Posted on 05/27/2014 4:44:13 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
"Our president [Ramzan Kadyrov] gave the order. They called us and we came,” 33-year-old Zelimhan tells VICE News. The bearded fighter, a member of a unit known as the “Wild Division,” says he arrived a week ago with 34 Chechen men who volunteered to come and support their “brothers” in the People’s Republic of Donetsk.
Russia and the authorities of the rebel republic have repeatedly denied allegations that foreign groups are crossing into Ukraine to fight alongside the rebels.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry has said that the country is under “undisguised aggression” from Moscow, which is “exporting foreign terrorism” to the country.
The Wild Division is just the latest unit to join the swirling mix of militia groups that are descending on eastern Ukraine to join in a conflict that increasingly looks to be turning into a civil war.
Fighting in the region has killed scores in the last week.
“We know how it looks when people are humiliated, so we have come to help,” says 30-year-old Magomed, another member of the Chechen unit. The fighter reclines against a wall outside the hospital, dragging heavily on a cigarette. His ragtag military fatigues are bloodstained and he looks exhausted. Yesterday he was shot twice, once in the ankle and once in the groin, during the fierce clashes between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian forces for control of Donetsk airport.
On his chest is a home-inked wolf tattoo: “It’s like me, independent and self-sufficient,” he says with a broad grin.
The battle over the airfield in the administrative capital of the region came just one day after Ukraine elected a new president: the so-called “Chocolate King" Petro Poroshenko. The oligarch-cum-politician has made clear that he will not negotiate with the “terrorists” operating in the country’s east, who he says are leading Ukraine to a Somalia-like scenario.
Following a bid by the rebels to take over the airport, Ukrainian helicopters and fighter jets fired overhead as a gun battle raged below. The rebels claim they were caught unawares after being lured inside for "negotiations," but what sparked the fighting is unclear.
Most of the pro-Russia militia groups operating in the area are local, but many have traveled from neighboring regions of the country, including Crimea, which was annexed by Moscow last month following a Putin-backed putsch.
Numerous loosely coordinated paramilitary units now operate in the country’s east. Some, such as Oplot, a Russian nationalist group based in Kharkiv, pre-date the crisis, while others like the Unit of Bes ("demon" in Russian) have formed in response to it.
On the other side of the fence, pro-Ukrainian fighter groups are also weighing into the conflict.
Last week, “Right Sector,” a nationalist group with strong ties to neo-Nazism, attacked a rebel checkpoint in Karlovka. The fighting, which raged for several hours just meters away from residential houses, killed at least a dozen. The far-right group coordinated the assault with Donbass Battalion, a newly formed group of so-called “patriotic volunteers” rumored to be financed by the Kiev-appointed Governor of Dnipropetrovsk and owner of Privat bank Igor Kolomoisky.
Another Ukrainian paramilitary unit, financed by Oleh Lyashko, leader of the Radical Party and presidential candidate in the recent election, were implicated in a botched anti-terrorism assault led by the Ukrainian army in Mariupol. The operation killed several unarmed citizens when nervous troops opened fire on an angry crowd. Lyashko’s unit openly claimed responsibility for another operation which “cleansed” pro-Russia rebels from an administration building in Torez; one was killed and two were wounded in the attack.
Both Russia and the West have engaged in mutual finger-pointing over the deepening Ukraine crisis, which has rocked the country since the Maidan revolution ousted the pro-Russia president Viktor Yanukovych in February.
America has openly supplied the Ukrainian army with food rations, but the rebels accuse the West of sending weapons and mercenaries to fight in the region.
The Ukraine’s porous borders with Russia allow easy access for those who want to send weapons, or men, to aid the rebel groups operating the country’s east. Ukraine’s border guard has made numerous reports of trucks with arms crossing into the country in the last few weeks.
Vasya, a 25-year-old formersmall-time gangster who now runs an intelligence and police unit for the rebels in Gorlovka – a town just thirty minutes drive from Donetsk city – told VICE News that he had run two trucks of weapons across Russian border into Ukraine this week. “It’s easy,” he bragged. “There’s nothing to stop you doing it.” The pro-Russia rebels are appearing on the streets with increasingly sophisticated weaponry including rocket-propelled grenade launchers and air to land missiles.
The journey from their native Chechnya via Rostov to Donetsk was equally straightforward, Sayid, one of the Wild Division’s fighters told VICE News. The Chechen unit tells VICE News they are fighting alongside 16 “brothers” from Ossetia, who have been on site for around two months.
Today, fighting continued to flare on the outskirts of Donetsk. Standing at a police cordon that marks a three-kilometer zone around the airport, the intermittent dull boom of shells was audible. A few anxious rebels armed with automatic weapons paced near the barricade, keeping their fingers on their triggers. Molotov cocktails were stacked up at the side of the road.
Speaking to VICE News, head of the Donetsk municipal police Yuriy Sednyev called the situation was a "mess," and reported that "neither side bothered to inform police about military actions."
"We are advising all civilians to stay inside their homes," he added.
In the city where most shops were closed and the streets were quiet, rebel leaders today announced a 10 PM curfew.
At the morgue the bodies continue to pile up. According to the police officer, stationed outside the cordoned-off hospital building, there were at least 35 bodies stretched out inside, including 10 civilians caught in the crossfire. Many were nearly unidentifiable due to their heavy wounds, he said.
Signs of war were visible on the streets of the Donetsk center this morning. Less than a kilometer down the road from the city’s central trauma hospital, the carcass of an overturned Kamaz truck lay outside a block of administrative offices. Another of the Soviet-era military vehicles sprawled across the highway near the bridge, body parts scattered on the road around it. The Chechen fighters told VICE News that they were transporting the rebels’ dead and wounded from battle in the vehicles when they were hit by heavy sniper fire.
Alexei Dmitrashkovsky, a spokesperson for Kiev’s “counter-terrorism” effort, claimed that his forces have killed at least 200 men. “The anti-terror operation in Donetsk will continue until all the terrorists will be destroyed or until they surrender,” he said in a statement.
The depths the country will sink to before that goal is achieved, however, could be catastrophic. “In our country there is a meaning to 'blood feud',” says tattooed Chechen fighter Magomed whose lost one comrade in the battle yesterday. “We will not forget this. If you kill one of ours, we will kill one hundred of yours.”
Go get a real job.
~Except, of course, that there are no connections.
Every “news item” that makes this connection ultimately links back to claims made in Russia Today, the propaganda arm of the Putin regime.~
It looks like you distrust Russia Today (probably for a reason, but..) so much that everything opposite to it is eternal Verity for you.
~Sashko Muzychko was another Right Sector trizub who bragged about killing Russians in Chechnya, and I’m sure there are others.~
There is a video of this idiot screaming crap to a crowd of muslims in Grozny back to 1990s.
~Sashko Muzychko was another Right Sector trizub who bragged about killing Russians in Chechnya, and I’m sure there are others.~
There is a video of this idiot screaming crap to a crowd of muslims in Grozny back to 1990s.
The “Western media source” cribbed all its “information” from Russia Today - a propaganda machine. The Daily Beast did not do any investigation.
You yourself said that Russians were the ones who had a motive to kill him.
If I were to believe the exact opposite of RT's line, I would think that Yarosh and friends were shining Ukrainian patriots and that the Right Sector is an admirable organization.
They are neither.
They are loudmouths and opportunists trying to bask in the glory of an independence movement that they did not create, and they are trying to take credit for a victory they did not achieve.
You are using the term 'islamist' incorrectly...either from ignorance or to mislead.
Yesterday there was a thread about US military training Syrian 'rebels' in Qatar and the news source was RT. Of course some slug posts a comment about Russian propaganda when in fact the article was about a Front Line documentary that was produced and broadcast on American public television.
That gave me a chuckle.
This is the current “Cause Celeb” over at DailyKos, just like the runup to Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria was.
Of course, the very same people who spent years decrying the War on Terror, are just fine with killing if a Democrat does it, and you had better not DARE to speak against it.
Good guess Mac.
....”All information coming out of Russia including RT media and territory held in eastern Ukraine by Russian terrorists is disinformation”.......
The same as in the MSM here in the US....thus looking for other sources and evidence of truth is necessary...dig one must do to arrive at the truth...and in the fog of war it isn’t always possible nor necessary.....it’s war...people die on both sides....and both sides using foreign fighters for this proxy war on top of Ukraine war...on top of Keiv Gov war within it.
Global Research.Org, an Open Society NGO from Canada is confirming that most of the 30+ wounded Rebels that died when the truck was hit in Donetsk were executed by shots to the head.
Also in today’s update:
-Donetsk Airport freight terminal is burned and partly destroyed. Kiev is believed to be in control of the airport at this time. Damage to the terminal building is unknown.
-The attempt to seize Donetsk Airport was reinforced by Vostok Brigade. Casualties were heavy in the brigade but numbers unknown.
-Numerous bombardments last evening and this morning of civilian areas of Slavyansk, Donetsk, Mariupol and Lugansk City and suburbs, civilian casualties are heavy with more than 70 reported dead and wounded.
-Major movements of Kiev forces as of 05 local time this morning have not commenced. More information on this later.
-As of 11:30 local time scattered probing attacks are reported around Slavyansk.
-As of 10:05 local time the situation in Mariupol is unknown.
-No major attacks by the Nats today, just numerous small probes.
-Evacuation is being attempted in Slavyansk for civilians but it is not possible, the city is cut off and surrounded to an extent. Don’t know if this is true or if it is a charade to mask the evacuation of at least the children. Reality is Slavyansk has to large a population to evacuate, 120,000.
-Scattered artillery and mortar attacks continue in the vicinity of Slavyansk and the outskirts of Donetsk, almost all at random civilian residential areas. Some casualties but number is unknown.
-No information on the situation in either Lugansk Oblast or Mariupol in Donetsk Oblast
http://www.globalresearch.ca/east-ukraine-report-from-the-front-lines-heavy-civilian-casualties/5384352?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=east-ukraine-report-from-the-front-lines-heavy-civilian-casualties&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
According to Global Research's own website, they are headed by a man named Michel Chossudovsky, and sports associates like Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, an 'anti-Zionist' Iranian who supports unrestricted uranium enrichment by Iran, and F. William Engdahl, who is connected to perennial nutcase Lyndon LaRouche.
All three are favorite "independent journalists" of RT, PressTV and Russian media, and Global Research constantly uses them as reliable sources. All three are also on the scientific board of Geopolitica, under the editor Tiberio Graziani, whose Russian connections are confirmed due to his being a leader of a Russian expansionist movement headed by Alexander Dugin.
Tentative conclusion: Global Research is yet another quasi-independent propaganda agency of the Kremlin, whose leaders are rewarded through payments made under the excuse of being on Geopolitica's board, which essentially functions as a money laundering front for the FSB's propagandists.
I found this part of Operation INFEKTION particularly interesting:
"Dissemination was usually along a recognized pattern: propaganda and disinformation would first appear in a country outside of the USSR and only then be picked up by a Soviet news agency, which attributed it to others’ investigative journalism. That the story came from a foreign source (not widely known to be Soviet controlled or influenced) added credibility to the allegations, especially in impoverished and less educated countries which generally could not afford access to Western news satellite feeds. To aid in media placement, Soviet propaganda was provided free of charge, and many stories came with cash benefits.[11] This was particularly the case in India and Ghana, where the Soviet Union maintained a large propaganda and disinformation apparatus for covert media placement."
...sound familiar?
Great research, you know a great deal.
It’s particularly interesting now after looking into some of the people on Geopolitica’s board, which at first glance appears to be an innocuous Italian language scientific journal.
Almost every single one of them have written positively about Russia’s ambitions and/or disparaged the West intervening in Ukraine and to top it off, there appears to be a disproportionate amount of Russians on the board. In fact, it looks like there’s are even more Russians than there are Italians.
On the board of Dugin’s Eurasian movement, you see the same thing. You would also expect the leaders of a Russian nationalist movement to be from formerly Soviet states, but instead there’s surprising diversity. There’s a Japanese leader, a few Serbs, a Turk, Frenchmen, Swedes, Kazakhstanis and of course, Mr. Graziani, who is apparently an Italian.
Just breaking:
A heavy fight going on near Oleksandrivsk, in Lugansk. A National guard unit is surrounded by rebels.
In addition, there was HUGE explosion in Lugansk at the National Guard base, during a fight when a rebel RPG hit an Ammunition storage building. Rebels now claim to have complete control of the base. Reports are of numerous casualties.
Important to note that Kiev has stopped releasing casualty figures, unless the incident and deaths are impossible not to acknowledge, like the widely distributed video of the helicopter crash.
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