The Murderers of Kiev, by Justin Raimondo

Today, SLL is reposting three articles about Ukraine and potential war with Russia. Even the possibility of war with Russia, whose nuclear arsenal matches and in some aspects exceeds that of the US, dwarfs other concerns. As Patrick Buchanan points out, there are “hotheads” in both the US and Russia for whom an escalation to nuclear war is not inconceivable or unacceptable. Two atomic bombs destroyed two Japanese cities in World War II, and today’s thermonuclear bombs are thousands of times more destructive. The threat of millions of lives lost and economies, cities, countryside, and infrastructure decimated may not be enough to curb the egos of the publicly bellicose; that’s often why wars either start or escalate. It should be a trivial and trite bromide, not worth repeating, but unfortunately it has to be: nobody would “win” a nuclear war.

Justin Raimodo examines the Ukraine government the US is supporting diplomatically, financially, and militarily. Finding anything in the mainstream American press other than boilerplate about Ukraine’s “democratic” government and the magnificent Euromaidan Revolution that put it in power is virtually impossible, but if that government is going to be the possible linchpin of a US war with Russia, it’s crucial to understand for whom we are risking nuclear holocaust. For anybody who does not believe what they read on the Internet until it is confirmed by the MSM, A Wall Street Journal article this morning, buried on page A16, “Kiev Is Hit by Series Of Mysterious Deaths,” 4/17/15, “confirms” the deaths cited by Raimondo in his article.

If you only have time to read one article, salon.com’s interview with historian Stephen F. Cohen is recommended. It is the first of two parts and SLL will also repost the second part next week. Cohen is careful and analytical, not prone to rhetorical hyperbole. He considers, sometimes endorsing and sometimes condemning, Russia’s point of view, and makes a strong case against US policy stretching back to when President Bill Clinton pushed for the expansion of NATO.

From Justin Raimondo, at antiwar.com:

Ukraine’s gangster regime shows its true colors

There seems to be a “suicide” epidemic afflicting opponents of the current Ukrainian government – eight opposition politicians and two journalists have mysteriously died since the beginning of the year. Here is the timeline of terror that has opponents of the regime fearing for their lives:

January 26 – Nikolai Sergienko, former deputy chief of Ukrainian Railways and a supporter of Viktor Yanukoych’s Party of Regions, reportedly shot himself with a hunting rifle. The windows were all locked from inside, and no note was found.

January 29 – Aleksey Kolesnik, the former chairman of the Kharkov regional government and a prominent supporter of the now-banned Party of Regions, supposedly hung himself. There was no suicide note

February 24 – Stanislav Melnik, another former Party of Regions member of parliament, was found dead in his bathroom: he is said to have shot himself with a hunting rifle. We are told he left a suicide note of “apologies,” but what he was apologizing for has never been revealed, since the note has not been released.

February 25 – Sergey Valter, former Party of Regions activist and Mayor of Melitopol, was found hanged hours before his trial on charges of “abuse of office” was set to begin. Whoever was responsible neglected to leave a “suicide” note.

February 26 – Aleksandr Bordyuga, Valter’s lawyer and former deputy chief of Melitopol police, was found in his garage, dead, another “suicide.”

February 26 – Oleksandr Peklushenko, a former Party of Regions member of parliament and chairman of Zaporozhye Regional State Administration, was found dead in the street with a gun wound to his neck. Officially declared a “suicide.”

February 28 – Mikhail Chechetov, a professor of economics and engineering, former member of parliament from the Party of Regions, and former head of the privatization board, supposedly jumped from the seventeenth floor window of his Kiev apartment. Another “suicide”!

March 14 – Sergey Melnichuk, a prosecutor and Party of Regions loyalist, “fell” from the ninth floor window of an apartment building in Odessa. Or was he pushed?

April 15 – Oleg Kalashnikov, yet another prominent Party of Regions leader, died of a gunshot wound – the eighth since the beginning of the year.
Kalashnikov, a former member of the Ukrainian parliament and a very vocal and visible critic of the Kiev regime, was found shot to death in his home. This time, the authorities are having a hard time spinning it as a “suicide,” although they haven’t come right out and said it was murder. Kalashnikov had recently been campaigning for the right of Ukrainians to celebrate the victory of the Allies during World War II – a controversial topic in Ukraine, where sympathy for the Third Reich and its Ukrainian collaborators is rife among supporters of the current government. He had reportedly received numerous death threats because of his stand.

And as I write this, the news that two other prominent critics of the Kiev gang, both journalists, have been found dead is being reported. Historian and journalist Oles Buznya was gunned down by two marked gunmen while jogging near his home. He had recently resigned his position as editor of the newspaper Segodnya, stating that he would no longer put up with the censorship imposed by government pressure on his employers: he had also been forbidden to make any media appearances. Earlier this year, a group of Ukrainian “journalists” with the oxymoronic moniker of “Stop Censorship” demanded that Buznya be banned from making appearances in the media on the grounds that he was “an agent of the Kremlin.”

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/04/16/the-murderers-of-kiev/

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