Trapped by Artillery Fire: Russian Roulette (Dispatch 88)

[snooper2]

VICE (real reporting not the bullshit that gets posted continually from "RT" )

Published on Jan 27, 2015
After a lull in fighting between the Ukrainian military and the Russian-backed rebels of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR) in eastern Ukraine, violence escalated again in mid-January.

A ceasefire agreed in September seemed barely worth the paper it was written on. A battle continued to rage around the strategically important Donetsk airport, as the Ukrainian soldiers — dubbed “cyborgs” for their resilience — fought to keep the airport from the DNR.

They were unsuccessful. The DNR claimed the airport on January 21, and subsequently launched an offensive on Ukrainian positions along the line of control that separates the two sides. Civilian areas have come under heavy shelling, leaving dozens killed and wounded.

In this dispatch, VICE News headed back to eastern Ukraine to see the effect this new escalation in the conflict is having on the innocent civilians, trapped between opposing barrages of deadly artillery fire with nowhere to go.

[Igel]

1. What generally fails to get mentioned with all the

Lavrovian "Ukraine chose the military option" was the constant bragging and demands that the LNR and DNR required the entirety of the former administrative borders of their oblasts. This bombast has gone on for months. But RT doesn't report it, and the Western media regard it as just so much blather.

They require territorial integrity when it serves them, and said they were more than willing and more than capable of waging war to "retake" the areas, many of which have Ukrainian majorities and were never originally "taken." Not that you could tell it from their press information.

Only Russians have rights. The lesser, not-quite-humans have obligations.