Putin's Murderers

OK. I have now officially had it with Putinism's thuggery, lies and now mass murder... and I'm not even Ukrainian.

For reasons best left to the psychohistorians, certain Leftist have convinced themselves that Ukraine's February uprising was led by "fascists" and that the uprising in eastern Ukraine is "people's democracy". This is hogwash so toxic and noncredible, that I must seriously ask what psychotropic drugs they are using, because they are hallucinating. 

Ukraine has an elected parliament, the press is remarkably free, and citizens can demonstrate and assemble in public spaces as they wish.

So why all the trouble? Because for the past month, Putinism's state-owned media has run the most despicable and toxic lies, smearing the people of Ukraine as anti-Semitic hooligans and latterday Nazis. Never mind the fact that anti-semitism is far more prevalent in Russia than in Ukraine. And never mind the fact that there is no fascist junta running Ukraine, just an interim President who will step down soon. In February, Ukrainians peacefully overthrew Yanukovych's thuggish kleptocracy, which had bankrupted the country by stealing energy-rents from the gas pipelines. Presidential elections are scheduled for May 25, just three weeks from now.

The only instability has been caused by Putin's regime. Since February 28, Putinism has armed, trained and financed thugs -- including this Russian colonel who lives in Moscow -- to terrorize locals, sack police stations, kidnap neutral OSCE observers (they've since been released), and torture and murder dissidents.

Most recently and most horribly, pro-Kremlin thugs used automatic weapons to shoot unarmed marchers in Odessa (close-up here).

Yes, those are automatic rifles being used for mass murder.

Enraged by the killings and by a complete abdication of police responsibility (some police may have been pro-Kremlin sympathizers, but most probably just lost their nerve), a pro-Ukrainian crowd spontaneously gathered, threw rocks at the shooters, and chased them back to their home base in a local government building.

What happened next is less clear. We know the two sides threw Molotov cocktails at each other, the building caught fire, and that somewhere between fifteen and thirty people inside died of smoke inhalation. The responsibility for the fire is unclear -- none of the video evidence taken by citizen journalists at the scene suggests anything like a conscious plan to burn down the building. One of the videos does show a fire starting inside the building on the third floor, inside an unbroken window. There were no pro-Ukrainians inside the building at the time, so it could be that the pro-Kremlin crowd accidentally started the fire by dropping or mishandling a Molotov of their own -- hopefully the EU will do an independent investigation to determine precisely what happened.

Once the building caught fire, the pro-Ukrainian crowd spontaneously organized a rescue mission, climbing into the building and saving countless pro-Kremlin protesters. Yes, that's right -- even after being shot at, the Ukrainians did the right thing, and saved as many lives as they could.

This is what Putinism has consistently failed to understand about Ukraine, or about the Ukrainian revolution. Ordinary Ukrainians are not following orders from Washington or carrying out some malign CIA plot. They are simply acting like the free citizens of a genuine democracy.

Putinism's brief window of opportunity to covertly destabilize its neighbor has passed. 

If Putin's generals are seriously contemplating military action, they should look closely at the footage from Odessa. Those young Ukrainians were not afraid of confronting AK-47s with cobblestones. You don't even want to think of the hellstorm they would unleash with precision anti-tank and anti-air weapons. If history teaches one lesson, it's that anyone who invades a Slavic nation digs their own grave. You have been warned.