Another powerful article by Patrick Lawrence, calling out the "reporting" of Western corporate journalists & kindly giving me a mention for my own reporting from the Donbass:


"...They are not allowed to cover this conflict at close range. Their foreign editors do not want them to and the Ukrainians will not let them. Neither wants daily reports of a slow march to defeat. Better to keep it broad and blurry and spotty. Lots of anecdotes featuring helpless victims, and Russian atrocities by the bale–none of which the correspondents reporting them actually witnessed.

Better, most of all, to rely solely on what Ukrainian officials and military officers tell you and let you see and what Western intelligence officials pretend to confirm. This, to me, is the disgraceful abrogation of duty that makes me wonder if mainstream media can ever step back from their out-and-out embrace of the role they have assumed as propagandists. Do not pretend to shock. This has been going on a long time. Ukraine simply marks a swoon too far in my estimation.

A Russian detention center in the Donbass is shelled and 50–odd Ukrainian prisoners are killed. We are asked to believe that Russian forces shelled their own holding camp for reasons unexplained. When we later learn the Russians were releasing, just before the shelling began, videos of the prisoners recounting the orders of commanding officers to torture any captured Russians, raising the question of war crimes at high levels, we are told this has nothing to do with it.

As we speak, we are asked to believe Russians are shelling a nuclear power plant their own troops have guarded since March. Here I lose the plot entirely.

One day last week we read that Russian forces are cynically sheltering in the plant on the thought that the Ukrainians cannot send rockets into it—too dangerous. The next day we read that the Russians are themselves shelling the power plant they were, one day earlier, reported to be sheltering in. There is only one plausible explanation for this: The correspondents reporting this logically impossible junk are not there and rely on Ukrainian accounts; these accounts differ one day to the next, one official to the next.

So the files sent to the foreign desk are a dog’s dinner, as the English say. And we are left with “So far as I can make out…”

I would say I feel sorry for these correspondents, but this is only partly true. It is too bad they have come of age as the mainstream of the profession collapses into propaganda and advocacy and their tours abroad have come to such an undignified business. I would weep tears of anger had this happened to me. But the alternative is to refuse and, if it comes to it, quit an enterprise a serious correspondent should have no part in.

A remarkable piece of work came across last week. It suggests a third alternative.

Eva Bartlett, a Canadian correspondent, reminds me of Wilfred Burchett in a way: She reports from “the other side” and has no use for anybody’s orthodoxies. She did this to effect in Syria, and before that in the Palestinians territories. Earlier in the Ukraine conflict, she traveled to a site nine miles outside Mariupol where it was widely reported the Russians had dug and filled a mass grave with—get set for this—9,000 Ukrainians. This is a lot of Ukrainians to bury all at once. But all the big dailies, never stopping to think things through, went with the story Ukrainian officials gave them. Nine thousand it was.

No mass grave, Bartlett found. Her piece featured interviews with local officials and witnesses, video segments, photographs. She found an orderly, undisturbed cemetery with orderly, undisturbed grave markers. She showed us pictures of same. She spoke to the grave-diggers, who were mystified by the reports of a mass grave.

Estonian Prime Minister Kallas - that the Narva tank will be demolished before August 20: The government will meet in the near future. Narva refused to make a decision. The intentions of the government were very clear - to remove the Soviet monuments. In order to save the world, it must be done as soon as possible. Our desire to resolve this issue definitively. This means that the tank cannot stay somewhere in Narva.⬇️⬆️

A little bit of history of the monument:

This Russian T-34/85 tank was lost during the battle of the Tannenberg line (25 July 1944 - 10 August 1944). In 1970 it was recovered and placed on a pedestal to commemorate the Soviet casualties of this battle. The memorial is also marking the spot where the Red Army broke through the German lines.⬇️⬆️

The monument to Soviet Soldiers of the WW2 The Tank T-34 began dismantling in Narva.

🇷🇺💻🇪🇪 KILLNET took revenge on Tallinn for the tank

Yesterday the Estonian authorities dismantled the monument to the T-34 tank in Narva. For some reason, the workers involved in this hid their faces in balaclavas. It was the last monument to the legendary tank in Estonia.

The mayor of Narva announced a boycott of the Estonian parliamentary elections after the demolition of the monument to the T-34 tank.

In response to such actions of official Tallinn, the Russian hacker group KILLNET yesterday warned the Baltic country that it's in big trouble 😄 And today they began ... with online payment and access to personal accounts of banks and government organizations throughout the country 😉

In Soviet criminal law, sabotage was defined as actions aimed at undermining any branch of the Soviet economy (industry, agriculture, trade, the monetary system, etc.) or the activities of state bodies or public organizations. A mandatory sign of sabotage was the awareness of actions carried out precisely with the aim of weakening the Soviet state. Wrecking in the form of inactivity was called sabotage.

Since 1992, the Criminal article 69 “sabotage” has been absent from the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.

Isn't it time to re-introduce?

"Reporter Rudenko V"

Americans are asked to show on the map where Ukraine and Russia are located...