Wiesenthal Center Urges Ukrainian Authorities to Take Action Against General Who Threatened to Murder Jews
May 17, 2017
Jerusalem-The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called upon the Ukrainian government to take legal action against retired Security Service General Vasily Vovk in the wake of a recent Facebook post of his in which he wrote that he intends to murder Jews, among them Jewish MP Vadim Rabinovych. In a letter sent to Ukrainian ambassador to Israel Hennadii Nadolenko by its Director of Eastern European Affairs, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Center emphasized the severity of the general’s comments and lack hitherto of an appropriate response by the Ukrainian authorities.
According to Zuroff’s letter:
“I am aware of the fact that the embassy here in Israel responded to express your regret about the ‘highly provocative post of [an] anti-Semitic character,’ but there is no indication that any legal action of any sort has or will be taken against General Vovk. So although the embassy ‘condemns all kinds of manifestations of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and other forms of intolerance,’ the bottom line as far as the Ukrainian authorities are concerned, is absolute impunity for vicious anti-Semites.
“We urge you to convey our concerns to the authorities in Kiev with a demand that appropriate and resolute action be taken against General Vovk, to send a clear message that in democratic Ukraine there will be no tolerance whatsoever for anti-Semites and bigots of any type.”
It’s been 3 years and over 10,000 people dead, 23,000 wounded and over 1.5 million displaced people in Donbas region. We all know that this bloody conflict is a covert Russian war against Ukraine, and its objective is to destabilize Ukraine and to prevent it from ever having a chance to be a part of Europe and exist independently from Russian influence.
But many Americans don’t realize that the war in Eastern Ukraine is far from being over.
This is why we will march and rally on May 20th to raise the awareness about an on going Russian aggression and to ask the US for support.
We demand that the Russian assisted militia immediately vacate the Donbas region and that Crimea be returned to Ukraine ASAP.
If these demands are not met, we insist on the American government sticking to its promise made in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which is to provide the full and immediate defense of Ukraine by all means necessary, in order to restore territorial integrity of the Ukrainian nation. American Government needs to be tough on Russia.
Above: BackChannels edited (re-paragraphed) excerpt from the San Francisco promotion for the May 20, 2017 march.
For democracy, for classical liberalism, for dignity and freedom, for rule of law (as opposed to the rule of thugs), fight back. Attend or publicize the above-listed marches.
BackChannels finds its unbelievable how so active a war as that taking place in Ukraine — and brought to Ukraine by invading Russian forces — has been so off the headlines in major media. To catch up with events, BackChannels has a portal page, “Ukraine Conflict Resources – Short List“.
Choose your Ukrainian conflict reporting or news outlet and get acquainted.
Russia has launched an unprecedented active measures / disinformation campaign across the web in association with its feudal aggression in Ukraine, and if you have been well informed, you may take measure of that yourself by having a look at the “alternative media” and “alternative news” outlets or the propaganda listings appearing to the right of the videos displayed here. You will find plenty evidence of “reflection in the mirror” or what BackChannels refers to as the “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” in Moscow / Moscow-Tehran’s portion of the “information warfare space”.
The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances refers to three identical political agreements signed at the OSCE conference in Budapest, Hungary on 5 December 1994, providing security assurances by its signatories relating to Belarus’s, Kazakhstan’s and Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The Memorandum was originally signed by three nuclear powers, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom. China and France gave somewhat weaker individual assurances in separate documents.[1]
The memorandum included security assurances against threats or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Russia has deployed as many as 10,000 troops in eastern Ukraine for more than a year and has actively sought to hide the deaths of its soldiers, according to a new report that provides a comprehensive assessment of the Kremlin’s invasion of its neighbor.
The report was published Thursday by the Interpreter, a daily online journal that translates Russian media and reports on Russian affairs, also detailed the Kremlin’s provision of increasingly sophisticated weaponry and vehicles to separatists in Ukraine. Nearly 8,000 people have been killed in the Ukrainian conflict since April 2014.
As Ukraine marked Armed Forces Day today, Poroshenko said that more than 2,500 Ukrainian servicemen and 7,500 civilians had been killed since the outbreak of the war in the spring of 2014.
In an interview with Holos Ukrainy, the official journal of the Ukrainian parliament, the defense minister, Viktor Muzhenko, specified today that 3,064 members of the security forces had been killed in the east since the start of what the Ukrainian government calls the “anti-terrorism operation” (ATO) in April, 2014.
Of this number, Muzhenko said, 2,636 were soldiers in the Ukrainian armed forces (VSU), the others presumably being volunteer fighters or servicemen in the National Guard, police or State Border Service. 2,148 of the VSU casualties were combat losses.
8 December 2016 – A new United Nations report out today has confirmed that Ukrainians living close to the “contact line” – the area between Government-controlled and armed group-controlled territory in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions – not only suffer due to fighting near their homes but also face the threat of landmines and unexploded ordinance as well as have to contend with severe restrictions on movement.
According to the Report on the human rights situation in Ukraine launched today by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), between mid-August and mid-November, at least 32 civilians were killed in conflict-related incidents and another 132 injured. Between mid-April 2014 and 1 December this year, more than 2,000 civilians are estimated to have dined while an additional 298 were killed in the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17.
Conflict-related civilian injures are estimated between 6,000 and 7,000.
“It is of deep concern that Government forces and armed groups operating in civilian areas do not take all feasible precautions against the effects of fighting, resulting in damage to schools, kindergartens, and medical facilities,” noted the report.
It added that it was worrying that Ukrainian military forces and armed groups continued to be positioned in civilian homes and buildings in villages and towns adjacent to the contact line.
The report also raised concern that armed groups in the self-proclaimed “Donetsk people’s republic” and “Luhansk people’s republic” continue to deprive people of their fundamental rights as well as of effective mechanism for redress.
The total number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Crimea and eastern Ukraine is 1,590,056 as of 3 April 2017, according to the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine.
IOM assisted over 137,000 vulnerable IDPs and conflict affected people in 24 regions of Ukraine.
Lack of funds made 40% of vulnerable IDPs IOM assisted with cash in Ukraine refuse medical treatment, according to the post-distribution monitoring of IOM’s project in 13 regions of Ukraine.
The march – with a full police escort – is scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. at the Washington Monument and conclude at the Holodomor Memorial, near Union Station, where a vigil is to be held, concluding at approximately 5:30 p.m.
Among the invited guest speakers are analyst Paul Goble, Peter Borisow, president of the Hollywood Trident Foundation; other noted Ukraine advocates are expected and, at the time of writing, were still being confirmed, among them Ukraine’s Ambassador to the U.S. Valeriy Chaly. Clergy from the Ukrainian Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic Churches, as well as leaders of the Jewish and Muslim faiths in Ukraine have been invited to properly represent the people of Ukraine.
As stated by Mr. Skibicki: “We demand that the Russian-backed terrorists immediately vacate the Donbas region and that Crimea be returned to Ukraine. If these demands are not met, we insist on the American government to stick to its promise made in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which is to provide the full and immediate defense of Ukraine by providing modern defensive weapons in order to help the Ukrainian people restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine. We are NOT calling for American troops to be deployed to Ukraine.”
Greater awareness of the Soviet Era history of the Far Left may help make greater sense of Hassan Akkad’s recent experience.
In relation to yesteryear:
According to Stanislav Lunev, GRU alone spent more than $1 billion for the peace movements against the Vietnam War, which was a “hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost”.[3] Lunev claimed that “the GRU and the KGB helped to fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad”.[3]
Lunev, Stanislav and Ira Winkler. Through the Eyes of the Enemy: Russia’s highest ranking military defector reveals why Russia is more dangerous than ever. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1998.
Vladimir Putin’s fascist nationalist revanche — that thing once again anchored by secret police, the adulation of a Great Leader, and the reappearance of deeply patronized (and compromised) aristocracy — appears to have proven George Orwell as relevant today as back when.
Have another look at the silencing of the one lone protester for Syrian lives at the British “Stop the War UK” event:
After a video of the encounter video was shared widely online, Mr Akkad told the BBC: “I didn’t see them protesting against the chemical attacks, I didn’t see them protesting against Putin bombing Syria for the last two years.
“I wanted to go to that protest and I wanted to observe.
“I went to the protest and I saw a group of 30 people with placards, not a single mention of Assad.
“All the placards are against Donald Trump and they’re repeating baseless slogans with their megaphones.”
Posted to YouTube by The New York Times, April 7, 2017.
Comment:
The public presentation of conflict may attempt to keep separate Syria, Ukraine, Russia, and Iran, but I don’t think the Kremlin (this is a good comment for Kremlin Watch) has an “Off” button in association with the defense of the autocratic feudal past that each dictatorship represents. Expect “mission creep”.
BackChannels may experiment here with watch-write updating on this post.
This is a complicated attack made more so by the foreknowledge that the Russian State, if true to form, will frame it for the public and neither the public nor the sincere among police may have access or authority in the investigation launched.
In the west, the public would trust involved security services to get to the truth and to tell the truth. In Russia, one may expect absolute authority to say what it may and for the public to nod agreeably or mumble away in political impotence.
Order: reverse chronological or most recently encountered material toward the top, a flexible guide.
People protesting in St. Petersburg's Palace Square in 1917 and today, chanting "Down with the Tsar!" pic.twitter.com/hGj5EwO40S
— THEY/THEMARS 🇺🇦 #ArmUkraineNow (@Mortis_Banned) March 26, 2017
The Guardian’s latest:
Hundreds of protesters have been detained by riot police in cities across Russia, as some of the largest anti-government protests in years swept the country.
The call to protest came from the opposition politician and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, who was himself detained at the Moscow demonstration. A monitoring group said at least 700 people were detained in Moscow alone, while the news agency Tass gave a figure of 500.
The post may exist only to get the Sunday reader started on the “All Russia Protests Against Corruption” (the title is BackChannel’s interpretation of the Russian billing for the event).
Note: many of today’s gatherings across Russia in protest of the Putin regime’s feudal indulgence in theft and corruption (reference: Gary Kasparov’s Winter is Coming and Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy) have not been permitted by state officials, so all who have responded to the call for protest risk arrest and other methods of political repression known to those who have challenged similar regimes in the past.
Add the supporters of opposition leader Alexei Navalny now organize such actions in dozens of Russian cities. In many places, authorities have not agreed on the meetings under various pretexts, and some are already there have been reports of detentions.
“The Italian Minister of the residence and you pay for it” (machine translated); posted to YouTube March 16, 2017. English subtitles available using the “cc” (caption) control.
@ naganoff_ru
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