If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists. --Joe Ettor (IWW labor organizer)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IASdERt3-m0
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Bucha Massacre and Mariupol Maternity Hospital Airstrike
These three articles all address the various anomalies that point to the fact that the so-called Bucha Massacre was implemented as a reprisal operation by one of the various fascist paramilitary and political organizations in Ukraine, not by the Russian Army as has been broadcast in a major Propaganda and Disinformation Campaign over the past few days.
There is an extremely suspicious period of nearly 72 hours, after the Russian Army had largely withdrawn from the Bucha (as well as from nearby Irpin, and Hostomel) and the widespread appearance of murdered corpses. The Mayor of Bucha, Anatoliy Fedoruk, appeared on the City Hall Steps at 4:30 PM on April 1st, and discussed the Liberation of Bucha; by elements of the Ukrainian military and the Fascist Azov Regiment. He never mentioned hundreds of bodies lying around on the streets though they should have been unmistakable and extremely noticeable. Then as the Standpoint Zero article points out:“Something very interesting then happens on 2 April, hours before a massacre is brought to the attention of the national and international media. The US and EU-funded Gorshenin Institute online site Лівий берег announced that:
“Special forces have begun a clearing operation in the city of Bucha in the Kyiv region, which has been liberated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The city is being cleared from saboteurs and accomplices of Russian forces.”
This statement is further reinforced by the appearance of a Bucha City Council Authority Spokeswomn this was also reported by the Standpoint Zero article:“Only the day before, Ekaterina Ukraintsiva, representing the town council authority, appeared on an information video on the Bucha Live Telegram page wearing military fatigues and seated in front of a Ukrainian flag to announce ‘the cleansing of the city.’ ” These killings are much more in line with a civil war reprisal operation, such as cleansing the city, as opposed to a massacre by retreating Russian soldiers. The delay in any mention of these hundreds of bodies is very telling and is the mistake that gives the whole operation away.
The Consortium News article reports that:“Evidence of crimes in Bucha appeared only on the fourth day after the Security Service of Ukraine and representatives of Ukrainian media arrived in the town. All Russian units completely withdrew from Bucha on March 30, ...”
We should note that the propaganda and disinformation efforts directed at the opposition and Russian Speaking population in Ukraine is nothing new. Not too long after the 2014 Euromaidan Coup a Malaysian Airlines flight was shot down while flying over eastern Ukraine. This was another suspicious event. To begin with, why was an airliner routed to fly over an active conflict zone by international air traffic controllers in the first place. The Corporate Controlled Media hastened to blame the event on Russian Separatists in the DonBass region. But not only did the Ukrainian military have more of the Surface to Air missiles, capable of shooting down the airliner. But photographs of the downed plane's nose section seemed to show evidence of cannon fire, suggesting the plane was shot down by Ukrainian fighter aircraft. A court in the Netherlands agreed with the Corporate Controlled Media and blamed the Separatists, but that was predictable.
It is also notable that Malaysian Airlines, which had a perfect safety record up until the Ukrainian Shootdown, shortly thereafter suffered two more mysterious losses of airliners that disappeared over the Pacific and Indian Oceans. It is instructive to note that Malaysia was a society that the U.S. ruling class dearly wanted to teach them a lesson and show them their place. Malaysia, under the leadership of Mahathir Mohammed had not gotten tangled up in the 2007 – 2008 Fiscal Crisis, and it was also the only country on Earth to officially host a 9-11 Truth Conference, at which Mahathir Mohammed gave the keynote address. Coincidence??? Not IMHO.
All of the Russian troops are gone and yet there is no mention of a massacre. The beaming Fedoruk says it is a “glorious day” in the history of Bucha, which would hardly be the case if hundreds of dead civilians littered the streets around Fedoruk.
“Russian Defence Ministry denied accusations by the Kiev regime of the alleged killing of civilians in Bucha, Kiev Region. Evidence of crimes in Bucha appeared only on the fourth day after the Security Service of Ukraine and representatives of Ukrainian media arrived in the town. All Russian units completely withdrew from Bucha on March 30, and ‘not a single local resident was injured’ during the time when Bucha was under the control of Russian troops,” the Russian MOD said in a post on Telegram.
What Happened Next?
What happened then on Friday and Saturday? As pointed out in a piece by Jason Michael McCann on Standpoint Zero, The New York Times was in Bucha on Saturday and did not report a massacre. Instead, the Times said the withdrawal was completed on Saturday, two days after the mayor said it was, and that the Russians left “behind them dead soldiers and burned vehicles, according to witnesses, Ukrainian officials, satellite images and military analysts.”
The Times said reporters found the bodies of six civilians. “It was unclear under what circumstances they had died, but the discarded packaging of a Russian military ration was lying beside one man who had been shot in the head,” the paper said. It then quoted a Zelensky adviser, who said:
“’The bodies of people with tied hands, who were shot dead by soldiers lie in the streets,’ the adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, said on Twitter. ‘These people were not in the military. They had no weapons. They posed no threat.’ He included an image of a scene, photographed by Agence France-Presse, showing three bodies on the side of a road, one with hands apparently tied behind the back. The New York Times was unable to independently verify Mr. Podolyak’s claim the people had been executed.'”
It is possible that on Saturday the full extent of the horror had yet to emerge, and that even the mayor was unaware of it two days before, though photos now show many of the bodies out in the open on the streets of the town, something that presumably would be difficult to miss.
In Bucha, the Times was close to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, whose soldiers appear in the newspaper’s photographs. In his piece, McCann suggests that Azov may responsible for the killings:
“Something very interesting then happens on [Saturday] 2 April, hours before a massacre is brought to the attention of the national and international media. The US and EU-funded Gorshenin Institute online [Ukrainian language] site Left Bank announced that:
‘Special forces have begun a clearing operation in the city of Bucha in the Kyiv region, which has been liberated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The city is being cleared from saboteurs and accomplices of Russian forces.’
The Russian military has by now completely left the city, so this sounds for all the world like reprisals. The state authorities would be going through the city searching for ‘saboteurs’ and ‘accomplices of Russian forces.’ Only the day before [Friday], Ekaterina Ukraintsiva, representing the town council authority, appeared on an information video on the Bucha Live Telegram page wearing military fatigues and seated in front of a Ukrainian flag to announce ‘the cleansing of the city.’ She informed residents that the arrival of the Azov battalion did not mean that liberation was complete (but it was, the Russians had fully withdrawn), and that a ‘complete sweep’ had to be performed.”
Ukraintsiva was speaking a day after the mayor had said the town was liberated.
By Sunday morning, the world learned of the massacre of hundreds of people. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We strongly condemn apparent atrocities by Kremlin forces in Bucha and across Ukraine. We are pursuing accountability using every tool available, documenting and sharing information to hold accountable those responsible.” President Joe Biden on Monday called for a “war crimes” trial. “This guy is brutal, and what’s happening in Bucha is outrageous, and everyone’s seen it. I think it’s a war crime.”
The Bucha incident is a critical moment in the war. An impartial investigation is warranted, which probably only the U.N. could conduct. The Azov Battalion may have perpetrated revenge killings against Russian collaborators, or the Russians carried out this massacre. (Once again the Pentagon is dampening the war hysteria, saying it can’t confirm or deny Russia was responsible.)
A rush to judgment is dangerous, with irresponsible talk of the U.S. directly fighting Russia. But it is a rush to judgment that we are getting.
[Update: Satellite images, published after this article appeared by The New York Times, purportedly showing bodies strewn on a street in mid-March, should be considered by an impartial investigation. It cannot be considered at this point as conclusive evidence.]
Yesterday (3 April 2022) an ashen faced Oleksiy Arestovych, a chief advisor to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy who has been making regular televised updates on the progress of the war, appeared on UA-TV — Ukrinform, the Ukrainian state broadcaster — to inform the public of the appalling massacre of civilians at the towns of Bucha, Irpin, and Hostomel to the northwest of Kyiv. Russian forces, in compliance with commitments made at the most recent round of talks, withdrew from this area of the Kyiv Oblast, allowing the Ukrainian armed forces to take back control of these towns. Late on Saturday evening pictures began to circulate of what Arestovych described as a ‘post-apocalyptic horror movie’ — of as many as three hundred bodies of murdered Ukrainian civilians strewn about public streets, in cellars, and in shallow graves.
In The Kyiv Independent, Olga Rudenko wrote in an article published at 2:21 am (3 April) that as soon as the Russian forces began to withdraw from the area ‘horrific photos and videos began to flow in’ that ‘appeared to prove that the Russian forces carried out targeted, organized killings of civilians in Bucha.’ At half past eleven in the morning Valentyna Romanenko was adding much more detail to these atrocities in Ukrayinska Pravda in an article headed: ‘Did you want another Srebrenica?,’ linking the crimes to the 1995 genocide of eight thousand Bosniak Muslim men in Bosnia. Quoting Mykhailo Podoliak, the Adviser to the Head of the Presidential Office, who had said that because the western world did not want to provoke Russia, it got the total unspeakable horror of inhumanity in Bucha, Irpin, and Hostomel:
Hundreds, thousands of murdered, maimed, raped, bound, raped again and then killed. Hundreds, thousands of Ukrainian civilians. Murdered with particular brutality.
Pictures published on Podoliak’s social media pages and in newspapers across the country confirmed these apocalyptic scenes of savage brutality. People with their hands tied behind their backs executed against walls, bodies laying on the public streets all over the town of Bucha, limbs poking from what look to be mass graves. Charred remains draped over the twisted wreckage of shot-out and burnt-out vehicles and machinery, hands with nail polish, and bloodied faces with multiple gunshot wounds. The horror was there for the world to see. Two whole hours before this had made it to the Ukrainian media, Louise Callaghan had the full story on the online edition of The Sunday Times in Britain, and by five o’clock in the morning the Wikipedia article was live: ‘The Bucha massacre was a slaughter of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha by Russian troops involved in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.’
All the facts were established. People in western Europe would have all the details, every gory photograph, and the number of times each victim had been raped before being shot before going to bed and in Ukraine it would be right on time for breakfast. Not only would this be the news story of the day — saturating every news bulletin from Los Angeles to Berlin, this story would be the news.
But this is a strange story. There is no shortage of photographic evidence of the aftermath. No one can dispute that hundreds of civilians have been butchered on the streets of their towns. We can all see it. We know that this happened. Yet, from the beginning of this conflict the media has stressed the point that this war is going on in the ‘civilised world.’ Every moment of this is being caught on camera by ordinary people. There is not a single piece of video footage of this massive crime; not a single snapshot, social media update, text message — nothing. The first anyone anywhere hears about this disgraceful and very public crime is when it hits the papers. In Mariupol, a city entirely surrounded by Russian forces, residents are using Skype to contact news outlets in Greece. Even within the Russian occupied south and east of the country ordinary citizens are filming what the Russians are doing, and what the Ukrainian forces are doing to the Russians. From a few miles north of Kyiv, however, during a horrific and sustained attack on the civilian population, we have nothing but silence until the press breaks the story. This is strange.
There is something stranger than this. We are given the impression from the media coverage that Ukrainian soldiers advancing into these Kyiv satellite towns were met by this horror. Many of the pictures we have clearly show the public nature of these crimes. Anyone walking into Bucha was going to see the crime scene. Nothing of this was hidden. This is exactly what Rudenko had written — as soon as the Russian forces began to withdraw from the area horrific photos and videos began to flow in. We would assume, then, that Russian forces began to withdraw from Bucha sometime in the late evening of Saturday 2 April and pictures began flowing into Rudenko and her colleagues at The Kyiv Independent shortly thereafter. But no, this is not how it happened.
Russian forces began leaving Bucha Irpin, and Hostomel during the afternoon of Wednesday 30 March — a whole three days before these awful videos and images began ‘flowing in’ to the Ukrainian media. The Russian military had entirely vacated the town of Bucha by 16:31 on 1 April, because this is when Anatoliy Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, stood in front of the town hall and declared the ‘liberation’ of the town and posted it to the official Facebook page of the Bucha City Council. It stands to reason, then, that survivors of the massacre and arriving Ukrainian soldiers would have seen the horrific scenes around the streets and reported them — but no. In fact, Mr Fedoruk says nothing about bodies littering the streets in his online liberation address. It is not for another twenty-four hours that a massacre is brought to the attention of the press. Strange.
Clearly, we have a few hours to fill in here. The Russians leave on the afternoon of 30 March, no reports of a massacre come from the city — not even from the mayor who is actually in Bucha on 1 April, and then on the evening of 2 April we have a massacre. This is more than seventy-two hours in which no one is reporting a massacre and Ukrainian forces have control of the town. The mayor is in town and the townspeople are getting back out onto the streets, and no one — no one — is talking about a massacre. There are perhaps one or two videos, taken by people driving through the town, in which there are bodies visible on the road. But there are maybe only three or four, and this is an active warzone. It is difficult to marry these videos to the later pictures of wholesale slaughter.
According to The New York Times, which had the photojournalist Daniel Berehulak on the ground, one of the first Ukrainian units to enter Bucha was the ultra-nationalist Azov battalion. On a walkabout with the Azov battalion, the comment accompanying the photo spread reads:
Ukrainian soldiers from the Azov battalion walked through the remnants of a Russian military convoy in the recently liberated town of Bucha on Saturday, just outside the capital after the Russians withdrew. Nearby residents reached for food being distributed by Ukrainian soldiers. Many had not received food, or had electricity or gas to cook with — for more than a month. Older residents stood near a body left on the sidewalk.
Through the morning of 2 April there were dead bodies, but not enough to suggest a massacre had taken place. The New York Times makes no mention of a massacre of civilians — and it has access to the city and the residents. There is obvious hardship and people, especially the elderly and infirm, are suffering a great deal. But there is no indication here whatsoever of a massacre; complete with mass graves, execution sites, rape victims et cetera. No, all of this is absent. Nowhere in the town does Berehulak get any hint of a massacre of the civilian population, and, given its ideological hatred of Russians, one would think that if such a thing were known or even rumoured, the soldiers of the Azov battalion would only have been too happy to share.
Something very interesting then happens on 2 April, hours before a massacre is brought to the attention of the national and international media. The US and EU-funded Gorshenin Institute online site Лівий берег announced that:
Special forces have begun a clearing operation in the city of Bucha in the Kyiv region, which has been liberated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The city is being cleared from saboteurs and accomplices of Russian forces.
The Russian military has by now completely left the city, so this sounds for all the world like reprisals. The state authorities would be going through the city searching for ‘saboteurs’ and ‘accomplices of Russian forces.’ Only the day before, Ekaterina Ukraintsiva, representing the town council authority, appeared on an information video on the Bucha Live Telegram page wearing military fatigues and seated in front of a Ukrainian flag to announce ‘the cleansing of the city.’ She informed residents that the arrival of the Azov battalion did not mean that liberation was complete (but it was, the Russians had fully withdrawn), and that a ‘complete sweep’ had to be performed. Before signing off, she instructed residents to remain in their shelters and not to go about the streets. Now, as an aside here, this message was shared on social media. So, this does away with the idea that witnesses to the mass killings said to have been committed by the Russians couldn’t communicate with the outside world. They could, and we have lots of evidence of online chatter from within Bucha during this period — only, we have no evidence of a massacre.
At this point, somewhere in the afternoon and early evening of Saturday 2 April, we have Azov battalion troops and Special Forces of the SAFARI Regiment inside the city conducting a special sweep operation for saboteurs and accomplices. This very much sounds like a few civilians are going to get killed. From this point on there is almost a complete absence of sources from within Bucha, except for one. Everyone else in the town has been ordered off the streets and informed that there will be a military operation happening around them. They will be expecting some more gunfire. Then one more source, the only source from the time window between the start of the sweep and the news of a massacre flowing into the media: Sergiy Korotkikh, head of the Nazi territorial defence at Bucha, shared a short thirty second video on Telegram of Azov battalion troops walking along a deserted street and a fragment of conversation:
Those guys, without blue armbands, can we shoot them? Fucking of course!
That’s it. The next thing we know is that there has been a massacre. All of the video and photographic evidence is in London, Berlin, New York, and Washington by nightfall and horrifying images are flowing into the Ukrainian media offices in Kyiv. The facts are all known and a Wikipedia page is online as soon as the press breaks the story. This was a massive crime against the civilian population perpetrated by the Russian army. But the Russian army left days before, no forensic or legal investigation has taken place, and there is not a single eyewitness. But who needs due process when you have a war?
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New witness testimony about Mariupol maternity hospital ‘airstrike’ follows pattern of Ukrainian deceptions, media malpractice
A key witness to the widely publicized incident at the Mariupol maternity hospital has punctured the official narrative of a Russian airstrike on the facility, and raised serious questions about Western media ethics. Meanwhile, news of a massacre in the city of Bucha contains suspicious elements.
On March 9th, shocking news of a deliberate Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, began spreading widely via social media and news outlets.
Fiery condemnation from Western officials, pundits, and journalists was immediate. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, claimed the act was proof of the “genocide” Russia was perpetrating against the civilian population, and urged European leaders to condemn the “war crime” and “strengthen sanctions” to stop the Kremlin’s “evil” deeds in the country. NPR suggested the attack was part of Russia’s “terrible wartime tradition” of purposefully targeting health facilities and medics during conflicts, dating back to Chechnya.
But newly released testimony from one of the incident’s main witnesses punctures the official narrative about a targeted Russian airstrike on the hospital. The witness account indicates the hospital had been turned into a base of operations by Ukrainian military forces and was not targeted in an airstrike, as Western media claimed. Her testimony also raised serious questions about whether at least some elements of the event were staged for propaganda purposes – and with the cooperation of the Associated Press.
The new testimony (watch below) comes on the heels of evidence strongly suggesting that the destruction of a dramatic theater in Mariupol on March 16 was staged by the Azov Battalion, and that nearly all civilians had evacuated a day before. And as we will see below, new reports of a Russian massacre of scores of civilians in the town of Bucha also contain suspicious details suggesting a pattern of information manipulation aimed at triggering Western military intervention.
“They said it was no airstrike. So our opinion got confirmed. We didn’t hear the airplane, they didn’t hear it either.”
At that moment we heard an explosion. Instinctively I personally put a duvet on myself. That’s when we heard the second explosion. I got covered by glass partially. I had small cuts on my nose, under my lips and at the top of my forehead but it was nothing serious…
Mariana Vishegirskaya, a pregnant resident of Donetsk who was present at the maternity hospital during the widely reported incident, has evacuated from Mariupol and is now speaking out. Photos showing a bloodied Vishnevskaya fleeing the building with her personal belongings became a centerpiece of coverage of the attack, along with a photo of another woman being carried away pale and unconscious on a stretcher.
In the wake of the incident, Russian officials falsely claimed the pair were the same person, citing Vishegirskaya’s background as a blogger and Instagram personality as evidence she was a crisis actor and the incident a false flag. Though that assertion was not true, as we shall see, the hospital had been almost completely taken over by the Ukrainian military.
In a video (above) reviewed by The Grayzone which began circulating via Telegram April 1st, Vishegirskaya offers a clear and detailed account of what took place on and in the days leading up to March 9th. The witness begins by noting how many residents of Mariupol attempted to evacuate following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, but says authorities ensured it was “impossible to leave.”
On March 6th, with the birth of her child impending, she checked into maternity hospital number three, the city’s “most modern” facility. She was not there long before the Ukrainian military arrived and evicted all the hospital’s patients, as they sought access to the building’s solar panels, one of the last remaining sources of electricity in the besieged city.
“We were moved to the only small maternity hospital left. It had only one small generator… Husbands of women in labor settled in the basement and cooked meals for us on the street. Residents of neighboring houses also brought us meals,” Vishegirskaya says. “One day soldiers came. They didn’t help with anything. They were told the food is for women, how could they ask for it? They replied they hadn’t eaten in five days, took our food and said, ‘you can cook some more.’”
On the night of the 8th, the pregnant women “slept peacefully” as there were “no shootouts.” The next day, the soon-to-be mothers heard a shell explode outside. Vishegirskaya “instinctively” covered herself with her duvet, but still, shattered glass from a nearby window cut her lip, nose and forehead, though she says it was “nothing serious.”
“After the second explosion we got evacuated to the basement,” Vishegirskaya recalled. “We proceeded to discuss whether it was an airstrike. They said it was no airstrike. So our opinion got confirmed. We didn’t hear the airplane, they didn’t hear it either. They told us it was a shell. After the first two explosions there were no other explosions.”
As she waited, she noticed “a soldier with a helmet” taking pictures of her, and demanded he stop, “because obviously it was not a good time for that,” and she did not want to be photographed in her current state. The soldier complied. Back upstairs, the same individual began filming her and others again, refusing to stop until his subjects had demanded several times he do so.
Vishegirskaya’s husband later told her the man wasn’t a soldier, but an Associated Press correspondent, one of many on the scene at the time. She believes these journalists had been there “from the beginning,” as they were ready and waiting outside to snap the woman being led away on a stretcher, the first to emerge from the building in the wake of the shell attack, “as soon as she came out.”
The next day, after her baby was delivered via cesarean section, the same Associated Press staffers interviewed her, asking her to describe what happened. They enquired point blank if an airstrike had taken place, to which she responded, “no, even the people that were on the streets didn’t hear anything, nor did anyone.”
Later, when she was in safer “ living conditions,” Vishegirskaya began scouring the internet, attempting to track down the interview. She found “everything else” the Associated Press staffers recorded – but not her denials that an airstrike had occurred.
The AP’s narrative on the hospital incident grows shaky
The Associated Press’ initial report by Evgeniy Maloletka on the March 9th incident provided the primary foundation and framing of all mainstream coverage thereafter. It categorically asserted the hospital was targeted by a deliberate “airstrike,” which “ripped away much of the front of one building” in the hospital complex and left nearby streets strewn with “burning and mangled cars and trees shattered.” The report suggested that the heinous act was a testament to Russia’s invasion force “struggling more than expected.”
Countless Western news outlets recycled this content, with particular emphasis on the claimed “airstrike.” These outlets served as eager conduits six days later when Associated Press issued a followup, revealing that the pregnant mother being stretchered out of the hospital had died, as had her unborn child. A doctor stated her pelvis had been crushed and “hip detached,” which the agency attributed to the hospital having been “bombarded” by the Russian air force.
However, the Associated Press made no mention in its follow-up report of any part of any building being “ripped away.” In fact, the words attributed by the AP to Vishegirskaya indicate she was completely unaware of how the damage was actually caused.
“We were lying in wards when glass, frames, windows and walls flew apart,” she told the AP. “We don’t know how it happened [emphasis added]. We were in our wards and some had time to cover themselves, some didn’t.”
Did the Associated Press insert ambiguity and uncertainty into Vishegirskaya’s mouth in order to maintain the bogus narrative of an airstrike? Even if quoted accurately, she could easily have been describing an explosion nearby which inflicted shockwave damage on the building.
Reinforcing that interpretation, an Associated Press video purporting to document the aftermath of the “airstrike” showed a large hole in the ground within the maternity hospital complex grounds, said to be “a blast crater” from the wider assault. Was this merely the impact zone of a shell that intentionally or not landed near the building, rather than one vestige of a targeted aerial onslaught?
Whatever the truth of the matter, other aspects of Vishegirskaya’s newly released testimony relate to major mysteries surrounding the Mariupol maternity hospital bombing. For example, she affectingly attests that the pregnant woman stretchered out of the building died. Yet for all the superficial damage inflicted, no photo or video evidence yet to emerge from the scene – bar a seemingly blood-soaked mattress – indicates how and where the fatal injuries could have been inflicted.
Even more curiously, the Associated Press implausibly claimed that due to “chaos after the airstrike,” no one on the ground learned the dead woman’s name before her husband arrived to collect her body – her identity remains unknown to this day. Still, doctors were “grateful” the nameless woman did not end up buried in one of the mass graves dug for Mariupol’s dead.
Associated Press embeds with the Azov Battalion
The number of people who lost their lives in the maternity hospital incident, and precisely how, are likewise conundrums. In a televised address that evening, Zelensky claimed three individuals, including a child, had been slain via “airstrike,” while others remained trapped under rubble. The next day, though, Donetsk regional government chief Pavlo Kyrylenko said zero deaths had been confirmed, and there were no confirmed injuries among children.
By contrast, numerous media outlets have since reported, or at least heavily implied, that several children were killed, and their bodies deposited in the aforementioned mass graves on the “outskirts” of Mariupol. Why it would be necessary or sensible to transport corpses far away from the city center, and why a child’s parents would consent to such an undignified burial, remains unclear.
We know about these supposed mass graves thanks to Associated Press correspondent Evgeny Maloletka, who has published photos and authored articles detailing their construction. His content has been widely repurposed by other Western outlets, the grim images traveling far and wide.
Maloletka also happened to be an eyewitness to the maternity hospital incident; he took the infamous shot of the pregnant woman being stretchered out of the building. Maloletka, in fact, has managed to place himself in the vicinity of many dramatic events instantly portrayed as titanic Russian war crimes.
A glowing March 19th Washington Post profile of Maloletka praised him for sharing “the horror stories of Mariupol with the world.” The article described the Ukrainian as a “longtime freelancer” for Associated Press, previously covering the Maidan “revolution” and “conflicts in Crimea” for the agency. There was no mention of the fact that Maloletka was a fervent supporter of the “revolution,” however.
In a lengthy multimedia presentation on the coup and resultant war in Donbas featured on his personal website, Maloletka claims to be “indifferent to the situation in my country.” However, his affinities are abundantly clear. He frames the US-backed regime change operation as a courageous fight against “corruption and social injustice,” while making no reference to both the Maidan protesters and their leadership being riddled with neo-Nazis.
This may be relevant to consider, given Maloletka has also been a key source of photos of training provided to Ukrainian civilians by Azov Battalion. Whether he sympathizes with the paramilitary’s fascist politics is unclear, but there can be little doubt he has been in extremely close quarters with the neo-Nazi regiment since the war began.
Maloletka’s protection, that of his Associated Press coworkers, and their collective ability to provide Western media an unending deluge of atrocity propaganda can only be guaranteed through the Azov Battalion, the primary defense force in Mariupol. This has obvious ramifications for the objectivity and reliability of all Associated Press coverage of the war.
As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal revealed in his investigation of the suspicious March 16th Mariupol theater incident, Associated Press published photos of the site bearing Azov Battalion’s watermark and a link to the neo-Nazi unit’s Telegram channel
A South China Morning Post caption (lower right corner) indicates the AP receiving photos from the Azov Battalion
The dubious narrative of the explosion at the Mariupol theater bears strong similarities to the official verson of the maternity hospital incident, particularly the wildly conflicting estimates of casualties and purported presence of the same people at both sites. Sky News alleged March 26th that pregnant women rescued from the hospital had been moved to the theater “for safety,” being coincidentally housed at “exactly the point” later said to have been bombed by Russian forces, of all places.
The perishing of eyewitnesses to the real events at the maternity hospital is convenient for the Associated Press and Azov Battalion alike. After all, dead people tell no tales. Having anyone able to testify to the on-the-ground reality of incidents such as the dubious theater bombing or the maternity hospital “airstrike” is inherently problematic to the Ukrainian cause.
And though the AP has has reporters on the ground in Ukraine throughout the conflict with Russia, the organization remains silent about transgressions unfolding right before the eyes of its staff.
Case in point: the presence of an AP photographer at the hospital gave it a front row seat for Azov Battalion’s occupation of the facility and its transformation of the site into a base of operations. But the agency avoided any mention of this critical piece of context, showing Western audiences what Azov Battalion wants them to see – and what its overtly pro-Kiev staff deem fit for public consumption.
The information war escalates in Bucha
Hours before the publication of this article, on April 2nd, claims of Russia’s most hideous alleged war crime to date erupted across social media. Footage and photos of scores of dead bodies – some with their hands tied – littering the streets of Bucha, a small city near Kiev, testified to an apparent massacre of military-aged men by Russian troops, as they retreated from the battered city two days earlier.
The gruesome visuals have triggered intensified calls for direct Western military confrontation with Russia. But as with the incident at the maternity ward in Mariupol and numerous other high profile events initially portrayed by Ukrainian authorities as Russian massacres, a series of details cast doubt on the official story out of Bucha.
Within hours of Russia’s withdrawal from the Bucha on March 31st, its mayor announced that his city had been liberated from “Russian orcs,” employing a dehumanizing term widely used by Azov Battalion. An accompanying article noted the Russians had “mined civilian buildings and infrastructure,” but no mention was made of any mass killing of local citizens, let alone scores of corpses left in the street, which one might reasonably expect would be top of any news outlet’s agenda when reporting on the event.
On April 2, within hours of the publication of photos and videos purporting to show victims of an alleged Russian massacre, Ukrainian media reported that specialist units had begun “clearing the area of saboteurs and accomplices of Russian troops.” Nothing was said about dead bodies in the streets.
The National Police of Ukraine announced that day that they were “cleaning the territory…from the assistants of Russian troops,” publishing video that showed no corpses in the streets of Bucha and Ukrainian forces in full control of the city.
A clip of the reported “clean-up operation” published by Sergey Korotkikh, a notorious neo-Nazi Azov member, shows one member of his unit asking another if he can shoot “guys without blue armbands,” referring to those without the marking worn by Ukrainian military forces. The militant stridently responds, “fuck yeah!” Korotkikh has since deleted the video, perhaps fearing it implicated his unit in a war crime.
Whether real or fake, and whoever the perpetrators are, the alleged extermination of civilians comes at a critical time for the Ukrainian government. Evidence of atrocities and war crimes committed by Ukrainian troops against civilians and captured Russians – including the shooting of helpless Russian POWs in their knees, and other heinous forms of torture – has come to light for the first time.
What’s more, Russia has virtually eliminated Ukraine’s fighting and logistics capabilities in much of the country, including its entire navy, air force, air defenses, radar systems, military production and repairs facilities, and most fuel and ammunition depots, leaving Kiev unable to transport large numbers of troops between different fronts, and consigning what forces remain in the east to encirclement and almost inevitable defeat.
As Zelensky has made clear, Ukrainian forces are desperate for direct Western intervention – in particular the so-called “closing of the sky.” With compelling but highly questionable atrocity propaganda filtering from media operations of the Azov Battalion and the Associated Press, public pressure for a major escalation is rising.
They SAID THERE WAS NO AIRSTRIKE
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