Anna Nemtsova, Daily Beast: A Year After the Odessa Massacre, Burning Hatred Divides the City
This beautiful city on the Black Sea has become a symbol of the complex suspicions and conspiracies that plague Ukraine.
ODESSA, Ukraine—Several women surrounded a man taking a cell phone video of people laying flowers around photographs of victims killed in the horrific fire at Odessa's Trade Unions House last year.
The women were hostile, even menacing. The man looked suspicious to them, could be “a provocateur,” they said, maybe even a pro-Euromaidan activist, a category of person nobody was going to tolerate on Kulikovo Pole Square, where thousands of local residents gathered on Saturday to mourn 42 victims killed on May 2, 2014.
That had been a day of violent protests and confrontations between those who supported closer ties with Russia and those fighting what they saw as Moscow’s attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty. In the mêlée, members of the pro-Russian faction retreated into a large office building. Molotov cocktails were thrown back and forth, and the building began to burn. But those on the street would not let those inside escape. Those inside died from fire, and smoke inhalation, and because they leaped from windows to their doom.
WNU Editor: As my regular readers know .... there was a time when I wanted to live in Odessa. I lived in the city for a short period of time .... and being on the Black Sea was (to me) a bonus. I even found my dream home there .... but when it went on the market a few months ago .... it was tempting but I did not bite. Odessa is no longer the city that I fell in loved with years ago .... it .... like Ukraine .... is now (sadly) something else.
When the massacre happened last year I wrote a commentary on it .... when I read it today .... I am surprised on how prophetic I was. My worst case scenario has become today's reality. The link to that post is here.
2 comments:
Massacre ? I don't think so, maybe a FSB screw up operation ? The true is that it was a play for the Odessa by paid up people to stir the place, but the all S..T backfire against the plotters in a tragedy.To bad that some naive people have follow those mercenary to they're dead.
It indisputably was a massacre, though, whatever its causes. Personally I don't take accusations of it being a secret FSB (or CIA, or whatever) operation very seriously because it has every sign of being more or less spontaneous. Occam's Razor is against it in the absence of any real evidence. But even if one were to say that it was deliberately engineered by Putin (as opposed to the local police - there actually are some grounds for that accusation, at least), it would still be a massacre, just a provoked one. A massacre is when a lot of defenseless people are killed. Most of the people in that building were innocent. The Ukrainian mob has started out in self-defense, but what it did afterwards was beyond the pale (but not really so unusual in this kind of chaotic situation, which is one more reason to doubt any external influence on the events beyond the level of MAYBE the local authorities).
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