Unpeople

I can sympathise with those who say I should stick to my usual Radnorian related material and not bother with Ukraine, I feel the same way myself a lot of the time.  If our mass media, in particular the BBC, were actually reporting the facts on the ground then I could happily ignore this bloody war at the other end of Europe.  People would have the facts to make-up their own mind about the company our government keeps. Instead we are being fed a load of tripe.  In Lugansk there seems, at the moment, to be just one Western freelancer.  In Donetsk you have a handful of Western photographers and a young Asian backpacker/blogger.  The BBC are too busy rehashing fanciful Kiev press releases or chasing after humanitarian convoys inside Russia to ever venture anywhere near the killing fields.

What is not reported are the civilian deaths, the SS-21 missiles being launched at cities, the 700,000 who have fled across the border into Russia - the largest ethnic-cleansing in Europe since the Second World War.  In particular many folk in the West are unaware of the enormous losses suffered by the largely conscript and barely trained Ukrainian army.  At least 11000 killed so far.  Like the civilians, mainly from working class districts, slaughtered by their hopeless shelling, these press-ganged Ukrainians are unpeople as far as the western media is concerned.

Their wives, mothers and surviving comrades are not unpeople however and in this subtitled youtube video you get a sense of the anger welling-up against the oligarchs who sold-out their country in the interests of American and European meddlers.  Facing such losses, a winter approaching without heating and an economy already in ruins, even before the IMF get to work, maybe the Ukrainian soldiers will follow George Bernard Shaw's advice to the British soldiery of a century ago - shoot your officers and go home.

Please turn-on the subtitles