THE 2021 movie Operation Mincemeat begins with the narrator saying: ‘In struggle, reality is protected by a bodyguard of lies’. The identical is true of the struggle in Ukraine. Whereas we all know the reality in regards to the gangster state that’s Russia and its malevolent dictator who has ordered the homicide of greater than a dozen individuals on British soil, supervises state terror and torture at residence and initiated an unlawful and bloody struggle, we’re not being instructed the entire reality about Ukraine. It’s not the freedom-loving democracy its propagandists declare.
In a 2021 index of world corruption, the place the UK scores 79, Ukraine scores 32, simply above Russia on 29. The Guardian has described Ukraine as ‘probably the most corrupt nation in Europe’. Writing in The American Conservative in April 2022, Ted Galen Carpenter states that ‘at greatest, Ukraine is a corrupt, quasi‐democratic entity with troubling repressive insurance policies’.
A BBC investigation in June 2022 on the plight of 100,000 disabled kids imprisoned in 700 establishments in Ukraine uncovered abuse on a monumental scale the place kids ‘will not be handled as human beings, they’re solely stored alive’. Gerard Quinn, UN Particular Rapporteur on the rights of individuals with disabilities, stated this was an issue which lengthy predated the struggle.
President Zelensky has shut down 11 opposition events and nationalised broadcasting, putting all TV channels beneath a single state organisation giving him whole management over information and opinion. In the meantime world leaders fawn on him.
In keeping with the German Council on International Relations, from 2012 to 2016, $41million was directed from Privat Financial institution, owned by the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, ‘by means of a collection of middleman corporations into the accounts of Zelensky and Co’.
When Ukraine’s nationalist authorities took energy in 2014 it banned Russian as an official language within the jap provinces, whose shut ties with historic Russia are nicely documented. When the jap provinces opted for self-rule the Kiev authorities bombed and shelled them for seven years. In keeping with the UN’s Workplace of Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights reporting in February 2019, the entire variety of conflict-related casualties between Ukraine and the jap provinces was 40,000-43,000 from April 14, 2014, to January 31, 2019, together with 12,800-13,000 killed.
A peace settlement alongside the boundary of the jap provinces, ceding them to Russia, would finish this struggle fairly than prolonging it for years. The billions given to Ukraine for munitions can be higher spent on rebuilding it into a contemporary democracy, elevating residing requirements far above what Putin’s gangster state can ever supply.
