Don't Allow Kiev to Rewrite the Holocaust, Warns Israeli Publicist

In an exclusive interview with Radio Sputnik, Israeli publicist Avigdor Eskin explains how history is in danger of repeating, as Kiev is allowed to rewrite the history of the Holocaust, and the lessons of the Second World War are being forgotten.

How strong are neo-nationalist sentiments within present-day Ukrainian society?

Eskin: There is a question mark about the legitimacy of this government, and not only in terms of the means and the ways they use power in Ukraine.

On the day of Ukrainian independence, the British Daily Mail newspaper carried an article about the Holocaust, about what the Ukrainian nationalists, those who followed Bandera and Shukhevych, what Ukrainian Nazis did during the war, and this is something which is going to be discussed now more and more, I believe.

We have questions about how the West looked at the current Ukrainian conflict, and now we see that there is a new angle which we are going to take into consideration as well, don't you think? 

I take that you mean that the neo-nationalist sentiments inside Ukraine are being exemplified by the Azov Battalion, and the Right Sector, and people can see it, if they really want to?

Eskin: Well I would rather put the emphasis on something else. The truth is, that you can see some Nazi ideology, racist ideology, anti-Semitism, you can see that in places like Britain especially. There is a discrimination campaign against Israel, which is unacceptable. But this is [limited to] private, little, tiny groups usually, who carry Nazi ideology, and you can see them in Russia.

But in Russia and in other civilized countries, the Nazi ideology is suppressed. People are put on trial and isolated from society if they preach Nazism.

But in Ukraine today, what happened is that not just certain military groups such as you have mentioned, but the president of Ukraine speaks openly about Bandera and Shukhevych being the heroes of the Ukrainian nation. 

He claimed officially that the ideology of Ukraine today is Nazi ideology.

The parliament of Ukraine voted for a law which makes all the fighters, who fought on the side of the Nazis, on a par during the war, they made them heroes.

We are not talking about just a few anti-Semitic neo-Nazis or racists or nationalist or ultra-nationalist battalions. 

We are talking about the ideology which comes from the president, from the parliament, and this is what makes Ukraine very different.

I want to insist upon this point of importance. When we face today this Ukrainian system, we ask what will be the precedent for it, how can we deal with it, because nothing like this happened for the last 70 years, since the Second World War.

And you know, at the Nuremburg trials, one of the defendants there was Julius Streicher. Now, Julius Streicher, who, by the way, was sentenced to death, was not a killer like Himmler, he didn't torture anybody, he wasn't violent. He was nothing more than the head of the Nazi propaganda machine, and he spread hatred and a criminal ideology.

So, the international court and the Nuremberg trials stated that there is such a thing as criminal ideology. And the criminal ideology of Julius Streicher was the cause of his death sentence.

Now, talking about Ukraine today and when the president and the state parliament declare that Nazism is their ideology, how should we treat Ukraine today?

You've touched upon something that I'd really like to discuss, you mentioned that inside the Rada they are making the followers of Stepan Bandera heroes. Do you think that Kiev is trying to rewrite the history of the Holocaust?

Eskin: Well, Bandera is exactly what Julius Streicher was. These are people who were behind mass murder.

The Mail wrote that there were 1.6 million Jews murdered in Ukraine due to the ideology of Julius Streicher, and Stepan Bandera. 

When we face something like this, in Kiev today, we have to ask ourselves, "what is the legitimacy of this government, no matter what they do?"  

No matter what they do today, the moment they announce that their ideology is rewriting history, which of course is one of their goals, and making the worst criminals of the war their heroes, they cease to be a part of any civilized society.

I don't see sanctions against Ukraine, and I wonder why.

How can other Europeans look to Ukraine as someone to have a serious dialogue with?

Eskin: How could the Europeans make peace with Hitler in 1938? How could Mr. Chamberlain in 1938 and 1939 become a close friend of his German counterpart Mr. Ribbentrop. How could the West betray the people during these years, pre-Second World War.

If the West hadn’t agreed to the partition of Poland, if the West hadn’t agreed to this aggression against Czechoslovakia before, if the West hadn't agreed to all that it agreed with Ribbentrop and with Hitler, probably the Second World War could have been prevented.

Let's begin from that, this appeasement ideology.

Source: Sputnik News 26-08-2015

Merkel, Hollande Rule Out Siding With Poroshenko Against Russia

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko might have been trying to create a "three vs one" configuration – Berlin, Paris and Kiev against Moscow – during his brief visit to the German capital on Monday but his ambitions (some might consider unhealthy if not downright malign) were doomed to fail.

Kiev's top official appears to never tire of blaming Russia for the Ukrainian civil war sparked by a US-sponsored coup, although Moscow is not a party to the deadly conflict.

Unlike Kiev, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande strongly oppose alienating Russia and siding with Poroshenko to oppose Moscow is out of the question, Tagesschau news service reported following the trilateral meeting.

"Three versus Russia? No, underscores the German government. One cannot cut ties with Moscow even if a new meeting [in the Normandy format] has not been scheduled yet. Poroshenko has to understand that Berlin and Paris count on diplomacy, including talks with all relevant countries," the media outlet noted.

Russia, Germany and France maintain that the Ukrainian civil war could only be solved through diplomatic means and not with a military solution. Ukrainian authorities do not have 100-percent faith in a peaceful resolution and have often asked the West to provide Kiev with lethal weapons.

The Minsk II agreements signed in mid-February were meant to pave the way for the de-escalation in the Donbass region and a constitutional reform aimed at protecting the rights and freedoms of Ukraine's eastern regions.

The Minsk peace process is stalling and the August 24 meeting in Berlin was supposed to provide an impulse to accelerate it, Tagesschau asserted.

"The implementation of the deal is not going smoothly. The West demands that Kiev engage in talks with the self-defense forces and bring about the federalization of Ukraine," the media outlet stated.

 
Source: Sputnik News 25-08-2015

MH-17 one year later

This column was written for the Unz Review: http://www.unz.com/tsaker/flight-mh-17-one-year-later/

Over a year has passed since Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 has been shot out of the skies by somebody, but we still don’t know the truth and all sorts of hypotheses are circulating on the Internet. In the West, the Emperor Barak Ist decreed on the day after the actual shoot-down that the party responsible for this atrocity was, of course, the Novorussians. That is as predictable as it is irrelevant since not a shred of evidence has been presented by anybody in the West. In contrast, the Russians did provide quite a lot of evidence, but it was all immediately dismissed without further ado. Again, this is also as predictable as it is irrelevant. The undeniable fact is that the western narrative about the Ukraine absolutely mandates that either the Russians or the Novorussians shot down MH-17. Any other version is completely unacceptable and therefore shall never be considered, nevermind accepted, by the western politicians and their corporate media.

But for the rest of the world the question remains opened: who shot down MH-17 and how?

The first thing we know is that the Ukrainian traffic air controllers directed MH-17 to fly directly over the combat zone and to lower its altitude. We also know for a fact that there was at least one Ukrainian aircraft in the immediate vicinity of MH-17 that day. This was confirmed both by Russian radar signals and by several local witnesses who saw at least one, possibly two, SU-25 aircraft in the air that day. Finally, we also know that Ukrainian air defense units were present in the area that day and that their radars were active. What nobody saw that day was the kind of large and highly visible smoke plume which would have accompanied any large missile launch, not did anybody hear anything special. Apparently, no missile launch, and yet the Ukrainian radars were active. How come?

I believe that MH-17 was shot down by a Ukrainian SU-25. Critics of this theory have pointed out that the SU-25 is a “close-air-support aircraft” which was designed to fly very low and to engage attacking amour columns, that it was never designed to fly very fast or very high, and the SU-25 does not have a radar or air-to-air missiles. Finally, the cockpit of the SU-25 is not pressurized which means that the pilot cannot fly over 7’000 meter in altitude. 

This is all quite true. But it also misses the point.

First, while it is true that the cabin of the SU-25 is not pressurized, all a pilot needs to do is use a mask to supply him with oxygen. The aircraft itself can easily fly well over the 7’000 meter limit. It is true that the speed of the aircraft is inadequate to intercept a large civilian jet flying at its cruising speed. The SU-25 engines were never designed to fly high and while they can be made to bring the aircraft over 7’000 meters, they cannot develop enough speed in this rarefied atmosphere. But what the SU-25 can do is carry a R-60 infrared-guided missile. Not only does such a missile not require an engagement radar, but it’s speed is over 3’000 kilometers per hour, way faster than any civilian airliner. The problem with the missile, however, is that it’s range is short, about 8’000 meters.

The SU-25 does not have a radar capable of detecting a civilian airliners and guiding the SU-25 towards it. But the Buk missile radar battery definitely does. Since the course of the MH-17 was known well in advance, all the Ukrainians had to do was the keep one or two SU-25 loitering at low altitude under the air corridor which MH-17 would take and wait for the Buk missile operators guide the best placed SU-25 towards the airliner at the appropriate moment. All the pilot would have to do when given the signal was to sharply climb towards MH-17 and get inside the missile’s flight envelope (in this case within less than 8 kilometers of MH-17) and then fire off his R-60 missile. At that point, the missile would guide itself towards the biggest heat source of the aircraft – one of the engines.

The R-60 is a rather small missile and it would never be able to destroy a large airliner like the Malaysia Airways Boeing 777. But the R-60 is more than capable to destroy one of the Boeing’s engines. At this point, the airliner would rapidly lose speed and enter into a sharp turn while the pilots would be trying to figure out what happened, extinguish a burning engine and compensate for the increased drag. This is exactly what was observed on radars, by the way. The rapid loss of speed and altitude would make the Boeing easy prey for the SU-25 which has a powerful cannon on board which would then easily catch up and finish off the attack with a volley of 30mm cannon fire. Having finished off it’s target, the SU-25 would then sharply turn and return to its base. This is exactly what the Russian radars saw.

One might wonder why the Ukrainian would use a close air support aircraft like the SU-25 instead of a dedicated interceptor like the SU-27 or a fighter like the MiG-29. Here again, the explanation is very simple: not only does the Ukraine have many more SU-25s than SU-27s or MiG-29s, but these would also be very conspicuous to any witness. In contrast, the one (or, possibly two) SU-25s tasked with the destruction of MH-17 would be very easy to conceal in the eastern Ukraine and on any airfield. It is precisely because the SU-25 would be an unlikely aircraft to be given such a mission that it is the perfect aircraft to execute what is a textbook example of a false flag attack.

As for the Buk, it is such a big and conspicuous missile system that it is impossible to hide. Furthermore, had such a missile been fired broad daylight, the launch would have been clearly seen for many miles around. 

However, as long as all the Buk battery was doing is guiding the SU-25 towards MH-17 nobody would have noticed it. Nobody except the Russian, NATO and the USA, of course.

As somebody who has personally monitored military and civilian air traffic over Europe, I can attest to the fact that several militaries in Europe are constantly monitoring the entire airspace between the Atlantic and the Urals. 

These countries include the US and NATO. This is especially true for a battle zone. In fact, US and Russian AWACS aircraft are always present when a conflict occurs anywhere near Europe. They have been monitoring the war in the Persian Gulf, the war in Bosnia and Croatia, the war in Afghanistan and many other conflicts. Besides their AWACS, the Americans and Russians also use their space based satellites to monitor any conflict zone. Of course, neither side is willing to share all the detailed information it has, but the real problem here is political: the US won’t share anything at all because of the need to protect the regime in Kiev while anything the Russians would share will be immediately dismissed as “propaganda” (which is exactly what happened with the little the Russians did share).

I would add here that if had been the Novorussians who had shot down MH-17 the US could easily have proven it just as they have done it with KAL007 in 1983. In fact, in the 20 years which separate us from the shooting down of KAL007 US intelligence capabilities have considerably improved, so I would expect the US could provide much more data than just radio intercepts. And yet the US provided exactly *nothing*. There is only one logical possibility for that otherwise bizarre US refusal to provide any data at all: the US points to the “wrong” party. In other words, the fact that the US is not releasing any data all all is, by itself, an indirect proof that the Ukrainians did it.

As for the Ukrainians themselves they, of course, know *exactly* what happened and there is no need for them to “investigate” anything. So there is really nothing left to investigate. The Ukrainian did it and the West will never admit it.

End of story.

The Saker

Source: The Vineyard of the Saker 24-08-2015

French Media Obsessed With Russophobic Propaganda - Journalist

French media is full of russophobia and provides no unbiased and balanced coverage of Russian and Ukrainian affairs, French journalist, descendant of Russian emigrants Dimitri de Kochko said in an interview with FAN.

In particular, the journalist pointed out that French media companies are owed by oligarchs who make most of their profits in the US. As a result, all media outlets – to one extent or another – have to promote pro-American ideas.

Media debates used to involve people with different points of views, but now it is impossible, de Kochko added.

"Word is given only to US advocates, pseudo specialists on Russian affairs, and Ukrainian nationalists," he said.

The journalist provided an example of a radio station which invited a Ukrainian nationalist to discuss the situation around the Mistral contract between Russia and France.

"She was totally incompetent to discuss the issue. She was talking a lot but said nothing. […] And that is how French media deals with Russia," de Kochko said.

Nevertheless, the journalist underscored some positive developments.

Major French media, including Le Monde and Figaro, published articles by French lawmakers who recently visited Crimea and gave an unbiased look at the situation there and in Ukraine, the journalist explained.

In whole, anti-Russian propaganda has gone beyond all bounds in French media. However, despite that many people in France oppose any conflict with Russia, de Kochko concluded.

 
Source: Sputnik News 23-08-2015