By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory
By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory
In Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, a fresh scandal has erupted. And while the Zelensky regime has a long and imposing record of spectacular misdeeds, this one has a quality all of its own.
For what has happened in the town of Petropavlovskaya Borshchagovka, effectively a suburb of the capital, brings together several of the most cruel, venal, and unscrupulous practices of EU-NATO Europe’s favorite gangster regime: mass kidnapping its subjects as military slaves for a Western proxy war against Russia, turning the same operation into a vicious extortion scheme, and using brutal violence – including torture and murder – to make it all go round.
In essence, local people rebelled against all of the above by laying siege to a below-the-radar holding pen for men caught in ‘busification’ raids and those trying to escape the meat grinder war by going AWOL.
‘Busification’ is of course the well-known practice of the Ukrainian establishment and its goon forces of dragging men – often with extreme violence – off the streets and public transport, from work and weddings, out of shops and their homes, really from any place you can imagine – to forcibly induct them into the Ukrainian military.
The preferred vehicles for these literal manhunts are vans capacious enough to hold a team of live-body snatchers and its subdued victim. Hence, ‘busification’ – a word every Ukrainian knows and almost every Ukrainian dreads. “Almost” because ‘busification’ is not only brutal and may well end in severe injury and death – not at the hands of Russian forces but Ukraine’s very own enforcers – but also highly unfair: if you are a scion of the Zelensky regime’s ultra-corrupt establishment, fear not; you won’t be touched. All others and especially the poor and rural live in a national free-fire zone for military slave hunters.
The other way out you may have is, as you would expect in Ukraine, paying a very hefty, indeed ruinous (for ordinary people) extortion bribe. Because once the ‘busification’ kidnappers have you in their van, you may well receive an offer you cannot refuse: find thousands of dollars – no matter how – in cash right now, pay them off, and you can go. To live and run and hide another day.
None of this is news, all of this has long been known to anyone willing to listen to actual ordinary Ukrainians, the ones sacrificed en masse to an insane Western attempt to take down Russia via Ukraine. But then, neither Western mainstream public intellectuals nor media are interested in what these real Ukrainians suffer.
The last element of the ‘busification’ horror is also no surprise: the victims freed from the war-slavery holding pen in a Kiev suburb were massively abused, some brutally tortured. In this case, their tormenters came from the neo-Nazi Azov unit which has colonized Ukraine’s National Guard. But make no mistake: Torture as well is much more common in Ukraine, under and before Zelensky, than Western mainstream media would let their captive audiences know. There have been credible reports of torture inflicted by Ukrainian authorities, including but not restricted to explicitly far-right and neo-Nazi units, for, at least, over a decade.
As with the many outrageous crimes committed by brazen Ukrainian terror commandos abroad, from the Nord Stream attacks to assassinations, the mainstream West has stubbornly turned two blind eyes. Indeed, instead of punishing the Ukrainian criminals and protecting even its own citizens and infrastructure, it has emboldened the Zelensky regime by ceaseless, astronomical infusions of money into its corrupt metabolism.
At this very moment, while the torture prison scandal is evolving in Ukraine, its de facto dictator Vladimir Zelensky is on yet another begging-and-bragging tour to one his most besotted and submissive fans, Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany. Meanwhile, back home Zelensky’s right hand man Kirill Budanov, himself an expert in terrorism and mayhem, has already had to admit the obvious, namely that the Kiev lock-up and torture facility is not unique. On the contrary, it is typical of a whole system of national-scale abuse, of the Zelensky regime’s depravity, and the West’s complicity.
That complicity was on display as if under a magnifying glass, when a US citizen, the critical blogger and journalist Gonzalo Lira was tortured to death – in classical Zelensky-regime fashion – to both make an example and fleece him. The case was buried. Indeed, Lira could have been saved easily, if the American authorities who knew of his fate had intervened.
The Zelensky regime’s impunity is stunning. Not quite yet Israel-level but getting there. And as with Israel, the reason for this abysmal situation is a toxic mix of – very bad – geopolitics and moral and intellectual perversion. For years, Western establishments, from public war propagandists such as Timothy Snyder who has even helped collect money for an Azov unit, to politicians have obfuscated the truth about the West’s favorite client regime, its violence at home and its best friends on the Nazi-level far right.
Western publics have been brainwashed not only with Russophobia but with a systematic campaign of lies and omissions to embellish Zelensky and his vicious regime. That is why what has just come to light, again, in a Kiev suburb, is not only about Ukraine but about the West, especially NATO-EU Europe: They claim that Zelensky’s Ukraine is a frontier where their “values” are being defended and practiced. I, for one, have come to believe them.
And the values in question are those of thieves, torturers, and murderers who betray their own people to enrich and empower themselves. Like Gaza, where the same ‘exemplary’ Europeans are complicit in an Israeli genocide, Zelensky’s Ukraine reveals the truth about this version of ‘Europe.’
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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