This is a truly awful video to watch — and Vice is going to get themselves in trouble if they keep staying this close to the action (and their correspondent Simon Ostrovsky was already kidnapped and mercifully released).
If in Crimea, we would see ordinary people somewhat baffled or not even supportive of the "little green men" — Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, even Russian perestroika liberals — now we see that ordinary people in Slavyansk or Kramatorks are really radicalized and turning ugly. Watch the middle-aged woman at the end who is ready herself to go fight the fascist Banderaites in Kiev, and personally tear Yuliya Tymoshenko to bits if she can find her.
Naturally they seek revenge for Odessa, which they believe is a clear-cut pogrom of their own people by Right Sector covered-up and/or aided by the "Kiev junta".
One thing is increasingly becoming clear from the escalation of violence — the pro-Russian separatists really loathe Kiev not so much because they are nationalists or "fascists" but because they made deals with the corrupt oligarchs in the south and east in order to stay in power. Note the scenes where the separatists go in and take over the banks and invoke the need to stop the oligarchs in political power as well who they feel paid for EuroMaidan, but more to the point, they blame for their own miseries.
Every single one of the Ukrainian "liberal" leaders we've had since the failed coup has had to do that — Tymoshenko is only the most colorful and Yanukovych was only the most efficient and wealthy. All of them played the nationalist card and then played the Russian factory town card especially for oil and gas and heavy equipment manufacturing. And the price they pay now is this.
Kernes, now regaining consciousness and sending out tweets after a serious injury from an assassination attempt, is only the most obvious of such figures bought out by Kiev higher-ups and who played the Russian card. Aksyonov played it the best so far, he got himself an Autonomous Republic which Russia may have trouble actually subduing, crime-wise, especially with Kadyrov's Chechen tycoons coming in to invest. The others are playing at Autonomous Republic but don't quite have them yet.
But buying out corrupt local potentates sure made ordinary people mad and now they will pile on the tires to burn by the city councils and police stations. Still, there are quite a few who you see as just trying to stay out of the way and not necessarily mobilized; this isn't Palestine, and Pastukhov's lurid invocations of a "Russian Palestine" just doesn't make sense yet (and he doesn't even say that about Chechnya or Dagestan).
All of this reminds me of the feeling Belgrade had, when a friend of mine who used to be a liberal and a federalist and not a nationalist, and who kept trying to report the truth and get people to stop being hysterical about the other side's sins, finally said in exasperation, "I'm going to fight this war."
I don't have time now to round up, link, and translate all the material on Odessa aftermath out there — I see a lot of conspiracy stuff. Radio Liberty's Russian Service Svoboda has some good stories.
Pyotr Poroshenko, the chocolate tycoon and Ukrainian oligarch who is running for president, is among those claiming that the people who died in the Trade Unions Building were poisoned with some other gas than the carbon monoxide that naturally occurs during a fire.
Like the conspiracy theories analyzing the corpses (and there are full videos of their bodies right after the fire burned out, and loads of pictures on social media), he is claiming that they couldn't have possibly died just from fire gases because they aren't curled up in the fetal position, the items around them aren't burned, or only their heads and not the rest of their bodies are burned.
I don' know what the forensic proof for this is at all, but if people try to commit murders with other weapons or means and then try to hide it with arson, generally the police, in a normal country, will figure this out. But there may not be any good-faith investigation in Odessa. I hope there will be. They say they are involving foreigners. This is something the OSCE and UN and international NGOs should be allowed to take part in because it's vital for stopping further spread of hatred and war. It's likely already too late.
I don't see that the theory of other poison gas holds necessarily, as you can drop and pass out from carbon monoxide in a fire — which can happen very fast — I've been in a tall building on fire before and the people on the ground floors are lucky if they can get out fast without anything blocking their way; the people on the higher floors are better of staying in place if they can get to a window to breathe because descending stairs leads them to smoke and gas and death. The levels go up fast and are deadly quickly.
We need real forensic experts to examine this. Could the people simply have passed out from carbon monoxide without being burned? Could a fire-ball have whooshed through when a window did get opened and only strike some of their heads and not bodies? Could bodies have been dragged because people thought maybe they were still alive and were trying to help?
There's the case of the woman who was screaming out the window for help, and then was found dead, having fallen backward against her desk. She appears to have been a building worker. There is the strange story that she was strangled by wire, but no real evidence of that at all; she, too, could have died of CO2.
Some of the people found dead inside are said to have had bullet wounds in their heads. Really? We were told that there were five people shot from the roof whose bodies were outside on the street. Are there more?
The list of names and causes of death has now been released in various formats, some incomplete. There are five with gunshot wounds listed as causes of death, 8 with death from jumping out windows, and the rest from asphyxiation and a few from burns.
The only evidence I could see for a possible other gas was the man spraying something on the roof. What was he spraying? Was it fire-starter?
There are tales that a crate of gas masks was found in the separatists' tent. But how? They were burned, remember? Other tales say they found the gas masks inside the building? Really? Can we get some more evidence?
The names in the list do not appear to contain any Chechens or Caucasians or foreigners of any type — they are all Russian and Ukrainian last names. But could they have been from Russian Federation or Transdniestria? We don't know because the Ukrainian Internal Ministry isn't telling us.
The ages of the people killed lets us know that part of what "Sofya" said was true, as I feared — that 6 were women, and 10 or so were in their 40-60s or even 70s — elderly people caught up in the cause of separatism, Soviet nostalgia. Most of the women were among the 10 or so elderly.
Of the men, two were only 17 and 18, very young for such an adventure, and the rest were in their late 20s and 30s, which suggests that they aren't organized combat-ready commados. Or maybe they are, seasoned, hardened mercenaries? But we have no way of knowing that because we don't have any bios yet. My guess is that this is a mixture of people who just got caught up in this cause from Odessa itself, and that likely there are few if any outside Russians who are some kind of battle-hardened separatists. If there were such people, they are the ones who likely escaped the building — remember, some 200 or more did escape.
I still don't see any evidence from the miles of videos out there that people outside — Ukrainian nationalists — deliberately lit the door on fire to make a barricade of furniture inside catch fire and block the exit. It looks to me rather from the video that a Molotov cocktail thrown randomly at the building happened to strike the open doorway and get in. Yet people say they saw doorway fire-lighting on live-stream, and maybe there is such footage or an eye-witness report. I have not seen any yet.
We also see from some of the footage of the victims that barriers were built inside the building on the stairways, keeping some people from escape. Barriers built by separatists to prevent nationalists' attacks? Or barriers built by nationalists to help separatists smother and die? That's what has to be determinated.
Police have arrested people they say are instigators from Russia. While more than 60 were let out after their supporters stormed the police station, some remain held. And given that they shot at least 6 or 8 people dead, that stands to reason.
P.S. I forgot to mention last time and now the issue of the red tape found on some policemen's jackets and some demonstrators' jackets. Here's one version of this story.
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