by GH Eliason for the Saker Blog
On September 28th, Lugansk Peoples Republic (LNR)Deputy Foreign Minister Anna Soroka and Andrey Chernov gave a presentation unveiling a photo album entitled Unanounced war. This collection of 150 images details the war crimes by the Ukrainian government during the war from 2014-2018.
Over the last 4 years, many journalists including myself reported on the war crimes committed by Ukrainian punisher battalions and sometimes the Ukrainian army. These war crimes are privately funded by Ukrainian Diaspora groups led primarily by US and Canadian citizens.
The Ukrainian punisher battalions and Ukrainian volunteer battalions take pride in the fact there is no need to hide any of Ukraine’s crimes from the West’s prying eyes.
Even now, when there is supposed to be a ceasefire so the children can go to school, Kiev is shelling cities and towns across Donbass. On September 29th, in just 24 hours Ukrainian army units shelled DNR (Donetsk Peoples Republic) over 300 times violating the ceasefire.
DPR representative at the Joint Centre for Control and Coordination (JCCC) Ruslan Yakubov said Ukraine used 82 and 120mm mortars, grenade launchers, IVFs, APCs, small arms of large caliber.
Last night in Staromikhailovka, a town west of Donetsk, a small girl was injured during the shelling.
September 30th was another tragic day when 3 boys aged 13-15 were killed when one stepped on an anti-personnel mine near the city of Gorlovka, DNR. The boys were on a path to the side of a main walkway. A 10 year old was badly injured in the mine-blast and is in the local hospital.
For the last few years, when LNR or DNR tries to clear landmines, the Ukrainian army stops them using snipers. Mines show up in areas that LNR and DNR clear. The children of Donbass deserve better than to become statistics in either sides casualty count.
The only benefit this could have is to aid Ukraine in terrorizing women and children and close the schools like Petr Poroshenko promised in 2015.
In LNR(Lugansk Peoples Republic)Ukraine is firing 120mm and 82 mm mortars, LNG anti-tank grenades, automatic grenade launchers, RPG’s and small arms breaking the school ceasefire agreement.
The strategy Ukraine has in mind is simple. As long as there are children in the small towns on the outskirts of the cities, people will stay there. If Ukraine can destroy the schools in a town or make the families with children move, the town dies quickly because almost everyone else leaves soon thereafter. This strategy is part of how they are cleansing villages in the gray zone. They fire on schools, hospitals, kindergartens, and churches to destroy the social fabric of a town.
They lay personnel landmines to destroy the families and more important, make them leave. The image above shows small boys whose only crime was being small boys on a hike in an area they should have felt safe in. They weren’t on the front lines. They were in a town on the edge of the demilitarized gray zone.
LNR’s Foreign Ministry is shedding light on this situation internationally by publishing the photo album dedicated to the people caught in the Donbass genocide from 2014-18. It will be made available to libraries and government institutions internationally.
Deputy Foreign Minister Soroka hopes to inspire more international journalists to come to Lugansk People’s Republic and report on what they see here.
Stopping the war against civilians and especially children in LNR and DNR is the prime concern the Foreign Ministry is tasked with. After Foreign Ministers Vladimir Danego and Denis Pushilin negotiated an agreement and a path to reintegration in the failed Minsk I and Minsk II agreements, Kiev has yet to make any effort to fulfill the terms they agreed to.
Ukraine has no intention of keeping Donbass as part of Ukraine. This is why the Poroshenko gives medals to soldiers that refused to join the Ukrainian army and commit atrocity.
The following gives a little insight into what goes on in LNR at the ministry level. Where are the war-journalists now that they are invited? Starbucks?
Glance at that last photo again. Is your heart in your mouth? The agreement that created the gray zone (no fire zone) is there to protect kids from this happening. It’ s there to keep the schools and hospitals from being shelled.
How many heart wrenching days do the families in Donbass need to endure? Kiev constantly shells, pounding the places children go to play. Is this the government you’d want sworn to protect your own children? How many more young lives will be lost when all you need to do is reach out and call your congressman?
I’ve been in Donbass since 2012. I’ve interviewed and spoken with all the people I need to. I lived through the uncertainty of whether or not we die today, in 2014.
If you’re a journalist and you want to know the big story in Eastern Europe, come and talk to people yourself. The locals will tell you. But don’t talk to me about the Ukrainian nationalists in Kiev until you’re ready to see the butchery they unleashed on their own people.
It’s time to be adults because Poroshenko’s government obviously can’t. Stop the funding to Ukraine.
***[note: Video courtesy of Zhenya van Amerongen ]
Ukraine, since the Coup, become (criminal) nightmare for itself, for Europe and even for the world.
Just a point about the location of the death of the 3 boys and very critical wounding of a fourth.
It took place in Gorlovka. That city has taken about 40% of the shelling of the Ukies. It has been a key city and has been blasted for four years nearly every day.
Many battles have been fought there.
I seem to recall Givi’s Somalia Battalion rushing there more than once to push back the Ukies, post-Minsk 2.
George Eliason is and has been the best investigative journalist and historian of the U.S. Government’s coup against Ukraine and ongoing proxy-invasion of Donbass by the nazi regime that the U.S. and its allies established in Kiev. What Vanessa Beeley has been regarding the U.S. Government’s invasion and occupation of Syria, George has been regarding the coup and its aftermaths in Ukraine. Both of these great investigative journalists are good enough to be blacklisted by the mainstream ‘news’ media in The West — blacklisted because they are too true, not because they aren’t true enough. The best journalists are too good to be publishable in the U.S. and allied regimes. So, everyone who reads such reports should do whatever is possible to spread them to friends and to everyone, but especially to people who don’t already know that they live under a dictatorship.
thanks Eric – that’s great to know about Eliason – one never knows who one is reading until something like this is said.
Its so sad about the boys – it is so wrong that children can’t be safe – also in Yemen the evil is targeting children. What a Satanic occupation.
Every journalist of true worth is outside the US now.
Sy Hersch, Glenn Greenwald had to rebase as well as publish from outside the borders of the country.
Abby Martin works outside the US.
And that’s really the long list, not the short list.
Very few trustworthy sources in media for a long time.
If you really take a hard look, we don’t get “news” as in SitRep, eyewitness, documented facts. We mostly have bloggers and social media sources, both actually “amateurs” but some very good and have earned our support.
Who covers Syria on the ground?
After Debaltsevo, RT picked up all its quality people and left. Donbass is an orphan to the big news orgs.
What investigative group is plunging into the “Highly Likely” bullshit from Britain?
The White Helmets should have been exposed long ago, certainly before the propaganda and Oscar-winning documentary.
Yemen is an orphan in the Media.
Look at the censorship in the West that was used to bury the spectacular success and joyful experience of millions of visitors to Russia for the World Cup, a month-long global event.
Journalism is dead. All we have is the trickles of truth from the courageous outliers like Eliason, or talented amateurs with video cameras.
And where can there reports be published by the Vineyard and maybe a few lesser blogs.
This is why keeping Saker’s Vineyard financed with donations is crucial.
Or the world we know will be down to emailed samizat publishing.
Can the book be published as a pdf?
Any chance to get on Amazon.com? If not, alternative distribution sites?
You don’t want to see the voluminous archives I have on these ongoing and unreported war crimes. Larchmonter mentioned Gorlovka. As you of the ‘old guard’ may remember, we were active in getting those left behind when Strelkov retreated from Slavyansk to Donetsk on 05 July, those who could not, or would not, leave with the army. The statements of some of these people we helped are on this blog in the archives.
I will not lay out chapter and verse what was and is going on up there, but I will recount one incident that happened in January of 2015. My wife had friends in Gorlovka, ‘dog people’ like we are, and she had a relatively reliable way of communicating with the lady of the house. Whilst speaking to her one evening, the commo they were using suddenly went dead. This was not unusual and not uncommon. She tried calling the lady the next morning, and got nothing. After two days, inquiries were made. It was found that a Grad missile had hit their flat, going in the kitchen window, while the lady was conversing with my wife. The lady, her husband, her mother, and four dogs died in the explosion, as did three people in surrounding flats. The neared DNR forces to their flat were 2.5 kilometers away.
We found during the inquiries that the lady’s two teen aged daughters had been sent to safe haven near Rostov na Danu the day before the hit. It took us two weeks to find them and succor them. We took care of them since, and as they reached their majorities, both cut their education short, returned to Novorossiya and volunteered for service in the armed forces. Both are serving to this day, field medics. As an aside, Russian field medics are trained like the soldiers, and they will fight in a heartbeat if needs be. You can connect the dots.
Auslander
Author
Never The Last One https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZGCY8KK A deep look in to Russia, her culture and her Armed Forces, in essence a look at the emergence of Russian Federation.
Sevastopol, The Third Defense. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079KRPLS4 Book 1, A Premonition, The Move South. Set against a backdrop of real events and real places, the reader is left to filter fact from fiction.
Dear Auslander
That story is so sad.
Yes, we of the ‘old guard’ well remember your heart wrenching reports of those awful days.
And when days went by and there was no post from you and the others reporting from that hell hole, the far fling readers of Saker’s blog held our collective breath and prayed you were all safe.
Your next book must soon be ready for proof reading?
My dear lady, Sevastopol, The Third Defense, Book 2, is about 85%. With fall upon us, it’s writing weather, so it’ll be done in a month or so, perhaps less. Annya Koli’s second tome is also at that stage, 85%.
We had many very sad stories and events back then, but we survived and the orcs were fought to a standstill. The turning point was the late summer cauldrons of ’14, when the young men sent for training in spring and early summer returned, trained, armed up and ready to relieve the veterans who fought all spring and summer to hold off the orcs.
Auslander
Hi Auslander – Having watched the situation in Ukraine unfold with the greatest of sympathy for the Ukrainian people as well as you and the friends you have lost having gone through something most of us can’t imagine easily, I wonder if you might help me understand a bit more by possibly answering a couple of questions I have been pondering for a while
– The DPR and LPR aside, is there any evidence anywhere within Ukraine of a resistance movement coming into being?
– I believe some million or so Ukrainians fled to Russia when the fighting was raging. Would you expect some at least of these people to wish to return and fight to reclaim their country?
– New US bases are being reported as being built in Moldova and Southern Ukraine. How big a worry is this and how do you see things progressing in Ukraine in the medium term? It looks bleak but there has to be hope and perhaps even more than that.
If you could address these questions I’d be grateful.
Best wishes
“Tomsk”– The DPR and LPR aside, is there any evidence anywhere within Ukraine of a resistance movement coming into being?
No actual resistance that I know of. After the Odessa, Mariupol, Kharkov, Slavyansk and Kramatorsk massacres, those who could ‘resisted’ with their feet, in other words, they left. Some did go to Novorossiya, many went to Russia, Byelorus, and eastern europe.
– I believe some million or so Ukrainians fled to Russia when the fighting was raging. Would you expect some at least of these people to wish to return and fight to reclaim their country?
It’s closer to 2 millions, possibly more, and a like number fled to europe and Byelorus. Until Ukraine becomes a country where the rule of law means something, they will not return, especially if they’ve made a comparable or better life where they fled to.
As for those who fled Novorossiya, it depends on who left. It has been made very clear that those who left are welcome to return, but they will categorically NOT slide back in to their cushy government and business vocations, that being qualified with unless they helped as best they could when they went refugee. Military age men, 18-50, especially are in this group. Not everyone is a warrior, but rear echelon are just as important as the line and everyone can do something.
– New US bases are being reported as being built in Moldova and Southern Ukraine. How big a worry is this and how do you see things progressing in Ukraine in the medium term? It looks bleak but there has to be hope and perhaps even more than that.
Any bases CehSha builds or assets kept around the Black Sea are sitting ducks. As for Ukraine, it will take something cataclysmic to turn that country around and beyond a full blown civil war involving west against east, and by ‘east’ I don’t mean the war in Novorossiya, nothing will change beyond possibly a change of ruling tribe in Kiev. Such a change, no matter who rules from Kiev, will change nothing for the citizens.
Novorossiya is gone from Ukraine as is Krimea and Sevastopol, plus some 4 millions of citizens not counting Krim, Sevastopol and Novorossiya. Total loss of population, no matter who tries to put a pretty face on it, is close to 8 millions, and quite possibly more, from a populace of perhaps 44 millions, and the figure ’44 millions’ was a pretty optimistic guess by some agency or another. Bottom line, it does not look good for Ukraine, either near or far future.
Auslander
Author
An Incident On Simonka https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01ERKH3IU February 2014. NATO Is Invited To Leave Sevastopol, One Way Or The Other.
Sevastopol, The Third Defense. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079KRPLS4 Book 1, A Premonition, The Move South. Set against a backdrop of real events and real places, the reader is left to filter fact from fiction.
Thanks a lot.
I kept those two books in my “Wish List” in Amazon, while I decide or not to buy a Kindle. But when do you find a publisher to give us a paper edition of your books? Essential books have to stay in my shelves, you know… not on any screen.
Cheers.
Santana,
I fully understand the desire for printed books. That situation will be addressed this winter. After several failed attempts to get something going for hard printing, I will have Amazon do it, that is unless someone who should be reading this does read this. Hint HINT.
Auslander
I believe there is still also a so called “white book” of the crimes against the Donbass….any latest details of what is happening with that?
Thank you for the reminder article.
That photo is very upsetting, The people of Donbass need help and our lying msm ought to shine a light on whats really happening there. I hope the conflict is brought to an end
Video from Vesti yesterday about the murder of Zakharchenko.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPEoxB-ocHI
About 10 mins long, English sub-titles.
Thanks for the video link. This and the video, 8 minutes of the infamous air attack on Lugansk in 2014 are proof enough for all the Kiev government to be hung, if not just shot dead.
This war has always been genocidal ethnic cleansing against Russian-speakers. Simple, proven over and over. Aimed at women and children and now assassinations of heads of state. All war crimes and crimes by any definition, sanctioned, financed, trained and equipped by the US.
Real justice may never come to Kiev, but certainly vengeance will in some measure. But Donbass will never return either. The border is lost forever. Ukraine may die on the war it wages.
How far would those crazy, murderous evil ‘people’ in kiev etc have got if there had been no support/interference in Ukraine by the satanic USG?
Also, while obviously the focus and attacks are on the Donbass, there is a sub-text of the fact that the USG, and of course the sick and evil Brit & German etc Governments, are also using, destroying and stealing (by way of corrupt kiev officials and the West crashing the Grivna, so that they can pay 75% or so less for Ukrainian assets) what is left of Ukraine.
Donbass is being subjected to the same tender, loving care by the Ukro putschists as was Republican Spain 80 years earlier by Franco. The latter had zero qualms about inviting fascist Germany and Italy to carpet-bomb the Spanish capital — with the full, tacit approval of Western imperialism, of course. The difference here is that Franco and the Spanish fascist reaction which he personified actually possessed a true vision for Spanish society, however backward and retrograde. The Ukronazis, by contrast, are just violent, rabid scum and imbeciles in love with ”Europe”. They ousted Yanukovich when he refused to sign EU’s colonial diktat, and they are raging and fuming non-stop since they failed to deliver Crimea to NATO. Donbass is their fascist playground — it’s sickening.
One minor disagreement regarding the following passage by the author:
”How many more young lives will be lost when all you need to do is reach out and call your congressman?”
Actually, you might just as well try getting in contact with George Soros or, better still, BHL.
”The Ukrainian punisher battalions and Ukrainian volunteer battalions take pride in the fact there is no need to hide any of Ukraine’s crimes from the West’s prying eyes.”
Strictly speaking, their pride is — correctly — based upon their full Western sponsorship. The ’moderate rebel syndrome’ in the Ziomedia’s opining on the Ukronazis is simply the immediate corollary.
But, still, they are not held in too high a regard since Crimea was lost, and they know it. Dents their pride accordingly.
Kudos from faraway places to GH Eliason..
What he is doing cannot be easy;
The light of Truth will provoke a murderous reaction from those in power
who have shown Zero respect for the sanctity of human life.
Take care, stay safe –
My (small) contribution – collecting this material, burning to DVD and distributing
it freely. Sort of like samizat publishing for 21st C
Ukro-Fascism did not revive spontaneously but in the think tanks and lobby groups of washington, london, brussells. Their Geopolitics is nauseating stuff. This phase of Ukro Fascism started around the time just after the UEFA Cup was held successfully, jointly with Poland, back when Ukraine was ruled by neutral politics and pro-Russians. Poland is playing a clear and simple game- to drain the EU for every zloty they can get, then leave once it no longer suits them. They despise Western Liberalism and Ukranian Nationalism- which aims for the destruction of Poland. The Football cup brought Poland and Ukraine much closer together. Ukraines’ economy was little affected by the western financial crisis 2008, they traded grain and metals with China and was on a course for the Eurasian Union membership.
The USA Empire couldnt not allow a ‘pro Russian’ government to be doing well and drifting away from USA Colony Europe, so they trained terrorists like Azov to do their dirty work. The assasination of the Polish leadership on the Tupolev which they blamed on Putin was also a part of this plot to create chaos and russophobia on Russia’s doorstep.
The broader Normalisation of Fascism started a long time ago. Even in high fashion, you can clearly see a change on catwalks around 2012 (the year of London Olympics- our era’s equivalent of Berlin Nazi olympics) to fascist inspired styles, using leather everywhere like Stasi uniforms, camoflage coats and skulls with crossed bones, high shiny boots, all subliminal signes the elite use to normalise and condition us to accept the Fascist symbolism. Nazis always played high importance on aesthetics and appearances, from Hugo Boss onwards. In all things they celebrate brute force and militarism. The latests design of SUVs aimed at wealthy families from Land Rover and Mercedes look more like APCs than civil road transport. Modern architecture takes the heavy handed neo classicism of Speer and mixes it with postmodern touches like solar panels and glass and gives us the new Totalitarian Liberalist style. Contempory Dance glorifies Agression and Sex and nothing else. Universities are echo chambers of Imperialism. The aesthetic war against Eurasia must be fought against, as well as the spiritual and geopolitical one!
”The broader Normalisation of Fascism started a long time ago.”
That is taking understatement to the point of caricature. Western culture has always celebrated violence, cruelty, greed, and warmongering as part of raising the West’s subjects.
I’ve just come across another video on the assassination of Zakh, and this one is worse (((
https://youtu.be/nIjFxzA85PM
I haven’t watched it in full yet; looks like it is all in Russian. Over 30 mins.
You can change the video’s subtitles to English. The translation is not good but better than nothing
‘Her Second War’ – by Donbass Rose, Reports from the Donbass, English subtitled.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4oLFWoz5rY