This article nearly had me convinced... But there are four clear giveaways that it’s overly sympathetic to Rusdian narratives.
1. Contradictions in adjacent paragraphs (yeah but no but) are typical in Russian puff pieces, and here’s a great example. There were no Russian troops in Donbas, but there were 50-odd Russians from Russia spotted.
Good old Russian doublespeak. ‘Yeah but no but yeah but we weren’t there at all, but we had people in there unofficially but they was in holiday except for the paid Wagner blokes and that includes the guy with the Waffen SS tats who got a medal off of Putin for doing such a good job in Ukraine even though he wasn’t there, though he says he was there...’ Where’s Vicky Pollard?
2. “In fact, it seems that the European Union and some countries have deliberately kept silent about the massacre of the Donbass population, knowing that this would provoke Russian intervention.”
Bluntly, there was no silence about the Donbass atrocities here in the UK WHILE THEY WERE ONGOING ... But even the DPR concedes that the genocide took place between 2014 and 2016, with the conflict de-escalating rapidly between 2018 and 2022. By Christmas 2020 it was pretty much only the occasional skirmish between azov militants and separatist militants with civilians very rarely caught in the middle.
So where does the claim come from? Russia? Was it a false flag, or based on intel 5 years past its use by date, like the rations sent with their troops? Can’t be up-to-date information because even the DPR’s figures indicated were saying the genocide had ended years earlier.
3. On Mariupol: “... the sequence of events tends to confirm that Russian forces struck a position of the Azov regiment and that the maternity ward was then free of civilians.”
This is totally untrue! The preceding sentence, “we don’t know”, is more accurate.
He’s citing an assertion made by Ambassador Lavrov on Ria Novosti which he repeated in Antalya, Turkey.
Ambassador Lavrov claimed that the separatists told Russia that the hospital had been cleared of staff and patients by Azov, and was no longer operating as a hospital, and was being used as an Azov base of operations.
However, a live stream from inside the hospital a few days before the bombing, clearly showed it was still operating as a hospital.
The most likely explanation is, Russia simply decided not to seek any confirmation of the DPR report, and okayed the strike, and then realised they’d bombed an operational maternity hospital.
Lavrov’s words:
“On March 7 or 6, I don’t remember exactly now, but at a meeting of the UN Security Council, facts were presented by our delegation about that this maternity hospital was seized long ago by the Azov Battalion and other radicals,.. All the women in labor, all the nurses, and all the attendants were expelled... We’re not planning to attack other countries. We didn’t even attack Ukraine!”
4. Chernobyl: “In the north, the Chernobyl power plant was occupied immediately to prevent acts of sabotage. The images of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers guarding the plant together are of course not shown.”
Russia shot the hell out of the administrative buildings, held a shift hostage in the plant, compromised the power to the safety monitoring systems, and dug trenches in a heavily irradiated area. The soldiers either didn’t know dhat they were shooting up,or were stupid enough to compromise the safety of the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident.
They did all of that sabotage to prevent sabotage?! You’d have to have rocks in your head to believe that. The presence of Ukrainian soldiers can just as easily be explained as, they knew better than to screw around with a firefight at Chernobyl than the Russians who seemed to be oblivious to the risks.
4. Chernobyl: “In the north, the Chernobyl power plant was occupied immediately to prevent acts of sabotage. The images of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers guarding the plant together are of course not shown.”
Russia shot the hell out of the administrative buildings, held a shift hostage in the plant, compromised the power to the safety monitoring systems, and dug trenches in a heavily irradiated area. The soldiers either didn’t know dhat they were shooting up,or were stupid enough to compromise the safety of the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident.
They did all of that sabotage to prevent sabotage?! You’d have to have rocks in your head to believe that. The presence of Ukrainian soldiers can just as easily be explained as, they knew better than to screw around with a firefight at Chernobyl than the Russians who seemed to be oblivious to the risks.
***I recently saw a report from a Ukrainian soldier who was posting from the site. He said the whole reason was to set it up as a safe haven command post for a Russian general. I’m afraid I can’t find the video clip.