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

[Mark Kohut]

I wonder if Hubschrauber has changed his very wrong judgment of
Bellingcat....
even then refusing to believe his eyes, the open sourced always confirmable
eyes of Bellingcat...

On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 6:37 PM Martin Dietze <mdietze at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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]
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>