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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550 mile range in my diesel Audi.
5 mins to fill it.
Heater on, fast as a like.
Plants get free CO2 to eat too.
Plus 12 year black kid in the Congo didn’t have to go down a mine to get the stuff that makes the silly EV work
850 on a tankful in my Renault Trafic. Heater or a/c full on
450+ in my little Hyundai i10 .. with heater, lights and radio on. £30 pa road tax; cheap to insure.
EVs are simply not a practical idea for long-distance driving. But perhaps that’s the whole point. They want us either not to travel far, or to use public transport and ditch private vehicles altogether. Remember the old prediction that people will own nothing, and be happy.
And the most galling thing is that all this inconvenience isn’t going to have the slightest beneficial effect on the climate.
Just like the attacks on Farmers harvest (pun intended) very little. This seems to be part of the Agenda 2030 push to Build Back better.
Or ‘Extract Money Faster’
“EVs are simply not a practical idea..”
You could have stopped there. If they were we would have been driving them for decades instead of ICEVs.
And you wouldn’t need to subsidise them with taxpayers cash or use taxpayers money to provide charging points.
Recall of MPs Act 2015:https://notonthebeeb.co.uk/so/c8PDZE4U1?languageTag=en&cid=426765f9-8b6f-43e7-9ca1-b318db924f5c
£1.12 per kWh is a rip off, if you convert the thermal content of petrol at roughly 9 kWh per litre & guesstimate the efficiency of your engine at around 30%. It’s like paying out £3.50 a litre.
Incidentally, at todays prices my petrol car averages about 9p per mille, with most fuel being bought from ASDA – and a lot of the total is longish M road trips.
The whole “Green Energy” thing is a rip-off. Pay more and get less. (If it’s available, that is. And with unreliables such as wind and solar, that’s not guaranteed.)
The huge question is will TPTB allow us to continue to nurse our ICE cars for as long as we can manage? Or will there be a huge bunch of taxes, ULEZ schemes and restrictions on spare parts so as to ‘drive’ us off the road?
If we are allowed to keep them going? I think there will be a big industry in keeping old ICE cars on the road. But if they force the issue and make it EVs or nothing then it is a dismal outlook. I suspect that new technologies will come along for transportation but the current generation of EVs will spell the end of happy family leisure motoring. At best us hoi-polloi may have a cheap low range Chinese EV for local utility travel.
I’m sure the easiest thing for TPTB would be to target fuel supplies. If they can find a way to stop us getting supplies of petrol and diesel, then it’s basically game over for the ICE vehicle.
And there was me thinking the Government are there to facilitate the will of the electorate!
Oh no, it’s there to shape the nation according to its own will. But first it has to hoodwink enough of the electorate into thinking that they both have the same interests.
What a quaint notion!
Let’s face it – if you remove personal transport then the leisure industry is dead. Unemployment, no tax income follows. Think of all the places that are not reachable by public transport. Think of all those who support motor vehicles who will now be unemployed. The hit to the government finances would make Rachel from Account’s imaginary black hole real by many times more.
Mileage with the heating off is not the proper mileage though. It is like saying my plate of steak and chips will fill me up but only if I eat 3 Kitkats first.
The British writer Patrick Hamiltion wrote about the horror of the motorcar. He is almost completely forgotten these days but his novels are well worth reading. Hangover Square, The Slaves of Solitude. He lives on though in one sense and that is through a play he wrote called Gas Light. There was a good Ingrid Bergman film of it. This term has found its way into modern political discourse, gaslighting, although its meaning has been distorted slightly.
One thing I like about the Brits, the common people, is that they never get all enthusiastic about a new technology like the Yanks do. They might adpot it eventually, usually out of laziness and vacantness but there isn’t any expectation that all of this crap could ever make life better. Although I have read horrible stories in educational supplements about how teachers are applauding the fact that every child in their class has an electronic tablet. Basically a zombie machine and you hear that parent give phones to children as young as ten. This is horrific just slightly less horrific than the demoniac smiles of the Yanks selling this crap.
The number of mobile phones per capita far outreached that in the USA in the 1990s.
The cost per unit of electricity obviously varies depending on which type of tariff you’re on but is at least 40p/kwh so charging the author’s Ford at home would work out as about the same cost per mile as his Honda Civic. Therefore it would be impossible to recoup the massive extra cost of the Ford. Proof that EVs are only for the well off.
It would be interesting to compare the cost per mile of an EV versus a petrol or diesel for urban driving and see if the costs work out about the same as motorway driving. Driving at speed means far more air resistance hence higher energy use per mile but urban driving is often stop start. Accelerating uses far more energy than driving at a constant speed and a lot of this energy is lost when braking so driving in traffic may result in roughly the same energy use per mile as motorway driving.
The nail in the coffin is the cost of battery replacement.
It astounds me that anyone chooses to buy an EV – apart from company car drivers who have to get one and gain some tax advantages.
“if you regularly cover high mileage in an EV, you need to travel when everyone else isn’t to avoid queuing at chargers.”
Au contraire, I see all the BEVVERS travelling in groups. It’s so they have fellow BEVVERS to socialise with while they wait together for two hours to charge their BEVs not too quickly to avoid damaging the batteries. They also get to share enlightening, heartwarming stories about how well they are saving the planet. And they MUST be friends, because fighting over chargers isn’t a very planet friendly look. Too much CO2 is emitted when you fight.
A bevvy of electric car drivers.
“Every cloud has a silver lining though. Your correspondent predicts an impending boomtime for old style garages and the market in spare parts for petrol cars for years to come.”
The Government will simply outlaw cars over a certain age, 12 years perhaps, and maybe make it illegal to sell spares apart from brake pads – all with no reference to Parliament of course.
Drugs are illegal but people get very rich selling them without too much problem.
”To eke out the range I travel everywhere with the heater off, which currently demands a substantial coat, hat and gloves.”
Yes prior to the 1970s cars required that, and many afterwards too for a number of years.
I do so love technological progress.
James May a few years back showed that the range of battery cars had barely increased since the 1890s. Yes, they are more comfortable. Yes, they go much faster….for a short while.
That’s the funniest bit for me – EV’s are not new tech. Sure lithium ion cells and 0-60 times in a few seconds is newish (and pointless day to day), however the electric BEV is over 100 years old… and we ditched them for petrol and diesel powered vehicles… until governments started bribing people with subsidies and tax breaks to start buying them again