The Mississippi Delta was shining like a national guitar
I am following the river down the highway through the cradle of the civil war
A great song from a great album by a great singer-songwriter – but the American of my title is not Paul Simon, and the civil war in question was not between the northern and southern states of 19th century America. It was between east and west of 21st century Ukraine, where, for eight years between the Maidan Coup of February 2014 and the Russian SMO of February 2022, a Kiev onslaught against its own people left 14,000 dead, most of them ethnic Russians. 1
“I think that this is something the people of the West need to come to grips with; that the government of Ukraine has done great violence against its own people in the Donbas, and that the people of the Donbas had every right to choose to leave Ukraine and join Russia. If Westerners understood this reality, they would think twice about ‘standing with’ and continuing to arm Ukraine.” – Daniel Kovalik, below.
Having bigger fish to fry, I’m not much inclined to argue the point but here I use “SMO” rather than the “invasion” demanded of all Western corporate journalists. The more important point being that, also demanded of those journalists, 2 is their prefacing of “invasion” with the term, “unprovoked”; a lie so glaring and easily refuted as to show – as with the duplicated howlers by which schoolboys who crib one another’s maths homework are caught – wholesale collusion …
… a point not lost on Caitlin Johnstone. In a blistering piece of August 8, replicated in full on this site – see Calling Russia’s invasion “unprovoked” is proof of media corruption on matters vital to power – she wrote in caustically forensic detail why their parroting of that mendacious adjective damns ‘our’ media beyond redemption. Amid her more specific accusations, she made space for this general indictment:
The western media claim to report the facts, but the way they’ve fallen in line behind the “unprovoked” narrative reveals that their actual job is to frame world events in a way that serves the information interests of their government. Which would be bad enough if that narrative was just a biased framing of a contentious issue, and not the bald-faced lie that it actually is.
Sooner rather than later I hope to write a brief post listing the ways in which Russia was over many years provoked by the most violently criminal empire ever – do feel free to challenge me on the quantifiably factual bases for so describing the USA – into this unholy mess, steeped in mortal peril to every man, woman and child on this sorry planet. Not to forget the beasts of the field, birds of the air and fish of the sea.
Some of the provocations were immense, none more so than that represented on my most frequently aired graphic …
… while others have been relatively minor, like the insults to Russia’s artists past and present, to her athletes – shit, even her cats. 3 Others still have been middling. In September 2016 I wrote Perilous Days, which houses this observation:
… in 2013 Russia made a bridging loan to Ukraine. At $3bn it was a small but significant sum, on very favourable terms when Ukraine’s credit status would have incurred punitive rates on world markets. Payment in full was due in December [2015], after the Maidan Square coup replaced [President] Yanukovych with a semi fascist regime.
Enter the International Monetary Fund. Since the US outvotes all comers, and can increase its share by arm-twisting states beholden to it, IMF rules are Washington rules. For decades these have debarred any country welshing on a sovereign debt from receiving loans by the IMF or by member states. That held for Greece last summer. But with that problem put to bed, 4 rules were altered. Now, Ukraine may borrow from the IMF without repaying Russia – nay, stiffing her is a de facto loan condition! Why? Because China and Russia are coming together – the one with its vast surplus, the other its vast energy reserves – to challenge a dollar hegemony going back to Bretton Woods and expanded after the fall of the USSR. Burning Russia on a relatively small sum was a shot across the bows. With the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank an emerging alternative to the IMF, developing and even western nations seeking finance might turn to the former to avoid swingeing austerity and public service cuts demanded by the latter. 5
I didn’t know the half of it back then; none of us did. But the context of that post was indeed the threat of nuclear war on Russia’s western border, and if I were to change anything in the above it would be to strengthen the condemnatory tone.
But while I’ve made frequent references to it, I’ve never fleshed them out into a fuller account of the civil war which began after Victoria Nuland and John McCain oversaw the ousting of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, and which ended – as a civil war that is – with Russia’s whatever you want to call it of February 24 last year.
That’s where a courageous – his disclaimers notwithstanding – American in the cradle of the civil war comes in …
*
Today’s Information Clearing House features this from Daniel Kovalik, a Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Daniel also teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. His gripping account of life and popular sentiment in the Donbas is here replicated in full and unedited, but I’ve axed some graphics so you may prefer to read on ICH.
Russia, Donbass and the Reality of Conflict in Ukraine
I just returned from my third trip to Russia, and my second trip to Donbas (now referring to the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk collectively) in about eight months. This time, I flew into lovely Tallinn, Estonia, and took what should be about a six-hour bus ride to St. Petersburg. In the end, my bus trip took me about 12 hours, due to a long wait in Customs on the Russian side of the border.
Having a U.S. passport and trying to pass the frontier from a hostile, NATO country into Russia during wartime got me immediately flagged for questioning. And then, it turned out I did not have all my papers in order as I was still without my journalist credential from the Russian Foreign Ministry, which was necessary given that I told the border patrol that I was traveling to do reporting. I was treated very nicely, though the long layover forced me to lose my bus that, understandably, went on without me.
However, sometimes we find opportunity in seemingly inconvenient detours, and that was true in this case. Thus, I became a witness to a number of Ukrainians, some of them entire families, trying to cross the border and to immigrate to Russia. Indeed, the only other type of passport (besides my U.S. passport) I saw amongst those held over for questioning and processing was the blue Ukrainian passport. This is evidence of an inconvenient fact to the Western narrative of the war that portrays Russia as an invader of Ukraine. In fact, many Ukrainians have an affinity for Russia and have voluntarily chosen to live there over the years.
Between 2014—the real start of the war when the Ukrainian government began attacking its own people in the Donbas—and the beginning of Russia’s intervention in February 2022, around one million Ukrainians had already immigrated to Russia. The fact that Ukrainians were going to live in Russia was reported in the mainstream press back then, with the BBC writing in September 2014 about some of the refugees while noting that “[s]eparatists in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk declared independence after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine.
Since the violence erupted, some 2,600 people have been killed and thousands more wounded. The city of Luhansk has been under siege by government forces for the past month and is without proper supplies of food and water.” The number of dead in this war would grow to 14,000 by February 2022, again before Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) had even begun.
Around 1.3 million additional Ukrainians have immigrated to Russia since February 2022, making Russia the largest recipient of Ukrainian refugees in the world since the beginning of the SMO.
When I commented to one of the Russian border officials—Kirill is his name—about the stack of Ukrainian passports sitting on his desk, he made a point to tell me that they treat the Ukrainians coming in “as human beings.” When my contact in St Petersburg, Boris, was able to send a photo of my newly acquired press credential to Kirill, I was sent on my way with a handshake and was able to catch the next bus heading to St. Petersburg almost immediately.
Once in St. Petersburg, I went to Boris’s house for a short rest and then was off by car to Rostov-on-Don, the last Russian city before Donetsk. I was driven in a black Lexus by a kind Russian businessman named Vladimir along with German, the founder of the humanitarian aid group known as “Leningrad Volunteers.” The car was indeed loaded with humanitarian aid to take to Donbas. After some short introductions, and my dad joke about the “Lexus from Texas,” we were off on our 20-hour journey at a brisk pace of about 110 kilometers an hour.
We arrived in Rostov in the evening and checked into the Sholokhov Loft Hotel, named after Mikhail Sholokhov, Rostov’s favorite son who wrote the great novel And Quite Flows the Don. We were told that, until recently, a portrait of the titular head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had adorned the lobby wall. They took this down after members of the Wagner Group invaded Rostov, putting fear in many of the residents. Now, the hotel only has Hollywood movie posters decorating the walls.
In the early afternoon the next day, my translator Sasha arrived from her hometown of Krasnodar, Russia, a seven-hour train ride from Rostov. Sasha, who is 22 years old, is a tiny red-headed woman who quickly turned out to be one of the most interesting people I met on my journey.
Donetsk militia escort Ukrainian prisoners of war in the Donbas. The militias have been fighting the Ukrainian Army, backed by the U.S., since the war really started in 2014. [Source: medium.com]
This is something I cannot impress upon the reader enough. While we are often told that these fighters in the Donbas are Russians or “Russian proxies,” this is simply not true. The lion’s share of fighters are locals of varying ages, some quite old, who have been fighting for their homes, families and survival since 2014.
While there have been Russian and international volunteers who have supported these forces—just as there were international volunteers who went to support the Republicans in Spain in the 1930s—they are mostly local.
Of course, this changed in February 2022 when Russia began the SMO. Nonetheless, the locals of Donetsk continue to fight, now alongside the Russian forces.
The lie of “Russian proxies” fighting in the Donbas after 2014 is actually one of the smaller ones of the Western mainstream press, for the claim at least acknowledges that there has been such fighting. Of course, the mainstream media have tried to convince us that there was never such fighting at all and that the Russian SMO beginning in February 2022 was completely “unprovoked.” This is the big lie that has been peddled in order to gain the consent of the Western populations to support Ukraine militarily.
What is also ignored is the fact that this war was escalating greatly before the beginning of the SMO and this escalation indeed provoked it. Thus, according to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), a 57-member organization including many Western countries, including the United States, there were about 2,000 cease-fire violations in the Donbas just in the weekend before the SMO began on February 24, 2022.
In a rare moment of candor, Reuters reported on February 19, 2022, “Almost 2,000 ceasefire violations were registered in eastern Ukraine by monitors for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on Saturday, a diplomatic source told Reuters on Sunday. Ukrainian government and separatist forces have been fighting in eastern Ukraine since 2014.”
Jacques Baud, a Swiss intelligence and security consultant and former NATO military analyst, 6 further explains the precipitating events of the SMO:
As early as February 16, Joe Biden knew that the Ukrainians had begun shelling the civilian population of Donbass, putting Vladimir Putin in front of a difficult choice: to help Donbass militarily and create an international problem, or to stand by and watch the Russian-speaking people of Donbass being crushed.
…This is what he explained in his speech on February 21. 7
On that day, he agreed to the request of the Duma and recognized the independence of the two Donbass Republics and, at the same time, he signed friendship and assistance treaties with them.
The Ukrainian artillery bombardment of the Donbass population continued, and, on 23 February, the two Republics asked for military assistance from Russia. On 24 February, Vladimir Putin invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which provides for mutual military assistance in the framework of a defensive alliance.
In order to make the Russian intervention totally illegal in the eyes of the public we deliberately hid the fact that the war actually started on February 16. The Ukrainian army was preparing to attack the Donbass as early as 2021, as some Russian and European intelligence services were well aware. Jurists will judge.
Of course, none of this was news to the people I met in Donetsk, for they had been living this reality for years. For example, Dimitri, a young resident of Donetsk who has been fighting since 2014 along with his mother and father, told me quite exasperatedly as he pointed to some of the weapons and ammunition behind him, “what is all this stuff doing here? Why have we been getting this since 2014? Because the war has been going on since then.”
Dimitri, who was studying at the university when the conflict began, can no longer fight due to injuries received in the war, including damage to his hearing which is evidenced by the earplugs he wears. He hopes he can go back to his studies.
Just a few days before my arrival in Donetsk, Dimitri’s apartment building was shelled by Ukrainian forces, just as it had been in 2016. Like many in Donetsk, he is used to quickly repairing the damage and going on with his life.
Dimitri took me to the Donetsk airport and nearby Orthodox church and monastery which were destroyed in fighting between the Ukrainian military and Donetsk militia forces back in 2014-2015. Dimitri participated in the fighting in this area back then, explaining that during that time, this was the area of the most intense fighting in the world. But you would not know this from the mainstream press coverage that had largely ignored this war before February 2022.
Bridge near Donetsk airport, destroyed in 2015 by Donetsk militia to halt Ukrainian troops and tanks. [Photo by Dan Kovalik]
One of the first individuals I interviewed in Donetsk was 36-year-old Vitaly, a big guy with a chubby, boyish face who wore a baseball hat with the red Soviet flag with the hammer and sickle. Vitaly, the father of three children, is from Donetsk and has been fighting there for four years, including in the very tough battle for the steel plant in Mariupol in the summer of 2022. He decided to take up arms after friends of his were killed by Ukrainian forces, including some who were killed by being burned alive by fascist forces—the same forces that, we are told, do not exist. Vitaly, referring to the mainstream Western media, laughed when saying, “they’ve been saying we’ve been shelling ourselves for nine years.”
Vitaly has personally fought against soldiers wearing Nazi insignia, and he is very clear that he is fighting fascism. Indeed, when I asked him what the Soviet flag on his hat meant to him, he said that it signified the defeat over Nazism, and he hopes he will contribute to this again. 8
When I asked him about claims that Russia had intervened with soldiers in the war prior to February 2022 as some allege, he adamantly denied this, as did everyone else I interviewed in Donetsk. However, he has witnessed the fact that Polish and UK soldiers have been fighting with the Ukrainian military since the beginning. Vitaly opined that, given what has transpired over the past nine years, he does not believe that the Donbas will ever return to Ukraine, and he certainly hopes it will not. Vitaly told me quite stoically that he believes he will not see peace in his lifetime.
During my stay in Donetsk, I twice had dinner with Anastasia, my interpreter during my first trip to the Donbas in November. Anastasia teaches at the University of Donetsk. She has been traveling around Russia, including to the far east, telling of what has been happening in the Donbas since 2014 because many in Russia themselves do not fully understand what has been going on. She told me that as she was recounting her story, she found herself reliving her trauma from nine years of war and feeling overwhelmed.
Anastasia’s parents and 13-year-old brother live near the front lines in the Donetsk Republic, and she worries greatly about them. Anastasia is glad that Russia has intervened in the conflict, and she indeed corrected me when I once referred to the Russian SMO as an “invasion,” telling me that Russia did not invade. Rather, they were invited and welcomed in. That does seem to be the prevailing view in Donetsk as far as I can tell.
During my five-day trip to Donetsk, I was taken to two cities within the conflict zone—Yasinovataya and Gorlovka. I was required to wear body armor and a helmet during this journey, though wearing a seatbelt was optional, if not frowned upon.
While Donetsk City, which certainly sees its share of shelling, is largely intact and with teeming traffic and a brisk restaurant and café scene, once we got out of the city, this changed pretty quickly.
Yasinovataya showed signs of great destruction, and I was told that a lot of this dated back to 2014. The destruction going back that far included a machine factory which is now being used as a base of operations for Donetsk forces and the adjacent administrative building which looks like it could have been an opera house before it was shelled.
Destruction of homes from Ukrainian army shelling in Yasinovataya. [Source: tellerreport.com]
For its part, the city center of Gorlovka looked largely unmolested with signs of street life and even had an old trolley, clearly from the Soviet era, running through the center of town. But the outskirts of Gorlovka certainly showed signs of war. In both cities, one could frequently hear the sounds of shelling in the distance.
In Gorlovka, we met with Nikoli, nicknamed “Heavy.” Nikoli looks like a Greek god, standing at probably 6 feet, 5 inches, and all muscle. I joked with him while I was standing next to him that I felt like I was appearing next to Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. He got the joke and laughed. While a giant of a man, he seemed very nice and with a strong moral compass.
He led us to a makeshift Orthodox chapel in the cafeteria of what was a school, but which is now the base of operations for his Donetsk militia forces. He told us that, even now after the SMO began, about 90% of the forces in Gorlovka are still local Donetsk soldiers, and the other 10% are Russians. Again, this is something we rarely get a sense of from the mainstream press.
Nikoli, while sitting in front of the makeshift chapel, explained that, while he still considers himself Ukrainian—after all he was born in Ukraine—he said that Donetsk would never go back to Ukraine because Ukraine had “acted against God” when it began to attack its own people in the Donbas. He made it clear that he was prepared to fight to the end to ensure the survival of the people of Donetsk, and I had no doubt that he was telling the truth about that.
At my request, I met with the First Secretary of the Donetsk section of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), Boris Litvinov. Boris, who has also served in the Donetsk parliament, explained that the Communist Party under his leadership had been one of the leaders and initiators of the 2014 Referendum in which the people of Donetsk voted to become an autonomous republic and leave Ukraine.
According to Boris, about 100 members of the Donetsk section of the CPRF are serving on the front lines of the conflict. Indeed, as Boris explained, the CPRF supports the Russian SMO, only wishing that it had commenced in 2014. Boris is clear that the war in Ukraine is one over the very survival of Russia (regardless of whether it is capitalist or socialist) and that Russia is fighting the collective West that wants to destroy Russia.
Boris compares the fight in the Donbas to the fight of the Republicans against the fascists in Spain in the 1930s, and he says that there are international fighters from all over the world (Americans, Israelis, Spanish and Colombians, for example) who are fighting alongside the people of Donbas against the fascists just as international fighters helped in Spain.
The last person I interviewed, again at my own request, was Olga Tseselskaya, assistant to the head of the Union of Women of the Republic of Donetsk and First Secretary of the Mothers’ United organization. The Mothers’ United organization, which has 6,000 members throughout the Donetsk Republic, advocates for and provides social services to the mothers of children killed in the conflict since 2014.
I was excited that Olga opened our discussion by saying that she was glad to be talking to someone from Pittsburgh because Pittsburgh and Donetsk City had once been sister cities.
I asked Olga about how she viewed the Russian forces now in Donetsk, and she made it clear that she supported their presence in Donetsk and believed that they were treating the population well. She adamantly denied the claims of mass rape made against the Russians earlier in the conflict.
Of course, it should be noted that the Ukrainian parliament’s commissioner for human rights, Lyudmila Denisova, who was the source of these claims, was ultimately fired because her claims were found to be unverified and without substantiation, but again the Western media has barely reported on that fact.
Boris compares the fight in the Donbas to the fight of the Republicans against the fascists in Spain in the 1930s, and he says that there are international fighters from all over the world (Americans, Israelis, Spanish and Colombians, for example) who are fighting alongside the people of Donbas against the fascists just as international fighters helped in Spain.
The last person I interviewed, again at my own request, was Olga Tseselskaya, assistant to the head of the Union of Women of the Republic of Donetsk and First Secretary of the Mothers’ United organization. The Mothers’ United organization, which has 6,000 members throughout the Donetsk Republic, advocates for and provides social services to the mothers of children killed in the conflict since 2014.
I was excited that Olga opened our discussion by saying that she was glad to be talking to someone from Pittsburgh because Pittsburgh and Donetsk City had once been sister cities.
I asked Olga about how she viewed the Russian forces now in Donetsk, and she made it clear that she supported their presence in Donetsk and believed that they were treating the population well. She adamantly denied the claims of mass rape made against the Russians earlier in the conflict.
Of course, it should be noted that the Ukrainian parliament’s commissioner for human rights, Lyudmila Denisova, who was the source of these claims, was ultimately fired because her claims were found to be unverified and without substantiation, but again the Western media has barely reported on that fact. 9
When I asked Olga whether she agreed with some Western peace groups, such as the Stop the War Coalition in the UK, that Russia should pull its troops out of the Donbas, she disagreed, saying that she hates to think what would happen to the people of the Donbas if they did.
I think that this is something the people of the West need to come to grips with; that the government of Ukraine has done great violence against its own people in the Donbas, and that the people of the Donbas had every right to choose to leave Ukraine and join Russia. If Westerners understood this reality, they would think twice about “standing with” and continuing to arm Ukraine.
* * *
- In footnote 3 of my last post but one, Down to the last Ukrainian, I spoke of “10-12,000 dead”. My upwards revision of that figure comes from this Crisis Group visual explainer, cited in Daniel’s account.
- When I speak of the ‘unprovoked’ mantra being demanded of all corporate journalists covering Ukraine, I don’t say this is at gun point or on pain of dismissal. My observation, oft repeated on this site, will suffice: journalists who know what’s good for them please editors; editors who know what’s good for them please proprietors; proprietors not only crave honours and seats at the high table, but also need advertisers and/or sponsors.
- I’m taking liberties here. The cat ban came a week or so after the SMO. I can’t be arsed to date Dostoevsky’s expulsion from our library shelves but such chronological pedantry misses the point. As Paul Craig Roberts (another gamekeeper turned poacher) has been pointing out for years – indeed, he blames “Putin’s appeasement” for expediting rather than averting WW3 – Russia had been turning the other cheek for way too long. In March 2018 Roberts opened a piece – Can Nuclear War Be Avoided? – with this:
Two factors are driving the world to nuclear war. One is the constant stream of insults, false accusations and broken agreements that the West has been dumping on Russia year after year. The other is Russia’s response, or, perhaps more correctly, the lack thereof
The article continues in the same vein – that in being too placatory, Chamberlain style, Moscow had been sending all the wrong signals; making it almost as culpable as Washington in endangering us all.
- In describing the savaging of Greece at IMF and ECB hands as “a problem put to bed” I do not, nor did I at the time, mean to minimise that country’s suffering. If her plunging living standards and devalued pensions registered at all with uncritical EU admirers whose name – and I myself voted “Remain” – was and is Legion, they were taken to be a morality tale of German thrift and Greek fecklessness. That infantile fable is blind to a Marshall Plan which – overriding Main Street America’s anger at ‘German and Japanese aggression being rewarded’ – divided Europe and the ‘free world’ into creditor and debtor nations in ways calculated to suit a US empire rooted not just in economic and military might but a fiscal sovereignty laid down at Bretton Woods. Of which more can and needs to be said but my point in 2016 was, and in 2023 still is, the narrower one that IMF rules on debt repayment were rewritten in one of the many provocations, great and small, which brought the world to February 24, 2022.
- I followed my own words with those of Michael Hudson, from a crisply forensic piece at close of 2015. With the deadline for Ukraine’s repayment ignored in Kiev, he spelt out the message from Washington:
Imagine the following scenario five years from now. China will have spent half a decade building high-speed railroads, ports, power systems and other construction for Asian and African countries, enabling them to grow and export more. These exports will be coming online to repay the infrastructure loans. Also, suppose that Russia has been supplying the oil and gas energy for these projects on credit.
To avert this prospect, suppose an American diplomat makes the following proposal to the leaders of countries in debt to China, Russia and the AIIB: “Now that you’ve got your increased production in place, why repay? We’ll make you rich if you stiff our adversaries and turn back to the West. We and our European allies will support your assigning your nations’ public infrastructure to yourselves and your supporters at insider prices, and then give these assets market value by selling shares in New York and London. Then, you can keep the money and spend it in the West.”
(Now that, in a nutshell, is imperialist use of local comprador capitalism for you!)
How can China or Russia collect in such a situation? They can sue. But what court in the West will accept their jurisdiction?
- Jacques Baud, who has featured in other posts on this site, is yet another member of the burgeoning ranks of the gamekeepers turned poacher so symptomatic of our times.
- I’ll shortly be posting, in its 7,468 word entirety, the RF president’s epoch shaping speech of February 21, 2022.
- Fascist influence on Kiev and the UA is beyond dispute, as shown by posts on this site. See for instance Yes, Ukraine is in the grip of Nazis! Prior to the war, nowhere was this truth more forthrightly aired than in Israeli media now uncharacteristically quiet on the matter.
- It is of course a recurring theme of mine that, huge as corporate media lies of commission are on matters vital to our ruling classes, the greatest shapers of our deluded – because myopic – understandings of the world are media lies of omission.