Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV
Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2022 12:10 pm
Operation deindustrialization
April 27, 13:41
Operation deindustrialization
The escalation of hostilities in Ukraine led to the fact that the Russian Armed Forces began to strike at railway infrastructure facilities. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, for the first time, a strike was struck on railway facilities in the west of the country and other rear infrastructure facilities in order to prevent the supply of Western weapons, ammunition and fuel and lubricants for the group in Donbass.
Representative of the Russian Defense Ministry, Major General Igor Konashenkov, said that long-range high-precision weapons were used to destroy traction substations on the territory of Ukraine.
Ukrzheldorog (UZ) said that on the morning of April 25, attacks were carried out on 5 railway stations in the western and central parts of Ukraine. The head of the company Alexander Kamyshin announced the delay of at least 16 passenger trains.
UZ also claims the destruction of three traction substations. It is reported about the decommissioning of two facilities in the Vinnytsia region (TPS "Kazatin-2" and TPS "Podolskaya-tupikovaya") and one in the Kyiv region (TPS "Fastov"). The voltage in the contact network disappeared at the sections Shepetovka (Khmelnitsky region) - Kozyatyn (Vinnitsa region), Zhmerynka (Vinnitsa region) - Kazatin, Kazatin - Fastov (Kyiv region). In the Lviv region, the Krasnoe railway station was destroyed, reports the Operation Z Telegram channel.
If this trend continues, the electric locomotives that are operated on the UZ network will turn into useless scrap metal.
If you look at the map of the railways of Ukraine, then you can conclude that the most, if I may say so, "careful" solution in relation to the infrastructure of Ukraine. The fact is that the Ukrainian railway network has been most widely developed since tsarist times. The high level of industrialization of the once second largest Soviet republic has led to the fact that the main highways of the country are electrified.
The number of diesel locomotives in UZ is extremely limited. Especially powerful diesel locomotives capable of hauling heavy trains. For the last 30 years, the railway industry has degraded. At the end of 2021, the government of Ukraine announced a deep modernization of UZ. Western funding was found and local producers were already looking forward to, if not participation in the division of the pie, then the selection of rich crumbs from the lordly table of foreign companies.
But it didn't come to fruition. The main transport arteries from west to east are the Kovel-Kyiv-Poltava and Lvov-Bila Tserkva-Dnepropetrovsk highways. This is the main cargo "move". The railway from Uzhgorod also flows into the Lviv transport hub. Accordingly, the railway communications of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are extremely vulnerable. Detours are mostly single-track, not designed for heavy trains and have also been electrified for a long time. It turns out that the defeat of the energy infrastructure of UZ paralyzes the supply of the eastern groups.
An alternative is to use diesel locomotives. But there are two problems. First, there are few diesel locomotives, and they are old. Secondly, diesel locomotives use valuable fuel that is required for military equipment.
A blow to traction substations, if not paralyzing, will significantly slow down the movement on Ukrainian railways. Morally and technically obsolete diesel locomotives of UZ will not be able to make up for the resulting shortage of traction rolling stock. The 30 GE diesel locomotives delivered to Ukraine in 2019 are unlikely to significantly improve the situation. Depreciation of the Ukrainian TPS park is more than 90%. Until 2033, UZ planned to purchase 315 units of TPS.
Further, we should expect the defeat of the depot, car repair plants and individual diesel locomotives.
Until recently, the transportation of weapons and ammunition in passenger trains, including electric trains, has been repeatedly reported. However, in the dilemma of attacks on infrastructure and heavy human casualties or the grinding of equipment in clashes, the Russian Armed Forces chose the second option. Gradual bitterness and attacks on Russian territory, on the one hand, and the moment when the flow of refugees from east to west subsided, on the other hand, led to the fact that it became possible for the RF Armed Forces to begin destroying the transport infrastructure of Ukraine.
What's next? Further, we should expect the defeat of the depot, car repair plants and individual diesel locomotives. Lack of traction will lead to paralysis of movement. If the foreign sponsors of the conflict urgently supply diesel locomotives to Kyiv, then the railway bridges in Kyiv and the Dnieper will become the target of the RF Armed Forces, which, of course, is a critical moment. If bridge crossings over the Dnieper become unusable, the Ukrainian rail network will be cut in two. Thus, the supply of units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the east of the country by rail will become impossible.
Merefo-Kherson railway bridge in Dnepropetrovsk
The southern route through Chisinau and Odessa will not be able to greatly affect supplies to the Donbass, however, it seriously complicates the military isolation of Odessa. There were videos from Croatian Osijek with platforms with British military equipment. This means that through Chisinau, Odessa can be “pumped up” with anti-aircraft, anti-tank and anti-ship missiles, which, with NATO satellite support, can turn it into a special fortified area. In this regard, provocations in Transnistria may play into the hands of Russia, which can cut this transport corridor through diplomatic and other methods.
On April 26, the Odessa City Council reported that in the Odessa region, a bridge across the Dniester estuary in the urban settlement of Zatoka was under attack. Put into operation in 1955, the drawbridge in Zatoka connects two parts of the Budatskaya Spit. This is one of two bridge crossings that connect the southern part of the Odessa region with the territory of the rest of Ukraine.
Over the past few weeks, the Western allies of Kyiv have been announcing the supply of military equipment, ammunition and fuel for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine almost on a daily basis. Only the heads of the US Department of State and Defense, Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, who visited Kyiv on a visit, promised Zelensky another $300 million for armaments. Since the beginning of the special operation of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine, American assistance to the Kyiv government has amounted to $3.7 billion.
Probably, there is not a single European country left that has not made its own, albeit small, but symbolic contribution to the fight against Russia. Trains with bulk tanks were seen on the approaches to the Ukrainian border in Moldova and Romania. Moreover, these trains are formed, most likely, at broad gauge marshalling yards in Romania. American "Hercules" regularly land in Polish Rzeszow.
Obviously, such volumes of weapons and ammunition cannot be transported except by rail.
Especially when it comes to heavy weapons. It will not be superfluous to recall the quote of the American general during the First World War, John Pershing: "Infantry wins battles, but logistics wins the war."
At the moment, Ukrzheldoroga continues the process of evacuating the civilian population from the settlements of the Kharkiv, Nikolaev and Dnepropetrovsk regions, as well as from the territory of the DPR and LPR controlled by Ukraine. Combining the removal of civilians in one direction and the transfer of military equipment to the other is a rather difficult task.
With a shortage of traction, both of these tasks may become impossible. Solely due to the fact that the railway infrastructure will become unusable. The victims will be refugees fleeing the battle zone.
Gazprom cut off gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria
1. Gazprom officially announced that gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria had been cut off due to their refusal to pay for gas in rubles.
2. Previously, Poland and Bulgaria stated that they were ready to pay only in euros, and they would not use the scheme proposed by Russia.
3. Yesterday, notification letters were sent to them from Gazprom, where it was said that in connection with this, deliveries were stopped from April 27.
4. At the same time, Hungary expressed its readiness to pay for gas through an account with Gazprombank with conversion into rubles.
5. Hungary will receive gas in transit through Bulgaria, so it will not be left without gas.
6. If they start stealing transit gas, then Gazprom promises to reduce the volume of transit by the amount of stolen gas.
7. After the announcement of the shutdown of Poland and Bulgaria, gas in Europe began to rise sharply in price.
8. The resumption of supplies to Poland and Bulgaria is possible if they agree to pay for gas in rubles.
We look forward to developments in Germany, where big German business howls that the rejection of Russian gas will lead Germany to an economic disaster and a long recession.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7581499.html
Google Translator
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Politico: "Germany approves tank sales to Ukraine, bowing to pressure"
Did Germany really decide to deliver tanks to the Ukraine?
The German government said Tuesday it will deliver anti-aircraft tanks to Ukraine after facing strong pressure at home and abroad to abandon its reluctance to supply heavy weapons to Kyiv.
The decision to provide the “Gepard” tanks, which come from German defense industry stocks, was made at a closed-door government meeting on Monday, Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht told reporters at a Ukraine security conference at a U.S. airbase in Ramstein, Germany. There was no immediate information on how many tanks Germany would deliver.
The announcement marks a notable shift for Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who as recently as last week was still ruling out sending German tanks to Ukraine, insisting it would make more sense for Eastern NATO countries to give Kyiv old Soviet-era tanks already familiar to the Ukrainian military. Scholz promised Germany would then send those countries replacement German tanks.
I find it amusing how many misunderstand this move. First off - the Gepard (Cheetah) is not a tank as the turret has very little protective armor.
It is a short range (5 km / 3 miles) anti-air system on a tank chassis useful against helicopters, drones and low flying planes.
That Scholz decided to offer these, instead of real tanks or armored infantry carriers as the U.S. and the camouflage-Green party demanded, is a nice way out. It guarantees that the Ukrainians will not be able to use them before the war is over.
The Gepard system with its two 35mm cannons is more than 50 years old but has been upgraded two or three times. The Germany army retired their last one of these in 2010. They have since been held in storage.
I remember them well from my time in the Bundeswehr. While my primary training was as a gunner on a real tank, the Leopard 1A3, two people I knew were trained as gunners for the Gepard. There was a huge difference though. It took 6 months of training to become a reasonably good tank gunner. It took 12 month, including hundreds of hours in a simulator, to become a gunner on a Gepard. The commander role required even more training.
The system was excellent for its time but also really complicate. The two radars have various modes for different purposes. One would better use the right one or risk to attract explosive countermeasures. The startup of the turret systems and the handling of their various error modes that could occur were not easy to handle. The tank chassis is also more complicate than the original one. It has an additional motor which powers five electric generators, two Metadyne rotary transformers and a flywheel to handle the extraordinary fast movements of the turret (2.5 sec for a 360°turn).
There are probably less than ten people in the current Bundeswehr who still know how to operate and maintain a Gepard. There is thus little chance to find German crews for them.
If the Ukrainians really want to use these outdated systems they will have to train fresh crews for at least a year. Otherwise those guns will be ineffective and of little use.
My hunch though is that none of these will ever be delivered. The Swiss, who manufactured the cannons and their ammunition, have seen to that:
Neutral Switzerland has vetoed the re-export of Swiss-made ammunition used in Gepard anti-aircraft tanks that Germany is sending to Ukraine, the government said on Tuesday.
Germany earlier announced its first delivery of heavy weapons to Ukraine to help it fend off Russian attacks following weeks of pressure at home and abroad to do so.
The Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) confirmed a report by broadcaster SRF that it had blocked Germany from sending munitions for the Gepard tank to Ukraine.
Chancellor Scholz likely knew all that. The offer of Gepards is a safe way to relieve the pressure put onto him to send arms to Ukraine. It is an offer of a system that can not be used within the timeframe of the war and for which he can not deliver the necessary specialized ammunition.
Are there still some Lockheed F-104 Starfighter in German storage? If so those flying coffins should be offered next.
Posted by b on April 27, 2022 at 10:24 UTC | Permalink
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/04/p ... .html#more
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The Nazis of Ukraine
April 26, 2022
By C.B. Forde – Apr 21, 2022
There is an inconvenient truth that those beating the war-drum against Russia love to ignore—namely, the Nazis of Ukraine. We are told that this is all somehow “Russian disinformation/misinformation,” or that Putin loves to call people whom he doesn’t like, “Nazis” (notice, this is what actually is done in the West against opponents of the elite). Of course, no real evidence is ever given to back up these claims, as has now become a sad habit, any self-righteous assertion is considered “truth.”
Here are the facts about Nazis in Ukraine. The drumbeaters have yet to disprove any of them.
Origins
When Hitler invaded Ukraine, for many it was a liberation from communism and openly celebrated, and soon led to the creation of the 14th SS-Volunteer Division “Galician” (later, the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, 1st Galician). It was nearly annihilated in the Lvov–Sandomierz Offensive (1944). What remained was regrouped as the Ukrainian National Army (UNA), under the German High Command (OKH) and led by General Pavlo Shandruk (1889-1979). The UNA numbered some 220,000 volunteers and fought in various theatres throughout Europe with the Wehrmacht, including Austria. What marked all these volunteers was a strong antipathy to the Soviet Union. With the defeat of the Nazis, the UNA surrendered to the British and the US. All the volunteers did not want to be sent back to the Ukraine and sought asylum elsewhere (a large number coming to Canada and the US).
General Shandruk struck a special deal with Poland (with the help of General Władysław Anders), which accepted members of the UNA as “pre-war Polish citizens.” Shandruk was given the Polish Virtuti Militari order, and he settled in Germany, before eventually moving to the US, where he died in 1979.
In effect, in Ukraine, Nazi Germany was not regarded as the enemy; rather, it was an ally in the fight against the Soviet Union, or the “Russians.” And therefore the negativity associated with Nazis and Nazism is weak, if not absent, in the Ukrainian context, where “uncle Hitler” was seen as a liberator from the Soviets.
This positive view of Germany goes back to that bloody period after the Russian Revolution, when Civil War broke out in all parts of what was once the Russian Empire, fueled by resistance to the Bolsheviks. As happened everywhere in the former Russian Empire, regions that did not want to become communist went into armed conflict with the Bolsheviks, including Ukraine, which declared itself independent of Moscow in 1918, with the establishment of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR).
The Bolsheviks did not accept such independence and launched a series of highly successful campaigns in the region that saw the capture of key cities and put the UPR government in a position of total collapse. To prevent such collapse, the UPR turned for help to Germany, which quickly sent in troops and supplies, and bolstered the weak Ukrainian National Army (UNA), and beat back the Reds.
But it was 1918, and Germany itself was exhausted and before long signed the Armistice of November 11, 1918, thus ending the First World War. This left Ukraine to fight on, on its own, until gradually it lost and became part of the Soviet Union, in 1922, as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Thus, in the post-1917 Ukrainian psyche, the enemy was always the Soviets, or the Russians, while Germany, whether in the figure of Kaiser Wilhelm or Hitler, was always the friend. Thus, also Nazism carried none of the negative connotations in Ukraine as it carries in the West.
Stepan Bandera
A Nazi-sympathizer, collaborator and murderer, Stepan Bandera is nevertheless a hero for many now fighting the Russians in Ukraine. His statues are proudly displayed and streets are named after him. Who was he? (What follows is summarized from Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist, by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe.)
Born in Galicia (now Western Ukraine, but then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Bandera early showed signs of violence. As a university student in Lvov, he routinely tortured himself in order to toughen himself up for the time when authorities might question him. Such discipline included self-flagellation and slamming a door on his fingers. He was getting ready for his life ahead—as a national revolutionary.
By this time, the Russian Revolution had already happened and new countries came into existence. But in Eastern Europe, the struggle was not simply the winning of a national destiny but also the fight for or against communism; for the Russian Revolution had also unleashed a bloody civil war which would devour entire populations. What was once Galicia now became part of Poland. The eastern portions of Ukraine belonged to the Soviets. Both outcomes stuck in the craw of the nationalists who wanted to unite the western portion and the eastern portions into one unified whole (Ukraine). The eastern portions had already been engaged in a long, bloody war with the Soviets (from 1917 to 1921), a war which was lost.
At the age of 20, Bandera joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), in whose ranks he rose quickly, given his penchant for violence. Aside from robberies (to fund the movement), in 1933, he organized an attack on the Soviet embassy in Lvov, killing one of the staff. This was the first of his murders in the thousands. In 1934, he planned and carried out the assassination of Bronisław Pieracki, the Polish Minister of Internal Affairs, as well as other murders. Bandera was arrested by the Poles, tried and given a death sentence, which was commuted to life. But the killings continued. Things got so bad that the Polish government carried out mass arrests of OUN members, which led to further dislike of Poland. Just before the outbreak of the war, the general sentiment was to appeal to Hitler to come and rescue Ukraine.
And in 1939, it seemed Hitler granted the Ukrainians their dearest wish; he invaded Poland. In the fog of war, Bandera escaped from prison and made his way to his allies, the invading Germans. As Bandera declared the “German army as the army of allies.” Once safely among the Nazis, Bandera created a break-away “Bandera faction” of the OUN, known as “OUN-B[andera],” or Banderites, whose goal was to fashion a Nazi Ukraine, under the auspices of Hitler, because Bandera had stated that “German and Ukraine interests” were identical.
The Banderites set up various militias, such as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and Ukrainian People’s Militsiya, or the Ukrainian National Militsiya. The Banderites then undertook vicious reprisals and ethnic-cleaning actions, against Poles, communists, “ethnic Russians,” and against Jews. Or, in the words of Bandera: “Muscovites, Poles, and Jews” must be “destroyed.”
It was during this time that a distinct Ukrainian “identity” was also fashioned, one which stated that the “real” Ukrainians were supposed descendants of Vikings who set up Kievan Rus. There is no real historical or genetic basis for this designation, but it was a convenient merging with Nazi ideology. In other words, in the “true Ukraine,” there were the superior humans and the sub-humans. This “Germanic identity” of Ukraine would have tragic consequences down to today.
The inevitable result of all this was mass slaughter of those that were “undesirable,” the bloodiest of which occurred in June and July of 1941, all coordinated by Bandera, and in which some 9,000 people were murdered (Jews, Poles, and “Muscovites”).
Given the success of this violence and thinking that he had the upper hand, Bandera blundered and declared the Ukraine as independent, and so was promptly arrested by his friends, the Nazis, who sent him off to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he stayed until 1944, when he was released to coordinate resistance against the Red Army, a task he took up with renewed fervor.
After the war, the Banderites were reorganized by the British (MI6) and the CIA, as a way to fight the Soviets. During this time, Bandera moved about, often in disguise and in secret, and always protected by the many members of the former SS, who had found convenient shelter in Ukraine and who formed an extensive underground network.
During this time, Bandera and his organizations killed thousands; some say hundreds of thousands; and all the while he worked closely with the BND, the Federal Intelligence Service of what was then West Germany.
Finally, Bandera was assassinated by the Soviets in Munich, in 1959. But this did not end the deep influence of Hitler and the Nazis in the aspirations of Ukraine nationalists—so much so that it is now difficult to say where Nazism ends and Ukrainian nationalism begins.
In the new Ukraine, statues of Bandera are everywhere. He is the official, national hero.
Which Ukrainians?
In view of the above, it is important to note that theme of the “Ukrainian people” is again at the center of the current Ukraine-Russia conflict. In the West, this has come to mean an alliance with the “Ukrainians” in order to defeat the Russians who are regarded as aliens and who do not belong to “us.” Such is the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine, in that people repeat its core tenet of the inferior Other, in their “defense” of Ukraine. Russians are not “Western” and so must be fought and defeated. That is the gist of the hysterical Russophobia that now grips the West, where “innocent Ukraine” and the “bully Russia” has become “settled science.”
Few in the grip of this hysteria seem to want to understand the complexity involved, let alone the near-impossibility of separating Ukrainian nationalism from Nazism—for the Banderites never went away—meaning that the Ukraine was never de-Nazified. Rather, the Banderites became inseparable from the country’s power-structures and institutions. This relationship only intensified with the dissolution of the Soviet Union when Ukraine became independent in 1991, and when Ukrainian nationalism gained full legitimacy.
And the myth of a “superior, Germanic Ukrainian” was central to the “new Ukraine,” which in turn was central to Euromaidan and what came later—the relentless slaughter of the “sub-humans” in the Donbas regions, as many have meticulously catalogued from 2014 to today.
And according to current Ukrainian law, there are two kinds of “Ukrainians”—the “Germanic Ukrainians,” along with allied people, the Tatars and Karaites (neither of whom actually live in Ukraine).
Then, there are the undesirable people, who are not legally “Ukrainians.” These are the Slavs, and a few others like the Magyars and the Romani who are denied the use of their own language in public. They have to use the official “Ukrainian” language which officially has nothing to do with Russian (!!).
This is the “Law of the Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine” which states that only Germanic Ukrainians, Tatars and Karaites have “the right to fully enjoy all human rights and all fundamental freedoms.” It was signed into law by the current BFF of the West, President Volodymyr Zelensky, on July 21, 2021. In other words, racial segregation of society into the Uebermenschen and the Untermenschen.
This law is not an aberration; rather it reflects the widespread view of where Ukraine “belongs.” For example, in 2018, a book appeared (which became a bestseller and won the Stepan Bandera Prize) in which wide-ranging claims were made about ancient Aryan Ukrainians who invented all kinds of things, including civilization itself. The book was happily “reviewed” by three professors of history and philology at Lviv University (Iryna Kochan, Viktor Golubko and Iosif Los).
As a further demonstration of this positive understanding of Nazis, recently the Ukrainian Parliament tweeted out a photo, comparing what the Russians were supposedly doing to what happened to Hamburg in 1943. The tweet was subsequently deleted. This could again be naivete. But in the context of Ukraine’s twentieth-century history, this should never be assumed.
Then, there is Hitler as the protector of Ukraine, a trope that appears often in children’s school textbooks. For example, one of the more popular textbooks is Andrei Kozitsky’s История Украины. 1914-2014 (History of Ukraine. 1914-2014), in which Ukrainian patriots often wear Nazi uniforms.
In another such textbook, Hitler is nearly teary-eyed with Ukrainian nationalism: “On April 1, 1939, he [Hitler] said: ‘My soul aches when we see the suffering of the noble Ukrainian people… The time has come to create a common Ukrainian state.’”
In other words, in Ukraine, uncle Hitler was never the bad guy; and Nazis equal real Ukrainian nationalism.
The West’s Grooming Of Nazis
Although the term “Nazi” is tossed about in the West to smear ideological opponents, the West also has a long and sordid history of grooming neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
In 2007, the CIA put together a “conference” of various anti-Russian factions in Ukraine whose purpose seems nothing other than to groom neo-Nazis and jihadists, both groups being solidly anti-Russian. Overseeing the conference was Dmytro Yarosh, who led the Trident and the Right Sector, both neo-Nazi organizations. Yarosh’s career is widely known.
These various neo-Nazi units were organized into anti-Russian fighters, trained by the West, and which were integrated into the Ukrainian army. Victoria Nuland, in 2021, told Zelensky to appoint Yarosh as adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian army—because no one can fight Russians better than Nazis, right? After 2014, the West actively protected these neo-Nazi groups
Of course, it is usual to hear that all this is “Russian disinformation,” and that Putin just likes to call people he doesn’t like “neo-Nazis.” The facts, however, are straight-forward enough. Here are the larger units of neo-Nazis, or Banderites currently fighting Russians in Ukraine:
• Members of Svoboda (formerly the “Nation-Social Party of Ukraine,” which curiously rhymes with Hitler’s “National-Socialist German Workers Party”)
•The AZOV Battalion (likely now destroyed by the Russians)
• C14 of Kiev
• The Aidar Battalion (destroyed recently by the Russians)
• The Wotanjugend (who are actually Russian in origin)
• Ukraine Patriot (co-founded by Andriy Parubiy)
• The National Militia
• Karpatska Sich
• Freikorps
There are also many other smaller units (more than 30) that have merged with the larger ones, and all have been integrated into the Ukrainian army. And the various symbols of these organizations are common-place in Ukraine (i.e., the Sonnenrad, the Totenkopf, the Wolfsangel). After 2014, Ukraine also became the main “exporter” of Nazi ideology throughout the world (the mosque shooter in New Zealand was an ardent supporter, for example).
Fighting alongside the neo-Nazis and the Ukrainian army are a slew of jihadis and mercenaries, many of whom are from other Western neo-Nazi groups like the Misanthropic Division. These mercenaries are known as the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine.
There are some who say that none of this is true because Zelensky is Jewish. There is no need to go into the history of Jewish collusion with the Nazis. Suffice to say that the Azov Battalion, and various other neo-Nazi militias, are funded by the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky who happens to be Jewish and who, it is said, hand-picked Zelensky. Both men also figure prominently in the Pandora Papers which further explains Zelensky the billionaire, complete with a mansion in Florida, lording it over the poorest nation in Europe.
Trudeau And The Nazis
In 2016, the government of Canada invited Andriy Parubiy to Ottawa, when he was the leader of the Social-National Party of Ukraine (now Svoboda), co-founder of Ukraine Patriot, and at that time Parliamentary Speaker of the Rada (the Ukrainian parliament). And Trudeau met him again in Ukraine later that same year.
In 2018, Parubiy opined about democracy: “I’m a major supporter of direct democracy… By the way, I tell you that the biggest man, who practiced a direct democracy, was Adolf Aloizovich [Hitler—and note the use of the honorific form of Adolf’s name, to show great respect].”
In his inimical way, Trudeau lined up with Ukrainian nationalism in a tweet (here translated from the French): “Five years ago, brave Euromaidan protesters were killed in Ukraine while demanding a better future for their country. Today, we honour the Hundred Heavenly Heroes and their sacrifices for democracy. Canada will always stand with the Ukrainian people.”
Irony aside, from the man who is now dictator of Canada, “the Hundred Heavenly Heroes” refers to protestors during Euromaidan who died, many of whom were neo-Nazis.
This may all be put down to naivete, but it is also clear that when Parubiy was invited to Ottawa, the government was fully briefed about his neo-Nazi credentials. But it seemed not to matter, in the greater game of besting Russia.
Perhaps, therefore, it is not surprising that Trudeau’s prominent role in backing Zelensky does have a precedent, and that neo-Nazis in Ukraine are perfectly acceptable, as long as they fight Russians. This is a very old story in Ukraine.
More recently, the current Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland happily posed with a neo-Nazi banner and posted the photo on Twitter, then removed it and posted another without the banner, while saying that anyone who said that she posed with a neo-Nazi banner was obviously spreading “Russian disinformation.”
The black-and-red banner read: “Slava Ukraini” (“Glory to Ukraine”), and it was the slogan of Banderites and the official slogan of the OUN-B. The colors, black and red, are the banner of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
Of course, one should never believe one’s lying eyes. It is better to believe the official narrative. It is also said that Freeland’s own family has connections to Banderites. The point being, not blood-guilt, but the deep-rooted problem of Nazism in Ukraine.
Such images might be seen as “innocent mistakes.” But in the blood-soaked history of Ukrainian nationalism, they carry a lot of weight and are used as valuable currency.
But the West helping Nazis is also nothing new.
More Atrocities
Ever since 2014, the sad litany of atrocities committed by the neo-Nazis, especially the Azov Battalion, are well-known and widely catalogued. And in the recent conflict, it these neo-Nazi units who are at the forefront of committing further atrocities against civilians. And there are also false-flag operations and yet more atrocities. Where will justice for these crimes come from? From the enablers of the Nazis?
But it would seem, few in the West care, as long as we can all collectively hate Putin and his Russians. Hatred is a great unifier, while the West keeps handing out cash and Wunderwaffen, in the hope that a great Volkssturm will sweep the Russians back where they came from. But notice too that the model of such efforts is always Nazi Germany.
And why does no one object to civilians being made into combatants? Is it a tactical Western move to get “bad press” about Russians “killing civilians?” Whatever the case, Zelensky is certainly guilty of a terrible crime against his own people whom he has pitted against a trained, professional army—and how are Russian soldiers to differentiate between combatants and civilians? Such is the face of a war led by Wokists.
Putin famously, at the beginning of Operation Z, said that Ukraine was ruled by a bunch of drug-addicts and Nazis. Others have looked at the wide-spread drug habits of the rulers, and in the Ukrainian army. The neo-Nazis we have outlined here.
Russia will succeed in its objectives, because it is not led by hysterical woke social justice warriors; and Russia will finally ne-Nazify Ukraine, a job long overdue. Here is Konstantin Pulikovsky, the Russian commander who sets the record straight. His is a voice of true sobriety. (You can watch with translation enabled):(Video wouldn't cc English for me. View at link.)
https://orinocotribune.com/the-nazis-of-ukraine/
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Russia Destroys US-European Weapons Depot in Ukraine
The spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry indicated that the weapons depot was in an aluminum factory in Zaporozhie. | Photo: @MarQs__
Published April 27, 2022 (1 hour 58 minutes ago)
The Russian Ministry of Defense indicated that it was possible to neutralize more than 120 Ukrainian nationalists and destroy 35 vehicles and armored vehicles.
The Russian Defense Ministry announced on Wednesday the destruction of a warehouse where weapons supplied by the United States and its European allies were stored in southeastern Ukraine.
The spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, Igor Konashénkov, indicated that the military operation was directed against the hangars of an aluminum factory in the Ukrainian town of Zaporozhie.
Igor Konashenkov said that Russian aircraft hit 59 Ukrainian military facilities overnight on Wednesday, including 50 assembly areas for Ukrainian soldiers and military equipment, and four warehouses with weapons and ammunition.
Konashenkov noted that more than 120 Ukrainian nationalists had been neutralized and 35 vehicles and armor had been destroyed.
According to the Defense portfolio, in the last few hours, 432 concentration areas for soldiers and military equipment, 67 artillery positions, two batteries of multiple launch rocket systems and seven ammunition depots were attacked.
In another incident, the governor of Russia's Belgorod region, Viacheslav Gladkov, reported on Wednesday the burning of an arms depot near the border with Ukraine.
According to Governor Gladkov, the fire in the town of Staraya Nelidovka, about twenty kilometers from the border with Ukraine, is under control.
Viacheslav Gladkov pointed out that the fire did not leave any victims or damage to nearby buildings and added that the causes of the incident have not been made clear.
The governor of Belgorod has denounced several attacks on villages in the region bordering Ukraine in recent days.
https://www.telesurtv.net/news/rusia-de ... -0008.html
Google Translator
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Accused of Treason and Imprisoned Without Trial: Journalist Kirill Vyshinsky Recounts His Harrowing Time in a Ukrainian Prison
Eva Bartlett sat down with recently released Ukrainian journalist Kirill Vyshinsky. Vyshinsky endured 15 months of appalling conditions in a Ukrainian prison after being falsely accused of treason.
by Eva Bartlett
In November 2018, I became aware of the case of Kirill Vyshinsky, a Ukrainian-Russian journalist and editor imprisoned in Ukraine without trial since May 2018, accused of high treason.
Soon after, I interviewed Vyshinsky via email. He described his arrest and the accusations against him as politically-motivated, “an attempt by the Ukrainian authorities to bolster the declining popularity of [then] President [Petro] Poroshenko in this election year.”
Vyshinsky noted that his arrest was advancing the incessant anti-Russian hysteria now prevalent among Ukrainian authorities, as he holds dual Ukrainian and Russian citizenship. He noted that the charges against him, which pertain to a number of articles he published in 2014 (none of them authored by Vyshinsky), became of interest to Ukrainian authorities and intelligence services four years after they were published. To Vyshinsky, this supports the notion that neither the articles nor their editor were a security threat to Ukraine, instead, he says, they were a political card to be played.
In early 2019, I traveled to Kiev to interview Vyshinsky’s defense lawyer Andriy Domansky about the logistic obstacles of his client’s case. Domansky viewed the Vyshinsky case as politically motivated and expressed concern that he could himself become a target of Ukraine’s secret service for his role in defending his client, an innocent man.
Domansky told me at the time,
The Vyshinsky case is key in demonstrating the presence of political persecution of journalists in Ukraine. As a legal expert, I believe justice is still possible in Ukraine and I will do everything possible to prove Kirill Vyshinsky’s innocence.”
To the surprise of those following the case against Vyshinsky, in late August 2019 he was released with little fanfare after serving more than 400 days in a Ukrainian prison but still faces all of the charges brought against him by the Ukrainian government and is “obliged to appear in court or give testimony to investigators if they deemed it necessary.”
By early September, Kirill Vyshinsky was on a plane to Moscow. Despite never being tried or officially convicted, he found himself the subject of a prisoner exchange between the Russian and Ukrainian governments.
A banner reading “Freedom to Kirill Vyshinsky” is held at a June 16, 2019 rally in Moscow. Maxim Shemetov | Reuters
I interviewed Vyshinsky in Moscow in late September. He told me about his harrowing ordeal, the Ukrainian detention system, other persecuted journalists, and what lies ahead for him.
He also touched on the inhumane conditions he experienced in Ukrainian prisons. He noted that a pretrial detention center as we know it in Western nations is a very different entity in Ukraine and that Ukrainian prisons were so over-crowded that it was common for inmates to sleep in three shifts in order to allow enough standing room for inmates crammed into a cell.
Ukrainian prisons like a “concentration camp”
Aleksey Zhuravko, a Ukrainian deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of V and VI convocations recently published photos taken inside of an Odessa pretrial detention center showing utterly unsanitary and appalling conditions. Zhuravko noted, “I am shocked at what was seen. It is a concentration camp. It is a hotbed of diseases.”
Another Ukrainian journalist, Pavel Volkov, was subjected to the same types of accusations lobbed against Vyshinsky. Volkov spent over a year in the same pretrial detention center as Vyshinsky. He was arrested on September 27, 2017, after Ukrainian authorities carried out searches of his wife and mother’s apartments without the presence of his lawyer and with what he says, was a false witness.
Volkov spent more than a year in a pretrial detention center on charges of “infringing on territorial integrity with a group of people” and “miscellaneous accessory to terrorism.” On March 27, 2019, he was fully acquitted by a Ukrainian court.
Volkov shared his thoughts on the persecution of journalists in Ukraine, saying:
The leaders of the 2014 Euromaidan movement, who subsequently occupied the largest positions in the country’s leadership, repeatedly stated that collaborators from World War II who participated in the mass extermination of Jews, Russians, and Poles are true heroes in Ukraine, and that the Russian and Russian-speaking population of Ukraine are inferior people who need to be either forcibly re-educated or destroyed.
They also believe that anyone who wants peace with the Russian Federation, and who believes that the Russian language (the native language for over sixty percent of Ukraine’s population) should be the second state language, is the enemy of Ukraine.
These notions formed the basis of the new criminal law, designed to persecute politicians, public figures, journalists, and ordinary citizens who disagree with the above.
Since 2014, security services have arrested hundreds of people on charges of state treason; infringing on the territorial integrity of Ukraine; and assisting terrorism for criticizing the current government in the streets or on the Internet.
People have been in prison for years without a conviction. And these are not only the journalists included in the ‘Vyshinsky list’.
Activists from Odessa, Sergey Dolzhenkov and Evgeny Mefedov, have spent more than five years in jail just for laying flowers at a memorial to the liberators of Nikolaev [Ukrainian city] from Nazi invaders.
Sergeyev and Gorban, taxi drivers, have spent two and a half years in a pretrial detention center because they transported pensioners from Donetsk to Ukraine-controlled territory so that they could receive their legal pension.
The entrepreneur Andrey Tatarintsev has spent two years in prison for providing humanitarian assistance to a children’s hospital in the territory of the Lugansk region not controlled by Ukraine.
Farmer Nikolay Butrimenko received eight years of imprisonment for paying tax to the Donetsk People’s Republic for his land located in that territory.
The 85-year-old scientist and engineer Mekhti Logunov was given twelve years because he agreed to build a waste recycling plant with Russian investors. The list is endless.
People often incriminate themselves while being tortured or under the threat of their relatives being punished, and such confessions are accepted by the courts, despite the fact that lawyers initiate criminal proceedings against the security services involved in the torture. These cases are not being investigated.
The only mitigation that has happened in this direction after the change of government was the abolition of the provision of the Criminal Procedure Code stating that no other measure of restraint other than detention can be applied to persons suspected of committing crimes against the state.
This allowed some defendants to leave prison on bail, but not a single politically-motivated case has yet been closed. Moreover, arrests are ongoing.
The only acquittal to date from the so-called journalistic cases on freedom of speech is mine. However, it is still being contested by the prosecutor’s office in the Supreme Court.
Ninety-nine percent of the media continue to call all these people ‘terrorists’, ‘separatists’, and ‘enemies of the people’, even though almost none of them have yet received a verdict in court.”
Volkov’s words lay bare the true nature of the allegations made against Kirill Vyshinsky as well as the countless other journalists and citizens of Ukraine that have fallen victim to the heavy hand of Ukrainian authorities.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/interview ... on/262498/
Video at link.
April 27, 13:41
Operation deindustrialization
The escalation of hostilities in Ukraine led to the fact that the Russian Armed Forces began to strike at railway infrastructure facilities. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, for the first time, a strike was struck on railway facilities in the west of the country and other rear infrastructure facilities in order to prevent the supply of Western weapons, ammunition and fuel and lubricants for the group in Donbass.
Representative of the Russian Defense Ministry, Major General Igor Konashenkov, said that long-range high-precision weapons were used to destroy traction substations on the territory of Ukraine.
Ukrzheldorog (UZ) said that on the morning of April 25, attacks were carried out on 5 railway stations in the western and central parts of Ukraine. The head of the company Alexander Kamyshin announced the delay of at least 16 passenger trains.
UZ also claims the destruction of three traction substations. It is reported about the decommissioning of two facilities in the Vinnytsia region (TPS "Kazatin-2" and TPS "Podolskaya-tupikovaya") and one in the Kyiv region (TPS "Fastov"). The voltage in the contact network disappeared at the sections Shepetovka (Khmelnitsky region) - Kozyatyn (Vinnitsa region), Zhmerynka (Vinnitsa region) - Kazatin, Kazatin - Fastov (Kyiv region). In the Lviv region, the Krasnoe railway station was destroyed, reports the Operation Z Telegram channel.
If this trend continues, the electric locomotives that are operated on the UZ network will turn into useless scrap metal.
If you look at the map of the railways of Ukraine, then you can conclude that the most, if I may say so, "careful" solution in relation to the infrastructure of Ukraine. The fact is that the Ukrainian railway network has been most widely developed since tsarist times. The high level of industrialization of the once second largest Soviet republic has led to the fact that the main highways of the country are electrified.
The number of diesel locomotives in UZ is extremely limited. Especially powerful diesel locomotives capable of hauling heavy trains. For the last 30 years, the railway industry has degraded. At the end of 2021, the government of Ukraine announced a deep modernization of UZ. Western funding was found and local producers were already looking forward to, if not participation in the division of the pie, then the selection of rich crumbs from the lordly table of foreign companies.
But it didn't come to fruition. The main transport arteries from west to east are the Kovel-Kyiv-Poltava and Lvov-Bila Tserkva-Dnepropetrovsk highways. This is the main cargo "move". The railway from Uzhgorod also flows into the Lviv transport hub. Accordingly, the railway communications of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are extremely vulnerable. Detours are mostly single-track, not designed for heavy trains and have also been electrified for a long time. It turns out that the defeat of the energy infrastructure of UZ paralyzes the supply of the eastern groups.
An alternative is to use diesel locomotives. But there are two problems. First, there are few diesel locomotives, and they are old. Secondly, diesel locomotives use valuable fuel that is required for military equipment.
A blow to traction substations, if not paralyzing, will significantly slow down the movement on Ukrainian railways. Morally and technically obsolete diesel locomotives of UZ will not be able to make up for the resulting shortage of traction rolling stock. The 30 GE diesel locomotives delivered to Ukraine in 2019 are unlikely to significantly improve the situation. Depreciation of the Ukrainian TPS park is more than 90%. Until 2033, UZ planned to purchase 315 units of TPS.
Further, we should expect the defeat of the depot, car repair plants and individual diesel locomotives.
Until recently, the transportation of weapons and ammunition in passenger trains, including electric trains, has been repeatedly reported. However, in the dilemma of attacks on infrastructure and heavy human casualties or the grinding of equipment in clashes, the Russian Armed Forces chose the second option. Gradual bitterness and attacks on Russian territory, on the one hand, and the moment when the flow of refugees from east to west subsided, on the other hand, led to the fact that it became possible for the RF Armed Forces to begin destroying the transport infrastructure of Ukraine.
What's next? Further, we should expect the defeat of the depot, car repair plants and individual diesel locomotives. Lack of traction will lead to paralysis of movement. If the foreign sponsors of the conflict urgently supply diesel locomotives to Kyiv, then the railway bridges in Kyiv and the Dnieper will become the target of the RF Armed Forces, which, of course, is a critical moment. If bridge crossings over the Dnieper become unusable, the Ukrainian rail network will be cut in two. Thus, the supply of units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the east of the country by rail will become impossible.
Merefo-Kherson railway bridge in Dnepropetrovsk
The southern route through Chisinau and Odessa will not be able to greatly affect supplies to the Donbass, however, it seriously complicates the military isolation of Odessa. There were videos from Croatian Osijek with platforms with British military equipment. This means that through Chisinau, Odessa can be “pumped up” with anti-aircraft, anti-tank and anti-ship missiles, which, with NATO satellite support, can turn it into a special fortified area. In this regard, provocations in Transnistria may play into the hands of Russia, which can cut this transport corridor through diplomatic and other methods.
On April 26, the Odessa City Council reported that in the Odessa region, a bridge across the Dniester estuary in the urban settlement of Zatoka was under attack. Put into operation in 1955, the drawbridge in Zatoka connects two parts of the Budatskaya Spit. This is one of two bridge crossings that connect the southern part of the Odessa region with the territory of the rest of Ukraine.
Over the past few weeks, the Western allies of Kyiv have been announcing the supply of military equipment, ammunition and fuel for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine almost on a daily basis. Only the heads of the US Department of State and Defense, Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, who visited Kyiv on a visit, promised Zelensky another $300 million for armaments. Since the beginning of the special operation of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine, American assistance to the Kyiv government has amounted to $3.7 billion.
Probably, there is not a single European country left that has not made its own, albeit small, but symbolic contribution to the fight against Russia. Trains with bulk tanks were seen on the approaches to the Ukrainian border in Moldova and Romania. Moreover, these trains are formed, most likely, at broad gauge marshalling yards in Romania. American "Hercules" regularly land in Polish Rzeszow.
Obviously, such volumes of weapons and ammunition cannot be transported except by rail.
Especially when it comes to heavy weapons. It will not be superfluous to recall the quote of the American general during the First World War, John Pershing: "Infantry wins battles, but logistics wins the war."
At the moment, Ukrzheldoroga continues the process of evacuating the civilian population from the settlements of the Kharkiv, Nikolaev and Dnepropetrovsk regions, as well as from the territory of the DPR and LPR controlled by Ukraine. Combining the removal of civilians in one direction and the transfer of military equipment to the other is a rather difficult task.
With a shortage of traction, both of these tasks may become impossible. Solely due to the fact that the railway infrastructure will become unusable. The victims will be refugees fleeing the battle zone.
Gazprom cut off gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria
1. Gazprom officially announced that gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria had been cut off due to their refusal to pay for gas in rubles.
2. Previously, Poland and Bulgaria stated that they were ready to pay only in euros, and they would not use the scheme proposed by Russia.
3. Yesterday, notification letters were sent to them from Gazprom, where it was said that in connection with this, deliveries were stopped from April 27.
4. At the same time, Hungary expressed its readiness to pay for gas through an account with Gazprombank with conversion into rubles.
5. Hungary will receive gas in transit through Bulgaria, so it will not be left without gas.
6. If they start stealing transit gas, then Gazprom promises to reduce the volume of transit by the amount of stolen gas.
7. After the announcement of the shutdown of Poland and Bulgaria, gas in Europe began to rise sharply in price.
8. The resumption of supplies to Poland and Bulgaria is possible if they agree to pay for gas in rubles.
We look forward to developments in Germany, where big German business howls that the rejection of Russian gas will lead Germany to an economic disaster and a long recession.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7581499.html
Google Translator
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Politico: "Germany approves tank sales to Ukraine, bowing to pressure"
Did Germany really decide to deliver tanks to the Ukraine?
The German government said Tuesday it will deliver anti-aircraft tanks to Ukraine after facing strong pressure at home and abroad to abandon its reluctance to supply heavy weapons to Kyiv.
The decision to provide the “Gepard” tanks, which come from German defense industry stocks, was made at a closed-door government meeting on Monday, Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht told reporters at a Ukraine security conference at a U.S. airbase in Ramstein, Germany. There was no immediate information on how many tanks Germany would deliver.
The announcement marks a notable shift for Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who as recently as last week was still ruling out sending German tanks to Ukraine, insisting it would make more sense for Eastern NATO countries to give Kyiv old Soviet-era tanks already familiar to the Ukrainian military. Scholz promised Germany would then send those countries replacement German tanks.
I find it amusing how many misunderstand this move. First off - the Gepard (Cheetah) is not a tank as the turret has very little protective armor.
It is a short range (5 km / 3 miles) anti-air system on a tank chassis useful against helicopters, drones and low flying planes.
That Scholz decided to offer these, instead of real tanks or armored infantry carriers as the U.S. and the camouflage-Green party demanded, is a nice way out. It guarantees that the Ukrainians will not be able to use them before the war is over.
The Gepard system with its two 35mm cannons is more than 50 years old but has been upgraded two or three times. The Germany army retired their last one of these in 2010. They have since been held in storage.
I remember them well from my time in the Bundeswehr. While my primary training was as a gunner on a real tank, the Leopard 1A3, two people I knew were trained as gunners for the Gepard. There was a huge difference though. It took 6 months of training to become a reasonably good tank gunner. It took 12 month, including hundreds of hours in a simulator, to become a gunner on a Gepard. The commander role required even more training.
The system was excellent for its time but also really complicate. The two radars have various modes for different purposes. One would better use the right one or risk to attract explosive countermeasures. The startup of the turret systems and the handling of their various error modes that could occur were not easy to handle. The tank chassis is also more complicate than the original one. It has an additional motor which powers five electric generators, two Metadyne rotary transformers and a flywheel to handle the extraordinary fast movements of the turret (2.5 sec for a 360°turn).
There are probably less than ten people in the current Bundeswehr who still know how to operate and maintain a Gepard. There is thus little chance to find German crews for them.
If the Ukrainians really want to use these outdated systems they will have to train fresh crews for at least a year. Otherwise those guns will be ineffective and of little use.
My hunch though is that none of these will ever be delivered. The Swiss, who manufactured the cannons and their ammunition, have seen to that:
Neutral Switzerland has vetoed the re-export of Swiss-made ammunition used in Gepard anti-aircraft tanks that Germany is sending to Ukraine, the government said on Tuesday.
Germany earlier announced its first delivery of heavy weapons to Ukraine to help it fend off Russian attacks following weeks of pressure at home and abroad to do so.
The Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) confirmed a report by broadcaster SRF that it had blocked Germany from sending munitions for the Gepard tank to Ukraine.
Chancellor Scholz likely knew all that. The offer of Gepards is a safe way to relieve the pressure put onto him to send arms to Ukraine. It is an offer of a system that can not be used within the timeframe of the war and for which he can not deliver the necessary specialized ammunition.
Are there still some Lockheed F-104 Starfighter in German storage? If so those flying coffins should be offered next.
Posted by b on April 27, 2022 at 10:24 UTC | Permalink
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/04/p ... .html#more
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The Nazis of Ukraine
April 26, 2022
By C.B. Forde – Apr 21, 2022
There is an inconvenient truth that those beating the war-drum against Russia love to ignore—namely, the Nazis of Ukraine. We are told that this is all somehow “Russian disinformation/misinformation,” or that Putin loves to call people whom he doesn’t like, “Nazis” (notice, this is what actually is done in the West against opponents of the elite). Of course, no real evidence is ever given to back up these claims, as has now become a sad habit, any self-righteous assertion is considered “truth.”
Here are the facts about Nazis in Ukraine. The drumbeaters have yet to disprove any of them.
Origins
When Hitler invaded Ukraine, for many it was a liberation from communism and openly celebrated, and soon led to the creation of the 14th SS-Volunteer Division “Galician” (later, the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, 1st Galician). It was nearly annihilated in the Lvov–Sandomierz Offensive (1944). What remained was regrouped as the Ukrainian National Army (UNA), under the German High Command (OKH) and led by General Pavlo Shandruk (1889-1979). The UNA numbered some 220,000 volunteers and fought in various theatres throughout Europe with the Wehrmacht, including Austria. What marked all these volunteers was a strong antipathy to the Soviet Union. With the defeat of the Nazis, the UNA surrendered to the British and the US. All the volunteers did not want to be sent back to the Ukraine and sought asylum elsewhere (a large number coming to Canada and the US).
General Shandruk struck a special deal with Poland (with the help of General Władysław Anders), which accepted members of the UNA as “pre-war Polish citizens.” Shandruk was given the Polish Virtuti Militari order, and he settled in Germany, before eventually moving to the US, where he died in 1979.
In effect, in Ukraine, Nazi Germany was not regarded as the enemy; rather, it was an ally in the fight against the Soviet Union, or the “Russians.” And therefore the negativity associated with Nazis and Nazism is weak, if not absent, in the Ukrainian context, where “uncle Hitler” was seen as a liberator from the Soviets.
This positive view of Germany goes back to that bloody period after the Russian Revolution, when Civil War broke out in all parts of what was once the Russian Empire, fueled by resistance to the Bolsheviks. As happened everywhere in the former Russian Empire, regions that did not want to become communist went into armed conflict with the Bolsheviks, including Ukraine, which declared itself independent of Moscow in 1918, with the establishment of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR).
The Bolsheviks did not accept such independence and launched a series of highly successful campaigns in the region that saw the capture of key cities and put the UPR government in a position of total collapse. To prevent such collapse, the UPR turned for help to Germany, which quickly sent in troops and supplies, and bolstered the weak Ukrainian National Army (UNA), and beat back the Reds.
But it was 1918, and Germany itself was exhausted and before long signed the Armistice of November 11, 1918, thus ending the First World War. This left Ukraine to fight on, on its own, until gradually it lost and became part of the Soviet Union, in 1922, as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Thus, in the post-1917 Ukrainian psyche, the enemy was always the Soviets, or the Russians, while Germany, whether in the figure of Kaiser Wilhelm or Hitler, was always the friend. Thus, also Nazism carried none of the negative connotations in Ukraine as it carries in the West.
Stepan Bandera
A Nazi-sympathizer, collaborator and murderer, Stepan Bandera is nevertheless a hero for many now fighting the Russians in Ukraine. His statues are proudly displayed and streets are named after him. Who was he? (What follows is summarized from Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist, by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe.)
Born in Galicia (now Western Ukraine, but then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Bandera early showed signs of violence. As a university student in Lvov, he routinely tortured himself in order to toughen himself up for the time when authorities might question him. Such discipline included self-flagellation and slamming a door on his fingers. He was getting ready for his life ahead—as a national revolutionary.
By this time, the Russian Revolution had already happened and new countries came into existence. But in Eastern Europe, the struggle was not simply the winning of a national destiny but also the fight for or against communism; for the Russian Revolution had also unleashed a bloody civil war which would devour entire populations. What was once Galicia now became part of Poland. The eastern portions of Ukraine belonged to the Soviets. Both outcomes stuck in the craw of the nationalists who wanted to unite the western portion and the eastern portions into one unified whole (Ukraine). The eastern portions had already been engaged in a long, bloody war with the Soviets (from 1917 to 1921), a war which was lost.
At the age of 20, Bandera joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), in whose ranks he rose quickly, given his penchant for violence. Aside from robberies (to fund the movement), in 1933, he organized an attack on the Soviet embassy in Lvov, killing one of the staff. This was the first of his murders in the thousands. In 1934, he planned and carried out the assassination of Bronisław Pieracki, the Polish Minister of Internal Affairs, as well as other murders. Bandera was arrested by the Poles, tried and given a death sentence, which was commuted to life. But the killings continued. Things got so bad that the Polish government carried out mass arrests of OUN members, which led to further dislike of Poland. Just before the outbreak of the war, the general sentiment was to appeal to Hitler to come and rescue Ukraine.
And in 1939, it seemed Hitler granted the Ukrainians their dearest wish; he invaded Poland. In the fog of war, Bandera escaped from prison and made his way to his allies, the invading Germans. As Bandera declared the “German army as the army of allies.” Once safely among the Nazis, Bandera created a break-away “Bandera faction” of the OUN, known as “OUN-B[andera],” or Banderites, whose goal was to fashion a Nazi Ukraine, under the auspices of Hitler, because Bandera had stated that “German and Ukraine interests” were identical.
The Banderites set up various militias, such as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and Ukrainian People’s Militsiya, or the Ukrainian National Militsiya. The Banderites then undertook vicious reprisals and ethnic-cleaning actions, against Poles, communists, “ethnic Russians,” and against Jews. Or, in the words of Bandera: “Muscovites, Poles, and Jews” must be “destroyed.”
It was during this time that a distinct Ukrainian “identity” was also fashioned, one which stated that the “real” Ukrainians were supposed descendants of Vikings who set up Kievan Rus. There is no real historical or genetic basis for this designation, but it was a convenient merging with Nazi ideology. In other words, in the “true Ukraine,” there were the superior humans and the sub-humans. This “Germanic identity” of Ukraine would have tragic consequences down to today.
The inevitable result of all this was mass slaughter of those that were “undesirable,” the bloodiest of which occurred in June and July of 1941, all coordinated by Bandera, and in which some 9,000 people were murdered (Jews, Poles, and “Muscovites”).
Given the success of this violence and thinking that he had the upper hand, Bandera blundered and declared the Ukraine as independent, and so was promptly arrested by his friends, the Nazis, who sent him off to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he stayed until 1944, when he was released to coordinate resistance against the Red Army, a task he took up with renewed fervor.
After the war, the Banderites were reorganized by the British (MI6) and the CIA, as a way to fight the Soviets. During this time, Bandera moved about, often in disguise and in secret, and always protected by the many members of the former SS, who had found convenient shelter in Ukraine and who formed an extensive underground network.
During this time, Bandera and his organizations killed thousands; some say hundreds of thousands; and all the while he worked closely with the BND, the Federal Intelligence Service of what was then West Germany.
Finally, Bandera was assassinated by the Soviets in Munich, in 1959. But this did not end the deep influence of Hitler and the Nazis in the aspirations of Ukraine nationalists—so much so that it is now difficult to say where Nazism ends and Ukrainian nationalism begins.
In the new Ukraine, statues of Bandera are everywhere. He is the official, national hero.
Which Ukrainians?
In view of the above, it is important to note that theme of the “Ukrainian people” is again at the center of the current Ukraine-Russia conflict. In the West, this has come to mean an alliance with the “Ukrainians” in order to defeat the Russians who are regarded as aliens and who do not belong to “us.” Such is the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine, in that people repeat its core tenet of the inferior Other, in their “defense” of Ukraine. Russians are not “Western” and so must be fought and defeated. That is the gist of the hysterical Russophobia that now grips the West, where “innocent Ukraine” and the “bully Russia” has become “settled science.”
Few in the grip of this hysteria seem to want to understand the complexity involved, let alone the near-impossibility of separating Ukrainian nationalism from Nazism—for the Banderites never went away—meaning that the Ukraine was never de-Nazified. Rather, the Banderites became inseparable from the country’s power-structures and institutions. This relationship only intensified with the dissolution of the Soviet Union when Ukraine became independent in 1991, and when Ukrainian nationalism gained full legitimacy.
And the myth of a “superior, Germanic Ukrainian” was central to the “new Ukraine,” which in turn was central to Euromaidan and what came later—the relentless slaughter of the “sub-humans” in the Donbas regions, as many have meticulously catalogued from 2014 to today.
And according to current Ukrainian law, there are two kinds of “Ukrainians”—the “Germanic Ukrainians,” along with allied people, the Tatars and Karaites (neither of whom actually live in Ukraine).
Then, there are the undesirable people, who are not legally “Ukrainians.” These are the Slavs, and a few others like the Magyars and the Romani who are denied the use of their own language in public. They have to use the official “Ukrainian” language which officially has nothing to do with Russian (!!).
This is the “Law of the Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine” which states that only Germanic Ukrainians, Tatars and Karaites have “the right to fully enjoy all human rights and all fundamental freedoms.” It was signed into law by the current BFF of the West, President Volodymyr Zelensky, on July 21, 2021. In other words, racial segregation of society into the Uebermenschen and the Untermenschen.
This law is not an aberration; rather it reflects the widespread view of where Ukraine “belongs.” For example, in 2018, a book appeared (which became a bestseller and won the Stepan Bandera Prize) in which wide-ranging claims were made about ancient Aryan Ukrainians who invented all kinds of things, including civilization itself. The book was happily “reviewed” by three professors of history and philology at Lviv University (Iryna Kochan, Viktor Golubko and Iosif Los).
As a further demonstration of this positive understanding of Nazis, recently the Ukrainian Parliament tweeted out a photo, comparing what the Russians were supposedly doing to what happened to Hamburg in 1943. The tweet was subsequently deleted. This could again be naivete. But in the context of Ukraine’s twentieth-century history, this should never be assumed.
Then, there is Hitler as the protector of Ukraine, a trope that appears often in children’s school textbooks. For example, one of the more popular textbooks is Andrei Kozitsky’s История Украины. 1914-2014 (History of Ukraine. 1914-2014), in which Ukrainian patriots often wear Nazi uniforms.
In another such textbook, Hitler is nearly teary-eyed with Ukrainian nationalism: “On April 1, 1939, he [Hitler] said: ‘My soul aches when we see the suffering of the noble Ukrainian people… The time has come to create a common Ukrainian state.’”
In other words, in Ukraine, uncle Hitler was never the bad guy; and Nazis equal real Ukrainian nationalism.
The West’s Grooming Of Nazis
Although the term “Nazi” is tossed about in the West to smear ideological opponents, the West also has a long and sordid history of grooming neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
In 2007, the CIA put together a “conference” of various anti-Russian factions in Ukraine whose purpose seems nothing other than to groom neo-Nazis and jihadists, both groups being solidly anti-Russian. Overseeing the conference was Dmytro Yarosh, who led the Trident and the Right Sector, both neo-Nazi organizations. Yarosh’s career is widely known.
These various neo-Nazi units were organized into anti-Russian fighters, trained by the West, and which were integrated into the Ukrainian army. Victoria Nuland, in 2021, told Zelensky to appoint Yarosh as adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian army—because no one can fight Russians better than Nazis, right? After 2014, the West actively protected these neo-Nazi groups
Of course, it is usual to hear that all this is “Russian disinformation,” and that Putin just likes to call people he doesn’t like “neo-Nazis.” The facts, however, are straight-forward enough. Here are the larger units of neo-Nazis, or Banderites currently fighting Russians in Ukraine:
• Members of Svoboda (formerly the “Nation-Social Party of Ukraine,” which curiously rhymes with Hitler’s “National-Socialist German Workers Party”)
•The AZOV Battalion (likely now destroyed by the Russians)
• C14 of Kiev
• The Aidar Battalion (destroyed recently by the Russians)
• The Wotanjugend (who are actually Russian in origin)
• Ukraine Patriot (co-founded by Andriy Parubiy)
• The National Militia
• Karpatska Sich
• Freikorps
There are also many other smaller units (more than 30) that have merged with the larger ones, and all have been integrated into the Ukrainian army. And the various symbols of these organizations are common-place in Ukraine (i.e., the Sonnenrad, the Totenkopf, the Wolfsangel). After 2014, Ukraine also became the main “exporter” of Nazi ideology throughout the world (the mosque shooter in New Zealand was an ardent supporter, for example).
Fighting alongside the neo-Nazis and the Ukrainian army are a slew of jihadis and mercenaries, many of whom are from other Western neo-Nazi groups like the Misanthropic Division. These mercenaries are known as the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine.
There are some who say that none of this is true because Zelensky is Jewish. There is no need to go into the history of Jewish collusion with the Nazis. Suffice to say that the Azov Battalion, and various other neo-Nazi militias, are funded by the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky who happens to be Jewish and who, it is said, hand-picked Zelensky. Both men also figure prominently in the Pandora Papers which further explains Zelensky the billionaire, complete with a mansion in Florida, lording it over the poorest nation in Europe.
Trudeau And The Nazis
In 2016, the government of Canada invited Andriy Parubiy to Ottawa, when he was the leader of the Social-National Party of Ukraine (now Svoboda), co-founder of Ukraine Patriot, and at that time Parliamentary Speaker of the Rada (the Ukrainian parliament). And Trudeau met him again in Ukraine later that same year.
In 2018, Parubiy opined about democracy: “I’m a major supporter of direct democracy… By the way, I tell you that the biggest man, who practiced a direct democracy, was Adolf Aloizovich [Hitler—and note the use of the honorific form of Adolf’s name, to show great respect].”
In his inimical way, Trudeau lined up with Ukrainian nationalism in a tweet (here translated from the French): “Five years ago, brave Euromaidan protesters were killed in Ukraine while demanding a better future for their country. Today, we honour the Hundred Heavenly Heroes and their sacrifices for democracy. Canada will always stand with the Ukrainian people.”
Irony aside, from the man who is now dictator of Canada, “the Hundred Heavenly Heroes” refers to protestors during Euromaidan who died, many of whom were neo-Nazis.
This may all be put down to naivete, but it is also clear that when Parubiy was invited to Ottawa, the government was fully briefed about his neo-Nazi credentials. But it seemed not to matter, in the greater game of besting Russia.
Perhaps, therefore, it is not surprising that Trudeau’s prominent role in backing Zelensky does have a precedent, and that neo-Nazis in Ukraine are perfectly acceptable, as long as they fight Russians. This is a very old story in Ukraine.
More recently, the current Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland happily posed with a neo-Nazi banner and posted the photo on Twitter, then removed it and posted another without the banner, while saying that anyone who said that she posed with a neo-Nazi banner was obviously spreading “Russian disinformation.”
The black-and-red banner read: “Slava Ukraini” (“Glory to Ukraine”), and it was the slogan of Banderites and the official slogan of the OUN-B. The colors, black and red, are the banner of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
Of course, one should never believe one’s lying eyes. It is better to believe the official narrative. It is also said that Freeland’s own family has connections to Banderites. The point being, not blood-guilt, but the deep-rooted problem of Nazism in Ukraine.
Such images might be seen as “innocent mistakes.” But in the blood-soaked history of Ukrainian nationalism, they carry a lot of weight and are used as valuable currency.
But the West helping Nazis is also nothing new.
More Atrocities
Ever since 2014, the sad litany of atrocities committed by the neo-Nazis, especially the Azov Battalion, are well-known and widely catalogued. And in the recent conflict, it these neo-Nazi units who are at the forefront of committing further atrocities against civilians. And there are also false-flag operations and yet more atrocities. Where will justice for these crimes come from? From the enablers of the Nazis?
But it would seem, few in the West care, as long as we can all collectively hate Putin and his Russians. Hatred is a great unifier, while the West keeps handing out cash and Wunderwaffen, in the hope that a great Volkssturm will sweep the Russians back where they came from. But notice too that the model of such efforts is always Nazi Germany.
And why does no one object to civilians being made into combatants? Is it a tactical Western move to get “bad press” about Russians “killing civilians?” Whatever the case, Zelensky is certainly guilty of a terrible crime against his own people whom he has pitted against a trained, professional army—and how are Russian soldiers to differentiate between combatants and civilians? Such is the face of a war led by Wokists.
Putin famously, at the beginning of Operation Z, said that Ukraine was ruled by a bunch of drug-addicts and Nazis. Others have looked at the wide-spread drug habits of the rulers, and in the Ukrainian army. The neo-Nazis we have outlined here.
Russia will succeed in its objectives, because it is not led by hysterical woke social justice warriors; and Russia will finally ne-Nazify Ukraine, a job long overdue. Here is Konstantin Pulikovsky, the Russian commander who sets the record straight. His is a voice of true sobriety. (You can watch with translation enabled):(Video wouldn't cc English for me. View at link.)
https://orinocotribune.com/the-nazis-of-ukraine/
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Russia Destroys US-European Weapons Depot in Ukraine
The spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry indicated that the weapons depot was in an aluminum factory in Zaporozhie. | Photo: @MarQs__
Published April 27, 2022 (1 hour 58 minutes ago)
The Russian Ministry of Defense indicated that it was possible to neutralize more than 120 Ukrainian nationalists and destroy 35 vehicles and armored vehicles.
The Russian Defense Ministry announced on Wednesday the destruction of a warehouse where weapons supplied by the United States and its European allies were stored in southeastern Ukraine.
The spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, Igor Konashénkov, indicated that the military operation was directed against the hangars of an aluminum factory in the Ukrainian town of Zaporozhie.
Igor Konashenkov said that Russian aircraft hit 59 Ukrainian military facilities overnight on Wednesday, including 50 assembly areas for Ukrainian soldiers and military equipment, and four warehouses with weapons and ammunition.
Konashenkov noted that more than 120 Ukrainian nationalists had been neutralized and 35 vehicles and armor had been destroyed.
According to the Defense portfolio, in the last few hours, 432 concentration areas for soldiers and military equipment, 67 artillery positions, two batteries of multiple launch rocket systems and seven ammunition depots were attacked.
In another incident, the governor of Russia's Belgorod region, Viacheslav Gladkov, reported on Wednesday the burning of an arms depot near the border with Ukraine.
According to Governor Gladkov, the fire in the town of Staraya Nelidovka, about twenty kilometers from the border with Ukraine, is under control.
Viacheslav Gladkov pointed out that the fire did not leave any victims or damage to nearby buildings and added that the causes of the incident have not been made clear.
The governor of Belgorod has denounced several attacks on villages in the region bordering Ukraine in recent days.
https://www.telesurtv.net/news/rusia-de ... -0008.html
Google Translator
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Accused of Treason and Imprisoned Without Trial: Journalist Kirill Vyshinsky Recounts His Harrowing Time in a Ukrainian Prison
Eva Bartlett sat down with recently released Ukrainian journalist Kirill Vyshinsky. Vyshinsky endured 15 months of appalling conditions in a Ukrainian prison after being falsely accused of treason.
by Eva Bartlett
In November 2018, I became aware of the case of Kirill Vyshinsky, a Ukrainian-Russian journalist and editor imprisoned in Ukraine without trial since May 2018, accused of high treason.
Soon after, I interviewed Vyshinsky via email. He described his arrest and the accusations against him as politically-motivated, “an attempt by the Ukrainian authorities to bolster the declining popularity of [then] President [Petro] Poroshenko in this election year.”
Vyshinsky noted that his arrest was advancing the incessant anti-Russian hysteria now prevalent among Ukrainian authorities, as he holds dual Ukrainian and Russian citizenship. He noted that the charges against him, which pertain to a number of articles he published in 2014 (none of them authored by Vyshinsky), became of interest to Ukrainian authorities and intelligence services four years after they were published. To Vyshinsky, this supports the notion that neither the articles nor their editor were a security threat to Ukraine, instead, he says, they were a political card to be played.
In early 2019, I traveled to Kiev to interview Vyshinsky’s defense lawyer Andriy Domansky about the logistic obstacles of his client’s case. Domansky viewed the Vyshinsky case as politically motivated and expressed concern that he could himself become a target of Ukraine’s secret service for his role in defending his client, an innocent man.
Domansky told me at the time,
The Vyshinsky case is key in demonstrating the presence of political persecution of journalists in Ukraine. As a legal expert, I believe justice is still possible in Ukraine and I will do everything possible to prove Kirill Vyshinsky’s innocence.”
To the surprise of those following the case against Vyshinsky, in late August 2019 he was released with little fanfare after serving more than 400 days in a Ukrainian prison but still faces all of the charges brought against him by the Ukrainian government and is “obliged to appear in court or give testimony to investigators if they deemed it necessary.”
By early September, Kirill Vyshinsky was on a plane to Moscow. Despite never being tried or officially convicted, he found himself the subject of a prisoner exchange between the Russian and Ukrainian governments.
A banner reading “Freedom to Kirill Vyshinsky” is held at a June 16, 2019 rally in Moscow. Maxim Shemetov | Reuters
I interviewed Vyshinsky in Moscow in late September. He told me about his harrowing ordeal, the Ukrainian detention system, other persecuted journalists, and what lies ahead for him.
He also touched on the inhumane conditions he experienced in Ukrainian prisons. He noted that a pretrial detention center as we know it in Western nations is a very different entity in Ukraine and that Ukrainian prisons were so over-crowded that it was common for inmates to sleep in three shifts in order to allow enough standing room for inmates crammed into a cell.
Ukrainian prisons like a “concentration camp”
Aleksey Zhuravko, a Ukrainian deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of V and VI convocations recently published photos taken inside of an Odessa pretrial detention center showing utterly unsanitary and appalling conditions. Zhuravko noted, “I am shocked at what was seen. It is a concentration camp. It is a hotbed of diseases.”
Another Ukrainian journalist, Pavel Volkov, was subjected to the same types of accusations lobbed against Vyshinsky. Volkov spent over a year in the same pretrial detention center as Vyshinsky. He was arrested on September 27, 2017, after Ukrainian authorities carried out searches of his wife and mother’s apartments without the presence of his lawyer and with what he says, was a false witness.
Volkov spent more than a year in a pretrial detention center on charges of “infringing on territorial integrity with a group of people” and “miscellaneous accessory to terrorism.” On March 27, 2019, he was fully acquitted by a Ukrainian court.
Volkov shared his thoughts on the persecution of journalists in Ukraine, saying:
The leaders of the 2014 Euromaidan movement, who subsequently occupied the largest positions in the country’s leadership, repeatedly stated that collaborators from World War II who participated in the mass extermination of Jews, Russians, and Poles are true heroes in Ukraine, and that the Russian and Russian-speaking population of Ukraine are inferior people who need to be either forcibly re-educated or destroyed.
They also believe that anyone who wants peace with the Russian Federation, and who believes that the Russian language (the native language for over sixty percent of Ukraine’s population) should be the second state language, is the enemy of Ukraine.
These notions formed the basis of the new criminal law, designed to persecute politicians, public figures, journalists, and ordinary citizens who disagree with the above.
Since 2014, security services have arrested hundreds of people on charges of state treason; infringing on the territorial integrity of Ukraine; and assisting terrorism for criticizing the current government in the streets or on the Internet.
People have been in prison for years without a conviction. And these are not only the journalists included in the ‘Vyshinsky list’.
Activists from Odessa, Sergey Dolzhenkov and Evgeny Mefedov, have spent more than five years in jail just for laying flowers at a memorial to the liberators of Nikolaev [Ukrainian city] from Nazi invaders.
Sergeyev and Gorban, taxi drivers, have spent two and a half years in a pretrial detention center because they transported pensioners from Donetsk to Ukraine-controlled territory so that they could receive their legal pension.
The entrepreneur Andrey Tatarintsev has spent two years in prison for providing humanitarian assistance to a children’s hospital in the territory of the Lugansk region not controlled by Ukraine.
Farmer Nikolay Butrimenko received eight years of imprisonment for paying tax to the Donetsk People’s Republic for his land located in that territory.
The 85-year-old scientist and engineer Mekhti Logunov was given twelve years because he agreed to build a waste recycling plant with Russian investors. The list is endless.
People often incriminate themselves while being tortured or under the threat of their relatives being punished, and such confessions are accepted by the courts, despite the fact that lawyers initiate criminal proceedings against the security services involved in the torture. These cases are not being investigated.
The only mitigation that has happened in this direction after the change of government was the abolition of the provision of the Criminal Procedure Code stating that no other measure of restraint other than detention can be applied to persons suspected of committing crimes against the state.
This allowed some defendants to leave prison on bail, but not a single politically-motivated case has yet been closed. Moreover, arrests are ongoing.
The only acquittal to date from the so-called journalistic cases on freedom of speech is mine. However, it is still being contested by the prosecutor’s office in the Supreme Court.
Ninety-nine percent of the media continue to call all these people ‘terrorists’, ‘separatists’, and ‘enemies of the people’, even though almost none of them have yet received a verdict in court.”
Volkov’s words lay bare the true nature of the allegations made against Kirill Vyshinsky as well as the countless other journalists and citizens of Ukraine that have fallen victim to the heavy hand of Ukrainian authorities.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/interview ... on/262498/
Video at link.