Photo credit: Hromadske
Katya Gorchinskaya, Foreign Policy: He Killed for the Maidan
Here's why my news organization decided to shed some light on a dark moment in Ukraine's revolution.
My television station had a murderer on air last week — a self-confessed one. Ivan Bubenchik was calm and collected, his demeanor was open, and he spoke confidently of his actions on February 20, 2014, like he had known exactly what he was doing. After all, he was on the good side of the Euromaidan revolution, which was raging in Ukraine at the time, and which eventually swept a corrupt president out of power.
In telling Bubenchik’s story, we were breaking a taboo — it was the police, the popular narrative goes, that were the murderers. The protesters were heroes. But Bubenchik’s words were chilling. “To create a word of mouth effect, you have to shoot two or three [police] commanders,” he said to the camera. “I only picked two. And after that, there was no need to kill anyone else, so I aimed at the legs.”
Bubenchik said he was trying to scare the police away — they had started to dominate the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kiev’s central Independence Square, where the anti-government protesters had been camped for months. His tactic worked perfectly. His first sniper shot killed an officer, his second wounded another. The rest of the riot police scattered and ran up the hill away from the square.
This was two days before the end of the revolution. President Viktor Yanukovych had not yet fled to Russia, fearing betrayal of his faithful friends in the government. But the revolution was already in its final — and deadly — stage. 39 people had already been killed. Most were protesters killed by the police or by hired thugs. Some 2,000 more people had been wounded — again, mostly protesters, but also a handful of policemen.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: I am not surprised by this revelation .... at the height of the Ukraine revolution my cousins's daughter was assisting protesters wounded by police sniper fire, and she told me at the time that many protesters were also armed and were firing back. It was when the firing started to intensify, that she and the other women were told to pull back to a safer area. Will Ivan Bubenchik's admission that he killed police officers during the height of the Ukraine revolution change anything .... sadly no. The simple fact is that most Ukrainians do know what happened during this time .... that both sides were killing each other.
Hat Tip to Jay for this link.
http://gordonhahn.com/2016/02/20/february-20-2014-snipers-massacre-another-euromaidan-protester-acknowledges-killing-berkut-first/
ReplyDeletefrom Michael Hudson here (quote)
ReplyDeletePublic relations spinning made it difficult to understand who was behind the snipers firing on demonstrators and police. An public campaign by the coup leaders and U.S. spokesmen accused Yanukovich’s police of doing the firing. But a TV investigative team sent from Germany’s ARD confirmed what had been trickling into the news contradicting the American version of events. The April 10 report found that contrary to the claims of the coup leaders in Kiev, the demonstrators were hit from behind by snipers shooting from the roof of “their own headquarters, the Hotel Ukraina.”[6]
One doctor found that all the bullets taken from bodies he examined were identical, suggesting a single group of snipers. The German team quoted family members about how the coup’s new Attorney General, Oleg Machnitzki, has stonewalled them with regard to the details of the death or injury of their relatives. He is a member of the right-wing Swoboda party, appointed to investigate snipers who seem to have come from his own group.
The ARD program quotes a senior member of the new government’s Investigative Committee saying that “The results of my investigations which I have found, simply do not match up with what the prosecutor says” in blaming Yanukovich. The program concluded: “the fact that a representative of the nationalist Svoboda Party as Attorney General quite obviously hindered the elucidation of the Kiev massacre, creates a bad image of the new transitional government – and thus also of all those western governments that support the new rulers in Kiev.”
In a travesty of reality, White House spokesmen portrayed the U.S.-orchestrated violence as representing a spontaneous nationalistic anti-Russian spirit of the Maidan demonstrators, as if they were supporting pro-EU and hence anti-Russian passions. But what evidently happened is that the coup leaders sought to jump in front of the anti-corruption parade by creating chaos and then restore “order” by removing politicians from the Eastern Russian-speaking region.
[6] “Fatal shootings in Kiev: Who is responsible for the carnage from Maidan,” ARD German television, April 10, 2014, translated on Johnson’s Russia List, April 14, 2014, #1. The German investigators confirmed from journalists with the protestors that “the hotel on the morning of February 20 was firmly in the hands of the opposition.”
https://www.rt.com/news/ashton-maidan-snipers-estonia-946/
ReplyDeleteThis is old news and Canada is up to her armpits in it. Worse still, we're carryong on with the dignification and legitimizing of the so called "revolution", Nazis and all.
https://newcoldwar.org/readers-of-canadian-daily-condemn-visit-to-ottawa-of-ukrainian-extremist-andriy-parubiy/