FAUSTO GIUDICEBucha, a Timişoara of the XXIst Century

Fausto Giudice, 9/4/2022

The mayor of Bucha, a residential suburb of 36,000 people northwest of Kiev, Ukraine, announced April 1 that the city was “liberated” the day before, on March 31, from Russian occupiers. At the same time, the Ukrainian police announced that they had launched a hunt for “saboteurs” and “Russian agents disguised as civilians.”

On April 2, Ukrainian lawyer Ilya Novikov posted on his Facebook page a video from a Ukrainian Telegram page.  This one-minute, nine seconds long video shows a convoy of Ukrainian tanks moving down a street in Bucha. Twelve bodies can be counted; one body had his hands tied behind his back with a white bandage.

Invisible corpses in Bucha
In the hours that followed, the entire “social media sphere,” and then the mainstream media, went wild. “The Russians committed war crimes in Bucha; they massacred 300 civilians.”  No one has seen these 300 corpses.  Some photos show black bags which supposedly contained bodies. It’s easy to believe that they contain dead bodies, but there is no explanation of when and how these deaths occurred.   
The photos and videos followed one another in total chaos.  The same body appears in different photos in different places. Bodies appear, disappear and reappear with different details. Some photos show bodies with their hands tied behind their backs, others show white armbands on their arms.
During the month in which Russian troops occupied Bucha and the surrounding areas, civilians were encouraged to wear white armbands to show that they were non-hostile civilians. Ukrainian civilians and military and paramilitary personnel wore blue armbands.

According to the dominant narrative, the Russian military killed civilians who were not hostile to them. They are therefore as crazy as their leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin, the “Great Satan” of 2022.

At the same time and then after the media and social networks ( publicized the video and photos),  the politicians entered the dance: U.S. President Joe Biden,  Ursula von der Leyen (president of the European Commission) and Josep Borrell (High Represemtatove of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy), all denounced the “war crime of Bucha.” Russia has been denied the right to speak and vote in the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Ukrainian President Volydymyr Zelensky, the “servant of the people,” the eternal hero of a never-ending soap opera, called for a “Nuremberg Tribunal for Putin.” And finally, here is the Pope himself, in a scene worthy of Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti, brandishing and kissing a Ukrainian flag “from the martyred city of Bucha,” during a ceremony in which he gives Easter eggs to Ukrainian children.

Ukrainian flag honors Cossacks

No media outlet that published photos or the video of the scene explained what was written on the flag: “Fourth Cossack Centuria of Maidan.” The Centuria (“sotnya”) was the basic unit of the Cossacks [mounted] troops of the various armies in which they served. During what Radio Free Europe dubbed the “Euromaidan” of 2013-2014, the security service organized by the politician Andriy Parubiy, initially a neo-Nazi and later a weathervane, was structured in groups with poetic names that evoked  Ukraine’s “glorious past” — in  other words, the fight against “Judeo-Bolshevism”!

So much for Bucha. Why Bucha? Is it because in English, Bucha inevitably evokes “butcher”? But who would be the butcher in chief of Bucha? There are two opposing theories [about who would fit this role, represented by two individuals]: Azatbek Asanbekovitch Omurbekov and Serhii Korotkykh.
Omurbekov is a lieutenant-colonel of unit 51460 of the 64th Separate Russian Motorized Rifle Brigade. He is a Kyrgyz according to some sources, a Karakalpak according to others.  His grandfather and father served in the Red Army and his brother belongs to the FSB [Federal Security Bureau].

Korokykh, born in 1974, nicknamed “Malyuta” in Ukrainian and “Botsman” in Russian, is a Belarusian neo-Nazi and, a member of the Russian fascist organization RNE (Russian National Unity), which he left to found the National Socialist Society.

He is a founder of the NGO Zirka, “Dawn” (Protection and Reconstruction of the Country), suspected of a series of murders and assaults in Belarus and then in Ukraine, where he has been active since 2014. Incorporated into the Azov Battalion (a neo-Nazi wing of the Ukrainian military), he was naturalized Ukrainian in December 2014 during a ceremony where (former Ukrainian) President Petro Poroshenko thanked him for his services.

In May 2015, Korothkykh became the head of the newly created Police Service for the Security of Strategic Objects and headed it until 2017. He also had dealings with Foxtrot-13, a police-run security company. In 2020, (Ian Beletsky), one of the authors of a file on Korothkykh, published by the Institute for National Policy, accusing him, among other things, of being an FSB agent, was kidnapped and severely beaten in the vicinity of Kiev, by the “usual suspects.”

Korotkykh arrived in Bucha with his men in early April. Imagine what kind of “humanitarian” work they dedicated themselves to: burying corpses or producing them?

‘Dracula of Bucharest’ and other myths

The Bucha staging will go down in history as the “detail” that tipped Ukraine into the European Union, another mountain of exquisite corpses in the closets of Brussels. Enough to definitively dethrone the ghostly “4,630 corpses of Timişoara, (city in western Romania), victims of the communist ‘Dracula of Bucharest’” that made the front page of the free and democratic press, from “Le Figaro” to “Libération.”

This was an exemplary media invention now taught in journalism schools, dating from a prehistoric time (December 1989), when the Internet did not exist, but when a poor Romanian speaking a foreign language could sell any hoax to a media thirsty for a “scoop.”

Some examples I remember: “Ceausescu had an underground highway dug from his palace to the Black Sea (225 km),” “Securitate uses Arab snipers to shoot pro-democracy demonstrators,” and “Elena Ceausescu had a fridge full of roast beef in her palace (human meat, of course).”  

And the most beautiful: “Ceaușescu, suffering from leukemia, needed to change his blood every month. Young people drained of their blood would have been discovered in the Carpathian forest. Ceaușescu a vampire? How can we believe it? The rumor had announced mass graves which were found in Timişoara. And they are not the last.” (French television channel TF1)
 A variant of the story was even circulating in Paraguay about the dictator Stroessner, alleging he was suffering from a skin disease and had to take a regular bath in the blood of young virgins, who were kidnapped and bled by his henchmen. But this was due to Indian tales and legends about the “chupasangre,” the vampires, meaning the Spanish conquerors. In short, stories of "brutes.” “Civilized” people armed with their iPhones do no better.

"Everything that ever happens is always the way it should happen and always for the better".
Local monument to the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) born in Kiev, who spent his vacations in the family dacha in Bucha.
"The moment someone telegraphs that his head has been cut off, it means that it is not completely cut off..." (The Master and Margarita)

 

JORGE MAJFUD Russia and NATO: the world's most dangerous game

Jorge Majfud, 5/4/2022

Translated by Lena Bloch

 While with one hand, the world's major media are constantly reproducing the horrifying images of hundreds of corpses scattered in Bucha, Ukraine - with the other hand they are stoking the fires of an escalation of war that could lead us to a nuclear holocaust in a course of months.

 

Tasos Anastasiou, Greece

Whoever committed the massacre (it seems most likely to have been Russian soldiers), it will go down in the annals of history as an unforgivable crime. But I think the smoke is obscuring the horizon. We can't see where we come from and worse, we can't see where we are going. Although I have repeated it in different media since long before the war, wrong or not, I will focus on these two sides of the road that the fire does not let you see.

Let's start with a simple and more immediate question: instead of continuing the endless, dangerous, and notoriously useless game of arbitral sanctions, why not impose the obligation to negotiate a resolution to the conflict between Russia and NATO once and for all and before innocent people continue to die?

A reasonable solution would be the dissolution of NATO in exchange for Russia's withdrawal from Ukraine, but that would be labeled radical. The owners of the business do not negotiate.

There are many other options, such as the most obvious and pragmatic one, i.e. Ukraine's neutral status (with provincial autonomy of the Donbas), which is where it should start instead of provoking Russia by integrating Ukraine into NATO and deploying missiles four minutes away from Moscow.

The neutrality or non-membership of NATO has always been the case of Austria, Finland, Sweden and other neighboring countries, some of which have just expressed the possibility of joining NATO, showing where the business of the old war merchants is going and demonstrating, once again, that the fight against communism - and not only in Latin America - has been nothing more than the perfect excuse to maintain geopolitical dominance and protect corporate, class and capital interests.

What do they intend, apart from expanding militarization more and more in a world, now that they have run out of the excuse of communism and, more recently, of Islamic terrorism, which in Afghanistan alone left eight trillion dollars in profits to the big companies specialized in "security"?

Do they think that having Russia surrounded by that anachronistic and mafia-like NATO organization would make Europe and the world a safer place?

You have to be under the influence of alcohol to forget that we are talking about one of the two atomic superpowers and imagine such stupidity. Or such wickedness of organized crime. If it were really about "security", if they were really sincere about "the right to defend themselves" that countries have, they would never have tried to break this order which, judging by the ongoing war, has not made the world, much less Ukraine. safer, but quite the opposite.

Of course, those who have that bargaining power are not being splashed with the blood of Russians and Ukrainians but, on the contrary, are doing their business, so it may take a few weeks, if not months, for them to stop shedding crocodile tears over the whiskey and get down to serious negotiations.