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Pro-Russian rioters kill and maim Ukrainians in Donetsk

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Image My report in PJ Media, based on a number of Ukrainian and Russian-language sources, published on March 14 at 7:03 am, hours ahead of other major U.S. news media.

Russian Nationalists Riot, Maim and Kill Pro-Ukrainian Demonstrators in Donetsk


By Oleg Atbashian

A mob of pro-Russian protesters savagely attacked a pro-Ukrainian rally with clubs, metal rods, rocks, tear gas, and smoke bombs, killing a 22-year-old local man and seriously injuring scores of others Thursday in Lenin Square in Donetsk, an industrial city in eastern Ukraine.

According to witnesses, the pro-Ukrainian rally consisted mostly of local men and women, some with children, who came there after work to support the territorial integrity of Ukraine against Russia's attempts to split the country. This angered a pro-Russian rally nearby, which held Russian flags and demanded that the coal-mining region be separated from Ukraine and joined with Russia.

At some point rocks, eggs, and smoke grenades started flying from the pro-Russian side towards a line of people who chanted Ukrainian slogans while holding a long banner with the colors of the Ukrainian flag. ~
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As the rally ended, a large crowd of angry Russian nationalists surrounded their opponents, hurling ethnic insults, and preventing them from leaving. The confrontation quickly became violent.

A slide show on this Ukrainian news site has the pictures. A 25-minute YouTube video, posted the same day by a local citizen reporter, shows uninterrupted footage of the most violent stage of the riot, helping to reconstruct the events.

As the police succeeded in letting most of the pro-Ukrainian side leave the square, they themselves got surrounded by an angry mob, with about twenty bloodied people huddled together next to a police bus inside a protective circle of policemen. The law enforcement, represented by both local and military police, was outnumbered; an officer was heard calling for reinforcement.

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The crowd chanted "Russia! Russia!" while also screaming threats, insults, and ethnic slurs. They also chanted "On your knees," demanding that the Ukrainian patriots kneel before their tormentors, who waved Russian flags.

As rocks, bottles, and smoke bombs continued to fly, the police managed to get the battered men into the bus, but the attackers slashed the tires and broke the windows, throwing more rocks and smoke bombs inside the bus, spraying pepper spray and forcing the people out into the street.

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As the pro-Ukrainian demonstrators climbed out of the bus windows back into the street, the crowd broke the police barrier and began to beat up the unarmed men with fists and clubs, leaving several of them lying on the pavement, covered in blood, all the while calling their victims "fascists" and "faggots." A few who tried to escape by breaking through the crowd were surrounded and beaten.

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The chant "On your knees!" continued as the surrounded and beaten people, many of them unable to stand, crouched on the ground, which the mob finally perceived as compliance with their demand to kneel. Having carried the wounded away, the police were finally able to escort the remaining few to safety.

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The video ends with the camera pointing downwards, as one of the pro-Russian attackers demands that the cameraman stop shooting because the footage may wind up in the "wrong" hands. During the time of this writing this video added half a million views on YouTube, with many comments in both Russian and broken English cheering the beating of Ukrainians and blaming America for the violence.

UPDATE: The New York Times posted its report with a similar account of the events and the same references, seven hours after mine in PJ Media. For once it's good to see truthful reporting from the "newspaper of record." They embedded a shorter video by the Vice News reporter Robert King, which shows the entire event unfold in brief segments, with English subtitles.


In another video, which shows an injured man being taken to an ambulance, gloating voices refer to him as a "Bandera" (a slur against Ukrainian nationalists) and an intruder from Maidan who got what he deserved for taking American money. This and other comments in the videos, as well as multiple pro-Russian comments on various YouTube threads, reveal a paranoid, hateful mind-set, which boils down to the following presumptions:

(a) The Ukrainian revolution was the result of a vast Western-Zionist conspiracy against Russia; (b) all pro-Ukrainian demonstrators are violent Nazis, fascists, and traitors who have been paid with dollars by their American, European, and Zionist masters; and (c) the demonstrators are all intruders from Western Ukraine, the land of hateful worshipers of the "Nazi collaborator" Stepan Bandera.

Such absurd beliefs are the result of a massive campaign of lies, distortions, provocations, and propaganda that the Putin government has been disseminating through all available media channels, both inside Russia and in the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine, aiming to discredit and demonize the recent popular uprising against the corrupt pro-Russian government of Victor Yanukovich. Among the various reasons to suppress the Ukrainian revolution, probably the most important one was the Kremlin's fear that it may soon spread from Maidan to Red Square.

Below is a pro-Russian sign opposing Ukrainian "fascism." The blue and yellow Ukrainian flag never had the Nazi eagle as a symbol, but that didn't stop the brainwashed activist from drawing it over the Ukrainian flag and then equating it with the Nazi flag.

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After the Maidan uprising finally succeeded on February 22, the propaganda only intensified, with an added focus on stirring separatist sentiments and paranoia in the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, with the apparent goal of breaking the country apart in order to destabilize, demoralize, and subdue the new Ukrainian government – or, better yet, to absorb the breakaway regions into Russia.

A pro-Russian rioter in Donetsk burns a blue-and-yellow ribbon with Ukrainian symbols. He himself is wearing a yellow-and-black St. Georgy ribbon, which symbolizes Russia's military pride and commemorates the Soviet victory over the Nazi Germany. Russians wearing these ribbons in Ukraine imagine they are fighting "Nazism," which in their minds gives them a moral license to act like Nazi thugs.

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The same propaganda, in a more subtle and less anti-Semitic, less gay-bashing form, has found its way to the West — first through the usual hard-left and "anti-war" channels, as well as a hired army of trolls posting anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian comments on the Internet and social media; then through more established news media and talk radio.

An important part in this propaganda has always been played by RT, or Russia Today — the second most-watched foreign news channel in the U.S. after BBC World News and the number one foreign station in five major U.S. urban areas, boasting on its Wikipedia page about being "very popular among younger American people, U.S. college students, and in U.S. inner city neighborhoods."

Reporting on the riot in Donetsk, for example, RT predictably blamed the violence on the pro-Ukrainian side, who allegedly provoked the Russian nationalists "by shouting far-right slogans 'Glory to Ukraine' and 'Glory to heroes,' loudly demanding the respect of Ukrainian territorial sovereignty." In that statement alone, preemptively disseminating the "correct" narrative, the RT editors revealed the unmasked voice of pervasive Russian chauvinism: how dare Ukrainians be patriotic and stand up for Ukraine while in their own country?

The important part of the story is that both the attackers and the attacked spoke Russian, which is the native tongue for the majority of people in eastern parts of Ukraine. Similarly, many speakers in Kiev's Maidan and a large number of anti-government protesters also spoke Russian and carried Russian-language signs. Admittedly, the majority of Russian speakers in Ukraine think of themselves as Ukrainians, and favor independence from Russia and the territorial integrity of their country.

Why would one group of Ukrainians attack another group of Ukrainians for espousing allegiance to their common country?

To be sure, this isn't a conflict between Ukrainians and Russians, or between the Ukrainian-speaking and the Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine, no matter how much the Kremlin desires to turn it into one. It is a conflict of two mindsets, two ideologies, and two allegiances. One side is nostalgic for the old Soviet era with its imperial, autocratic , and collectivist mode of existence. The other side desires freedom, individual rights, and the dignity of living outside of Russia's shadow.

In addition, according to local sources in Donetsk, there was evidence that at least some of the attackers, who shouted at the local Ukrainians to "go home," themselves had been intruders from the neighboring Russia. It is hardly a coincidence that during pro-Russian actions in Donetsk all local hotels were occupied by young visitors from Russia, while the separatists posing as Ukrainian citizens weren't familiar with the name of the local governor.

Pro-Russian demonstrators, earlier that day in Donetsk, getting ready to attack the pro-Ukrainian "fascists."

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This wasn't their first riot, either. On March 1, a 7,000-strong pro-Russian separatist rally in the same Lenin Square in Donetsk marched on the office of the regional government, took down the Ukrainian flag on its spire and raised the flag of Russia instead.

Earlier they demanded that the Donetsk region split from Ukraine and join Russia, declared the new Ukrainian government illegitimate, refused to obey the newly appointed local governor, and elected a local populist leader, Pavel Gubarev, as "the people's governor."

Gubarev then declared that the local law enforcement and military units must obey his orders and compared himself to the Venezuelan Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, as well as such autocratic leaders as Belarus president Lukashenko, Russian president Putin, and Kazakhstan president Nazarbayev, adding that the future belongs to the Eurasian Union, which is based on the authoritarian model of government.

Russian and communist flags together in Lenin Square, Donetsk. Communists strongly support pro-Russian separatism, willing to split Ukraine and join Russia.

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A speaker at a Maidan rally in Kiev later described these events, suggesting that the only way for the Ukrainian patriots to stop such Russian intruders from going to Ukrainian cities, inciting separatism, and tearing down Ukrainian flags with impunity was to start shooting them so they begin to respect another country's sovereignty.

A video of that speech soon went viral in Russia. Taken without context, a claim that Ukrainian protesters now want to start shooting Russians stirred a wave of indignation among Russian nationalists. It is easy to imagine that part of this indignation translated in today's beatings of local pro-Ukrainian demonstrators in Donetsk, whom the pro-Russian attackers imagined to be "murderous intruders" in the service of "Western imperialism."

So far, however, the only people killed and maimed were those on the Ukrainian side. In the meantime, anti-Ukrainian propaganda and the incitement of ethnic hatred by the Kremlin continues unabated at home and in many languages abroad, creating preconditions for more military incursions to "protect" ethnic Russians from "Ukrainian violence."

In a predictable development, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that the new Kiev government is unable to control the situation in Ukraine and, therefore, Moscow reserves the right to protect its "fellow citizens" on the Ukrainian territory.

A pro-Russian rioter waves Russian flag in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk.

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Some of the images that didn't fit into the page:

Russian rioters beat up outnumbered pro-Ukrainian demonstrators while the police largely stands by.

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The confrontation began with the pro-Russian side throwing eggs and firecrackers at the pro-Ukrainian rally.

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The pro-Russian attackers breaking through the line of police as the pro-Ukrainian group defends itself with pepper spray.

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Battered pro-Ukrainian demonstrators surrounded by an angry pro-Russian mob.

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Image This kind of thing has me thinking: 1) what can the average Joe do to help, since captain mompants is impotent (phone is not working; pen is out of ink); 2) if there were guns involved, the tea party would be blamed; and 3), if Putin wants a warm water port in New York, how many basement-dwellers would be there to catch mooring lines and beat up what few patriots might still around ?

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Thank you, Comrade Red Square, for keeping us informed.

I am beginning to understand that we Westerners CAN'T understand. The culture, the history there is so different from what any of us have experienced.

And I appreciate you doing what you can to help us out of that knowledge deficit.

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Astonishing restraint on the part of the Ukrainian police. They seem to understand quite clearly that Putin is itching for an act of "brutality" to be captured on video. Of course, if he can't provoke one, he'll invent one.

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Good job, Mr. Atbashian!! It's amazing how much of this is not being covered in the Drive-By Media.

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I said over on I Own The World that Ukraine must brow up the motor vehicle, pedestrian and rairroad bridges over the Russia - Ukraine border to prevent Russian hoorigans from infirtrating Ukraine and causing trumped-up internationar incidents.

If you catch any of these Russian fascists, prease deport them to my country, Demokratik Peopre's Repubrik of Korea. We wirr eat them. er, have them for dinner. er, have them over for dinner.

We hungry; this Weight Watchers shit ain't working.

Kim Jong Un

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I find this very credible and scary, written by an American from Kiev. From Forbes:

Former Top Putin Advisor Sounds The Alarm: Putin Has Already Declared War On Kiev

I'm glad Forbes writes about it, and I also like and trust this author, whose views are close to mine - Paul Roderick Gregory - "I cover domestic and world economics from a free-market perspective."

The way this page is set up, you can keep scrolling for more articles by this author. He is covering all the developments quite well.

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And more:

Russian Spetsnaz arrested in Ukraine


Here are some thought of my own, from my correspondence with people:

I noticed there's a tendency in the academic circles to blame America for everything that goes bad in the world, and it borders on the irrational. The US is not perfect, and has a share of stupid politicians, but often times other countries are much worse. There was little that the US could have done with Putin's idea to unite the country by stirring up jingoistic nationalism inside Russia and creating the image of the West as the evil conniving enemy, which is the easiest road that all wannabe dictators go. I've been seeing that develop for years, and now we have the results.

Putin's goal is a strong Russia, which is great, I only wish the best for that country. But he is not making it strong by fostering growth on the grassroots level. He divides the economy among those oligarchs who stay loyal to him, while destroying those who dare oppose him. In this situation, the only way he can make Russia appear stronger is by undermining and weakening the competition. Hence all the anti-Western propaganda at home and abroad. The KGB used to have a developed network for disseminating and planting disinformation and propaganda in the West, and Putin seems to have brought it back to full speed now, especially with the Ukrainian situation.

Claims that Russia is being constantly provoked by the West are laughable. It's just like in any group of people some can work with others and take constructive criticism rationally, while some others see the same things and perceive them as personal insults. It's like saying that a street thug is not guilty for attacking a passer-by who accidentally brushed his shoulder because the passer-by should have been more sensitive to the thug's sensibilities.

* * *

The mistake most observers are making is based on the false EU vs. Russia dichotomy, which is certainly useful to Russia but does not describe the true state of affairs. It's true that the protests in Ukraine started with Yanukovich's decision to stay with Russia as opposed to the EU. But from there it went to the demands of the complete overhaul of the corrupt government made of Moscow-backed politicians. If Ukraine doesn't distance itself from Moscow, it will forever remain in its shadow - a small, corrupt, dependent, incompetent, and ridiculed Little Russia. It's time for Ukraine to grow up and act as an independent adult.

I know you'll say that EU is not better, but has there really been any talk of Ukraine actually joining EU as a member? I thought it was about entering the European economic space only.

mi
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Given what we now know, it was not "pro-Russian" rioters, who killed and maimed Ukrainians in Donetsk. They were simply Russian. But, I suppose, the "pro-" prefix may remain -- because they surely were professionals.

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It is noteworthy that while Putin is busy redrawing Soviet borders, Dear Leader has completed his March Madness brackets....

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Red Square wrote:I find this very credible and scary, written by an American from Kiev. From Forbes:

Former Top Putin Advisor Sounds The Alarm: Putin Has Already Declared War On Kiev

I'm glad Forbes writes about it, and I also like and trust this author, whose views are close to mine - Paul Roderick Gregory - "I cover domestic and world economics from a free-market perspective."

The way this page is set up, you can keep scrolling for more articles by this author. He is covering all the developments quite well.


Dear Mr. Putin:

A new conqueror deserves a new capital:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pripyat



They will probably let you have the whole place. Even the ferris wheel!
Pripyat-007.jpg
pripyat aerial.jpg

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Boss, I feel dumb for asking this now...because I feel like I should have before....do you still have people in Ukraine? Godspeed to everyone who is there....the people of Ukraine are in my prayers.

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Yes, Kelly Ivanovna - my parents still live in Ukraine, as well as aunts and uncles and a lot of cousins.

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Red Square wrote:Yes, Kelly Ivanovna - my parents still live in Ukraine, as well as aunts and uncles and a lot of cousins.

I cannot imagine the thoughts you must be having with all of this happening right now......My prayers and thoughts for you and your family.

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Commodore Snoogie Woogums wrote:
Red Square wrote:Yes, Kelly Ivanovna - my parents still live in Ukraine, as well as aunts and uncles and a lot of cousins.

I cannot imagine the thoughts you must be having with all of this happening right now......My prayers and thoughts for you and your family.
I add my prayers as well.

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Here's the newest example of Moscow propaganda distributed through RT -

Ukraine Leader In New Leaked Recording: 8 Million Russians In Ukraine "Must Be Killed With Nuclear Weapons"

But the smoking gun, and where Putin once again shows just how masterful of a chess player he is, is the following statement by Tymoshenko, after asked, rhetorically, by her counterparty, "what should we do now with the 8 million Russians that stayed in Ukraine. They are outcasts"... to which she replies: "They must be killed with nuclear weapons."

A frightening title - unless the audiences speak Russian and listen to the actual conversation without the misleading English subtitles.

Yulia Timoshenko was angry at Putin's invasion, so she said she's ready to grab a gun and start shooting those Russkies starting with Putin. That's how a furious woman talks even if she never held a gun. Consider that she's angry, not at some big mouth in the hair salon, but the aggressors who just invaded her country. Imagine that!

As for the nukes, it's a jocular hyperbole - "fire-squading someone with the nukes" is a deliberate absurdity, similar to "rocket surgery." You can't nuke people in front of you, just as you can't selectively nuke people who are dispersed throughout a country. So what she really meant was "kick their asses," which can mean anything at all. As for the implied anti-Russian ethnic hatred there, that's also absurd because her own first language is Russian - and here's the kicker - the whole conversation was in Russian!

But then again, had she said "kick their Russian asses," RT would have come up with a headline, Ukraine Leader In New Leaked Recording: 8 Million Russians In Ukraine "Must Be Subjected to Cruel and Unusual Punishment by Mutilating their Pelvises"

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A recent piece from Kiev, maybe some here have seen it, on the television to the left in the photo, Kiseliov's recent Rossiya 1 broadcast. The "picture" on the wall shows the real banner which was being held.
If I have this right, on the bottom of the picture is written the name of the picture itself, something like “the way the events in Ukraine are displayed in Russian news”. In the right side of the picture are Ukrainians holding the banner with words: “We do not want the war”. On the left side of the picture is the screen from Russian news where we see that the first words of the banner were cut and it changed the meaning of what is written to “we want the war”. Continuous propaganda to incite violence.



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