The Ukraine war has its roots in the events of February 2014 when the country’s pro-Russian government was overthrown and replaced by a pro-Western government. One of the key events in the ‘Revolution of Dignity’, as it became known, was the massacre of police and protestors on the Maidan.
The official narrative is that the protestors were killed by snipers from the Berkut (a special police unit loyal to then-President Viktor Yanukovych) and/or by unidentified Russian snipers. Yet Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian-Canadian academic, maintains that they were killed by snipers from the Ukrainian far-right – as part of a false flag operation to bring down Yanukovych’s government.
Some of the evidence Katchanovski cites in support of his argument comes from the trial of five Berkut officers who were charged with the murder of protestors. For example, 51 out of 72 wounded protestors who testified at the trial stated that they were shot from buildings that were under the control of Maidan forces or that they witnessed snipers in such buildings. Most said they were shot from the Hotel Ukraina, and as Katchanovski notes:
Videos show that the Maidan forces not only controlled the entrances and exits to Hotel Ukraina before, during, and after the massacre of the protesters, but also that armed Maidan groups were on the same floors that protesters and journalists identified as locations of snipers around the same time … The far right Svoboda party, a Maidan Self-Defense commander in the hotel, and the hotel staff stated that the Hotel Ukraina was seized and guarded by the Maidan forces since the end of January 2014 … In its official statement, Svoboda stated that its activists took Hotel Ukraina under their control and guard on 25 January 2014.
On 18 October, almost nine years after it began, the trial finally reached a verdict: three of the Berkut officers were found guilty of murder, a fourth was found guilty of abusing his office, and the fifth was acquitted.
Interestingly, though, none of them will serve any prison time. The officer found guilty of abuse-of-office has already served his full five-year sentence while in custody during the trial. And the three found guilty of murder were released from custody in 2019 as part of a prisoner exchange with Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas.
For his part, Katchanovski attributes the conviction of the three Berkut officers to “fabricated forensic ballistic examination”, noting that “the specific time and direction of shooting by Berkut policemen did not coincide with the killing of specific protesters”. In fact, even before the verdict was reached, he had written that the trial would be unlikely to weigh the evidence impartially due to “political pressure and far-right attacks”.
It’s interesting, then, that the verdict states as a “categorical conclusion” that “persons with weapons, from which the shots were fired, were in the premises of the “Ukraine” hotel”. In other words, it acknowledges the presence of snipers in the Hotel Ukraina – something that had previously been dismissed by proponents of the official narrative as a “conspiracy theory”.
(As an aside, the court document is around 1,700 pages and 1 million words in length. It’s also written in Ukrainian. Katchanovski was kind enough to direct me to the relevant parts, and I translated them using Google.)
In addition, the verdict states that for eight killed and twenty wounded protestors, “the involvement of law enforcement officers has not been proven, and other unknown persons cannot be ruled out”. In several of these cases, it even states that the individual was shot from the Hotel Ukraina or other territory that was “not controlled by law enforcement agencies at that time”.
The “unknown persons” could, in principle, be Russian snipers. Yet according to the verdict, any “Russian trace” was “not confirmed”. In particular, “all cases of crossing the border zone by FSB officers into Ukraine, their movement around Kyiv and the region, the time and place of their stay, as well as the dates and ways they left the territory of Ukraine were investigated”. And there was “no participation in the events on the street”.
It’s worth noting that the trial itself only dealt with the shootings of around half the protestors who were shot in the massacre. The other half were determined before the trial even began to have been shot from areas where no Berkut officers were present – and the five defendants were not charged with their shooting. So even if some protestors were shot by Berkut officers (something Katchanovski admits as a possibility) there are still dozens of unexplained shootings.
The trial verdict will not be the final word on the Maidan massacre. But it does lend support to several of Katchanovski’s claims: there were snipers in the Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled buildings; many of the protestors could not have been shot by the Berkut officers; and there is no evidence that Russian snipers were involved.
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2004 and 2014 US led coups. The Maiden massacre by Ukes and the CIA. 15000 Russians slaughtered in Donbas post Maiden. Bio labs, money laundering. NATO, EU takeover of a former Russian state oblast which was never a country. And yet Russia is the bad actor. The US empire as evinced by Rona, fake science and endless wars is the locus of evil.
You sound a bit like a Marxist Revolutionary.
74 down ticks even with the last sentence being true
The quantity of down tickers only means that a group of people don’t like Ferd’s conclusions, not that they are wrong.
Assuming the US and it’s allies, which includes the UK, are the only bad actors in the world is naive. What can be done in the name of national security is just about anything. These clandestine agencies operate above any laws or morality.
https://off-guardian.org/2023/11/04/the-great-reset-part-2-a-camp-with-no-outside/
The second part of Simon Elmer’s look at their Great Reset and this looks at Digital Identity and the horrors this entails.
“At present, the UK Government is promoting Digital Identity in terms of ease of access, greater convenience and increased safety. So, under the Online Safety Act 2023, Digital Identity will be a requirement of access to the internet, not in order to censor what we can see, read and write but to protect children from pornography and grooming gangs.
Under the Elections Act 2022, it will be a requirement of voting, not in order to further discourage public participation in the electoral process but to stop illegal voting. It will be a requirement of receiving Universal Credit or, in the future, Universal Basic Income, not in order to force the immiserated and unemployed into obligatory retraining and work but to stop fraudulent benefit claims. It will be a requirement of gaining access to public transport, medical care, education and employment, not in order to control us whenever the World Health Organization declares a new pandemic but to protect the population from future health crises. It will be a requirement of travel and movement between nation states and within the UK, not in order to enforce the restrictions on our freedoms imposed by Agenda 2030 but to stop illegal immigration into the UK and save the planet from ‘global boiling’. It will be a requirement of opening a bank account, not to force us into opening a Digital Pound account but to stop financial crime.”
This is actually a first rate article and more like the Simon Elmer I have learnt to appreciate.
Toby, you’ve really got to keep Noah away from Ukraine issues.
DS credibility is at stake.
It’s like being back in London Calling, but with only James’s rantings presented.
Has it really taken you nearly 2 years to make that comment?
It wasn’t worth the wait.
Noah is making a rod for his own back here, because he hasn’t examined Katchanovski’s claims objectively (by having translations of videos, etc. done, as I have). Here’s a brief excerpt from an article I’ve been working on, which shows Katchanovski’s contempt for the facts. However, we know there was one gunman in the Hotel Ukraine on the February 20th 2014, he was seen shooting probably towards government units on rooftops towards the presidential buildings to the north west. It’s almost like Noah is being a cipher for Katchanovski by saying the idea of anyone with a gun in the Hotel Ukraine is a “conspiracy theory”.
—————————————————–
[His] next supposed witness is in the clip beginning at 2m49s. Katchanovski’s caption reads as follows:
To be clear, the Hotel Ukraine was never controlled by the Maidan protesters, as far as I have been able to establish from contemporaneous accounts and videos. It was used as a hotel, occupied by foreign journalists (BBC, RT, etc.) and others during this time. First aid was given to protesters in the lobby on February 20th, but Katchanovski has never established anything more. However, what Katchanovski fails to mention about this witness is that he states that he saw three individuals in uniform run into the hotel on February 17–18th and then down the stairs with cases resembling weapons cases. This is from a show broadcast by the popular Ukrainian channel TSN which, from what I can tell, presents the mainstream view that it was only government forces who were sniping protesters, and it’s clear from the video that these “snipers” were police or other government officers.
It is probably a waste of time dissecting those events yet again.
Ukraine is doomed and it is only a matter of time before the West formally casts them adrift.
America is already building a blame narrative that absolves Biden from any culpability and fingers Zelensky, Zelensky is already blaming his generals for the failures and Aristovich is positioning himself to replace Zelensky.
I think a stock of popcorn is in order.