pro-Russian separatists

After the bloody suppression of a patriotic demonstration in Warsaw in 1861, Alexander Herzen wrote to Tsar Alexander II: “You have become a common murderer, an ordinary thug.” He also described the Russian press as “shameless” and “unscrupulous.”

Today, perhaps we should repeat the words of this great Russian, and direct them at Vladimir Putin and his Russian press-men who are lying ceaselessly and insolently. First we hear that Poland trained the Ukraine fascist squads that terrorized the Maidan; next we are told that Putinist conquerors of the Crimea bought their weapons and uniforms in stores and that the Kremlin had nothing to do with it. Now we are once again hearing about the Ukraine state’s responsibility in the MH-17 disaster.

The 298 victims of the shoot down of the Malaysia Air flight are a result of Putin’s ruthless and cynical imperialist policies. It was his decision to arm and finance the so-called “separatists” who in reality are the Kremlin’s spy network and fifth column in the Donbass region. They were armed with Putin’s knowledge, approval and money. And these people are the ones who killed random, innocent individuals.

Putin—with his KGB polkovnik mentality—does not want to let Ukraine follow its own path toward democracy and Europe. He wants to reconstruct the Russian empire. Inciting, upholding and supporting ethnic conflicts in Latvia and Estonia serves this aim, as does the creeping dismantling of Moldova, and maintenance of conflicts around Upper Karabakh. Indeed—this great power, this great Russian chauvinism is the final and highest stage of communism. And Putin understands progress as gradual and complete annexation of successive former Soviet states.

The European Union—accustomed to peace and quiet—has neither determination nor an understanding of the growing threat. The clichéd faith in the possibility of placating the beast is replaying over and over again. The blindness and loyalty of European political and business elites gives reason for concern. But there is nothing that releases us—intellectuals active in culture, scholarship, and media—from the duty to say clearly, stubbornly, and emphatically: This is very dangerous. We must not be allowed to repeat the naiveté once displayed by intellectual elites toward Hitler and Stalin. And back then we were not allowed to close our eyes to the annexation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic States.

My friend from Moscow says that there are two scenarios in which the Russian army will leave Ukraine: One realistic and the other miraculous. In the realistic scenario, Saint George will ride in on a dragon and use his fiery sword to chase this band of scoundrels away. That’s the realistic scenario. And the miraculous one? They’ll just up and leave on their own.

The policy of successive concessions leads nowhere. Putin is not a European-style politician; he’s a politician of permanent belligerence and aggrandisement. Much seems to suggest that he has already let the genie out of the bottle—crowds of mercenaries are moving from Russia to Ukraine, crowds of sentimental monarchists, Orthodox fascists, National-Bolsheviks, and the like. Arming these bandits with first-class weapons is simply criminal. It is a good thing that Poland’s current government has taken an honest and judicious stance—it’s not flexing its muscles but it’s also not succumbing to illusions or hypocrisy.

Source: Adam Michnik – a leader of the anti-Communist opposition in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s, is the editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, where this piece originally appeared (as edited). Translated by Agnieszka Marczyk.

US intelligence officials say they have no clear evidence of direct Russian government involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which they say was most likely hit by rebels by mistake. This is a narrow view at the least considering the source of the weaponry used in the attack.

They say that MH-17 was likely hit by an SA-11 SAM fired by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine and that Russia “created the conditions” for the attack by arming and financing the separatists.

It is believed that the most likely explanation for why the plane was shot down was that the rebels made a mistake and misidentified the aircraft as that belonging to the Ukraine air force. Separatists had previously shot down 12 Ukrainian military aircraft.

“The most plausible explanation … was that it was a mistake,” and that the missile was fired by “an ill-trained crew” using a system that requires some skill and training, an official said. Again this statement does not stand the test of scrutiny! Why was this “ill-trained crew” using a technical weapons platform, but even so they still managed to shoot down an unidentified civilian aircraft flying at 33,000 ft by assuming it was a Ukraine air force aircraft.

The officials had made their appraisal using social media postings and videos made public in recent days by the Ukrainian government, even though tnot all off this evidence has been authenticated.

Video of a missile launcher said to have been crossing the Russian border after the launch, and appearing to be missing a missile has yet to be verified as being exactly what it purported to be.

It is still not known who fired the missile at MH-17 or whether any Russian operatives were present at the missile launch. As if Russia (or the separatists) is going to freely divulge that information!

It is also not certain that the missile crew was trained in Russia, although a stepped-up campaign in recent weeks by Russia to arm and train the rebels suggests that Russia is clearly implicated in this disaster. This training has continued even after the downing of the commercial jetliner. The Russian military had been training the rebels at a large base in Rostov on various weapons, including air defence systems, they said.

The claim that the Ukrainian government had shot down the plan was not supported and was unrealistic, as Kiev had no such missile systems in that area, which is clearly under the control of the rebels.

This would mean Ukrainian government troops would have had to fight their way into the area towing the weapons systems, fire at the passenger plane and fight their way out again. “That is not a plausible scenario to me,” the official said.

President Barack Obama said the Malaysia Airlines plane “was shot down over territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine.’’ He also said Russia has both trained the separatists and “armed them with military equipment and weapons, including anti-aircraft weapons”.

But in Russia, at a news conference held yesterday, defence chiefs offered two alternative theories about what happened to MH-17, the first being that it was possibly shot down by a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jet. Moscow stated its radar systems had detected the fighter tracking near the Boeing 777 at the time it crashed and noted the plane was armed with air-to-air R-60 missiles (how?) that could shoot down the aircraft.

The US dismissed the claim as “desperate” propaganda, pointing out that Ukraine air force fighters cannot operate at 33,000 feet where MH-17 was flying and that Ukraine has told Washington that none of its planes was in the air at the time.

Russia also suggested MH-17 might have been shot down by a Ukraine government surface-to-air BUK missile system rather than a Russian supplied system provided to rebels by Moscow. But again, how did Ukraine get the missile into the rebel held area?

Russia seems to be offering feeble and implausible excuses to attempt to deflect their role in this disaster!