Was the massacre of over 700 civilians at Bucha perpetrated by the Ukrainian National Police and the Safari Unit and Azov Battalion?

If these Nazi-style execution of civilians were perpetrated by the Russians why did Bucha’s Mayor say nothing when he announced its 'liberation'?

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The wanton massacre of civilians, in a Nazi style execution, makes no sense from the perspective of the Russian forces. We know that they have fed and provided water to civilian inhabitants. Why would they want to perpetrate a massacre such as in Bucha? What possible good would it do them?

However the massacre of Russian supporting Ukrainians by fascist militias which abound in Ukraine today does undoubtedly make sense.

Russian Torture victim

Undoubtedly there will be individual instances of war crimes by Russian soldiers. All armies perpetrate such atrocities in times of war and where they happen they should be severely punished. But the story of a Russian massacre at Bucha doesn’t ring true. It is what the CIA’s paramilitaries in El Salvador and Nicaragua have done. It is the United States which set up the School of the Americas in order to train such groups in torture and murder.

Azov Torture Victim

On 30 March Russian forces left Bucha, a town on the outskirts of Kyev. They had been using Kiev as a diversion to split up Ukraine’s troops. They rerouted their troops to the Donbas to bottle up and destroy the 125,000 Ukrainian troops there.

The very next day a beaming Anatolii Fedoruk, the Mayor of Bucha, in a video on Bucha City Council’s official Facebook page, which was aired on Ukrainian TV channel Ukraine 24 TV,  announced, in a translated post accompanying the video that March 31 was:

the day of the liberation of Bucha. This day will go down in the glorious history of Bucha and the entire Bucha community as a day of liberation by the Armed Forces of Ukraine from the Russian occupiers.

Now you would have thought that if there were 700+ dead bodies scattered around town, that he might have noticed something? 

bodies with Russian packs

On 2^nd April, the Communication Department of the National Police of Ukraine posted photos and a YouTube video on their website. They declared that their Special Unit, Safari (mainly Azov), would be carrying out a "cleansing operation" to "liquidate" pro-Russian "saboteurs" and "collaborators" on April 1st. They also asked residents to stay indoors and to not be alarmed. A female politician from the area also publicly broadcast the same message on television: that a "cleansing operation" was taking place, and for residents to stay indoors and not t panic. You can find the announcement here:

‘Special Forces Regiment SAFARI Begins Clearing Operation in Bucha from Saboteurs and Accomplices of Russia’.

The Safari consists of members of the Azov Battalion and one particularly notorious thug and murderer, Sergey Korotkikh, who according to Evan Reif is a man also known as Botsun, Malyuta. Bandit, Terrorist and most fitting of all, Nazi.

Sergey "Boatsman" Korotkikh was not only among the first Ukrainian forces in the town along with his squad of terrorists, he was making jokes about shooting civilians as he entered. He would later happily post these videos on his official telegram channel. Botsun is captured on film asking his commanding officer

“There are guys without blue armbands, can I shoot them?”

“Fuck yeah

Dead bodies with white armbands

Most of the victims were wearing white armbands (friendly to Russia), or had them used to tie their hands behind their backs. The photo of the alley shows multiple victims lying dead next to Russian ration packs. These ration packs are green with star symbols on them which you can see in the photographs. The Ukrainian State's public policy is to treat any civilian who trades eggs and other dairy goods for dry goods with the Russians as ‘collaborators’. The bodies in the street look placed, as they are lying in a symmetrical pattern which isn't natural--the victims wouldn't have fallen so perfectly, if, say, dumped from the back of a moving truck, or shot while in the area.

A young Ukrainian, known only as Halexandria, posted a comment on YouTube in which she stated that she has family who live in Bucha. After the initial fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces, Russians handed out food and water to residents--some took it, and others declined it. After the Russians pulled out on March 30th, the mayor of the town betrayed the townspeople, and told Ukrainian forces which residents took humanitarian aid. Military personnel then broke into people's homes, and shot anyone who the mayor alleged took aid, or had ration packs in their home, and anyone else who got in their way. Her family members witnessed this, as they live very close to some of the residents who were shot.

bodies with Russian packs

All of this evidence points to the Bucha Massacre being committed by the Nazi Safari unit of the Ukrainian National Police, under instructions of the state itself.

On April 4th the New York Times alleged to have satellite photos from the Pentagon which prove that the bodies had been in place since, at least, March 19th. Satellite images show bodies lay in Bucha for weeks, despite Russian claims.

Naturally the BBC and dozens of other MSM echoed this nonsense. The Pentagon denied that they had any photographic evidence confirming that Russian troops had committed the massacre. That was because an independent analysis of the satellite imagery concluded that it was taken on April 1st.  But see Russia to show UNSC 'empirical evidence' regarding Bucha deaths and Scott Ritter’s What Happened in Bucha Ukraine

Any forensic pathologist would tell you that bodies exposed for two weeks would have bloated, expanded with gas, burst, changed colour, and spilled liquidised organs onto the ground according to any basic forensic analysis. The victims were clearly killed soon after the Russian withdrawal,

Was Alleged Russian Army Massacre of Civilians at Bucha Actually a False Flag Event Staged by Ukrainian Nazis?

The Russians, when accused of this crime 3 days later, immediately demanded a special session of the UN Security Council. And you know what? Britain, which was in the Chair, refused the request. Now why would that be?

The Guardian, ever the faithful servant of the British Security State and NATO, is getting very perturbed about all this. It ran an article on April 21 Facebook posts disputing Bucha atrocities shared 208,000 times in a week. It seems, judging by comments on the Guardian’s Facebook page that more and more people are not buying the never ending, ceaseless propaganda barrage by NATO and its loyal press.

The neo-Nazi insignia of NATO's Nazis

Now if the Guardian and the rest of Britain’s yellow press were seriously concerned about this horrific massacre, then the first thing they would do would be to demand an impartial, international inquiry into who did this. Even UN Secretary General, António Guterres’s demand for an inquiry has been ignored. Yet the Guardian complains in a non-story that people aren’t buying into NATO’s lies anymore.

The real question is why, instead of a barrage of war propaganda, the Guardian and the BBC aren’t supporting Gutuerre’s demand for an inquiry.

NYT: Ukraine Responsible For Bucha War Crimes Against Russians

Perhaps the reason is because, as a Pentagon official admitted, even they can't independently confirm atrocities in Ukraine's Bucha, official says. None of this has prevented a rush to judgement by the mass media. Why? Because they want it to be the Russians. The idea that they might at last have to face up to the fact that the West is backing a Ukrainian state, whose security forces depend on 100,000 strong neo-Nazi paramilitaries might cause people to start asking questions as to why we are backing Zelensky. People might even start to ask whether Russia had a very good case for intervening in Ukraine in order to defend its Russian speaking population and Ukrainian Russians.

Woman  tortured and killed by Azov in Mariupol - swastika engraved into her

Background

The background to this is what happened in 2014. To compensate for the lack of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias. In 2020, they constituted about 40 percent of the Ukrainian forces and numbered about 102,000 men, according to Reuters. They were armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France. There were more than 19 nationalities.

Disagreeing with NATO's narrative is defined by Twitter as 'harassment'

These militias have been operating in the Donbas since 2014, with Western support. These militias are violent, convey a nauseating ideology and are virulently anti-Semitic and are composed of fanatical and brutal individuals. The best known of these is the Azov Regiment, whose emblem is reminiscent of the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division, which ‘liberated’ Kharkov from the Soviet Union in 1943, before carrying out the 1944 Oradour-sur-Glane massacre in France.

The characterization of the Ukrainian paramilitaries as "Nazis" or "neo-Nazis" is considered Russian propaganda. But that's not the view of the Times of Israel, or the West Point Academy's Center for Counterterrorism. In 2014, Newsweek magazine seemed to associate them more with... the Islamic State.

Russian Torture Victim

So, the West supported and continued to arm militias that have been guilty of numerous crimes against civilian populations since 2014.

The integration of these paramilitary forces into the Ukrainian National Guard was not accompanied by a "denazification," as some claim.

What happened in Bucha is part of a continuous fabrication of stories over the war in Ukraine.  It is literally impossible to believe anything you see anymore on the BBC, Sky or the major press with the exception of the Morning Star. 

Take for example the so called Russian strike on a railway station in Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine involving a Tochka-U missile. This kind of missile is not used by Russia but it has nonetheless been blamed on Russia.

The serial number on the missile that hit the Kramatorsk train station matches exactly, bar one digit, the serial number on a missile that was shot into the Donbas in 2015. Russia decommissioned Tochka-U missiles in 2019. Also, an analysis by DNR forces on the ground found that the trajectory very likely points to the missile being fired from Ukrainian-held territory.

Patrick Lancaster and Matron at Mariupol Hospital

Or take the continuous lies that have been broadcast about Mariupol. It has taken a brave and independent journalist, Patrick Lancaster (please donate to his appeal for expenses) to broadcast the truth about the Russian bombardment on a hospital in the city. Patrick interviewed the matron in the hospital that was bombed who confirmed that all the patients had been ordered days before to leave in order that Azov thugs could establish themselves in the hospital.

Of course when Israel bombs a hospital or clinic in Gaza no one says a word when Israel says Hamas is using it. But when the neo-Nazi Azov regiment claims a hospital was bombed it is held to be true. But judge for yourself.

Dead left behind in Mariupol

There is a concerted attempt to whitewash the Azov brigade. We had one of the main Zionist organisation in the United States, the Anti-Defamation League, which can sniff out ‘anti-Semitism’ miles away, whitewashing Ukrainian neo-Nazis.

Youtube, which for some reason defines itself as a 'community' does its best to deter people from accessing material questioning NATO's Nazi narrative

As Ali Abunimah wrote on 17 March, two weeks before the ADL published an article by Andrew Srulevitch, its director of European affairs, which can only be called a whitewash of Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, who had the blood of 200,000 Jews on his hands as well as 100,00 Poles.

In an interview with David Fishman who is a professor of Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary as well as a member of the academic committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Srulevitch asked

“We’ve seen torchlit marches in the middle of [Kiev] with the red and black flags of UPA … and pictures of Stepan Bandera, who allied with the Nazis during WWII” “Isn’t that evidence of Nazism in Ukraine?”

Fishman replied

“For Ukrainian nationalists, UPA and Bandera are symbols of the Ukrainian fight for Ukrainian independence. The UPA allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union for tactical – not ideological – reasons.

This is a complete lie. As Daniel Lazare wrote in 2015 in a review of Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s book Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist.

“Bandera envisioned the Ukraine as a classic one-party state with himself in the role of führer, or providnyk, and expected that a new Ukraine would take its place under the Nazi umbrella.”

However Fishman then contradicted himself:

 “For Jews, however, not only is allying with the Nazis unforgivable under any circumstance, but historians have documented that Ukrainian nationalists participated together with Germans in the murder of many thousands of Jews in Ukraine,” Fishman adds.

If ‘Ukrainians’ participated in murdering thousands of Jews doesn’t that suggest some form of ideological alignment? People then wonder why I have made it a specialism to document the history of Nazi-Zionist collaboration.

Fishman asserted that “There are neo-Nazis in Ukraine, just as there are in the US, and in Russia for that matter... But they are a very marginal group with no political influence and who don’t attack Jews or Jewish institutions in Ukraine.”

Another example of this attempt to whitewash Ukraine's neo-Nazis was the sacking of Jewish journalist Konstanty Gebert from a Polish newspaper for refusing to describe Azov as 'far- right' rather than neo-Nazi.

The leader of Ukraine’s Jewish community, Eduard Dolinsky, clearly doesn’t agree. See  ‘Open anti-Semitism’: Ukrainian police request names and addresses of city’s Jews - Jewish leader says last such demand was ‘during the German occupation

And this report Ukrainian neo-Nazis torture Jewish anti-war MMA athlete suggests that ADL are doing what Zionists have always done, lying and playing down anti-Semitism when it is the genuine article. Why? Because their relationship with the US state demands that they ignore the actual anti-Semitism of the US’s allies. It is a replay of the Zionists’ behaviour in WW2.

We know from the presumed death of blogger Gonzalo Lira that the Azov Battalion and Ukrainian neo-Nazis will stop at nothing to silence independent journalists and bloggers and prevent the truth emerging from Ukraine. In this they are enormously helped by papers like the ‘liberal’ Guardian.

NATO's fascist goons joke about the murder of Gonzalo Lira who was betrayed by the Daily Beast  to the SBU

In the same way the true story of what has happened in Mariupol and the reported murder of hundreds of its Russian speaking inhabitants is being deliberately covered up by our mass media. They prefer to report on the ‘heroic’ last stand of Azov at the steel plant. Human shields only apply in Gaza not Ukraine. See Patrick Lancaster’s road of death and his interview with a Mariupol resident

Resident in Mariupol interviewed about Azov's terror

The Western press cannot even admit that the purpose of NATO is to fight to the last Ukrainian. See NATO admits it wants 'Ukrainians to keep dying' to bleed Russia, not peace

We hear a lot about Zelensky being Jewish (in fact he is an ultra-Zionist). But as The Nation wrote:

TV comedian-turned-politician Volodymyr Zelensky was elected last year as Ukraine’s first Jewish president, yet “anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant” in the country, reports .

A victim of CIA trained torturers in Ukraine

It has been also been confirmed that the SAS are in the Kiev region training Ukrainians. NATO has been training Ukrainian troops since at least 2014. The third floor of the SBU (Ukraine’s version of the SS) headquarters is dedicated to the CIA who are also heavily involved in such activities.

There are also reports that the Ukrainians asked the Turkish military whether their drones could administer over 20 litres of aerosol, and the Turks said no. There is now footage of jerry-rigged drones that have been captured by Russians which have tanks and aerosol administration devices attached to them. Why would this be?  Because if you want to stage a false chemical attack (& remember Azov alleged a chemical attack in Mariupol which has now been forgotten) then a drone would be an idea means of delivery.

Tony Greenstein

See also

https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/06/questions-abound-about-bucha-massacre/

“One less traitor”: Zelensky oversees campaign of assassination, kidnapping and torture of political opposition

Ukrainian neo-Nazis torture Jewish anti-war MMA athlete

Retired Swiss Military-Intelligence Officer: 'Is it Possible to Actually Know What Has Been And is Going on in Ukraine?'

The Ukrainian conflict is a U.S./NATO Proxy War, but one which Russia is poised to win decisively – Scott Ritter

Pro-war socialists

The Blame for the Conflict in Ukraine Belongs Entirely with NATO and the United States

Only Starmer Could Find Himself to the Right of Boris Johnson with his call to Ban RT

UPDATE

As is to be expected Israel is taking advantage of the situation in Ukraine to step up its repression. I have just received these photos from Jenin refugee camp

At this point in time it is impossible to know exactly what is happening in Ukraine and the Republics of Lugansk and Donbass. However it appears that Russian troops are confining their presence to the 2 breakaway republics of Donbass and Lugansk with its aircraft taking out Ukraine’s NATO supplied weaponry and air defences. However one thing is crystal clear. The blame for any conflict and armed hostilities lies firmly at the feet of NATO.

For weeks we have speculation about a Russian invasion and false flag operations. A month ago we had a fake story, which the BBC naturally reported on without the slightest query, that Russia was planning to install a pro-Russian regime in Kiev.

It was less than a month ago that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy criticized the U.S., saying it was damaging his country’s economy by stoking panic that Russia may be planning an invasion. Biden’s reaction was to increase the war rhetoric. From the very start the United States has wanted a war as part of its global project to impose US hegemony in the world.

The United States economy is geared to war. That is not to excuse Russia’s President Putin who is a right-wing nationalist but it is or should be abundantly clear that Russia’s actions in Ukraine is a response to NATO threats.  It is defensive not offensive.

What is happening now with Russian military intervention in the Donbass and bombing of Ukrainian military positions is a consequence of the determination of the United States and Biden to encircle Russia with NATO bases and NATO aligned countries.

Labour Left Alliance Discussion on the situation in Ukraine

According to the National Security Archive

U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).

The idea that Ukraine had some ‘right’ to join NATO, as if joining an anti-Russian military pact is a ‘right’ is absurd. Ukraine has the right to peaceful and secure borders but it has no right to threaten Russia’s security.

Likewise if Ukraine has the right to self-determination then so do the people of the Donbass and Lugansk. After the European Union and United States sponsored coup in Ukraine in 2014, which deposed the elected President Yanukovych, they installed a far-Right regime which immediately attacked the Russian language rights of the Russian speaking people of the Donbass and Lugansk. In 2021 new regulations were introduced mandating the use of Ukrainian. France 24 reported that:

Galyna Lekunova, a veterinarian in the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, was left fuming by a new law in January mandating the use of Ukrainian in the service industry....

"If I work, pay my employees' salaries and my taxes, it's none of your damn business which language I do it in," Lekunova, wearing a floral-patterned apron, told AFP.

Mariupol, which is outside the present breakaway republic of Donbass is a heavily Russian city. It is quite likely, given its situation, that it will be the focus of Russian military action in order to unite it with the Donbass.

As John Pilger wrote in 2015 The rise of fascism is again the issue. He described the absorption of Crimea back into Russia after an overwhelming and free referendum of the people of Odessa.

The Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleansing. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions.

More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping "the violence" caused by the "Russian invasion". The Nato commander, General Breedlove - whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove - announced that 40,000 Russian troops were "massing". In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.

These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine - a third of the population - have long sought a federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not "separatists" but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous "states" are a reaction to Kiev's attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.

On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as "another bright day in our national history". In the American and British media, this was reported as a "murky tragedy" resulting from "clashes" between "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) and "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).

The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington's new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims - "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says". Obama congratulated the junta for its "restraint". And as Pilger presciently predicted:

If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine.

It is that which is happening now. There is no invasion of Ukraine as such and there is unlikely to be such an invasion. The people of Donbass and Lugans have long lobbied Russia to incorporate their states into Russia.  When people are oppressed they have the right to secede from the states they are part of.

In 2014 fascists of the Right Sector attacked a trade union building in Odessa burning to death and killing 41 trade unions. Attacks on trade unions are the hallmark of fascists. Dmitry Rogovsky of the Right Sector was clear: "The aim is to completely clear Odessa [of pro-Russians]. They are all paid Russian separatists."

Today we have the neo-Nazi Azov battalion integrated into the Ukrainian national guard and armed and trained by the United States and British military as well as Israel. See Why is Israel arming Ukraine’s neo-Nazi militias?

You might not believe it but it was less than 2 years ago, when Starmer became leader, that he pledged that there would be

No more illegal wars. Introduce a Prevention of Military Intervention Act and put human rights at the heart of foreign policy. Review all UK arms sales and make us a force for international peace and justice.

Today this liar and his shadow cabinet calls for the closing down on RT, Russia Today, because it is a propaganda station. Even were this true then at least it offers British people an alternative to the BBC, which is the British state’s propaganda arm with its endless series of ‘experts’, all of whom just happen to adopt the US narrative.

Indeed Starmer has managed the feat of being to the right of Boris Johnson who in his response to Sturmer talked about ‘free speech’.  Of course Starmer, having abolished free speech in the Labour Party is intent on abolishing it in the rest of society.

Despite wrapping himself in the Union Jack like the pathetic jingoist that he is, I do not detect much enthusiasm amongst British people for the war in Ukraine. That is why Starmer wants to close down another avenue of information.  Read John Pilger’s article below.

Tony Greenstein

War in Europe and the rise of raw propaganda

By John Pilger | 18 February 2022, 11:00am

Propaganda against Vladimir Putin has given Russia a bad name in the press (Screenshot via YouTube)

Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened.

Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the U.S. and Britain.

On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured. The model is corporate spin, the currency of the age. In 1964, McLuhan famously declared: “The medium is the message”. The lie is the message now.

But is this new? It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream.

The great editor David Bowman, author of The Captive Press, called this “a defenestration of all who refuse to follow a line and to swallow the unpalatable and are brave”. He was referring to independent journalists and whistleblowers, the honest mavericks to whom media organisations once gave space, often with pride. The space has been abolished.

The war hysteria that has rolled in like a tidal wave in recent weeks and months is the most striking example. Known by its jargon, “shaping the narrative”, much, if not most, of it is pure propaganda.

The Russians are coming. Russia is worse than bad. Russian President Vladimir Putin is evil, a Nazi like Hitler, salivated the Labour MP Chris Bryant. Ukraine is about to be invaded by Russia — tonight, this week, next week. The sources include an ex-CIA propagandist who now speaks for the U.S. State Department and offers no evidence of his claims about Russian actions because “it comes from the U.S. Government”.

The no-evidence rule also applies in London. The British Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, who spent £500,000 (AU$947,767) of public money flying to Australia in a private plane to warn the Canberra Government that both Russia and China were about to pounce,  offered no evidence. Antipodean heads nodded; the “narrative” is unchallenged there. One rare exception, former Prime Minister Paul Keating, called Truss’s warmongering “demented”.

Truss has blithely confused the countries of the Baltic and the Black Sea. In Moscow, she told the Russian Foreign Minister that Britain would never accept Russian sovereignty over Rostov and Voronezh — until it was pointed out to her that these places were not part of Ukraine but in Russia. Read the Russian press about the buffoonery of this pretender to 10 Downing Street and cringe.

This entire farce, recently starring UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Moscow playing a clownish version of his hero, Churchill, might be enjoyed as satire were it not for its wilful abuse of facts and historical understanding and the real danger of war.

Vladimir Putin refers to the “genocide” in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. Following the coup in Ukraine in 2014 – orchestrated by Barack Obama’s “point person” in Kyiv, Victoria Nuland – the coup regime, infested with neo-Nazis, launched a campaign of terror against Russian-speaking Donbas, which accounts for a third of Ukraine’s population.

Overseen by CIA director Moscow, Barack Obama’s Victoria NulandJohn Brennan in Kyiv, “special security units” coordinated savage attacks on the people of Donbas, who opposed the coup. Video and eyewitness reports show bussed fascist thugs burning the trade union headquarters in the city of Odessa, killing 41 people trapped inside. The police are standing by. Obama congratulated the “duly elected” coup regime for its ‘remarkable restraint’.

In the U.S. media, the Odessa atrocity was played down as "murky" and a "tragedy" in which "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) attacked "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal damned the victims — ‘Deadly Ukraine fire likely sparked by rebels, Government says’.

Professor Stephen Cohen, acclaimed as America’s leading authority on Russia, wrote:

...the pogrom-like burning to death of ethnic Russians and others in Odessa... reawakened memories of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during World War Two. [Today] storm-like assaults on gays, Jews, elderly ethnic Russians, and other “impure” citizens are widespread throughout Kyiv-ruled Ukraine, along with torchlight marches reminiscent of those that eventually inflamed Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s...

...the police and official legal authorities do virtually nothing to prevent these neo-fascist acts or to prosecute them. On the contrary, Kyiv has officially encouraged them by systematically rehabilitating and even memorialising Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi German extermination pogroms, renaming streets in their honour, building monuments to them, rewriting history to glorify them, and more.

Today, neo-Nazi Ukraine is seldom mentioned. That the British are training the Ukrainian National Guard, which includes neo-Nazis, is not news. (See Matt Kennard’s Declassified report in Consortium, 15 February). The return of violent, endorsed fascism to 21st-Century Europe, to quote Harold Pinter, “never happened... even while it was happening”.

The economic crisis of capitalism and the return to the doctrine of great power rivalry has seen Cold War rhetoric return.

On 16 December, the United Nations tabled a resolution that called for ‘combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism’. The only nations to vote against it were the United States and Ukraine.

Almost every Russian knows that it was across the plains of Ukraine’s “borderland” that Hitler’s divisions swept from the west in 1941, bolstered by Ukraine’s Nazi cultists and collaborators. The result was more than 20 million Russians dead.

Setting aside the manoeuvres and cynicism of geopolitics, whomever the players, this historical memory is the driving force behind Russia’s respect-seeking, self-protective security proposals, which were published in Moscow in the week the UN voted 130-2 to outlaw Nazism.

They are:

·                     NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missiles in nations bordering Russia. (They are already in place from Slovenia to Romania, with Poland to follow);

·                     NATO to stop military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia;

·                     Ukraine will not become a member of NATO;

·                     the West and Russia to sign a binding East-West security pact; and

·                     the landmark treaty between the U.S. and Russia covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be restored. (The U.S. abandoned it in 2019.)

These amount to a comprehensive draft of a peace plan for all of post-war Europe and ought to be welcomed in the West. But who understands their significance in Britain? What they are told is that Putin is a pariah and a threat to Christendom.

Russian-speaking Ukrainians, under economic blockade by Kyiv for seven years, are fighting for their survival. The “massing” army we seldom hear about is the 13 Ukrainian army brigades laying siege to Donbas: an estimated 150,000 troops. If they attack, the provocation to Russia will almost certainly mean war.

In 2015, brokered by the Germans and French, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France met in Minsk and signed an interim peace deal. Ukraine agreed to offer autonomy to Donbas, now the self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The Minsk agreement has never been given a chance. In Britain, the line, amplified by Boris Johnson, is that Ukraine is being “dictated to” by world leaders. For its part, Britain is arming Ukraine and training its army.

Since the first Cold War, NATO has effectively marched right up to Russia’s most sensitive border having demonstrated its bloody aggression in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and broken solemn promises to pull back. Having dragged European “allies” into American wars that do not concern them, the great unspoken is that NATO itself is the real threat to European security.

In Britain, a state and media xenophobia is triggered at the very mention of “Russia”. Mark the knee-jerk hostility with which the BBC reports Russia. Why? Is it because the restoration of imperial mythology demands, above all, a permanent enemy? Certainly, we deserve better.

John Pilger is a regular contributor to Independent Australia and a distinguished journalist and filmmaker. You can follow John on Twitter @JohnPilger.

Putin's Russia, the facts and the Sydney Morning Herald

James O'Neill critiques the Sydney Morning Herald's recent portrayal of Putin's Russia.