other conflicts, like Palestinian activists, who are now wondering why all the groups deemed extremist in those conflicts aren’t being given the same deference. Shouldn’t Hamas also get a conflict-carve-out? How about calls for the killing of Israelis? Why isn’t that allowed when the war in Ukraine resulted in an special exemption in calls for the death of Russians? Shouldn’t Facebook be forced to address this inconsistency? These aren’t unreasonable questions:
Of course, there was a very simple way for Facebook to address these inconsistencies, at least when it came to the ban on the promotion of Nazi groups like Azov: just keep the ban in place. But that apparently wasn’t an option for the company. So now we get to find out whether or not Facebook’s highly preferential treatment of Ukraine’s Nazis is going to prompt a global loosening of the platform’s anti-extremist policies. Special loopholes for Nazis in the spirit of fairness. This is where we are.
The hits keep coming! There was another piece put out by CNN yesterday covering the Azov battalion and the renewed focus on its controversial ‘past’. Yes, the article talked about how Azov’s past Nazi problems are creating complications for a fighting unit that is playing a big role in Ukraine’s resistance against the Russian invasion. It gives you an idea of the general gist of the article.
And what about the undeniable present-day Nazi problems in the Azov movement? Well, that’s where this article appeared to be blazing the trails for a new level of pro-Azov propaganda: According to ‘extremism expert’ Alexander Ritzmann, a senior adviser at the Berlin-based Counter Extremism Project (CEP), the Azov battalion is now essentially entirely separate from the broader Azov political movement and its National Corps party. Once the Azov battalion was incorporated into the Ukrainian national guard, it found that it wasn’t able to embrace the Nazi ideals of its found Andriy Biletsky. So Biletsky and the other die hard ideologues left to form the National Corps and Azov movement, which is now entirely separate from the Azov battalion. Yep, that’s the new narrative, but pushed out by in the article by both Ritzmann and the Azov battalion spokespeople.
Note that Ritzmann is current listed as a Senior Advisor to the European Foundation for Democracy (EFD), a hawkish think-tank created in 2006 on the model of the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) with close ties to the Foundation for Defense of Democracy and a history of warning about the dangers of Muslim extremist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. So if it seems odd that an extremism expert would be dismissing the dangers of an extremist group, it’s important to keep in mind that the EFD is primarily focused on Muslim extremism.
There is actually some sobering comments near the end of the article by Oleksiy Kuzmenko, a Ukrainian-American investigative journalist focusing on the Ukrainian far-right, so it’s not entirely unbalanced. As Kuzmenko points out, “While it’s correct to point (out that) Ukraine’s far-right has minimal electoral support, they (Azov) have enjoyed near impunity for violence aimed at minorities, were unchecked in their efforts to build influence in military and security forces, and have been normalized by Ukraine’s senior leaders.” And it’s that juxtaposition — with dismissals of Azov’s Nazism paired with Kuzmenko’s words of clarity — that underscore just how damaging the Nazi-coddling propaganda is going to be in the long run. Because the net message Western audiences are getting in this deluge propaganda isn’t just blanket denials of Ukraine’s undeniable Nazi problem. We’re also getting articles this this, where the very real dangers of Ukraine’s Nazi problem are revealed and simultaneously dismissed as overblown and Russian disinformation and really not so bad when compared to Russian fascism. It’s the kind of information environment that’s inevitably going to leave a lot of readers with the sense that, yes, Nazism in Ukraine is a problem but it’s really the lesser evil in this situation, which is basically fascism’s rhetorical sweet spot:
“An effective fighting force that’s very much involved in the current conflict, the battalion has a history of neo-Nazi leanings, which have not been entirely extinguished by its integration into the Ukrainian military.”
That more or less captures the cognitive framing in this article: ‘yes, there was a Nazi problem in the Azov battalion. Before it was formally incorporated into the Ukrainian military. But now the Nazi problems have been almost extinguish. Problem solved! The only real problem left is that all these people keep associating the Azov Battalion with extremism when the only extremism it can be accused of today is extreme patriotism.’
It would have been the completely unchallenged narrative in the article if it wasn’t for the counter-arguments by Oleksiy Kuzmenko at the end. And it’s not a particularly surprising narrative given the circumstances. What is surprising is that this appears to be a selective whitewashing of just the Azov battalion by implying that the battalion has completely divorced itself from the broader Azov movement and the National Corps political party following the incorporation of the battalion into the Ukrainian national guard. All the enduring Nazism is solely manifesting in the Azov movement, not the Azov battalion, according to this narrative.
It’s a remarkable narrative for a number of reasons, including the fact that it’s implicitly admitting that, yes, there is a very real contemporary Nazi problem in the Azov movement. It’s a narrative that assumes the audience isn’t gullible enough to buy the idea that Ukraine doesn’t have a Nazi problem but is still gullible enough to accept the idea that the Azov battalion is somehow separate from the broader Azov movement. A battalion that, as the article notes, still operates as a relatively autonomous entity. We’re supposed to assume that the this autonomous unit has purged itself of the extremists:
And then we get the laughable disavowal of Azov founder Andriy Biletsky’s open Nazi ideology. Not only is the battalion denying that it currently follows Biltesky’s state goal for the unit of leading “the White races of the world in a final crusade,” or has anything to do with the National Corp, but it also denies Biletsky ever made comments in the first place and continues to appreciate and respect Biletsky as the regiment’s founder and first commander. It’s a classic Nazi troll response:
And then we get to the ‘whataboutism’ kinds of comments by Alexander Ritzmann, a senior adviser at the Berlin-based Counter Extremism Project (CEP), who seems to view far right extremism in Russia as an equivalent threat, seemingly ignoring the fact that the West isn’t currently engaged in the military training and arming of Russian Nazis. Of course, Ritzmannm is also a Senior Advisor to the right-wing hawkish think-tank, the European Foundation for Democracy (EFD):
But it’s Ritzmann’s assertions that the Azov battalion is somehow divorced — both ideologically and operationally — from the broader Azov movement and the National Corps that presents the most sinister of the Azov whitewashing narratives we’ve seen. It’s a narrative that it literally designed to assuage concerns about the military training and arming of Nazis by denying their open Nazi political activities:
But also note the extreme convenience of this narrative about a supposed ideological separation between the Azov battalion and the larger Azov movement: It’s a narrative the directly undercuts the logical conclusions one arrives at when noting how the National Corp has been allowed to operate like open Nazis in the full view of the police with few or no repercussions. Concerns about arming and training the military unit leading ‘Nazification’ of Ukraine can suddenly be dismissed as Russian propaganda:
And then we find Ritzmann actually comparing the openly Nazi Azov battalion to the problems the US and Germany might find in their militaries. And yes, the US and Germany undoubtedly have serious issues with extremism in the military. Germany, in particular, has an undeniable problem with extremism in its ranks, notably the KSK special commando unit that was operating under extremist leadership. But that recent story about Germany’s extremism problem in the military underscores the enormous difference between the extremism problems in the US and German military and what’s going on in Ukraine. In Germany’s case, that story was a big scandal with a major whiff of a coverup. In Ukraine, Azov’s Nazi status is basically an open secret with the government actively covering for it and the only coverups going on are directed at the international community:
It’s only at the end of this article that we get to the sobering comments by Oleksiy Kuzmenko, who not only highlights facts that undercut the absurd narrative about the Azov battalion ideologically divorcing itself from the Azov movement, but also points out what is arguably one of the most important points that could be made today given the war raging in Ukraine: the inaction by Ukraine and its backers in the West on this glaring Nazi problem “paved the way for Putin to quite literally weaponize them against Ukraine in an attempt to justify his aggression”:
So we’ve gone from “there are no Nazis in Ukraine” to “there are Nazis, but don’t worry, they are no longer in control of their former battalion”. We’ll see what’s next, but keep in mind that that the “yeah, there are Ukrainian Nazis, but there are also Russian Nazis, so it’s even!” narrative is pretty easy to retool into a “isn’t a great how our awesome Ukrainian Nazis are beating back those bad Russian Nazis!” Lies are fungible like that.
@Pterrafractyl–
A disturbingly predictable combination of political/historical revisionism and modified limited hangout.
The story doesn’t touch any of the other manifestations of Nazism in the country, from the Ukraine Institute of National Memory to Svoboda’s C14 militia, named after David Lane’s Fourteen Words, to the ceremony honoring the 75th anniversary of the 14th Waffen SS Division.
https://spitfirelist.com/news/zelensky-and-the-jewish-question/
Note the NY Times front page picture of Ukraine’s Odin Unit (as it terms them) featuring volunteer fighters from the U.S. and Britain.
“Odin Unit” eh? No further explanation from the Gray Lady.
As Dr. Spock would have said: “Fascinating.”
Keep up the great work!
Best,
Dave
Following up on the recent piece in the Grayzone about the BBC ‘Ukrainian journalist fixer’ who was leading the BBC’s coverage of the Mariupol drama theater bombing, there was an update to the piece about a second figure with a rather notable background who ended up providing one of CNN’s first accounts of the explosion at the theater. It turns out this individual, Maria Kutnyakova, works as a communications professional at an IT startup in Mariupol, 1991 Ukraine. And 1991 Ukraine just happens to be a recipient of USAID funding.
And as we’re going to see when we look at the transcript of Kutnyakova’s initial interview, while she wasn’t at the theater for the initial bombing, she claims to have witnesses a second round of bombing at the theater shortly after the explosion after she returned to the theater, which is odd since there haven’t been other reports of a second round of attacks on the theater. So one of the initial eyewitnesses interviewed by CNN in that attack has USAID ties, and didn’t actually witness the initial explosion but apparently witnessed subsequent explosions that haven’t be reported elsewhere:
Now here’s a transcript of the CNN piece where Kutnyakova is interviewed. Note how Kutnyakova wasn’t at the theater for the initial explosion. She was visiting an uncle at the time. But after she returned the building was hit with a second attack. That second attack is referred to as an artillery shelling in the article although Kutnyakova calls it a Russian bombing. So there were reportedly two separate explosions at the theater according to Kutyakova, which is rather notable since given that we haven’t really heard about a second bombing from other eyewitnesses:
“Shortly after arriving, Maria went to check whether an uncle who lived nearby was still alive.”
It’s a pretty important detail for this eye-witness: she wasn’t there for the initial attack. But after returning, she did apparently witnesses a new round of either shelling or artillery or some sort of attack on what remained of the theater. Which, again, doesn’t show up in other reports about the events of that day:
So Maria Kutnyakova, the CNN eye-witness to the bombing, wasn’t there for the initial bombing, but was there for a second bombing that no one else appears to have reported. And as the following article from April of 2021 describes, Maria Kutnyakova also happens to be a communications specialist at a Mariupol startup that’s a recipient of USAID funding. It’s a remarkable constellation of coincidence:
““The aim is to help build a full ecosystem for IT companies in Mariupol. ” explains Maria Kutnyakova, the communication specialist at 1991 Mariupol to Ukraine Nu, “Almost 300 people have been through our courses so far.””
Being a communications specialist, we can be pretty confident Kutnyakova wasn’t misunderstood when she was recounting her recollection of the events that took place at that theater on March 16. So it’s going to be interesting to see if we there are any more reports of a second round of artillery strikes/bombings at that theater following the initial explosion. And it’s going to be especially interesting to see if any of those reports come from eye-witnesses who don’t also have western intelligence ties.
Here’s a set of articles that underscore one of the most depressing aspects of the war in Ukraine: the elevation of extremists to national hero status. Or in this case, international hero status. That’s that status of famed Ukrainian combat media Yuliia Paievska, aka “Taira”, who was released from Russian captivity last month and recently recounted her experiences for the AP. As we’ll see, the recent AP report makes no mention of Russia’s claims that Taira was a member of the Azov Battalion, an not outlandish claim given that that was captured while trying to escape from the Azov’s home city of Mariupol back in March. Taira and her acquaintances claim she holds no extremist sympathies and is purely driven by patriotism. Of course, as we’re going to see, she was openly espousing her life long membership in Right Sector back during a Bloomberg interview in Jan 2019. While technically an ex-member of Right Sector, Taira insisted that “there’s no such thing as ex-Right Sector” and went on a nationalist rant about how the ‘volunteers’ own the land they fought and bled for.
Interestingly, we’ve seen Taira indirectly show up in another story that’s come out of Mariupol: Recall how the bombing of the Mariupol drama theater — an attack that circumstantial evidence strongly suggest was a false flag carried out by the Azov Battalion — took place the day after the last international journalists fled from Mariupol on March 15. And as we saw, those journalists were trapped in a Mariupol hospital surrounded by Russian forces when a dozen Ukrainian troops rushed in, yelling “Where are the journalists, for fu ck’s sake?” The troops had a mission of giving the AP journalists a trove of videos of footage capturing the fighting in Mariupol and getting them out of the city before Russian forces captured them. It turns out the footage they gave the AP journalists was capture on a body camera worn by Taira and Taira was part of that extraction team and personally handed them the footage.
As a reflection of Taira’s international hero status, it turns out the reason she had this body camera on her person when the war broke out was because she had been selected to be featured in a Netflix documentary about inspiring figures being produced by Britain’s Prince Harry. The documentarians had given her the body camera. So Taira’s body camera footage was seen as so important for the propaganda war that they apparently executed a dangerous mission to extract these journalists solely for the purpose of getting that footage out to the world. And that footage is now part of the international legend-building taking place that is elevating Taira to international hero status:
“Taira is an outsized personality in Ukraine, famed for her work training field medics and instantly recognizable by her shock of blond hair and the tattoos that circle both arms. Her release was announced by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.”
Yuliia Paievska, aka Taira, isn’t just a combat medic. She’s a national hero who was already being featured in a Netflix documentary on inspirational figures when the war broke out in February. As a result, that Netflix body camera was repurposed for documenting Taira combat medic work. In Mariupol, Azov’s home city, of all places:
So it’s rather fascinating to learn that it was reportedly Taira who handed the last international journalists in Mariupol the 256 GB of footage she collected with that body camera. Recall how those AP journalists recounted their harrowing last hours in Mariupol, when then were stationed at a hospital surrounded by Russian forces. We are told a dozen Ukrainian troops burst into the hospital, yelling, “here are the journalists, for fu ck’s sake?” They then gave the journalists a trove of video evidence and escorted them out of the hospital and put them on a path out of the city. As we saw, the Mariupol theater bombing — which circumstantially looks like an Azov false flag attack — took place hours after these last international journalists were removed from the city. So it sounds like Taira gave these journalists here video footage and then also fled Mariupol, but was as lucky as the AP reporters and got captured:
Now, given the fast that Taira was stationed in Mariupol, the home base of the Azov Battalion, we have to ask: so is this Ukrainian national hero also an open extremist? Well, notice how there was no mention of Azov at all in the above report. And yet, as the following report from last month on her initial release points out, Russia was claiming Taira was a member of Azov after her capture, something Taira and her friends completely deny. In other words, if Taira does hold extremist sympathies, she’s not sharing them these days:
“Russia portrayed Taira as working for the nationalist Azov Regiment, in line with Moscow’s narrative that it is attempting to “denazify” Ukraine. But the AP found no such evidence, and friends and colleagues said she had no links to Azov, which made a last stand in a Mariupol steel plant before hundreds of its fighters were captured or killed.”
That’s a pretty blanket denial by Taira and her friends. Although, if we parse it carefully, she’s only denying links to Azov. Not extremism. And that brings us to the following Jan 2019 Bloomberg piece about the Ukrainian global diaspora’s role in financing the warming and training of Ukraine’s ‘volunteer battalions’. It turns out Taira is one of the figures interviewed for the piece. And wow has her attitude about expressing support for extremist groups changed over the past three years. As we’re going to see, while Taira is described as a former member of Right Sector, who left due to infighting in the group, she takes pains to insist that there is no such thing as ‘ex-Right Sector’ and then goes on a rant about how the ‘volunteers have rights’ and how the land these volunteer units fought and bled for was theirs. This appeared to be in response to questions about the Ukrainian government’s reticence over embracing extremists groups. So it is true that the evidence doesn’t indicate Taira is a member of Azov. Because she’s with Right Sector:
“I meet Julia Paevska, the founder of a volunteer ambulance corps and a former member of Right Sector, a leading ultranationalist group, at a restaurant in Mariupol, a port city just 12 miles from the front line. Everyone I talk to describes Paevska, dappled with Buddhist tattoos and sporting dyed blue hair, as motivated purely by patriotism. Her organization, whose equipment includes an old Chevrolet Suburban retrofitted with a night vision camera on the grille, has saved 450 soldiers with serious or critical injuries in the past four years, by her estimate. She runs through about $20,000, half of it from abroad, in cash, fuel, and medical supplies every month.”
Everyone describes Taira as being purely motivated by patriotism. And yet the rant we hear from Taira herself sure sounds like the rantings of a far right nationalist when insists that the land they are fighting for is the “Volunteers’ ” land that they fought and bled for. And then declares that “There’s no such thing as ex-Right Sector”:
It sure sounds like Taira still viewed herself as a member of Right Sector at the time of this Jan 2019 interview, at least in spirit. So it’s notable that she was also planning on soon joining the official army medic unit at this time. It’s the kind of detail that suggests the real reason she left Right Sector was to ease her admission into the official army. But note the chilling detail further down in this paragraph: a June 2018 poll found the extremist volunteer battalions were the most trusted institutions in the country, head of the church and military:
It will be grimly interesting to see the results of similar polls today. Just how much more trusted are these ‘volunteer battalions’ than the rest of Ukraine’s institution today? And how will those polls move as the war plods on? Time will tell, but try not to be surprised if Taira ends up being part of a far right post-coup Ukrainian government in the future. Probably in an international public relations role.
Who attacked a Russian POW camp in Donbass? Russia or Ukraine? It’s not the kind of question one would expect at the start of the conflict, but here we are, a week after a devastating attack that appears to have almost exclusively killed over 50 prisoners taken from the Avozstal plant in Mariupol and injured 70+ more. All of these prisoners appear to be members of Azov.
Yes, as we’re going to see, this wasn’t just an attack on a POW camp. It was a highly odd attack for a number of reason. For starters, the building attacked was not a normal housing facility. Instead, it appears to have been in an industrial part of the former-prison were convict used to work, and was only very recently converted to a housing unit. The Azov prisoners were apparently transferred to the building in the days before the attack (1 day before, according to Ukrainian intelligence, which should obviously be taken with a grain of salt).
No guards were killed in the attack. And while might sound suspicious, it’s not as unimaginable as you might expect given the other curious features about the attack. Because it turns out there was almost no collateral damage to any surrounding buildings. It was a VERY targeted attack.
So what happened? Well, Russia is claiming that Ukraine carried out the attack using the HIMARS high-precision artillery system provided by the US. Ukraine is countering that Russia staged the entire thing to cover up crimes.
Although Urkaine’s intelligence claims are actually more specific, and somewhat absurd: a day after the attack, Ukrainian intelligence released a report indicating that the attack was actually a secret plot organized by the Wagner Group on the personal instructions of ‘Putin’s Chef’ Yevgeny Prigozhin without the agreement of the leadership of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. The alleged motive of the plot was to cover for the embezzlement of funds allocated to take care of the prisoners. Yep. Ukrainian intelligence claimed they staged the attack to cover for the embezzlement of funds used to house the prisoners. Keep in mind that the number of prisoners killed was still just a small fraction of the 2500+ soldiers who ended up surrendering from Mariupol, so if we take this allegation at face value, a fake HIMARS attack was staged to cover for the embezzlement of a relatively small percentage of the funds allocated to take care of these prisoners.
Then next day, we got reports from anonymous US officials asserting that US intelligence had concluded the HIMARS were NOT used in the attack. We aren’t actually told how they arrived at this conclusions. But those assertions were then used by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) to issue a report concluding that Russia was behind the attack. The ISW report was based on the logic that the evidence suggested the attack was either done by the HIMARS or was an insider plot, and when those anonymous US officials told reporters that the US concluded that HIMARS weren’t used the ISW ‘logically’ concluded that it must therefore be Russia.
And we’re also now getting warnings from US intelligence that Russia is planning on planing HIMARS ammunition evidence at the scene of the attack to further that narrative. It’s the big story here: the available evidence suggests this was either an insider false flag attack or a HIMARS attack because only HIMARS attack have the kind of precision that could limit the damage to just that one building.
So did Ukraine intentionally target a building full of Azov POWs using HIMARS? If so, were HIMARS used because Ukraine really, really, really wanted to kill of those Azov POWs for some reason? Keep in mind that if Ukraine did indeed attack a POW camp, it presumably didn’t want to indiscriminately kill all of its POWs. There were just Azov soldiers there. So if Ukraine had intelligence that Azov soldiers were being used in a separate facility and wanted to specifically kill those soldiers, a HIMARS attack makes a lot of logistical sense. But also note the other implicit feature of a HIMARS attack: it doesn’t leave the kind of signature that other artillery strikes leave. HIMARS strikes are just more ambiguous in the aftermath...with the exception of any HIMAR ammunition wreckage that might be left behind. Did Ukraine really do this? It seems like an odd move,
but the alternative is the Ukrainian intelligence story about a false flag order by ‘Putin’s Chef’ to cover up embezzled funds that just doesn’t make sense:
“Details: According to the Main Directorate of Intelligence, the explosion was carried out to cover up the theft of funds allocated to the maintenance of Ukrainian prisoners. On 1 August, a commission from Russia was due to arrive at the colony to check the expenditure of the allocated funds and the conditions of detention of prisoners. However, the actual condition of the building did not meet the requirements, so the “problem” was eliminated by destroying the premises with the Ukrainians inside. The second goal of the terrorist attack was to increase social tension around Ukraine, taking into account the public interest in the captured Heroes of Azovstval.”
A plot to cover the theft of funds allocated to the maintenance of Ukrainian prisoners. That was the primary motive behind a plot to stage an attack on the prison colony, according to Ukrainian intelligence. Interestingly, they also claim that the plot was carried out by the Wagner Group under the orders of ‘Putin’s chef’ Yevheny Prigozhin, but not the leadership of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. So one of Putin’s closest allies — someone who should have zero problem accessing extensive wealth — independently orchestrated this plot to cover the theft of state funds. It’s not exactly a compelling narrative:
Also note this intriguing detail: Ukrainian intelligence claims that the building was specially equipped to hold prisoners from Azovstal. The work on the building ended one day before the attack, after which some of the Azovstal prisoners were transferred there. So the Russian forces built a special building was built to house the prisoners, and then apparently blew it up with the prisoners inside after a day:
And since covering for embezzled funds that were allocated for the maintenance of these prisoners is apparently the motive for killing them and blowing up the facility, also keep in mind that the 50+ killed and 70+ wounded prisoners was still a relatively small number of the thousands of fighters who surrendered from Azovstal. Again, it’s an odd narrative. But that’s the storyline Ukrainian intelligence was going with a day after the attack.
It wasn’t long before US intelligence began weighing in on the incident. And issuing denials that the HIMARS system was used in the attack. We aren’t told exactly why US intelligence concluded that the HIMARS were used but we’re assured that’s the case:
“However, no traces of the U.S.-provided weapons were found at the site, according to two U.S. officials with knowledge of the assessment, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.”
No trace whatsoever that HIMARS were used in that attack. That’s the unequivocal conclusion reached by these two anonymous US officials. Except it doesn’t actually appear to be that unequivocal, with one of those anonymous officials stopping short of saying Ukraine wasn’t responsible for the strike. So was something other than the HIMARS platform used by Ukraine in the attack? Well, that’s where the narrative gets messier. Because one of these officials insists that “We know Ukraine didn’t attack the site with HIMARS because the site doesn’t have the indications it would have if it was hit with HIMARS,” but we aren’t told what those indications of HIMARS usage would be. And yet satellite photos from Maxar showing how only the damage was limited to just one section of the building housing the prisoners. And as we’re going to see, that limited precise damage with no destruction to surrounding buildings is a strong indication of a HIMARS attack. The narrative here just doesn’t add up:
Next, here’s a report describing how former prisoners at that camp confirm that the building struck was not normally used to house prisoners. It was an industrial area of the former-prison were convicts used to work.
The article notes an potentially important detail regarding the allegations of HIMARS usage: the camp is only 10 km from the front, well within range of artillery. Of course, as the article also notes, had artillery been used there would have been A LOT more collateral damage. It’s part of what makes the HIMARS allegation so compelling: of all the types of artillery strikes at Ukraine’s disposal, only HIMARS could have limited the damage to just that structure:
“Moscow quickly alleged that the Ukrainian military had targeted its own, hitting the building with a U.S.-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) to prevent the soldiers from testifying about “crimes against humanity” committed by Ukrainian forces. To support this narrative, Russian state media later broadcast a video showing a charred structure with a large hole in its roof, crushed bunk beds and burned body parts.”
Video showing showing a charred structure with a large hole in its roof, crushed bunk beds and burned body parts. That’s more or less the evidence we have to work with, along with satellite videos.
At least the evidence we get to see. Ukrainian is already claiming to have intercepted calls
in which “the occupiers confirm that Russian troops are to blame.” No details about those calls have been released, so it will be interesting to see if that alleged evidence is ever revealed. It also raises the obvious question of why the alleged perpetrators were talking about their plot over the phone knowing full well that such calls taking place in the middle of war zone could likely be intercepted, including by the Russian government. Don’t forget the specific claims by Ukrainian intelligence: that this was a plot secretly ordered by ‘Putin’s Chef’ to cover up evidence of embezzled funds allocated for the housing of those prisoners. Making phone calls of this nature would obviously be incredibly risk for the perpetrators of such a plot:
There is one rather suspicious detail that would seem to conform with Ukraine’s narrative: no guards were killed in the attack. But is that actually all that suspicious given the localized nature of the damage? If no surrounding buildings were damaged, we can also expect that no guards would have been hurt either unless they happened to be inside the building directly with the prisoners:
The testimonies by the three former prisoners at the Olenivka seemed to confirm Ukrainian intelligence’s claims about how the attacked building was not a regular housing facility. They described it as an industrial zone where convicts once worked:
And note the interesting dismissal of the HIMARS allegation by this this analyst: the long-range HIMARS were unncessary because the prison camp is only 10 miles from the front lines. In other words, if Ukraine wanted to strike the camp with traditional artillery, it could have easily done so. And while that’s true, it’s a point that completely ignore the limited scope of the damage. If Ukraine actually did carry out the attack with HIMARS, limiting the damage to just that building would have been the objective. And you can’t limit the damage with traditional artillery, which was a point made in an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). As the ISW concluded in their report, anything other than a HIMARS attack would have left a lot more collateral damage around the facility:
Also that the ISW update in its analysis — an update that it now considers Russia to be the culprit — was based entirely on the claims of the two anonymous US intelligence officials in that Politico report claiming that US intelligence concluded that no traces of the HIMARS were found. The ISW analysis concluded that explosion with either caused by a precision strike or a planted explosive and since those two anonymous sources to Politico made their claims about the US intelligence assessment concluding that no HIMARS were used the ISW in turn updated their assessment to logically conclude that it must therefore have been a Russian planted explosion. It was that shoddy. Blind-faith analysis, which is basically disinfo-laundering in action:
“ISW assesses that Russian forces were responsible for the killing of 53 Ukrainian POWs in an explosion at a Russian-controlled prison in Olenivka, Donetsk Oblast on July 28. Two US officials anonymously confirmed to Politico on August 1 that no traces of US-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), Ukraine’s most precise artillery system, were found at the prison site.[4] The Kremlin alleges that Ukraine fired HIMARS and precision-guided rockets to kill Ukrainian POWs and deter Ukrainian defectors. Satellite and other imagery from the site indicate that the attack only damaged one building, did not collapse the walls of that building, and did not leave any shell craters in the vicinity, very strongly suggesting that the destruction of the prison was the result of either a precision strike or an internally planted incendiary or explosive.[5] One US official told Politico that “the evidence showed the attack was not conducted by Kyiv.” If Ukraine had used something other than HIMARS to conduct the strike, the attack would almost certainly have left collateral damage around the facility, including craters and other damaged buildings. Given the US assessment that HIMARS were not used in the attack, ISW assesses that Russia was responsible for this attack on Ukrainian POWs in violation of the Geneva Conventions.”
So we have two anonymous US officials make evidence-free assertions that no HIMARS were used, and the ISW then takes that assertion to ‘logically’ conclude that it must have been a Russian plot. It’s the kind of ‘logic’ that underscores just how powerful the circumstantial evidence for a HIMARS attack really is in this scenario. If the Russians did stage the attack, they apparently did such a good job that it only looks like a possible HIMARS attack or a staged HIMARS attack.
And that brings us to the following update on the investigation: US intelligence is now warning that Russia is planning on planting evidence of HIMARS ammunition on the site. Also, Ukraine has determined that the attack was actually caused by a flammable substance used inside the building. That assessment that it was caused by an internal fire was also shared by an anonymous Western government official. So we’re getting more anonymous evidence-free assurances that Russia definitely carried out this attack at the same time we’re getting anonymous evidence-free warnings that Russia is planning on planting HIMARS evidence:
“U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Russia is looking to plant false evidence to make it appear that Ukrainian forces were responsible for the July 29 attack on Olenivka Prison that left 53 dead and wounded dozens more, according to White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.”
Planted evidence. Specifically, planted evidence of HIMARS ammunition. That’s what US intelligence has now determined that Russian is planning on doing. In other words, we should fully expect Russia to show evidence of HIMARS usage in that attack. It’s coming:
And then we get the other round of intelligence claims: according to an anonymous ‘Western government official’, explosive experts who review photos released by the Russian government have concluded that the damage was caused by a an incendiary from inside the location and NOT a ‘high-explosive strike from the outside. Ukrainian intelligence is now also making similar claims about the Russian use of a flammable substance. So if these analyses were based on photos released by the Russian government, that’s presumably publicly available evidence. And yet we aren’t seeing these explosive experts publicly reveal the specific parts of those photos they are basing their assessment on. Nor has Ukrainian released any of the intelligence its own assessment was based on. We’re just getting anonymous assertions:
And yet, as we saw with that ISW report, anonymous evidence-free assertions are more than enough, at least when it comes to building a narrative. And at this point the available evidence appears to be limited to photos released by the Russian government. So let’s hope the UN can get a fact-finding mission into that area sooner rather than later. Because at this point this story is operating in fact-free mode and that’s only a recipe for more nonsense. And more mysterious POW attacks.
@Pterrafractyl–
The Ukrainian article comes from “Ukrainska Pravda,” which is an OUN/B‑influenced Ukrainian Nazi paper.
https://spitfirelist.com/news/yahoo-and-ukrainska-pravda/
Keep up the great work!
Dave