Brothers and sisters!
Here’s the Summary for July 21, 2014 (for previous summary, please see Summary for July 18).
The bad news:
1. In the case of the downed Boeing, Moscow and its domesticated little fighters continue to behave like petty pickpockets, caught by their hand and delivered to the police department. Resourcefulness, deceit and villainy are the Kremlin’s business card.
Putin is hysterically calling for an “international investigation,” and at this time the terrorists managed by him won’t let the international experts onto the scene [of the accident], interfering with their work in every possible way, stealing the evidence, and they are not inclined to give over the “black boxes” – not until the specialists from the Russian intelligence services do their magic over them. [Editor’s update: since this was written the terrorists have agreed to hand the black boxes over to the Malaysian authorities].
Simultaneously, the Russian Defense Ministry keeps making up its usual nonsense. Supposedly, the Boeing was being chased by a Ukrainian fighter jet, but at the same time on the ground (on the territory controlled by insurgents) there was not even an empty spot for an apple to fall [to avoid] the Ukrainian Buk missile systems. And so the goddamn Ukrainian military destroyed the passenger plane, they fired volleys from the ground and finished off the plane in the air. Why they needed [to do so] remains a great mystery.
If Russia had just said that it had not handed over the SAM [surface-to-air missile] to the terrorists, one could argue it. But the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces announced, “we did not pass on the SAM Buk nor other weapons and military equipment.” But here, everything is clear, taking into account the fact that Donbas is stuffed to the eyeballs with weapons that came from Russia.
… I’m confident that if Moscow had not lied so famously and explicitly, maybe someone in an African savannah or a Papuan village in New Guinea would believe in her [Moscow’s] innocence. But Putin is doing everything possible and impossible so that no one is left in doubt about who exactly killed 300 civilians in the sky over Donbas.
2. An increasing number of countries connect the attack in the Donbas skies with Russia and [its] insurgents. Let’s hope that Kyiv’s appeal will be heard in the world, and that the DNR and LNR [Donetsk- and Luhansk People’s Republics] are recognized as terrorist organizations far beyond our country’s borders, and Russia as a sponsor of terrorism (although it is in fact a terrorist country).
The bad news is that this insight was given to the world at the price of so many innocent victims…
3. Under unrelenting pressure from the ATO forces, terrorists stop at nothing just to keep up the initiative. Civilian casualties don’t confuse them at all–on the contrary, it is the [civilian] population that becomes a hostage of this agony.
Today, the Russian media broadcast a statement by insurgent “commander” Girkin-Strelkov: “In Dzerzhynsk, the battle continues. The city center is destroyed by volleys of Grads and Uragans, there are continuous fires there (it seems that Tymchuk is already writing about how ‘the city is being shelled by terrorists’).”
But Girkin guessed it wrong: I did not have to write anything. A video surfaced online, in which Girkin’s own little fighters were shelling a peaceful town on the territory under their control with Grads–although it’s not Dzerzhynsk with a population of 87,000 but Donetsk with its million inhabitants.
An uneasy conscience betrays itself. But this doesn’t make it any easier on civilians.
Dmitry Tymchuk, Coordinator, Information Resistance
Translated and edited by Voices of Ukraine