by Marco Travaglio
Who knows if the major Western newspapers will notice the grim humor in the statement released yesterday by Ukraine’s military secret service, the Gur, alongside a video showing a man being blown up by a bomb under his car: “On October 4th, around 7 a.m., in the temporarily occupied area of Energodar, a car carrying a war criminal, the ‘head of security’ of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Andriy Yuriyovych Korotkyy, exploded… After the takeover of the plant, Korotkyy voluntarily collaborated with the Russian invaders, providing them with lists of plant employees with their personal data, identifying pro-Ukrainian citizens. Every war criminal will receive just punishment.” It sounds less like a statement and more like a typical claim by terrorist organizations: only that the Gur is a pillar of the famed Ukrainian “democracy,” trained, financed, and armed by the U.S., NATO, and the EU to fight the autocratic and terrorist regime of Russia on our behalf, in defense of the free world and international law.
The narrative was already quite absurd until the day before yesterday, given the ten years of civil war in Donbass and especially the terrorist acts carried out by Ukrainian secret services and death squads around the world: the explosions of the Russian-German Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines by a Ukrainian saboteur wanted by Berlin, who fled to Poland and then to Kyiv in a diplomatic car from the embassy in Warsaw; the murders in Moscow of Darya Dugina, daughter of a pro-Putin philosopher (car bomb), and the former Ukrainian socialist deputy Ilya Kiva, expelled and convicted of treason after criticizing Zelensky, also for his drug addiction (headshot); the murder of pro-Russian Ukrainian blogger Vladen Tatarsky in Saint Petersburg (explosive statuette); the attempted assassination of Russian nationalist writer and politician Zakhar Prilepin, who was injured and sent into a coma by the explosion of his car near Moscow; the killings of “propagandist” journalists, meaning those unfavorable to the regime, proudly claimed in May by the head of the Gur, Kyrylo Budanov; the support for jihadist groups linked to ISIS and al-Qaeda in Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso, bragged about in July by a Gur spokesperson as an anti-Wagner move. But up until now, the Ukrainian state terrorists always struck abroad. Now they carry out attacks at home: instead of wasting time arresting and prosecuting alleged collaborators, they just blow them up directly. Luckily, Ukraine is with the Good Guys and will indeed join the EU and NATO, while Russia leads the Bad Guys, so much so that the European Parliament has declared it a “terrorist state,” and Putin has an international arrest warrant. Otherwise, who knows what people might start thinking.
Il Fatto Quotidiano, October 5, 2024
