May 2, 2015

The May 2nd Odessa Massacre: Why Obama’s Coup-Regime Still Runs Ukrain

by Eric Zuesse

The May 2nd Ukrainian massacre of anti-regime pamphleteers last year at the Odessa Trade Unions Building, burning these pamphleteers alive there, was crucial to the Obama’s Administration solidification of its control over Ukraine. That massacre was designed to, and it did, terrorize the residents in all areas of Ukraine which had voted overwhelmingly for the man whom Obama had just ousted, Viktor Yanukovych. Especially in the Donbass region, Yanokovych had received 90%+ of the votes. In Odessa, he had received three-quarters of the votes. (Later will be explained why this terror against the residents of such regions was necessary for Obama’s purpose of solidifying his control.)

So, the shocking methods of executing these people, and its being done in public and with no blockage of video images being recorded of these events by their many witnesses, and with the newly-installed Obama government in Kiev doing nothing whatsoever to prosecute any of these horrific murderers, a clear message was being sent to the people who had voted for Yanukovych: If you resist the new authorities in any way, this is how you will be treated by them. This is how you will be treated (and that video was posted to the Internet by the perpetrators and their supporters, by headlining, “48 Russian Subversives Burned To Death In Fire At Trade Unions Building Fire In Odessa,” so that any other ‘Russian Subversives’ would have no doubt. However, those victims’ identities were subsequently published, and all of the victims were actually Odessa locals, none were Russians. The perpetrators were racist fascists, after all; and, so, being a ‘Russian’ meant, to them, being from a hated ethnicity, not necessarily being a citizen of Russia.) Terror was the purpose here, and Obama was behind it, but nazis were in front of it, and they were proud of their handiwork.

After May 2 Praviy Sektor celebrated the murder of ethnic Russian “beetles” with images such as these,

Yanukovych had been elected in 2010 in an election that was declared free and fair by international observers; and, furthermore, according to wikipedia, “All exit polls conducted during the final round of voting reported a win for Viktor Yanukovych over Yulia Tymoshenko.[162][163][164].” But, starting in Spring of 2013, which was as soon as Obama got into position all of his key foreign-affairs appointees for his second Presidential term, after the 2012 U.S. election, the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine immediately started organizing, for Maidan square in Kiev, public demonstrations to bring Yanukovych down, and they placed at the head of this operation the co-founder of the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine, Andriy Parubiy, a man who had long studied Hitler’s methods of political organization.

The troops, actually mercenaries, that provided the snipers who fired down onto the demonstrators and police in Maidan square in Kiev in February 2014 and pretended to be from Yanukovych’s security forces, were trained not by Parubiy but instead by Dmitriy Yarosh, who was the head of Ukraine’s other large racist-fascist, or nazi, organization, the Right Sector, whose CIA-and-oligarch-backed army numbered probably between 7,000 and 10,000. Yarosh selected the best of them. Whereas Parubiy was the main political organizer and trainer of Ukraine’s far-right, Yarosh was the main military organizer and trainer of Ukraine’s far-right.

So, Obama’s operation to oust Yanukovych was fully dependent upon Ukraine’s far-right, which was the only nazi movement that still retained deep and strong roots anywhere in Europe after World War II. Obama built his takeover of Ukraine upon people like this. As is clear there, they were very well trained. Yarosh had been training them for more than a decade. (He had been doing it even prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union.) Yarosh had carefully studied successful coups; he knew how to do it. Just as Obama had very skillfully selected his political campaign team for his 2008 White House run, he very carefully selected his American team for what would become the chief feature of his second-term foreign policy: his war against Russia, central to which was his campaign to install rabid haters of Russia into control of Ukraine, right next door to Russia (in the hope of ultimately placing missiles there, against Russia). He had groomed Dick Cheney’s former foreign-affairs advisor Victoria Nuland as the spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s State Department (Nuland and Clinton were also personal friends of each other, so she was a skillful choice for this post), and then boosted Nuland in the second term to the State Department post which oversaw all policymaking on Ukraine. Likewise Obama boosted Geoffrey Pyatt into the Ambassadorship in Ukraine, as the operative there to carry out Nuland’s instructions. Nuland made the decision to base the Maidan demonstrations upon the political skill of Paribuy and the military muscle of Yarosh. They headed her Ukrainian team.

Wikipedia says of Parubiy, and of Obama’s other Ukrainian operatives:

Parubiy co-led the Orange Revolution in 2004.[5][11] In the 2007 parliamentary elections he was voted into theUkrainian parliament on an Our Ukraine–People’s Self-Defense Bloc ticket. He then became a member of the deputy group that would later become For Ukraine!.[5] Parubiy stayed with Our Ukraine and became a member of its political council.[12]

In February 2010 Parubiy asked the European Parliament to reconsider its negative reaction to former Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko’s decision to award Stepan Bandera, the leader of the [racist-fascist] Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the title of Hero of Ukraine.[13]

In early February 2012 Parubiy left Our Ukraine because their “views diverged”.[14] In 2012 he was re-elected into parliament on the party list of “Fatherland”.[15] [Yulia Tymoshenko heads the Fatherland Party; and she had been Obama’s choice to become the next President of Ukraine, but she was too far-right for even the far-right voters of northwestern Ukraine, so Poroshenko won instead.]

From December 2013 to February 2014 Parubiy was a commandant of Euromaidan.[16] He was coordinator of thevolunteer security corps for the mainstream protesters.[17] He was then appointed Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine.[6] This appointed was approved by (then) new Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on June 16, 2014.[18]

As Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Parubiy oversaw the “anti–terrorist” operation againstpro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.[19]

Working directly under Parubiy in that “anti-terrorist operation” or “ATO,” was Yarosh, who in an interview with Newsweek, said that he has “been training paramilitary troops for almost 25 years,” and that his “divisions are constantly growing all over Ukraine, but over 10,000 people for sure.”

On May 14th of last year, there appeared, at Oriental Review, an important news report, “Bloodbath in Odessa Guided by Interim Rulers of Ukraine,” which described the roles of Yarosh, and of these others. It opened: “The information provided below was obtained from an insider in one of Ukraine’s law-enforcement agencies, who wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.” It said:

“Ten days before the tragedy a secret meeting was held in Kiev, chaired by the incumbent president Olexander Turchinov, to prepare a special operation in Odessa. Present were minister of internal affairs Arsen Avakov, the head of the Ukrainian Security Service Valentin Nalivaychenko, and the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Andriy Parubiy. Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskiy, the Kiev-appointed head of regional administration of the Dnepropetrovsk region, was consulted in regard to the operation.

During that meeting Arsen Avakov has reportedly came up with the idea of using football hooligans, known as “ultras,” in the operation. Ever since his time as the head of the Kharkov regional administration he has worked closely with the fans leaders, whom he continued to sponsor even fromhis new home in Italy.

Kolomoisky temporarily delivered his private “Dnieper-1” Battalion under the command of law-enforcement officials in Odessa and also authorized a cash payment of $5,000 for “each pro-Russian separatist” killed during the special operation.

Mykola Volvov was wanted by the Ukrainian police since 2012 for fraud.

A couple of days before the operation in Odessa Andriy Parubiy brought dozens of bullet-proof vests to local ultra-nationalists. This video shows an episode of handing the vests to the local Maidan activists in Odessa. Take note of the person who receives the load. He is Mykola Volkov, a local hard-core criminal who would be repeatedly screened during the assault on Trade Unionist House gun-shooting at the people and reporting about the “incident” by phone to an official in Kiev.

Preparations

Ultranationalist militants from the extremist Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA-UNSO), who could be recognized by their red armbands, were also used during the operation. They were assigned a key role in the staging of the provocations: they masqueraded as the defenders of the tent city on Kulikovo Field, and then lured its occupants into the House of Trade Unions to be slaughtered.

Fifteen roadblocks were set up outside of Odessa, secured by militants under the personal command of Kolomoisky’s “Dnieper-1” Battalion, as well as Right Sector’s thugs from Dnepropetrovsk and the western regions of Ukraine. In addition, two military units from the Self-Defense of Maidan arrived in Odessa, under the command of the acting head of the administration of the president, Sergey Pashinsky – the same man who was caught with a sniper rifle in the trunk of his car on Feb. 18 on Independence Square (Maidan) in Kiev. Pashinsky later claimed that he had not been fully informed about the plans for the operation and had dispatched his men only to “protect the people of Odessa.” Thus, there were a total of about 1,400 fighters from other regions of Ukraine in the vicinity at the time – thus countering the idea that there were “residents of Odessa” who burned down the House of Trade Unions.

Deputy chief of Odessa police and principle coordinator of the operation Dmitry Fucheji mysteriously dissappeared soon after the tradegy in Odessa.

The role of the Odessa police forces in the operation was personally directed by the head of the regional police, Petr Lutsyuk, and his deputy Dmitry Fucheji. Lutsyuk was assigned the task of neutralizing Odessa’s regional governor, Vladimir Nemirovsky, to prevent him from putting together an independent strategy that could disrupt the operation. Fucheji led the militants right to Greek Square where he was allegedly “wounded” (in order to evade responsibility for subsequent events).

The operation was originally scheduled for May 2 – the day of a soccer match, which would justify the presence of a large number of sports fans (“ultras”) downtown and would also mean there would be a minimal number of Odessa residents on the streets who were not involved in the operation, since the majority of the city’s population would be out of town enjoying their May Day holidays.

It should also be noted that Kolomoysky himself was directly connected to the U.S. White House.

If not for this horrific massacre, then the voters in the anti-coup regions would have remained inside the Ukrainian electorate, participants in the May 25th Presidential election to succeed Yanukovych as Ukraine’s new President: they would have been Ukrainian voters because the public sentiment in those regions still was not predominantly for separating from Ukraine; it was instead for the creation of a federal system that would have granted Donbass, Odessa, and the other anti-coup areas, some degree of autonomy. But that way, with the moderating influence of the voters in the far southeast, the resulting national government wouldn’t have been rabidly anti-Russian, and so wouldn’t have been, like the present one is, obsessed to kill Russians and to join NATO. Obama needed to get rid of those voters. He needed them not to participate in the 25 May 2014 election. The May 2nd massacre was the way to do that. Here was the electoral turnout in the 25 May Ukrainian Presidential election. As you can see, almost all of the voters were located in the parts of Ukraine that had voted overwhelmingly for Yulia Tymoshenko in the 2010 election, against Yanukovych.

Obama did his best to get the nazi queen Tymoshenko elected as Ukraine’s President; but, now that she was publicly and openly campaigning as the rabid anti-Russian that she had always been, and now that even many Ukrainian conservatives had qualms about going to war against Russia, since there was now so much political rhetoric favoring doing that, Poroshenko won, Tymoshenko lost. Poroshenko had played his cards just right: having been a supporter of the Maidan and of the overthrow of Yanukovych but not publicly associated with the nazis. He was even one of the people who informed the EU’s investigator that the coup was a coup, no authentic revolution.

Publicly, Poroshenko gave no hint that he knew that Yanukovych had been framed for the February sniper-attacks by the U.S. White House and that the overthrow had been a coup. In fact, on May 6th, less than a month before the 2014 Presidential election, Poroshenko said, “Proof was presented at the Verkhovna Rada’s session behind closed doors today that what happened at the House of Unions can be called a terrorist attack.” By that time, the polls already showed that he was going to win the election, and he knew that his only real audience was the man sitting in the U.S. White House.

Obama didn’t get the more overt anti-Russian President that he had wanted, but he still controls Ukraine. The installation by Nuland of Arseniy Yatsenyuk as the ‘temporary’ new Prime Minister to lead Ukraine after the coup, until a new President would be elected on May 25th, turned out to be permanent, instead. And Petro Poroshenko can’t do anything that Obama doesn’t want him to do. So: Obama still remains the virtual Emperor of Ukraine.

The people of Ukraine shouldn’t praise or blame either their Prime Minister or their (perhaps merely nominal) President for what has been happening in their country after the coup; they should instead praise or blame those men’s master: Barack Obama. He’s the person who made Yatsenyuk the Prime Minister, and who controls Poroshenko even though he didn’t prefer him over Tymoshenko.

Ukraine is just part of the American Empire now. Any Ukrainian who doesn’t recognize that would have to be a fool. It’s the outright nazi part of the American Empire, but it’s part of the American Empire nonetheless. Obama is the first U.S. President to install a racist-fascist, or nazi, regime, anywhere, and he did it in Ukraine, which has long been the ripest place in the world for doing that sort of thing. The May 2nd massacre was an important part of the entire operation. This is why that massacre is ignored as much as it can be, in the U.S.