GRAYZONE, that black rag: Can't cut & paste

[Martin Dietze]

Good propaganda always has a bit of truth in it while never telling the
whole truth.

Here's a snippet from Tim Snyder's "Twenty Lessons", chapter 17, which
summarises pretty well what happened in Eastern Ukraine in 2014:

The plan, besides Crimea, was to overthrow regional Ukrainian governments
> in 8 regions. The idea here was to use Russian Special Forces to organize,
> provoke, what appeared to be local uprisings against the Ukrainian state.
> This in general did not work. It failed almost everywhere. It was a partial
> succes in 2 Ukrainian districts - Luhansk and Donetsk - and that success
> was achieved in a very particular way.
>
> The Russian Special Forces that were active in that part of Ukraine
> recognized that they were failing. They were about to be defeated by the
> Ukrainian army which - weakened and confused as it was - wasn't having any
> problems with that small number of Russian Special Forces and a small
> number of local volunteers that was supporting them.
>
> So, what the leader of the special forces in the southeast did, a man
> called Girkin, was that he deliberately withdrew to a city in order to draw
> artillery fire to that city. And this was successful in part because
> Russian forces on the other side of the border hideously for weeks rained
> down artillery fire on the Ukrainian army.
>
> So, the artillery exchanges that followed created the impression that the
> Ukrainians were shelling their own people, which of course was the case
> because they ware responding to shelling that was coming to them from the
> other side but that exchange of shelling for shelling created a sense that
> everyone was against everyone which made it possible for the separatists as
> they started to call themselves to recruit from local people.
>

This is where the propaganda narrative about Ukrainians "relentlessly
shelling their own people" originates. And thanks to people believing just
about anything contradicting what they consider the "mainstream", this has
worked rather well. Rather than blaming invading Russian Special Forces for
using "human shield" tacticts, systematically drawing fire on civillians by
operating from residential areas, the vicitms are again made the villians.

What Snyder tells us in that text isn't new to me. Back in 2014 people I
knew in the Ukrainian army told stories about the sheer endless artillery
fire, and Bellingcat were able to prove that it quite a large portion of it
indeed originated from the Russian side. The Russians shelling from
residential areas in Donetsk and Luhansk was by the way been confirmed by
internationional observers.

For believers without any connection to Ukraine there's no problem in
buying the narrative of Ukrainians being nationalists hating people from
Eastern Ukraine etc. - which is of course bullshit. Since 2014 people from
all the country have been organising all kinds of help for those affected
by the war, destroyed settlements and infrastructure were repaired, and
living conditions had got significantly better than in "DNR" and "LNR"
(that's what Poroshenko was talking about in his Odessa speach on how
Ukraine were to win this war - not by weapons but by creating something the
warlords in the occupied zones could not and did not want to: conditions
for a life in dignity and acceptable material conditions).

Nothing that will make true believers change their minds. Still... I
sometimes cannot sit still when reading this kind of nonsense.


On Tue, 21 Mar 2023 at 22:19, Hübschräuber <huebschraeuber at protonmail.com>
wrote:

> > > Your pain is no greater than the people of the Donbass who have been
> > > shelled by The Ukrainian army for years before the current Russian
> > > intervention
> >
> >
> >
> > Which is not true.
>
> Interesting. So what are all those OSCE reports about, then?
>
>
>

-- 
Dr. Martin Dietze
[https://www.martins-braindumps.de/]

1. Vorsitzender - Deutsch-Ukrainischer Kulturverein e.V.
Голова - Німецько-Українське Товариство Культури
[http://www.deutsch-ukrainischer-kulturverein.de/]

Redakteur / Редактор - Karpaty Lviv Nachrichten
[https://karpaty-lviv-nachrichten.com]