These ‘Exclusive’ CIA Claims of Russian War Crimes Lack Both Credibility and Self-Reflection
Their authors are confusing Russian troops with Ukrainian Nazis, who have been repeatedly filmed dragging young Ukrainian men off the streets to dragoon them into MI6 agent Zelensky’s meat grinders.
The CIA’s Associated Press network’s recent exclusive on very bad deeds being done to very good Ukrainian prisoners in “Putin’s Russian gulags” forms the spine of this article. The article leads with a sketch of what we can only presume are Ukrainian prisoners aimlessly scratching at some barren patch of ground beneath a clump of trees with shovels and hoes, presumably to build trenches for Russian soldiers to lie down in. Further down, we see stock pictures of batons, electric prods, out houses and two spoons sitting atop three stacked plates.
Whatever points the article wishes to make are not helped by those childish drawings. And nor are they helped by the backstories of the three journalists and their various helpers, who knocked up this hit piece. Paris-based American Lori Hinnant is the main name behind the article; she received a Pulitzer research grant for this fiction and won a Pulitzer Prize for her previous work in muddying the relationship between ISIS and their American sponsors. Ukrainian citizens and seasoned junta apologists Hanna Arhirova and Vasilisa Stepanenko are her co-authors.
Still, just as we should not judge a book by its cover, let’s skip the graphics and the authors and look at the meat of their piece, which begins by that telling us the prisoners are awakened before dawn and, after doing their ablutions “in the bitter cold”, are carted off in “overlarge Russian military uniforms” and “in boots five sizes too big”, to spend “the next 12 hours or more digging trenches on the front lines for Russian soldiers”.
Leaving to one side their subsequent purple prose about how their “hands curled into icy claws” by day’s end, we have to assume that those Ukrainians were being deliberately punished and that the Russian officers did not care a damn about how those trenches were being constructed or by whom. In fact, that piece smacks of MI6’s hoary old line that all the Russians had were nineteenth century shovels. Given that Russia has very formidable lines of defence, we must assume that they were constructed by highly experienced Russian sappers with state of the art machinery.
The article then goes on to say that Putin (who else?) is constructing a series of gulags throughout Russia to hold “many civilians….. for alleged transgressions as minor as speaking Ukrainian or simply being a young man in an occupied region”. The authors are here confusing Russian troops with Ukrainian Nazis, who have been repeatedly filmed dragging young Ukrainian men off the streets to dragoon them into MI6 agent Zelensky’s meat grinders.
As regards speaking Ukrainian where Russian is the lingua franca or “tying a ribbon to a bicycle in the Ukrainian colors of blue and yellow” Russia’s front line troops would, like all other armies, contain rough diamonds who are best avoided and not needlessly antagonised. Though one only has to look at the almost endless litany of war crimes King Charles’ notorious Parachute Regiment have committed against Irish civilians to see that, one must note that these are assault troops, not community Bobbies against whom the best tactic is to feign friendliness and give their details back to someone, NATO’s Ukrainian proxies in this case, who might do something about it.
Although the charges these geniuses make against Russia’s front line troops are not all that different from the documented way the Parachute Regiment and other British criminal groups treated civilians in South Armagh and other IRA strongholds, unlike South Armagh, there seems to be no major visible military or civilian resistance, not even Life of Brian type graffiti, to Russian rule.
Because the authors presumably attribute this lack of resistance to the widespread use of primitive torture techniques by Russia, let’s now address that charge which “Olena Yahupova, the city administrator who was forced to dig trenches for the Russians in Zaporizhzhia” suspiciously claims is “a business of human trafficking.”
The authors are claiming that the Russians are using primitive torture/interrogation techniques that can only be validated by a desire to humiliate or sadistically torture and not, as with MI6 and The Hooded Men, to refine their torture/interrogation methods. This AP/Ukrainian narrative is a continuation of their hoary old one that the Russians are orcs, not quite humans, untermenschen to use the words of the Third Reich, who knew a thing or two about torture.
And, with the Luftwaffe’s Hanns-Joachim Scharff, inducing information out of even the hardest nuts with the gentlest and most deceptive of techniques. It simply is not credible that Russia would not use Scharff’s more sophisticated methods, which MI5 very successfully used against the Belfast IRA but prefer to run with the methods the CIA’s ISIS allies used. The Russkiys, it seems, have never heard of the good cop, bad cop routine, never mind of the techniques the legendary Scharff perfected and later passed on to the CIA and MI6. That is because the CIA and MI6, working through MI6 agent Zelensky and his Nazi enforcers, have decided to paint the Russians from time immemorial as base savages devoid of both brains and common sense.
Although the article cites all kinds of charges Vladimir Oshenkin, a Paris-based Russian, levels against his compatriots, Oshenkin’s twitter feed is worth an investigation in its own right. Given that he claims he is on a hit list, Oshenkin, the self-proclaimed human rights’ activist, should explain why he published the pictures and car plate numbers of civilian Russian women in France and, if he regards, as MI6 agent Zelensky’s Nazi enforcers do, civilian Russian women like the late Darya Dugina as legitimate targets.
The article then cites Oleksandr Kononeko who, the Guardian claims, “oversees human rights in the security and defence sector on behalf of Ukraine’s parliament.” As Konokneko, may be seen here ratting off all kinds of anti-Russian allegations to this Swiss-based Azeri outlet, we can dismiss his remarks as being a part of his day job of defending MI6 agent Zelensky’s Nazi-run regime and smearing its enemies.
Having treated us to Kononeko’s dubious pronouncements, the authors go on to give us some human interest stories of Ukrainian bravery, tragedy and resilience in the face of the barbaric Russians. We first meet two dudes, who formed a platonic relationship because one had “a giant black Italian mastiff” and the other had “a toy poodle whose apricot fur matched his beard”.
That is the springboard to tell us of a resistance chain of brave Ukrainian prisoners, who can smuggle cell phones into Russian prisons and who can pass messages over hundreds of miles from gulag to gulag. However, such resistance would be possible only if the prisoners were a cohesive and very determined unit, as were IRA prisoners in British jails or as, for example, are the Aryan Brotherhood supremacist gang in American prisoners.
Whatever the veracity of Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov’s statement that “there is no logic” to Russia’s arrest policies, there is no logic to this stupid article. Having quoted Fedorov about all the imaginary Ukrainian flags fluttering from imaginary bicycles to stick it to the Russkiys, we are then treated to a number of portraits of civilians held by Russian forces.
These prisoners include the middle-aged Olena Yahupova who, if the authors are to be believed, spent her captivity digging ditches, often for “24 hours a day when they had an inspection coming”, in the depths of the Russian winter when she was not suffering mock executions.
Yahupova, much like Rambo and other Hollywood actors, eventually escaped and “traveled thousands of miles through Russia, north to the Baltics and back around to the front line in Ukraine, where she reunited with her husband serving with Ukrainian forces”.
Although the authors interview other Ukrainians with similarly tall tales of woe, they add no light to this CIA work of fiction, which is but a bit part of their greater narrative we have seen rehashed before in their wars against Syria, Vietnam and Iraq and will continue to see until NATO, the CIA, MI6 and all their little helpers are decommissioned and assigned to other duties more aligned to their pathetic skill sets.
