First-hand sources: Connecting the US to Maidan and to Ukrainian torture chambers. Archived Message Posted by Ken Waldron on September 2, 2023, 6:50 pm First-hand sources Connecting the US to Maidan and to Ukrainian torture chambers ALISTAIR P-M AUG 31, 2023 I sometimes write that ‘there are reports that…’ or ‘it is thought that…’, without offering a link to back up what I’ve said. Partly that’s because posts would end up being full of links that I know most readers wouldn’t click on, partly it’s because it would take forever to write anything, but also it’s because these claims often appear in interviews with legitimately reliable sources that I have heard or read, but can’t easily find again. An astute reader should be sceptical of any claims made without a reference, whether it’s in a blog with a handful of subscribers or on mainstream news watched or read by millions. When the author of a BBC article claims to have spoken to someone who told them that they were tortured by Russian soldiers, my first reaction is always “where’s the audio or video”? The reporters are getting paid to do this, so if the BBC’s mission is really to help people understand and engage with the world around them then the least they could do is show you some proof that someone told them that, so you know they’re not just making it up. They assume trust from their readers, so they don’t feel they have to show proof. I’m just a guy writing all this for free because I feel like I’ll go mad if I don’t, and I don’t expect anyone to believe what I’m saying without showing some sources. It’s very difficult to find articles in English proving that, for example, the US had a hand in the Maidan coup, or that Joe Biden was effectively running Ukraine thereafter. The news space is so tightly controlled that they’d never publish it, and blogs like this one are easily dismissed as being full of ‘conspiracy theories’. Well, what’s a theory when it has evidence to back it up? The following are interviews with sources who had very different first-hand experiences of life in Ukraine since 2013. One was working in the Ukrainian government and even helped organise the Maidan coup (but later spoke out when he saw the direction the country was taking), and the other spoke to victims of Ukrainian political prisons in eastern Ukraine. Since they are just speaking about the things they saw, and not showing photo or video evidence for those things, you are well within your rights to call them liars and dismiss them, if you wish (as any NAFO troll on Twitter would absolutely do). But ask yourself why they would go to such trouble to lie - do they really sound like they are in the pay of the Kremlin to you? They have both earned themselves entries on Myrotvorets, Ukraine’s hit list of ‘enemies of the state’. Andrii Telizhenko, former Ukrainian government official and diplomat In this episode of Aaron Maté’s podcast Pushback, Maté (who also has a Myrotvorets page) speaks to Andrii Telizhenko, who was working in the Prosecutor General’s office at the time of the Maidan coup. He went on to work in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, and later for Blue Star Strategies, a lobbying group that took on Burisma as a client while Hunter Biden was employed there. Telizhenko was subpoenaed to testify in Ron Johnson’s Senate Homeland Security Committee investigation into Burisma Holdings and the removal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, but the US Treasury sanctioned him for his role in spreading ‘conspiracy theories’, thus blocking him from testifying. He was also sanctioned illegally in Ukraine, purely as a result of his US Treasury sanction. He specifies that the US was not only involved in the Maidan coup, they were instrumental in making it happen. Of the Maidan sniper killings, he says that he is fully in agreement with Ivan Katchanovski of the University of Ontario’s assessment, that it was perpetrated by the coup organisers to shore up sympathy because they “needed a higher body count”, as it was immediately reported as being done by forces loyal to Yanukovych. During his time at the Prosecutor General’s office, he saw Americans given security clearance to walk around Ukrainian government buildings. He says that Poroshenko (Ukraine president at the time) would cancel appointments to speak to US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, and that Pyatt was effectively telling Poroshenko what to do. He says that he knows at least three people who have been shot for speaking out against the coup government, and many more threatened by the SBU or other groups. This is, he says, why there is such silence from people within Ukraine against the authorities - they are well aware of the risks to them and their families of saying anything. His Myrotvorets page describes him as an ‘accomplice of the Russian invaders’; his entry was added by ‘NSA’. Laurent Brayard, French journalist Laurent Brayard moved to Russia from France in 2010, and has spent time in Donbass since then. In this interview with Stratpol (in French with English subtitles), he talks about the victims of Ukraine’s prisons that he spoke to. His testimony really is harrowing. Some of the people he speaks about include: A woman called ‘Natasha’, who was picked up by Pravy Sektor in Kramatorsk while doing her job reading gas meters, suspected of being a spy. She was taken to a factory that had been turned into a prison and tortured (pulled out fingernails, broke teeth, injected her with drugs) for 20 days, and then taken to a different prison for another 20 days. Here, there was another female inmate who was tied to a bed and raped by the guards, and who begged them to kill her. ‘Oleg’ is from Mariupol, and he decided to take up arms against the Maidan government after he saw the Mariupol massacre, which took place after the Ukrainian authorities banned celebration of May 9 (Victory over Nazism day). He was arrested in June by uniformed members of the SBU, but four of the five men who detained him only spoke English, not Ukrainian or Russian. He was tortured for several days in Mariupol, but spent a total of 14 months in detention, with occasional torture during this time. Vitali (his real name) was a delivery driver in Mariupol, with little prior interest in politics; he was even in favour of Maidan because he believed it would remove corrupt politicians. Like many in eastern Ukraine, he felt let down by Yanukovych. He too witnessed the Mariupol massacre and saw who Maidan had put in power, and worked as a spy for the resistance. He was arrested, held for over a year, tortured, and his confession (extracted under torture) was used against him in his trial. He spent another year in prison in Kharkov. ‘Olga’ is from a small village called Spartak. The Aidar battalion came to the village, and Olga managed to hide in the roof space of her house, where she stayed for two days. Aidar killed everyone in the village, except for three young men and one young pregnant woman. Olga heard them torturing these four to death over the course of a night. The next day, when Aidar left, Olga saw what they had done to the four. According to Brayard, a Swiss woman from the Red Cross called Charline Franz has heard all of the prisoners’ testimony that he has heard, and many more. The same goes for a Frenchman from the UN whom he declines to name. Brayard’s Myrotvorets page list his main crime as ‘Deliberate violation of the State border of Ukraine’, and under this, ‘transmission of unreliable information’. His entry was added by ‘MI5’. I know that these interviews are quite hard work to listen to. Telizhenko throws a lot of names around that you are probably not familiar with, and he can be a bit hard to understand. He also occasionally makes mistakes about the years in which things happened, which is confusing even if you do know what he’s talking about. The Brayard interview is in French, so unless you speak French, you will need to read subtitles. I still think it’s worth listening to these people, to get a real unvarnished view from behind the media blackout. If you know of testimony of similar things happening to Ukrainian prisoners at the hands of the DLPR or Russia, please share them in the comments. But remember - a news article alleging that something happened without providing some kind of witness isn’t testimony. That’s exactly the kind of disinformation/propaganda we should all learn to disregard. -With all links here: https://alipmcg.substack.com/p/first-hand-sources?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 Message Thread: First-hand sources: Connecting the US to Maidan and to Ukrainian torture chambers. - Ken Waldron September 2, 2023, 6:50 pm Ha - t September 3, 2023, 1:22 am   Searching