Ukraine's war on the children of the Donbass
'за детей' - 'for the children'
Armed conflict is an ugly thing, and it's not uncommon for a lot of civilians to get killed. Leaders of belligerent parties generally at least pay lip service to the idea that this is an unfortunate consequence of fighting the armed forces of their opponent. Not so Petro Poroshenko in 2014, at the beginning of Ukraine's war on the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, when he declared that "Their children will hole up in the basements - this is how we win the war!"
'We will win the war by targeting civilians, especially children' - and this has been going on since 2014. This is the side that our entire media is telling us is the bulwark of freedom, democracy and human rights, the poor underdog whom big bad Russia have invaded in a completely unprovoked act of aggression, boo hoo, #StandWithUkraine. If this doesn't make you really, really angry, I don't know what to tell you.
Poroshenko wasn't bluffing about targeting kids. They attacked a children’s beach in August 2014. This video, made by Spanish journalist Liu Sivaya in July 2022, is filmed at the Alley of Angels in Donetsk, a grove of trees planted to commemorate all the children killed by Ukrainian shelling since 2014. They numbered 412 at the time. You can hear the anger in her voice, almost breaking; I presume the video has as many cuts as it does because she was unable to contain her rage.
And there's so much more. Remember the attack on Kramatorsk railway station on 8th April 2022? It was an attack on a group of civilians awaiting evacuation east, to Russia. Someone started filming moments after it happened. Just look at what these animals did (graphic content warning, obviously): Aftermath of the missile strike over Kramatorsk train station.
On the missile is written 'за детей' - 'for the children'. The BBC, and indeed all western mainstream media - lying, disgusting excuses for journalists as they are - go to great lengths to try and blame this on Russia. The cowardly, cringing Guardian are careful to only report the accusations that Russia did it, never questioning the reliability of those accusations, and calling the missile a 'Russian missile' because it dates from the Soviet era. See how that sleight of hand works? CNN and Business Insider just outright say Russia did it, knowing full well they didn't.
The Donbass Insider article goes into great detail proving, from the available evidence - i.e. the fact that the missile body landed to the west of the point where the anti-personnel warhead detonated, that it was pointing east, that the attack targeted Russian speakers evacuating to Russia - that of course the missile came from the west, from the Ukraine side. The writer of the article treats the reader like an adult, capable of simple deductive reasoning; the writers of the articles on BBC, CNN, Guardian etc treat the reader like a slack-jawed child, one who will accept what they say unquestioningly.
But this onslaught continues. Donetsk still comes under shelling every day, and will continue to until Russia finishes demilitarising and denazifying Ukraine. To the simple-minded bootlickers who insist that the Nazis only make up a tiny proportion of the Ukraine army and therefore aren't a problem (how can they take themselves seriously saying that?): If there are Nazis in the Ukrainian army and that army lets them do this, it's a Nazi army. And if you're making excuses for them, what does that make you? As Yevhen Karas, leader of the C14 Neo-Nazi group said in 2020 of the Maidan violence, extremists like them may have only represented 8% or so of the protesters at Maidan square, but they were the ones prepared to “perform the tasks set by the West, because we are the only ones ready to do them, because we have fun, we have fun killing and we have fun fighting”, and without them “that whole thing would have turned into a gay parade”.
In July those Nazis killed a 10 year old girl in Donetsk, blew her apart. Here's her grandfather and her mother, by her dead daughter's side - it's a gruesome video. Watching it makes me angry, and it should make you angry, too.
Russia are fighting against a side that knowingly and proudly targets civilians and children, often with weapons that we send them, and if our media mentions it at all, they tell us that it's Russia doing it. Is it any wonder that I don't care that a lot of very boring people have decided they don't want anything to do with me any more, on the grounds that I'm a 'Putin propagandist'?