I had not intended to devote any time to watching or tweeting about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s phony phone-in this year. However, when reading about his stone-cold denials about the Russian military presence in Ukraine, a response is warranted.
The lies spouted by the Russian president cannot go unchallenged. It is time to be this direct in our language: Vladimir Putin is a liar.
In response to a question from Ukrainian journalist Roman Tsymbalyuk, a question that was booed by Russian journalists present, Vladimir Putin responded, “there are no Russian army groups (in eastern Ukraine.) But there are militia groups who are prepared to counter any offensive in Donbas.” Putin then went on to assert that if it were not for these forces, Ukrainian nationalist battalions would slaughter local residents “worse than in Srebrenica.”
The final part of that statement, the disgraceful assertion that Ukrainian forces are intent on committing genocide, is something that the Russian media (directed, as we all know, by the Kremlin) has been intent on insisting is true since the very beginning of their war. Despite there being zero evidence to base this claim on. In the spring of 2014, the Ukrainian army was on the front foot, and liberated hundreds of towns and villages from the Russian army/proxy army who had seized them. No massacres occurred. That fact did not stop Russian media, even the relatively sanitized international outlets such as RT, from pumping out lie after lie accusing Ukraine of war crimes.
RT has run headlines stating that in the city of Slovyansk “death squads (are) going house to house executing all males under 35” and Ukraine’s army “shooting anyone who tries to leave besieged cities” and that Kyiv also “brags of filtration camps for ‘cleansing’ of all east Ukrainians.”
None of it ever happened. What did happen, in Srebrenica specifically, is that many thousands of people, mainly men and boys, were indeed murdered because of ethnicity. The Russian president has just told the world that Ukraine would behave in the same manner as those who have committed one of the worst atrocities of modern history. A charge that has absolutely zero foundation. No, we must not let this pass. This is not diplomatic language, and so I expect few diplomats to share this article, but it must be said and said very clearly, Vladimir Putin is a liar.
That Putin also deems it necessary to throw the words “nationalist” in to his shameful accusation offers an opportunity to address that question too. Here’s the reality, in Ukraine there are some people who have right-wing or nationalist views. That is a fact. It is also a fact that the percentage of Ukrainians who have any kind of extremist views is actually far lower than the European norm. The myth about Ukraine being some hotbed of fascism of neo-Nazism is an invention of Russian propaganda.
As in all good propaganda stories it has element of truth: there are some unsavory people in Ukraine’s armed forces. But they are a tiny, tiny, fraction of the 250,000 Ukrainian servicemen and women who have bravely defended their country against the invasion that has happened because of the whims (and, ultimately, fears) of one man – Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Let’s now examine and thoroughly repudiate the opening lie from Putin’s statement regarding Ukraine. That “there are no Russian army groups” there.
On July 17, 2014 a BUK missile launcher shot down flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine. That missile launcher has been positively identified as coming from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Regiment based in Kursk, Russia, and it was almost certainly manned by its Russian crew from the same regiment. Moreover, it has recently been discovered that the voice of the senior officer heard in intercepted communications relating to the movement and operations of that BUK missile launcher belongs to Colonel General Nikolai Federovich Tkachev of the Russian army.
Later in July of 2014, Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov produced a film titled “Five facts that prove Putin’s behind the conflict in Ukraine.”
In late August of 2014 Russian military forces streamed across the border to join the fight for the city of Ilovaivsk. This is definitively proved by examination of satellite imagery of that period. The fact that the Russian military was able to cross that border with relative ease was due to the shelling, from Russia, of Ukrainian army positions along the border in the preceding months, that fact is incontrovertibly proven by various sources – here is just one.
On May 12, 2015, a report titled “Putin. War” was released. It was the brainchild of Boris Nemtsov, and it was completed by his colleagues after Nemtsov was murdered in the shadows of the Kremlin just two weeks earlier. This report contains 65 pages of evidence of Russian military involvement in the war eastern Ukraine.
On May 28, 2015, the Atlantic Council releases their report documenting Russia’s role in the conflict in Ukraine. Hiding in Plain Sight is 40 more pages of yet more irrefutable evidence from yet another independent source.
On June 16, 2015, journalist Simon Ostrovsky from Vice News releases his film Selfie Soldiers, in which he traces serving Russian military personnel back to their homes in Russia after tracking them down based on the evidence those same men have provided in their social media footprints.
On Aug. 22, 2015, taped telephone conversations involving Putin right-hand Sergey Glazyev were made public. These tapes are clear evidence that Glazyev (read, the Kremlin) directed the first stages of anti-Ukrainian disturbances across southern and eastern Ukraine. Most of those efforts were unsuccessful and only in small parts of two oblasts were the Russian directed operations able to get a foothold, but these tapes prove that the very foundation of this entire situation is Russian in origin. Carried out under direct orders from the Kremlin. This war was started by Vladimir Putin.
On Dec. 13, 2015, an 88-page report entitled “An Invasion by any Other Name. The Kremlin’s Dirty War in Ukraine” was released. It is a joint publication from The Institute of Modern Russia and Interpreter Magazine. Yet another document corroborating all of the findings of the many other publicly released reports on Russian military involvement in eastern Ukraine.
On April 24, 2016, the Atlantic Council published an analysis of hacked e-mails from an account belonging to (the assistant of) another close advisor to Putin, one Vladislav Surkov, now the point man involved in negotiating the implementation of the Minsk Agreements with U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine, Ambassador Kurt Volker. This report is simply titled “Russia Funds and Manages Conflict in Ukraine, Leaks Show.”
When Putin tells the world “there are no Russian military groups” in eastern Ukraine, he is deliberately telling the world bare-faced lies.
As for the often-proffered flimsy excuse that any Russian citizens who are fighting in eastern Ukraine are just volunteers, that, too, is unacceptable. The fact is that Russia, being a police state, could stop Russian citizens intent on fighting in Ukraine from participating in military training in Rostov on Don.
The Russian authorities could, if they had the slightest desire to do so, then stop those Russian citizens from moving freely around Russian sovereign territory with weapons before those Russian citizens then moved intro Russian occupied territory in eastern Ukraine.
The reason for using these Russian “volunteers” (few are any such thing, the vast majority of these irregular forces are paid for fighting in Ukraine, they are mercenaries) is something called “plausible deniability.”
But these denials are not plausible.
Vladimir Putin is a liar.
