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Disarming Ukraine Day 15: A Curious Hospital Bombing And ‘No-Fly Zone’ Pressure
This allegedly happened on March 9 at about 17:30 local time (15:30 UTC) in Mariupol, Ukraine:
Russian forces bombed a maternity and children's hospital in southern Ukraine, authorities there said Wednesday, an attack described by the country's President Volodymyr Zelensky as an "atrocity."
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Mariupol city council posted a video of the devastated hospital in the city and accused Russian forces of dropping several bombs on it from the air.
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Police in the Donetsk region said that according to preliminary information at least 17 people were injured, including mothers and staff, as a result of the attack.
Zelensky repeated his call for the NATO military alliance to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine, as he expressed his outrage at the attack.
This is curious. The three story building is quite large with more than a hundred rooms.
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Pictures show that all windows have been destroyed by a huge pressure wave. If there had been people in the building many would be dead and all would likely have cuts from glass and other debris flying around.
How come that there were allegedly only 17 people injured?
The video taken shortly after the incident (still in daylight) and published by CNN shortly thereafter shows the completely destroyed interior of the hospital but no casualties and no traces of blood on the floors. The still pictures published with the CNN report show only one man in uniform who has some blood on his face. Other persons in the pictures have no visible signs of wounds.
A day before a news piece in the Russian magazine Lenta.ru published on March 8 at 00:01 local time (March 7 21:01 UTC) had mentioned the hospital. (The piece was fetched by archive.org on March 7 22:09 UTC.) It is a report from a Lenta.ru reporter in Donbas who interviewed refugees arriving from Mariupol. Here is a machine translated excerpt:
“They can’t hold out for more than a week” Residents of Mariupol talk about the humanitarian catastrophe that is unfolding before their eyes
The correspondent of Lenta.ru visited the village of Bezymennoye in the south of the DPR, where residents of Mariupol fleeing the hostilities arrive, and talked with those who managed to leave the city.
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Some of the residents of the villages adjacent to Mariupol managed to get to the territory controlled by the DPR without any problems. But not everyone is so lucky, and everyone has their own story.
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During the first day of the humanitarian corridor's operation, only 52 people left Mariupol (and about 200,000 were expected). There are always human tragedies behind the numbers.
A man walks by the tents where refugees are taken. He is on edge and does not let go of the phone, his face shows that he has not been without sleep for several days. His name is Igor, he spent about a day on the road to get to Bezymennoye from the Crimea. He constantly approaches the military, employees of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, asking to see the lists to find out if his elderly parents were able to evacuate from Mariupol. He is trying to go along with the soldiers towards the front line, closer to the city.
Igor said that in the last days of February, people in uniform came to the maternity hospital where his mother works. He does not know whether they were fighters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine or the nationalist battalion "Azov" (banned in the Russian Federation). The military knocked down all the locks, dispersed the staff of the maternity hospital, and set up firing points in the building in order, as they explained to the doctors, to prepare the “fortress of Mariupol” for defense. The reaction of the military to objections is standard: blows with rifle butts, shooting into the air.
On March 7 (UTC-5) the permanent mission of the Russian Federation to the UN published a statement by its Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia had made at a UNSC briefing on the humanitarian situation in Ukraine. The briefing had been scheduled for March 7 3:00 pm local time (March 7 20:00 UTC). (The statement was fetched by archive.org on March 8 at 2:12 UTC.)
The statement says among other things:
By our records, 200 thousand civilians are trapped in Mariupol alone and held at gunpoint by the Azov battalion. The humanitarian situation in cities deteriorates rapidly. As for humanitarians who are ready to help, they cannot get in there and prevent the unfolding disaster. People in other regions of Ukraine that have been blocked by nationalist battalions find themselves in the same desperate situation.
Ukrainian radicals show their true face more distinctly by the day. Locals reports that Ukraine’s Armed Forces kicked out personnel of natal hospital #1 of the city of Mariupol and set up a firing site within the facility. Besides, they fully destroyed one of the city’s kindergartens.
We have these records:
- On March 7 some time after 20:00 UTC the maternity hospital #1 in Mariupol was mention at a UNSC meeting as being occupied by the Ukrainian military.
- On March 7 21:01 UTC Lenta.ru published a report from a reporter in Donbas who had interviewed someone who said that the hospital was occupied by possibly Azov or other military forces.
- On March 9 about 15:30 UTC the hospital gets bombed and completely destroyed but with astonishing few alleged casualties none of which are documented despite video records taken on the scene shortly after the incident.
- Shortly thereafter President Zelensky uses the bombing to publicly press for a 'western' enforced 'no-fly zone' over Ukraine. (There is currently a Russian enforced no-fly zone over Ukraine.)
I leave it for readers to decide what really has happened here.
209 Cont’d–
I want to provide this Q&A exchange with its own spot as Lavrov goes off in a manner similar to the 25 February presser, which I posted portions of a few days ago. You can see Lavrov’s controlled anger in his words and word choices. It’s a type of fire western presstitutes are seldom subjected to, although that’s occurring more often now that the gloves are certainly off. For total context, I’m also including the Q, and do note that Lavrov answered the entire multipart Q:
“Question (translated from English): Russia used various words to justify the invasion of Ukraine, but you said that this is for the benefit of the Ukrainian people. How can you justify the shelling of the maternity hospital and the hospital where the children were treated? Do you agree with President Zelensky that it is an atrocity to shoot at mothers and children? As for the Russian people, Russia faces a default – forty billion dollars – this will send Russia to 1917, during the Bolshevik Revolution. What do you say, making excuses to Russian citizens, that you destroyed their economy because of an invasion that the rest of the world thinks should not have happened?
“Sergey Lavrov: About the maternity hospital, this is not the first time we have seen pathetic cries about the so-called ‘atrocities’ committed by the Russian armed forces. Three days ago, on March 7, at a meeting of the UN Security Council, our delegation presented the facts that this maternity hospital had long been seized by the ultra-radical battalion ‘Azov’, from where all the women in labor, nurses, all the attendants were expelled. Therefore, draw your own conclusions about how public opinion around the world is manipulated.
“Today I saw the reports of your channel and other Western media. Very emotional. Unfortunately, the second side of any situation that allows you to make an objective representation is never given much attention.
“As for the state of the Russian economy, as you know, we will take care of this ourselves. Both the President of Russia and our Government are engaged in this. You say that we have used many words to justify what we are doing in Ukraine. We drew attention to the fact that ‘anti-Russia’ has been made out of Ukraine for many years. Since the early 2000s, the West has publicly demanded that Ukrainians decide whether they are with the West or with Russia before each election. That is, either you are with us or you are against us. What are these Western values that have been hammered into the minds of the Ukrainian people? In addition, we observe such things: as soon as the pro-Western ‘candidate’ was in last place, as it was in 2009, the West, in violation of the Constitution of Ukraine, forced the Constitutional Court of the country to decide on the third round of voting. There were many such manipulations in those ‘best years’. A pro-Western experimental instrument was constantly being created from Ukraine. Ultimately, NATO began to demand that Ukraine have complete freedom to join this bloc, naval bases have already begun to be created in Ukraine, and there was talk of deploying missiles there that pose a direct threat to the Russian Federation. Now we find out that secretly from the Ukrainian people and the world community, military-biological laboratories also functioned there. When they began to talk about the need for Ukraine to abandon the nuclear-free status, we began to appeal to the reason and conscience of our Western partners and proposed to agree on the principles of security on the European continent. We were told that you can talk about anything, but do not even get into the issues of NATO expansion. We will decide this without you. Don’t worry, NATO enlargement doesn’t threaten your security. Why would NATO determine our security issues and our security interests? It’s not going to go that way. You can’t talk to Russia like that. We are not going to justify our actions in Ukraine. Their goals are very specific: we do not want the militarization of Ukraine in NATO or without NATO, because it is possible to put American systems there without NATO, which will keep our territory under the gun. We do not want to build a neo-Nazi state in Ukraine with traditions, when battalions with SS stripes march in front of the President of Ukraine. When these militants train to carry out terrorist activities. We want Ukraine to be neutral. President Vladimir Putin has said many times that by insisting on the non-expansion of NATO, we do not want to deny the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian state security. We are ready to discuss security guarantees for the Ukrainian state together with guarantees of the security of European countries and the security of Russia. The fact that now, judging by the speeches of President Zelensky, the understanding of this approach is beginning to make its way, inspires a certain optimism.
“As for our economic problems, we will cope with them. We coped with difficulties at all stages of our history, when they arose. This time, I assure you, we will come out of this crisis with a completely healed psychology and consciousness. We will have no illusions that the West can be a reliable partner, we will have no illusions that the West will not betray at any moment, anyone and its own values. Where is it that private property rights can be trampled upon with the flick of two fingers? Where is it seen that the presumption of innocence, as a pillar of the Western legal system, is simply ignored and grossly violated? I assure you, we will definitely cope. But we will do everything to no longer depend in any way on the West in those areas of our life that are crucial for our people.” [My Emphasis]
I usually skip the videos, but this time I want to watch Lavrov’s eyes and hope that the camera also shows the face of the presstitute so its reaction can be seen. The following comes from the end of an A to a Q later down the transcript:
“We realized that now we are not talking about Ukraine at all, but about aggression against everything Russian: interests, religion, culture, language, security, etc. The fierce reaction of the West to our actions shows that there is indeed a battle not for life, but for death, for Russia’s right to be on the political map of the world with full respect for its legitimate interests.” [My Emphasis]
I’d provide even more emphasis to a few key words if I could, but Lavrov is 100% correct to draw the conclusion that as with WW2 the situation is existential for Russia, Russians, and all things Russian. And yes, there’s more, but I’ll leave it for you. At least after he stated the above there appeared to be some retrospective thinking, but it didn’t last very long as you’ll see when you read that last several Qs.
Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 11 2022 0:10 utc | 216
For a diverse mob of humans from all over the planet who express nothing but contempt for corporate global media, we sure spend a helluva lot of time and energy on the beatup propaganda issues pushed by that crew.
When the front page of every website was dominated by commentary, after article, after ‘fact-based’ piece on covid, it was exactly the same in here at MoA. b would try to set up anything-but-covid alternative threads yet the covid posts always crept in seeking to dominate. Why? Well in many cases the covid free threads were popular so someone with an axe to grind about some aspect of covid but without manners, would always push in to ensure their view was foisted on as many as possible.
The same thing is happening now with Ukraine, there are other conflicts, some like Yemen killing many more humans each day than Ukraine, that only get a few mentions, and of course if any of us bothered to look hard at Africa we would find many conflicts, some local affairs where a clan is getting threatened, raped & murdered off their long held traditional lands because their ancestors were stupid and parked their mob on a spot where some now hugely valuable mineral or metal has been lurking since the year dot.
Other whitefella engineered conflicts in africa are much bigger involving the destruction of entire nations of humans – see (the links are entirely random, just there to show there is a conflict but often low on facts, mostly just repeating imperial lies) Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Cameroon, Kenya, Uganda, Chad ‘insurgency’ in Magreb to name but a few.
That list was too easy to construct, all I did was write down a list of the countries in Africa which first came to my mind, then enter each nation into duckduckgo followed by the word conflict, hit search & rummage through the result.
I figured if a certain African nation’s name would come to mind I had probably read about it and since just about all reporting on Africa is about wars that the list would probably reveal a few organised killings which I could not recall. It did but the success had me gobsmacked for a minute.
I did not expect a 100% strike rate though which is what I got, every name revealed a very recent, probably ongoing, certainly not settled, conflict.
By running these occassional bloody but superficial, largely info free articles, corporate media indoctrinates us all into believing that it’s blackfellas’ fault, corrupt, violent people who would rather kill each other than live happily ever after.
Of course the one thing that these stories almost never reveal, well not before the fight is over and we’re talking history not currency, is the cluster of self-interested whitefellas eagerly arming & winding up at least one of the sides in the conflict.
Few if any of these entirely avoidable horror stories ever make multiple front page stories in one day as both covid and Ukraine have done. Unless one of the brave resistance to whitefella exploitation types shoot down an amerikan helicopter, a blackhawk say, then maybe they would garner two front page articles for a day, maybe even a steaming & stinking pile of hollywood propaganda. But certainly never the weeks of Ukraine or the months of covid. Lookit the Grauniad’s front page where there must be links to 20 different articles on ‘wot those russkies are doing to the innocents of Kyov’.
There was a time when most if not all media outlets offered a range of different stories each day, but no longer.
Since March 2020 we have all gotten used to just one story dominating many different pieces across many frontpages and news programs. Covid first, now Ukraine.
This is why we are all noticing the uniformity of views on Ukraine, not defending a nation thousands of kilometers from where you live, where elected representatives are cowed in supporting an ideology adhered to by around 2% of the population, at the point of a gun, isn’t only considered treason in Ukraine, it is also considered to be treasonous by yer drinking buddies.
If you are rude enough to point out that you don’t live in Ukraine, you live in amerika, englanderland or Oz, you will be told that “There is such a thing as treason against values, you know” WTF does that even mean? Of course saying that only gets you into a shouting match where blatant lies are considered to be absolute truths.
We’re all fucked for as long as this continues, at least until the reality of what standing up for a corrupt, nazi controlled administration actually means for Jo/Joe Q Citizens can no longer be ignored.
Actually I’m beginning to wonder if any response at all including facts in opposition to the lies, is the wrong move as all responses to the story generate interest, encourage more stories which keeps the pot boiling.
Are we stuck in a lose lose where the only useful response to this unmitigated 24 hr a day, 7 day a week complete bulldust propaganda, is no response at all?
It seems everything else, positive, negative or indifferent, just keeps propagating the story for one more newscycle.
Posted by: Debsisdead | Mar 11 2022 5:01 utc | 263
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