Commentary taken from a yandex.ru blog post, written by Sergey Sergey Buntovsky.
[ColonelCassad] It is impossible to say that after 1991 Ukraine was at the center of European, let alone world attention. The vast majority of foreigners, when asked about Ukraine, could only remember Chernobyl, the Klitschko brothers
| ...Vitali and Wladimir dominated professional heavyweight boxing 2004-2015, after which Vitali went home to become a politician... |
Then, during Ukrainian former resident Viktor Yushchenko's time, many Western specialists worked in the country, most of whom directly or indirectly promoted the interests of their employers, but some political scientists and sociologists tried to be objective, studying the whole palette of opinions.
Although when my colleagues and I (I was then a member of the local council and an activist in one of the Donbass public organizations) told them about the revival with the support of the official government of Nazism and the inevitable subsequent conflict between neo-Bandera and pro-Russian regions, they perceived our fears as extremely exaggerated, and wrote off Nazism to the games of the marginalized.
The second spike in global interest in Ukraine was in 2013/14, when hundreds of foreign journalists flew in to cover the coup d'état. Naturally, the information in their media was presented extremely one-sidedly: 95 percent of foreign journalists did not leave Kyiv and openly played along with the Maidan, but there were those who were not too lazy to go to the Russian-speaking regions.
We then took them around Donetsk, where the Russian spring began, talked about our problems, explained the essence of what was happening. For employees of a very serious international office who flew to Donbass, my colleagues and I created a whole dossier covering the violation of the rights of Russian-speaking citizens in various spheres of life.
As a result, it was possible to establish human relations with some foreigners, although it was clear that at best they remain neutral, and even sympathize with the Ukrainians “who made a democratic choice.”
However, I believe that if they began to work objectively, their materials would be shelved by their direct superiors. Moreover, this applies to both “independent” journalists and employees of international structures who, taking advantage of their position, worked freely on both sides of the front line from 2014 to 2022.
I can’t speak about all foreigners, but some of them changed their minds during the war years. They regularly saw the real very dirty deeds of the heroes of the ATO, encountered the Nazis and found out whose artillery was shooting down the cities. So they tried to document what was happening and somehow influence the Ukrainian security forces.
An example of one such attempt to make the Armed Forces of Ukraine be human can be a letter from the Chairperson of the UN Monitoring Mission for Human Rights, Matilda Bogner, sent to Lieutenant General Oleksandr Pavliuk on January 25, 2022. Official copies of this letter were sent to a number of Kyiv officials, who either did not respond at all or limited themselves to empty replies. Therefore, the document was handed over to several civil activists. So a copy of this voluminous document reached me.
The letter was written based on the results of monitoring conducted by UN staff from September 1 to December 31, 2021.
Most of the letter consists of a multi-page list of those killed and wounded, as well as a scrupulous enumeration of destroyed residential buildings and infrastructure. That is, I have in my hands the unemotional statistics of the nightmare that Kyiv arranged in the recalcitrant region. However, there are also emotional moments in the document when Matilda addresses the Ukrainian general.
At the same time, when reading a letter, one must take into account that Ms. Bogner, firstly, is very loyal to Kyiv, and secondly, she is a diplomat and expresses herself with the greatest possible tact, carefully wrapping her real thoughts in tinsel that is pleasant for the addressee.
For example, she wrote:"I would like to remind you that ... all parties to the conflict are obliged to adhere to the applicable rules of international humanitarian law."
Translated from diplomatic language into plain language, this means: “General, your soldiers are violating the rules of war so massively and grossly that it is no longer possible to turn a blind eye to this!”
Or this: "... I would be grateful if your command would carry out the necessary internal checks on compliance with the above-mentioned norms of international civil law by units of the armed forces of Ukraine, the fire of which probably led to the above-mentioned cases of death or injury of civilians ..."
I translate : "Explain to your freaks that you can’t just shoot people at will and shoot at residential areas. This is a war crime."
“... I would like to raise with you the issue of the deployment of military facilities in populated areas ... our monitoring ... has found a clear relationship between the presence of military units under your command in populated areas and civilian casualties”
This doesn’t even need a translation. Where militants appear with a trident on their cockade, blood begins to flow.
"I would like to recall that, in accordance with customary international humanitarian law, parties to an armed conflict should avoid placing military objectives in or near densely populated areas."
It turns out that the practice of placing Ukrainian military equipment among residential buildings, and the personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in schools with hospitals and turning ordinary citizens into human shields, was widespread in the Armed Forces of Ukraine long before the start of the Russian special operation. And not just journalists are talking about this, but UN officials.
Well, then Matilda writes a lot of beautiful words about the fact that soldiers should take care of the safety of civilians, try to avoid accidental killings of civilians and the destruction of civilian objects, or, as Mrs. Bogner put it: "at least to reduce such cases to a minimum."
And the icing on the cake is the phrase:
"I would like to urge you to ensure that the armed forces under your command always respect the obligations in the field of international humanitarian law."
Despite the fact that the words are in the form of a wish, this is a very serious statement. In fact, this is a direct accusation of the Ukrainian security forces in the mass commission of war crimes.
In addition, the letter contains various tables and graphs from which interesting conclusions can be drawn.
Here, for example, is a table that analyzes the places where civilians were killed as a result of shelling. 81.4% of those killed fall on the territory of the People's Republics and another 2.3% in the gray zone. The Ukrainian-controlled part of Donbas accounted for 16.3% of civilian deaths, respectively. The difference is colossal and indicates that it is the Armed Forces of Ukraine that are guilty of the vast majority of deaths, since it was they who shot the cities of the republics.
Thus, UN experts testify that the Ukrainian security forces massively and openly violated international humanitarian law, but none of the European or American politicians made any effort to stop the killing of residents of eastern Ukraine by the armed forces of Kyiv.
Adds Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin:
It is worth noting that almost all the “UN recommendations” regarding the war crimes committed by Ukraine, which are cited in these documents, have already migrated in an accusatory manner to the latest report of Amnesty International, which caused a whole hysteria in Ukraine and the resignation of the head of the Ukrainian branch of Amnesty International, which was simply suspended from the preparation of the report, since even in such a grant-eating organization as Amnesty International they perfectly understood that no objectivity, even decorative, could be expected from it.
Separately, it is worth noting that the Zelensky gang is yelling about the fact that Amnesty International accuses the UAF of a large number of victims due to the deployment of troops in schools and city blocks, indicating that the UAF cannot be blamed for this, because Russia attacked. As we see from the UN documents, the Armed Forces of Ukraine were accused of this even before the start of the JMD. Of course, we have been well aware of this since 2014. Here, of course, the beef is that now this topic has leaked into the Western press through the report of Amnesty International, and the Zelensky gang is now hastily extinguishing this fire, accusing Amnesty International of helping Putin.
Although the bottom line is only the desire of the Zelensky gang to evade responsibility for the committed systemic war crimes, for which Zelensky himself is directly responsible. leaked to the Western press and the Zelensky gang is now hastily extinguishing this fire, accusing Amnesty International of helping Putin.