How Many Innocents Must You Shoot In Order to Buy Western Neocon and Media Complicity with your Regime Change Strategy?
As Professor Katchanovski explains, on the basis of his own research and on court-presented evidence (the court findings will be possibly available within the next few months) there is very strong evidence, much of it presented in court in Ukraine, that the massacre of many Maidan protestors in 2014 was committed by snipers (some smuggled into Ukraine from Georgia) shooting from the roof and from individual rooms within a hotel building that had been occupied by ring-wing, neo-nazi supporters of Maidan. The leaders of this operation doubtless had been encouraged by, or even took their instructions from, indications from western sources as to the number of killed it would take to bring in the big cannons of western support for the illegal, minority-propelled coup. I cited Katchanovski in my 2017 book Western Mainstream Media and the Ukraine Crisis. Since that time the amount of evidence (including over 100 videos demonstrating which buildings were under opposition control, protestors hit by bullets fired from locations under opposition control etc.) has considerably increased.
This is not necessarily the worst crime that occurred during this coup, but it is certainly one of the most dramatic and least forgivable. The protests may have started as a peaceful protest against corruption, but they were taken over and directed by the far right, neo-nazi opposition to Yanukovyich, stirred up by tales of overreactrion by his government’s security forces and by misinterpretations of Yanukovych’s decision to turn down European subsidy packages in favor of Russian (which were in fact better, having fewer hidden strings). The coup has done nothing to reduce corruption but has greatly extended it. A legitimate protest would have limited itself to campaigning against Yanukovych in the upcoming elections (he would quite possibly have lost that election). But violent overthrow by an electoral minority, supported by US vice-presdident, Joe Biden, US senators such as John McCain, and US neocon officials such as Victoria Nuland, one which clearly did not include the pro-Russian regions of Ukraine, trumps electoral democracy every time, because it offers certainty.
In almost every respect the 2014 coup is an instance of the theatrical constructrion of a Big Lie in order to justify regime change, supported as always by western mainstream media, which rightly have lost almost all credibility among informed people, at least in the domain of western foreign policy. The protests, were not peaceful. The protestors did not represent the consensus of the majority of the Ukrainian people. The security forces were not responsible for the shootings of protestors. The right-wing snipers of the Maidan movement were responsible for these murders as they (or comparable actors) were also responsible for the murders of their opponents in the Trade Union Building in Odessa days later when it was set on fire and exit prohibited. Yanukovych was not a tyrant: he was duly elected and would soon have had to go back to the polls. Yanukovch did not “justify” the coup by fleeing (very likely from reasonable fear for his life, given evidence of plans for his assassination), since the change of regime took place without respect for constitutional procedures and also involved the banning of the largest Ukrainian political party namely, The Party of Regions.
The question of who was responsible for the Maidan massacre is an important foundation, almost entirely disregarded by western mainstream media, to understanding the current war. It is in many ways astonishing that Russia for so long delayed its SMO, given the continuning and murderous assault of the Kiev regime on its own people in the Donbass.
In the Donbass we still await evidence of a Ukrainian counter-offensive, either in Bakhmut, or more generally, or both. Latest Russian estimates of the number of Ukrainians in the center of Bakhmut run as high as 15,000 to 20,000 - which seems a very high number under conditions in which we are told most or all the normal access supply routes are cut or under Russian fire control and suggests either that the extent of the isolation of Ukrainians in Bakhmut has been exaggerated or that some kind of operation to free the garrison cannot be more than a few days away (perhaps as soon as the weather has further improved and the mud hardened) or that there may be some kind of ceasefire. If there is a Ukrainian counteroffensive on Bakhmut and it succeeds, the war will likely continue for longer. As for a broader counteroffensive, there are some indications that Zelenskiy himself lacks confidence, given what he reasonably describes as an overall weapons and ammunitions deficiency. Even in these circumstances one should not underestimate Ukrainian capacity to do considerable damage with the resources it does have at its disposal. Even “old” tanks, and “old” figher jets,” and all the rest of it, must be quite frightening when they are headed in your direction. But if, as seems to be the case, you are badly deficient in ammunition, as seems to be case with Ukraine, whether or whenever the EU’s promised 1 million rounts arrives, the odds are stacked in Russia’s favor at this time.