Voices of Ukraine

PUTIN the Compulsive Boldface LIAR. 10 lies Putin uses to justify the occupation of Ukraine. Compiled by Walter Derzko, Toronto

1.0 PUTIN’S LIES: Russians are under threat in Ukraine

1.0 REALITY: There is no proof whatsoever that ethnic Russians are threatened or were killed in the Crimea or in South-Eastern Ukraine

2.0 PUTIN’S LIES: Ukraine is governed by Nazis, Fascists and Anti-Semites
2.0 REALITY: Prominent Ukrainian Jews and the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine rebuffed all of Putin’s anti-Semitism claims

A recent cover of a main Dutch newspaper said it all: on top of a photo of a street demonstration the word “Ukraine” had been crossed out and next to it was written “Bosnia!!” The message was clear: Bosnia was where the real action was, where the real demonstrations against the government took place, in Ukraine things were slowly withering away.

However wrong that impression might be, many people in the West indeed think that only little has been left of the force of the opposition against Yanukovych and his regime. And it is a stiff competition: Putin is having his Sochi-show in full galore, Britain is under water, and then there are the occasional other mishaps on the international scene. And thus Ukraine is sharing the position of Syria, where barrel bombs keep on falling from the air creating immeasurable destruction and…

Watching the news programs in The Netherlands during a short stopover I am amazed at the low quality.  Not only is a lot of the news old, lagging considerably behind the changed reality, it is also limited both in depth and in scope. A few days ago, while a battle raged in Kyiv and some one hundred activists had been shot dead, the Dutch radio canceled a radio interview with me “from the front” because of “more important news”: the country had won a gold medal in Sochi. And not the first! No, it was the 19^th or 20^th, but still this was considered more important than the war right on the doorstep of the European Union.

Russia: Foreign Agent Law, adopted in July 2012. http://www.frontlinedefenders.org

Lately I wake up in the middle of the night with a complexity of thoughts about the situation in Ukraine, the effect it has on the former Soviet Union and on relations between Russia and the West. In particular the posts by Russian nationalists, pro-Putin facebook users and facebooks glorifying the deeds of Berkut leave a bad taste and a considerable impression. Some are downright stupid, others are racist or anti-Semitic, some are really abhorrent – but many show a total lack of information on what is actually going on outside Russia. The information block that the Putinshchina imposed really works, and we haven’t seen the end of it: now even livejournals that provide balanced information on Maidan are banned because of ‘extremism’.

Russia froze the accounts of the Ukrainian confectionery corporation Roshen on March 14, the corporation’s press secretary Inna Petrenko informed ITAR-TASS.

Petrenko also reported that Roshen has suspended production for a week at its Lipetsk facility in Russia, starting March 19. “Work has been suspended due to the fact that yesterday, March 19, company representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia in Moscow conducted inspections at our Lipetsk company as part of a criminal case that we consider fabricated. Under such conditions, production is impossible,” she explained.