British videoblogger Graham Phillips, known for his cooperation with Russian occupation regimes in Ukrainian Donbas staged out a crooked provocation at an exchange of hostages, tormenting and humiliating a mutilated prisoner of war. Ukrainians are now addressing UK officials with a demand to punish Phillips for psychological torture and cooperation with terrorists.
Mocking an armless PoW
"Who brainwashed you? You speak like a brainwashed zombie… Who needs you now, with no arms?” These are not the phrases a maimed prisoner of war is supposed to hear minutes before reuniting with his family after almost a year of captivity. Neither could such questions be qualified as a part of an interview by any war correspondent working on a story about the release of hostages. However, this is exactly what Ukrainian soldier Volodymyr Zhemchugov had to go through as he was waiting for his release by the "Luhansk People's Republic" (“LNR”) on 17 September in Russia occupied Donbas. Odious British blogger Graham Phillips, known for cooperation with the Russian-backed separatist "republics" in Donbas, was deported from Ukraine back in 2014. On 17 September, he found himself in an ambulance that brought a seriously ill soldier to exchange of hostages. In a five minute video uploaded to Phillips’ YouTube channel the blogger repeatedly addresses the soldier as a “zombie,” claims he is “no intelligent man,” and insults Ukrainian journalists present at the exchange. Zhemchugov, who has spent almost a year in captivity, states he is an educated man, a patriot, and assures that “Ukraine doesn’t leave its own people.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuTrYXoiDgk&app=desktop For Phillips, such an approach to “journalism” (as he calls it) is no exception. For instance, on 22 January 2015, he was filming a “parade of prisoners” of the military personnel of Armed forces of Ukraine, with a couple of “active citizens” shouting and throwing something at the POWs. In fact, the scene turned out to be a plot – the few “active citizens” were driven in specially to be filmed by the Russian media, and filmed at angles to make their number appear larger than they were. The video with Zhemchugov, however, doesn’t seem to have received an expected reaction from YouTube audience. As of 21 September, it received 3,829 “dislikes” compared to 1,341 “likes” and got bombed with pro-Ukrainian comments. “What a miserable 'journalist,' I think he will be prosecuted as a terrorist after the liberation of Ukrainian territories, in case he won’t be eleminated by Russian terrorists, or it will run away terrified by punishment for its crimes,” a comment by Kolya Shcherbina states.Suicide attempt to avoid "LNR" captivity
On 28 September 2015 Volodymyr Zhemchugov, who calls himself „a Luhansk partisan of Ukrainian underground” got injured due to an accidental tripwire detonation. A local of Luhansk with Russian citizenship, he decided to join Ukrainian Armed Forces as an intelligence agent and later went on as a partisan fighting Russian soldiers in an occupied Luhansk oblast. After detonation, Zhemchugov started crawling towards the road nearby hoping to get run over by a car. There he was found by “LNR” militants who put him into reanimation, under interrogation and under arrest.Read more: Kremlin-backed militants demand amnesty, put hostage without arms or eyesight on trial
“There is a route Krasnodon-Luhansk there, and at night Urals [freight vehicles – ed.] from Russia carrying shells for… [separatists’ – ed.] warehouses follow that route. At night those convoys are being redeployed further here, to Luhansk, to Stakhanov. Indeed, when I realized I wasn’t dying, I decided to commit suicide. I crawled to the road not to be saved, but to be killed. I didn’t want to be taken captive," he explained in an interview for TSN.
