By Thomas Theiner
The Russian story about the shootout at Sloviansk- see if you can spot the ludicrous parts:
26 guys armed with nothing but bats man a checkpoint 6 km outside of Sloviansk. Four cars with at least 10 heavily armed guys drive up to the checkpoint and stop 10 m before it. The armed men get out of the cars and open fire, killing two (10 armed men, 10 m distance and hitting only two… atrociously bad shooters).
The rest of the guys with bats run away and 20 armed men from Sloviansk are called to come and retake the barricade. Until these 20 men arrive, the attackers do nothing but wait at the barricade; they don’t leave, they don’t advance, they don’t set up an ambush, they don’t try to dismantle the barricades, nothing! They even don’t move their cars…
The 20 armed men from Sloviansk arrive at the barricade and open fire on the attackers, who don’t fire back but flee with just two of their cars as the other two cars are shot up from the left side and the back… but not shot up from the front where the barricade and Sloviansk is… so the attackers were attacked from behind and managed to escape exactly in that direction too…
More amazing: even under fire from behind and the side the attackers managed to load their injured into the remaining two cars and drive off… while the Sloviansk men managed to get backpacks, guns, uniforms, a World War II era German machine gun, brand new dollar bills, etc. out of the burning cars… with nothing of that stuff being scorched… and, wondrously, neither are the two license plates of the burning cars scorched.
Need more hints that this is a staged fakery by idiots? In Sloviansk they display a body who supposedly had a Right Sector business card and a Right Sector medallion with him, but no ID documents whatsoever, and on the business card the Russian transliteration for Right Sector is used, because now we all die-hard Ukrainian nationalists are in love with Russian and don’t use Ukrainian at all.
To sum it all up: I expected the GRU/FSB to work more professionally when setting up faked accidents as pretense for Putin’s war.
Thomas Theiner is a writer and production manager. He has previously lived in Kyiv for 5 years and worked at a subsidiary of Ukraine's biggest film company.
