The video above shows independent journalist Eva Bartlett reporting from Donetsk city, where a kindergarten and a maternity hospital were among the buildings targetted by the heaviest bombing in the entire eight-year conflict. There was no military value to any of the buildings targetted, which hit only civilians, their homes and their infrastructure.
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The city of Donetsk, capital of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) that seceded from Ukraine in 2014, has come under heavy fire and shelling from the Ukrainian military in recent days, according to multiple reports. Footage on social media shows smoke billowing above the city, burning houses, apartment blocks ablaze, and streets littered with debris and shrapnel.
Perhaps with a twisted sense of irony, the Kiev regime’s forces have even targeted the city’s maternity hospital, according to a report by independent journalist Eva Bartlett (see video above). Only a month or two ago, the corporate media was filled with lurid Ukrainian ultranationalist accounts of “Russian airstrikes on a maternity hospital”, which was later found to be a fabrication according to eyewitness testimony.
Needless to say, no such media outlet is very interested in covering the very real crimes of the pro-Kiev forces, except for a minority whose Putin Derangement Syndrome has reached such levels that they have accused Russia of bombing its own side.
At first glance, it may seem very strange that the Ukrainian forces would waste precious ammunition attacking civilian areas with no military value, given the chronic shortage of weapons and ammunition at the front. According to the Moon of Alabama, on 13 June the Ukrainian military used 5 percent of its entire daily ration of ammunition bombing civilian neighbourhoods in Donetsk city.
The reality is that these actions of the Ukrainian forces, as shameful as they are, should not be surprising to anyone. The political ideology and worldview of the Kiev regime and its supporters is very much one that is prepared to commit any crime to justify its ends. Contrary to popular belief, this is not something limited to Nazi ideology (although of course many of the Ukrainian troops are followers of that particular brand of fascism). Rather, it is common to all liberal-imperialist thought, no matter how ‘democratic’ and ‘human rights defending’ it may subjectively claim to be.
Are the crimes that Ukraine is committing against the people of the Donbass any different from the actions of the USA, Britain and European Union imperialist nations when they flattened Raqqa, Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, etc? Was there any concern for civilians shown by these most highly-developed ‘liberal-democratic’ nations, which are invariably idolised as role models by every supporter of Ukraine’s Maidan movement and the Kiev junta? The Nato alliance that Ukrainian regime supporters are so desperate to join showed no mercy to civilians in Yugoslavia in 1999, nor in Libya in 2011.
The imperialists understand that when a population is truly united behind its chosen leadership in resistance to imperialist control, the distinction between civilian and military becomes somewhat blurred. This is seen particularly clearly in imperialist client regimes that do not care so much about maintaining a ‘liberal’ image, such as Saudi Arabia or Israel.
No distinction is made by the Saudi aggressors between the ordinary Yemeni people and the Yemeni resistance. No distinction is made by the Israeli aggressors between the ordinary Palestinian and Lebanese peoples and the Hamas and Hezbollah resistance. In all cases, the people and the resistance are seen as one united enemy, to be broken down through indiscriminate terror and brutalised into submission.
More ‘liberal’ and ‘respectable’ capitalists will deny harbouring such fascistic views. Nonetheless, their actions have been the same throughout the history of western imperialist capitalism, from the French terror during the Madagascar and Algeria rebellions and the British terror in Kenya and Malaya during the 1940s and 50s, through to the more recent terror bombings of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan by US imperialism.
Such is the reality of fighting a class war on behalf of a decaying minority ruling class, in the face of which all their subjective pretences to be defending ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ are shattered into pieces.
When this is the track record of the USA, Nato and the EU, is it any wonder that the Ukrainians who revere them and take them as role models would be just as brutal to the patriotic civilian populations of the Donbass? If these are the leaders of the free world, what can be expected from the followers?
Victory to the Donbass resistance!
