In the meantime, some alt-headlines not seen on CNN etc, do not know veracity, but interesting as PoV spin / a/k/a propaganda
rt.com
Russia threatens to strike US space infrastructure Orbital facilities used to help Ukraine could become legitimate targets, a Foreign Ministry official has said rt.com
US ‘can afford two wars’ – Treasury secretary Washington is more than capable of supporting country’s overseas interests, Janet Yellen has said rt.com
West ‘fed up’ with Zelensky – Lavrov Ukrainian Finance Minister Sergey Marchenko recently acknowledged that Western backers are growing tired of supporting Kiev rt.com
BRICS economies now larger than G7 – Putin The Russian president says the economic group is crucial to the formation of a multipolar world
rt.com
Secret Soviet files reveal horror crimes of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators
Ukrainian women dressed in national costumes salute Nazi German high command during the parade in Stanislaviv (currently Ivano-Frankovsk), October 1941. © Wikipedia
RT has obtained a trove of declassified KGB documents, highlighting crimes committed by Ukrainian nationalists in Soviet territories occupied by Nazi Germany during WWII. The files include witness accounts of people who survived ethnic cleansing, as well as testimonies of Ukrainian collaborators captured by the Soviet domestic intelligence, then known as the NKVD.
Large swaths of present-day Ukraine fell under Nazi occupation in summer 1941 as German troops advanced deep into the Soviet Union. In fact, attacks on ethnic Jews and Poles, as well as local communists, began immediately as Soviet troops withdrew.
“In the first hours following the retreat of the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainian population has demonstrated commendable activity against Jews,” a status report from the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s secret police, dated July 16, 1941, reads.
Said “commendable activities” involved burning down a synagogue in the western Ukrainian city of Dobromyl and the murder of some 50 Jews by an“angry crowd” in Sambor. In Sokal, the help of local “trustworthy Ukrainians”allowed Nazis to find and exterminate some 183 “communist Jews.” Moreover, Ukrainian nationalists rounded up and brutally abused around 1,000 Jews in Lvov, subsequently putting them into a local prison, with the facility and the ‘inmates’ eventually taken over by the Germans, according to the status report.
With the German occupation regime properly established, the ethnic cleansing process was streamlined, with the so-called Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, created by the Nazis in August 1941, playing a very active role in it. According to the testimony of the Ukrainian police commander in Belya Tserkov, a major city in the Kiev region, Mikhail Tomasevish, members of his unit were so eager to kill Jews that they acted even beyond orders given by their Nazi masters. Namely, the local police secretary took pleasure in “questioning” arrested Jews, beating them with a rubber tube, and freely taking them “away” afterwards, with none of the detained ever returning to the police HQ.
Tomasevich led the police unit until 1943, when he fled alongside retreating German forces but ultimately ended up in the NKVD’s custody. While Tomasevich claimed most of the city’s Jews were exterminated before he assumed the post, he admitted partaking, one way or another, in the killing of over 1,000 people. Under his leadership, the police continued to actively search for survivors, using various tricks to lure the remaining Jews in the city to their deaths.
“To identify hiding persons of Jewish nationality, the [German field] gendarmerie, through the [Ukrainian] police, organized so-called traps, i.e., it was announced throughout the city that henceforth Jews would be allowed to live freely, but only in select houses,” Tomasevich testified.
“I put all the Jews who believed that and settled in the houses on a special register, a special folder of cases, titled ‘Yids’ [a derogatory term for ‘Jews’], was opened,” he explained, adding that when the flow of Jews willing to settle in the houses waned, all of them, some 50 people, were detained and killed “around January or February 1942.”
Civilian Ukrainian authorities, established under German occupation, have actively contributed to ethnic cleansings as well. For instance, according to an indictment in a 1944 case about Nazi crimes committed in the city of Sarny and its vicinity, local Ukrainian mayor Marinyuk directly facilitated the extermination of the entire local Jewish population in August 1942.
Some 13,000 people were gathered at a local concentration camp, guarded by field gendarmerie and Ukrainian police, under the pretext of being relocated for “work” in Germany. Instead, the Jews ended up before firing squads, with children thrown into the death pits and buried alive. Only some 40–50 people managed to escape the massacre, with Ukrainian nationalist units in pursuit, and those who managed to capture escapees were awarded a sack of salt.
rt.com
All eligible Ukrainians told to report to conscription offices
Ukrainian enlistees receive basic military training. © Getty Images / Anadolu Agency / Metin Aktas
All Ukrainians liable for military service should attend local enlistment offices for an inspection of their documents, a spokesman for the country’s Ground Forces has recommended.
Vladimir Fityo made the remarks on Saturday live on Ukrainian TV's state-controlled “broadcasting marathon” which has been running during the conflict with Russia.
“Now I would like to remind everyone that the duty to defend their country is ingrained in the Constitution of Ukraine, and in order to be ready to fulfill one’s duty to protect Ukraine, one must come to one’s territorial recruitment and social support centers [enlistment offices] to update your credentials,” Fityo stated.
The visits are required in order to “properly use” the limited resources of the country’s recruitment machine, as well as to exempt those not fit for service, Fityo claimed. The ‘voluntary’ call-up concerns not only military-aged men, but female medics and women with military backgrounds, he added.
“If there are any grounds for a deferment – produce them so that the resources that are there are used properly. A person who, according to the database, is liable for military service and is healthy, but actually has an illness, but did not report it – we do not know that the person cannot serve,” the official explained.
It was not immediately clear to what extent Ukrainians are actually expected to heed the spokesman’s call, given Kiev’s chaotic mobilization efforts, which have been marred by instances of violence by draft officers against conscripts, as well as a vast number of draft dodgers being detained trying to leave the country.
Speaking separately during the “marathon” on Sunday, the head of Ukrainian border guard Andrey Demchenko revealed that the service has caught more than 22,000 draft dodgers at the country’s border since the beginning of the hostilities. On average, at least 20 would-be-servicemen are being caught daily, according to the official. A vast majority of dodgers, about 16,000, had attempted to leave the country by crossing the border in unpopulated areas.
“About 6,800 more were apprehended at border crossings as they attempted to pass through using fake documents,” Demchenko added.
Ukraine has sustained heavy casualties during its much-heralded counteroffensive against Russian forces, launched in early June. According to the latest Russian estimates, cited by President Vladimir Putin last week, Kiev’s forces lost “over 90,000 people,” 557 tanks and 1,900 armored vehicles since its operation began, with little to no tangible result. On Sunday, Putin said that the counteroffensive “has failed completely.” |
