One of the most enraging and offensive things about being accused of being a ‘Putin shill’ or similar, for trying to show people that the media and western governments have been lying on such a grand scale about Ukraine, is the fact that the people accusing us of such things have no understanding of what Ukrainian people have been experiencing at the hands of their own government. The one idea that the media has probably been most successful in instilling as fact in the public consciousness, is that the Russian army is targeting Ukrainian civilians, when there is a wealth of video evidence of the threat to Ukrainian civilians coming from its own side, although none of this makes it into mainstream news.

That’s not even including what the Ukrainian nationalists like Azov were doing to people in Mariupol, a nominally Ukrainian city (where Azov had their base of operations) on the border with the DPR, in which the mostly Russian-speaking population had been terrorised since 2014, and became targets once Russia started its SMO in 2022:

⚠️ Warning: The rest of this post includes some graphic images and video of what Ukrainian police and government or nationalist thugs, including army ‘recruitment’ (i.e. conscription) officers, have done to those who either resist them or who are accused of being spies or Russian collaborators. It’s not pretty.

From the first days of the SMO, I was seeing videos, even on the usually censorious Youtube, of horrific violence perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists and directed at ethnic Russians. There was a particularly shocking video of a man stabbed to death in a stairwell - this was a snuff video, on Youtube, and it was up for months with nothing more than a ‘sensitive content’ warning to prevent you viewing it. By contrast, a video of members of Azov who had been ‘evacuated’ by Russia (remember that?) from Azovstal, with all their Nazi tattoos on full display, lasted only a few weeks before being taken down. It’s endlessly infurating to see this kind of partisan censorship happening, and to be simultaneously told that it isn’t and that in fact I’m falling for Russian propaganda, by people who haven’t been paying close enough attention. It literally amounts to corporate gaslighting, done at the behest of powers far bigger than the Ukrainian state apparatus.

Something else that western news never mentioned, was what Ukrainian police and nationalists were doing to those they considered ‘collaborators’ or ‘marauders’ (one of the names given to the invading Russian army). They had/have a signature technique, that of tying people up with cling film:

It’s absolutely gruesome and medieval in its cruelty, and there are endless images like this, as well as videos which are even more distressing. They also like to humiliate victims by exposing their backsides, and the victims of this abuse are not always men. Note how some of the people doing it are in uniform - these are not rogue elements, this is official policy. The standard braindead normie response to this kind of content is to blame Russia anyway, to make everything that the Ukrainian security state does to its own people a reaction to the Russian invasion, and maybe even to suggest that those being abused might have deserved it. As the saying goes: Scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds.

A common refrain amongst those who dismiss this kind of content as somehow Russian propaganda is that the person in question knows Ukrainians, and none of them have heard of any of this cruelty, in fact they’ve heard about nothing but the awful things the invading ‘orcs’ have been doing. No doubt this is true. That’s because bloggers who have dared to record videos expressing their horror at what Ukrainian security services are doing, or contradicting the official line in any way, run the risk of being arrested. In Ukraine, I could be arrested for writing this blog. This man recorded a video in January saying that contrary to what the Ukrainian media were saying, the military were indeed stationed in a hotel in Kharkov that was hit:

A couple of weeks later, he was detained - and photographed - and allegedly charged with “justifying Russian aggression”, which could result in an 8 year prison sentence.

A prison sentence might be preferable to being a free man in Ukraine right now, though. The sweeping Ukrainian conscription that has been going on for months has resulted in Ukrainian towns turning into man-free ghost towns, as men avoid the roaming conscription officers, who regularly bundle men into vans to go and fight on the front line. If the army recruitment officers decide they want to take you, don’t expect the police to help you:

There are many videos of those army recruitment officers savagely beating people who resist them, like this unfortunate man in Poltava:

A woman in Transcarpathia recorded a selfie video just after her husband was abducted by these conscription officers, in which she is hysterical about what has just occurred:

Soon after, she recorded this ‘apology’ video, saying that “no force was used against us, I am very ashamed of what I said about the AFU”:

If that seems like a disingenuous thing to say (or be forced to say), then consider the case of this woman who filmed her husband being abducted by army thugs, hoping that she could stop it happening, and instead they turned on her:

She took photographs afterwards of the injuries she sustained in the attack:

One conscription officer filmed another engaging in a ‘mock execution’ of a would-be draft dodger, who is handcuffed:

Those who are conscripted may suffer abuse once they are in the army, too. This was filmed in Ternopil:

This video shows the result of the extreme violence meted out to someone who openly criticised the Ukrainian regime within Ukraine - it doesn’t matter that he had been collecting funds for the AFU before making his feelings known:

So Ukrainian men have a strong motivation not to get drafted into the army. This is clearly worst for men in Ukraine, but Ukraine has also pushed to get Ukrainians living in the EU back into Ukraine, to send them to the frontlines to extend the desperate war for as long as possible. Ukraine has suspended consular services for military-age men abroad, forcing them to return to Ukraine if they want to renew their passport - in which case, they are bound to be conscripted. When this was announced there was a rush to Ukrainian consular offices to get new documents before it came into effect, as seen here in Poland:

In case you thought that European officials might have some sympathy for Ukrainian men, the Polish defence minister stated ominously on April 24 that Poland is “ready to help” Ukraine get those military-age men back to Ukraine. Here is Estonian MEP Jaak Madison calling those who have illegally left Ukraine since the SMO started ‘cowards’, who should be sent back to fight for their country (i.e. for the corrupt globalist class):

Madison mentions something that has been intentionally glossed over in the western media: that since the SMO began, it has been illegal for Ukrainian men to leave the country. That means that all those people who helped male Ukrainian refugees after the start of the SMO, were actually aiding criminals, at least in the eyes of Ukrainian law. No doubt those helping them all believed that they were helping people running from the Russian invasion, but the truth may have been rather different. To be sure, those Ukrainian men might have feared Russian bombs, but they would also have been acutely aware that they could be called up to join the army at any time. They almost certainly would have had to bribe their way out of the country.

The recent $61B aid package/loan from US Congress was supposed to help Ukraine win the conflict, but it was never clear how the money was supposed to make that happen. No amount of money or materiel is going to be enough, even if there were trained soldiers alive to use it, which there simply are not. The reality is that that money went to US arms manufacturers and to pay the salaries of Ukrainian politicians. This AP article admits that $20B of that $61B is going to “restock the Pentagon’s shelves and ensure that the military services have what they need to fight and protect America”; so much for ‘aid for Ukraine’.

The ongoing Ukraine conflict is a horror show (and very much not хорошо), but the vultures in the US State Dept have no other option but to keep prolonging it, because they know that once Ukraine falls, all the lies will start to come out, and they know that they might even end up being held responsible. The western media will keep up the facade as long as they can, but at some point they too will be the subject of legal action, probably from courts in Russia or Novorossiya.

I’m really not writing this so that I can say “I told you so” to some hypothetical person at a later date - there just do seem to be very few outlets collating this kind of information. Telegram is useful, but it is very diffuse and there is a constant deluge of new information: you can’t put your mouth over a fire hose and expect to be able to drink what comes out. I want people to understand what’s happening, and videos like the ones in this post tell a story that capably disproves the disgusting, immoral line taken by the mainstream media.

Even all of this awful abuse and wilfull negligence towards Ukrainians, is to say nothing of the wider conflict being waged against Europe in the form of policies like sanctions on Russia, forced on European states by the EU and the US. The most blatant and egregious action in this conflict is probably the Nordstream sabotage, which itself only makes sense in the context of powerful individuals in the US wanting to control gas supplies across Ukraine into Europe. Hunter Biden’s “10% to the big guy” appointment to Burisma is just the tip of the enormous iceberg of corruption and grift that Ukraine represents, and yet the majority of people still think that’s some kind of conspiracy theory. It just gets exhausting, knowing all this and still having to live your life like everything’s fine and dandy.

Republished from The Reluctant Dissident.