Situationen i Ukraina just nu, del 3

He (Hollande) said there was a need for "time to draw up a law, an electoral law that perfectly conforms" to international standards.

The journalists presented them as facts, because apparently ‘they’d been widely reported’. Lavrov refused to accept the charges as ‘facts,’ reminding the audience that during the ‘hot phase’ of the Ukrainian conflict, Western media were forced to apologize for similar reports about ‘Russian strikes’ on Ukrainian targets, which later proved to have been faked.

We can also recall breaking news stories in the New York Times about Russian troops launching a Ukraine offensive from Crimea (they stated the Ukrainian authorities as the source, putting the reference in tiny print at the end).

Nor did they apologize for describing the Maidan rebels as ‘peaceful protesters,’ even after those peaceful protesters began to kill the police. In 2014, the Western media even included Svoboda (formerly Social-National Party of Ukraine) activists in the list of ‘peaceful protesters,’ and top European diplomat Catherine Ashton shook hands with the party’s leader Oleg Tyagnybok.

Now after the Poroshenko-Tyagnybok fallout, Western media paint the same party activists as dangerous criminals, who killed four law enforcement officers during the clashes in central Kiev on August 31, 2015.

They race to put on the hottest news, peddling very catchy (although untrue and almost certainly vulgar) headlines to the audience. Traditionally the villain, whose intentions the reader is supposed to figure out, is President Vladimir Putin.

Yet some authors appear to be out of touch with reality. They don’t even try to hide the fact that all they care about is the ‘information war’, in their calling to combat ‘Russian propaganda’.

Pro-Russian activists killed themselves [in Odessa]? Then how would Coynash explain the mean headline that appeared in pro-Maidan Ukraniska Pravda at the same time as people were tragically dying: "Separatists are being smoked out of the Trade Unions Building"?

Who was smoking the people out of the building? Putin? No, it was the young nationalistic activists who ‘smoked separatists’ out of the building. And yes, there is video proof.

Ukrainian nationalists hate him with a mad passion.

Most recently, this quite outrageous attempt of the Guardian (in association, perhaps inevitably, with the notorious Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat) use of a photo from Donbass of the aftermath of shelling by Ukraine’s military used to illustrate a ‘report’ (the use of inverted commas indicating the general standard of reports emanating from Donbass – essentially PR dossiers for western press consumption) on how ‘Russia’ was shelling its own positions.

As it is, as an independent, freelance journalist, I’m not on anyone’s side. I like to report, and tell things exactly as they are. The pro-Euromaidan/Ukrainers have been seemingly irreversibly spoiled by a western media which has long lavished sweet spoonfuls of what they want to hear. Now, they can’t go back to the savoury of objectivity, they’ll throw their toys out the pram instead.

My Russian audience never say to me ‘thank you for the pro-Russian news‘, simply ‘thank you for the truth‘.

However, i’m British, very proud to be British.

I’d like the world to know the truth their media doesn’t want them to. A truth inconvenient for a western media allied to western government position in a way I simply hadn’t realised before this was the case.

But as a woman there told me, 'It's not Russia who's attacking us, it's not our own (people's militia), it's the Ukrainian army. And they aren't attacking 'separatists' or 'terrorists', they are killing us.'"