It is a feature of Western mainstream journalism that from time to time individual reporters in the field report the truth in an unvarnished way. This is an excellent report from a journalist in the field in Eastern Ukraine, on Channel 4. The reporter shows that there are thousands of people in Pokrovsk who are waiting for the Russians to arrive. There is an interview with one woman who explains very clearly that the West of Ukraine “spits on them”. This was precisely the problem that the Minsk agreements were supposed to solve; a large section of the population in the Donbas feel that there are not represented in Kiev and that the Western Ukrainians look down on them. I’ve seen other, similar reports on mainstream media, which, again and again, report on these “waiting ones”. [1] Early on in the current war I saw a clip when a Ukrainian commander was interviewed and he referred to people in the East of Ukraine as backward. So; clear, convincing, definitely not “Russian propaganda”; many people (not necessarily a majority but not a small minority either) of people in Donbas would prefer to be under some kind of Russian umbrella, than be ruled by Zelensky and his Ukrainian nationalists.
At the editorial level and in the political circles they persist with the myth about “sovereign Ukraine”. The narrative is that Ukraine is fighting to defend its sovereignty and territory against “Russian aggression” and “Russian imperialism”. At the political level and at the level of the editors in London the people pictured in this report simply do not exist and Merkel can mock the Minsk agreements, claiming she only signed them to buy time for a military solution. The West has allied itself with Ukrainian nationalists who despise many of their own citizens in the East for being “backward”. We may even be prepared to go to WWIII to support these people in their fundamentally undemocratic project which is at odds with European values of recognizing minority cultural and linguistic rights.
It is a really bizarre situation. Essentially Western policy is based on a narrative which flies in the face of the truth that they can see in front of them, on their own TV screens produced by their own reporters. (Channel 4 is owned by the British government). I don’t really know what to make of it. The official Western narrative is simply unsustainable based on the reports in their own media. It is like talking to a madman who thinks he is Napolean. Even after you provide him with conclusive proof that he is not, his birth certificate, a dead Napolean, he goes on asserting it. What can you do in the face of such total madness? It is really difficult to know.
Notes