Below is a message that I will share on Friday night at the Ukraine Teach-In to be held in Bath, Maine. It comes from a person in Odessa who I know. This person wishes to remain anonymous due to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) current round-up of thousands of peaceful activists in Odessa. The SBU headquarters building in Kiev has an American flag hanging outside the doorway indicating which nation is really running things these days inside of Ukraine.
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| SBU headquarters in Kiev, Ukraine - we see who really runs Ukraine these days |
Message from Odessa
Odessa region of
Ukraine is extremely important for the Kiev authorities. Several lucrative
ports with the flow of goods in transit, a strategically advantageous position
in the area of the Danube mouth, the economically active population, the
infrastructure which is not fully destroyed during the years of independence -
this is not a complete list of the region’s benefits.
Known to everybody
Odessa tolerance and multiculturalism, that had always been its hallmark,
became an obstacle to the total Ukrainization of the region. Odessa resisted
the Maidan nationalism so strongly, that the so-called "patriots"
have developed and implemented a bloody campaign of intimidation on May 2, 2014
[Odessa Trades Hall massacre where more than 50 were killed by neo-Nazis.]. Having
survived the shock, the city and the region have moved to active resistance to
the "new order", expressed in constant actions of resistance which
has reached its climax in the period May 2-9, 2015. In these days tens of
thousands of people came out into the streets of the city under the newly
prohibited red flags, and Poroshenko showed the world a million of fake smiles
on the Walk of Fame in Odessa under a thunderous cry "Fascism will not
pass!".
Under these
conditions, Poroshenko recovered the move which is traditional to Ukrainian
presidents – he appointed his godfather as the governor of the trouble-making
Odessa region. But this time the choice was approved even by the international
curators of the Maidan power, for it was Mikheil Saakashvili [former president of Georgia and a favorite US CIA operative who is now wanted for crimes in Georgia but Ukraine refuses to send him back to his country] who was appointed the
governor, and who is one of the most rabid Russophobes of our days and in the
same time doesn’t have the reputation of Bandera-nationalist and who is not
directly related to the May 2 mayhem.
By all accounts, the
Kiev government has assigned for Saakashvili two tasks - an obvious one and
quite probable one. As to the first, everyone agrees, then Poroshenko demanded
to capture and redirect the financial flows, and above all, the proceeds from
the customs and trading port, as well as pave the way for the privatization of
the region's largest asset - Portside Plant. As to the probable objective, many
analysts mention an escalation of tensions on the border with Transnistria.
With this Saakashvili should cause the greatest possible damage to Russia, and
the rest we'll see.
The new governor immediately
developed a rigorous activity, strengthening his already robust reputation of a
populist and a windbag. An objective observer analyzing the situation cannot
ignore the following facts.
Firstly, the active
process of the property redistribution is at full speed in Odessa and its
region. The press has already published numerous stories about the people in
camouflage uniforms who appeared on various enterprises, captured them and did
not let the owners in. Usually, these people represent themselves as
"Pravi sector", "Automaydan" and other Bandera-nationalist
brands. The great thing is that they really are those.
Creating and pumping
the atmosphere of fear and terror, the nationalists literally beat political
opponents with impunity and pay no attention to any laws of the country or to
the statements of the liberal leaders of the region. Only recently the
militants brutally beat unarmed protesters who were protesting against holding
in prison Artyom Buzilov - Bessarabian progressive journalist. They have
repeatedly destroyed the humble and touching makeshift memorial erected by
Odessans on the Kulikovo Field in memory of those unarmed citizens who were
killed on May 2. They also constantly terrorize the participants of weekly
meeting-requiem on the Kulikovo field, many of whom are elderly people.
The peak of cynicism of nationalist gangs is
the bullying of mothers who lost their children on May 2. On July 13, 2015, the
hearing on the case of Sergei Hodiyaka in Odessa Primorsky court was appointed.
This euromaidan activist is accused of the murder of Yevgeny Losinskogo
(Article 115 of the Ukraine Criminal Code), as well as of the attempted murder
of several other people. The relatives of the victims, their friends and
Odessans who wanted to support the mothers whose sons were apparently killed by
Hodiyak during the May tragedy last year came to the hearing.
What happened later in
the hall cannot be named other than coven and lawlessness. Relatives of the
victims were insulted, pushed out from the benches. Despite all their appeals
to the judge and to the prosecutor, they were taken [photos] on mobile phones and
cameras, and were threatened to be burned next time ...
No action on the part
of judges and prosecutors to protect the relatives of the victims had been
taken. After the abolition of the court session, as the judges again recused
themselves, the "patriots" have built a "corridor of shame"
through which all the mothers of the victims
and all those who came to support them had to go through. At the same time
they were abused, pushed, beaten, kicked in the legs, they spitted at. The
police, who could stop this abuse, were absent in the the court room.
Looking at all these
manifestations of painful social schizophrenia that is not suppressed by the
authorities, Odessans cannot believe in the good intentions of the new
governor Saakashvili.
Changing the signs does not change anything in substance - that is the main conclusion of Odessa citizens. Moreover, a growing concern has the steps of the new governor, that can only be described as a rejection of sovereignty. How else can we assess the fact of the regional administration officials being paid their salaries by the US government? Or the upcoming transfer the control of the South (Odessa) customs office to an American corporation? [There has been at least one article speculating that the US wants to use Odessa to port its Navy warships deployed in the Black Sea.]
And only the
nationalists and their henchmen do not get tired to extol all the steps of the
new governor. This causes vague doubts among ordinary Odessa residents – the
patriots of what state are those home-grown radical nationalists been taken.
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