29.03.2024

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Sooner or later they always start talking

16:16, 23.02.2016

February 2016 has become a month of revelations in Ukraine.

First, on the background of Kiev’s constant accusations of the DPR and LPR of violating the Minsk Agreements, there appears an interview of Jury Dumansky, which he gave to the project “Cauldron of lies” in the Internet newspaper “strana.ua”.

General Jury Dumansky was a representative of Ukraine who signed the first Minsk Agreements on September 5, 2014. The document obliged both sides of the conflict to cease fire in Donbass and make some mutual territorial concessions.

According to Dumansky, the DPR and LPR fulfilled their part of the Minsk Agreements. The situation on the contact line stabilised. The intensity of shellings significantly decreased.

However, in the mid-November, strange things happened. First, the OSCE mission withdrew its representative who was a member of the Contact group and signed the plan of measures on resolving the conflict. Then a representative of the Presidential Administration came to the Ukrainian representatives in the Contact group with an inspection.

Dumansky says that Poroshenko’s representative was very surprised to find out that the plan of measures on resolving the conflict had been signed. After Dumansky’s statement that the “separatists” were willing to negotiate, he left. A few days after the inspection Dumansky received an order to withdraw his signature under the plan and return to Kiev.

‘In January a big war started again in Donbass. In February there was the Debaltsevo pocket,’ says the general.

***

The battle at Debaltsevo is one of the most tragic events of the civil war in Ukraine. According to the militia, there were surrounded 8-10 thousands of the Ukrainian military. This is the only available information because Kiev classified all data about the number of personnel and military equipment that got into the pocket.

Kiev would not admit that its troops were surrounded and on the verge of a crushing defeat till the very end. On February 11, 2015 when the DPR and LPR reported to have blocked the last road connecting the surrounded troops and the rear, the Defense Minister of Ukraine Stepan Poltorak informed Ukrainian journalists that there was no pocket at Debaltsevo, the units in the town received weapons and ammunition and the commandment had a stable connection and interaction with them.

On February 15 the Head of the DPR Alexander Zakharchenko officially appealed to the surrounded troops, proposing them “green corridors” out of the pocket on condition on leaving weapons and equipment behind. According to captured Ukrainian soldiers, the proposal didn’t reach them. They didn’t even know that they were surrounded. Many officers were the first to flee and the commandment kept promising them reinforcements that wouldn’t come. In panic they tried to break out of the pocket, using byroads and all available vehicles, which the militia considered a violation of its conditions and opened fire.

Then, on February 18, the president Poroshenko suddenly announced the completion of ‘the planned, orderly withdrawal of the Ukrainian troops from Debaltsevo’. According to him. about 2,500 military, or 80% of the personnel, had left the town with almost 200 units of their weapons and equipment, with the casualties of 6 men killed and more than 100 wounded. Later the Ukrainian Defense Ministry officially announced the number of casualties during the whole Debaltsevo battle as 136 killed and 331 wounded.

In August 2015, in an interview with the weekly "Novoye Vremya” (The New Time) the Chief of Staff Viktor Muzhenko said, ‘I personally believe that it was one of the most successful Ukrainian army operations’.

When on February 19 the DPR Army made it public that in the battle at Debaltsevo the Ukrainian side had lost more than 3,000 men, Kiev called it propaganda.

When Ukrainian survivors wrote in social networks that ‘only in one hospital in Artyomovsk there were more than 170 wounded and the dead were left in the street because morgues couldn’t take any more of them’ and volunteers quoted messages received from the pocket ‘We’re running out of food, we’re running out of water, people are fighting for a place in a basement’, it was called, according to President Poroshenko, ‘fakes made outside Ukraine’.

And yet, a year later, on February 19, 2016, Yury Biryukov, a former adviser of the Ukrainian leader, wrote on his Facebook page that when the battle started he had gotten a direct order from the President ‘to bring confusion and lie, lie and lie’.

‘A year has passed, so I can speak about it. I was called to the Bankovaya street (street where the Presidential Administration is situated) at about 16:00. The President voiced a request, somewhat unusual…

We were to get the enemy confused for two days. At night we were to start a “All-good-we-stand” wave in Facebook and keep it going for at least two days. At any “reputation” cost. We were just to straightforwardly lie, and lie, and lie.’

Buryukov added that the Defense Ministry coordinated all stages of information bursts and picked up suitable photographs. The official was also to persuade his friends, bloggers, to support the action.

The former adviser of the Ukrainian president doesn’t say a word about responsibility for thousands of dead Ukrainians; he just complains that the action failed because the truth about what was going on in the pocket leaked into Facebook.

*** However, it is not the crushing defeat of the Ukrainian army at Debaltsevo that makes February so memorable for post-Maidan Ukraine. No ‘most successful Ukrainian army operation’ can be compared for Maidan supporters with the “revolution of dignity” as they call the coup that took place in Kiev on February 20, 2014.

Peaceful protests of the people outraged by the corrupted authorities, their unbreakable spirit in the struggle for the better, European future, the brutality of the police, its treacherous shooting of about 100 protesters who were later called the Heavenly Hundred…

That was a picture shown to the whole world and mesmerising it for months. Whatever evidence was given by opponents of Maidan about aggressiveness of its supporters, their violence toward anyone opposing them, their burning and torturing policemen, it wasn’t heard. Soldiers of the law enforcement agencies were found guilty of starting the massacre before any investigation. The investigation itself, started under pressure of the West, has lasted for two years and still hasn’t found the tiniest fact in favour of the policemen.

It may seem some twisted irony of fate but all the efforts of Kiev authorities, brought to power by Maidan, to hide the truth of what happened on Maidan are ruined by supporters and active participants of Maidan. On February 19, 2016, on the eve of the second anniversary of the massacre in the capital of Ukraine, the portal Bird In Flight published an interview with Ivan Bubenchik, a resident of Lvov, who told the journalist who had really started shooting to kill.

Bubenchik says that before February 20 the protesters had only hunting rifles and the police used pump shotguns. Due to the distance between them, both kinds of weapons served rather to chase the opponent away than to seriously harm him. On February 20, 2014, though, Bubenchik got an automatic gun.

He shot from a building situated behind the line of the policemen. He chose those in command, by their gestures, and shot them to death, from behind. He shot well as he had had training in a military intelligence school of the Soviet Army.

‘The distance was small, so it took me only two shots to eliminate two commanders,’ he says.

He didn’t feel a need to kill the soldiers, shooting them in their legs seemed sufficient. He left the building, came to the barricades and kept shooting. The practically unarmed policemen fled, those who could. As for those who couldn’t, the peaceful protesters gathered them in groups of ten or twenty and took them to their headquarters. Their further fate was left unspoken of in the interview.

Excited by their “success”, the hottest heads rushed to chase the fleeing policemen up the Institutskaya street where they were met by other law enforcements who had finally got a permission to shoot in order to stop the attackers…

The only thing Ivan Bubenchik regrets is that by that moment he had ran out of ammo. And blames the leaders of protesters who promised to bring more cartridges but failed to do so. He could have killed more policemen after all.

‘I realised that I could have stopped the execution of our guys,’ he says.

He doesn’t feel responsible for the death of his fellow protesters inspired by his shooting into the fatal chase. He doesn’t feel ashamed at having shoot people from behind. He doesn’t feel remorse for having been one of those who started the bloodbath that has already claimed the life of thousands of Ukrainians.

‘Some say that I killed them from behind, and it’s true. They happened to stand with their backs to me. I couldn’t wait for them to turn. It was God’s will that it happened so,’ he sais.

He feels absolutely right, he feels ‘a defender of his Motherland and his people’, and he feels ready to repeat what he did if need arises.

‘Today my country is still unlawful, and I consider all its law enforcement agencies unlawful as well. My victims were criminals, enemies. I speak now so that other people know how to deal with enemies’, he says at the end of the interview.

Maidan has engendered impunity which has already caused, according to the latest UN data, about 8,000 people dead and more than 1 million people turned into refugees.

On February 19, 2016, Sergey Gorbatyuk, the head of the Special Investigation department of the General Prosecutor Office of Ukraine, announced that the investigation of cases involving crimes in the so-called "revolution of dignity" on Maidan in Kiev in 2013-2014 would be closed on March 1.

‘According to the decision of the Verkhovnaya Rada, all persons who were involved in any crimes against law enforcement officers come under the amnesty. The cases against them should be closed. They can not be arrested, they can not be informed of being suspects,’ he said in an interview with BBC.

On February 20, 2016, the most radical nationalists set up tents on Maidan, seized a nearby hotel, named it their headquarters and announced the ‘revolutionary situation in the country and the beginning of the third Maidan’.