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Did Putin Plan the Odessa Massacre?
National Review Online ^ | May 13, 2014 | Robert Zubrin

Posted on 05/13/2014 11:02:27 AM PDT by AU72

In 1943, having murdered most of the Jewish population of the occupied portions of the Soviet Union, the Nazis launched a campaign to exterminate the Slavs as well. As part of this effort, Nazi SS units under the command of Himmler protégé Jochem Peiper (who later achieved infamy in the West as well for his massacre of captured GIs at Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge) systematically rounded up Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarussian villagers, herded them into their churches, blocked the doors, and set them ablaze. Over a thousand such massacres were perpetrated, and the memory of these horrific crimes is deeply seared into the Russian psyche.

So it was easily predictable, when a similar scene was enacted in Odessa on May 2, with 42 pro-Russian activists burned to death or killed by smoke inhalation while trapped in the city’s Trade Union building, that ferocious rage and demands for revenge should break out in every part of Russia and every ethnic-Russian community in Ukraine. Indeed, in eliminating dissent and unifying Putin’s subjects into a mad herd behind his plans for war and fascism, the massacre could hardly have better served his aims and objectives if the former spymaster had planned it himself.

So the question is, did he?

To a person whose knowledge is limited to the Western political universe, the idea that Putin, or his FSB, might have knowingly arranged for the massacre of 42 Russians to gain political advantage might seem fantastical, like the conspiracy theories that blame FDR for setting up the Pacific Fleet to be sunk at Pearl Harbor or George Bush for plotting with the FBI to ensure the success of the 9/11 attack. But the FSB is nothing like a Western military-intelligence or police agency. The FSB does not exist to protect Russians. It exists to oppress them. Within the past century, the FSB and its prior incarnations under other initials (KGB, MVD, NKVD, GPU, OGPU) have murdered millions of Russians and other Soviet citizens, including many of the country’s most talented people, and particularly those most critically necessary for its actual national defense. Far from being unknown, exceptional, or even occasional, terror (along with lies, disinformation, hate campaigns, frame-ups, murder, mass murder, and genocide) has been the standard operating procedure of the FSB and its predecessors since 1917.

Furthermore, as far as Putin himself is concerned, the dictator’s willingness to employ FSB operatives in covert operations involving the murder of not dozens but hundreds of Russians to achieve political manipulation has already been demonstrated. Specifically, in 1999, when he had just stepped down as the head of the FSB and become prime minister, Putin murdered over 300 Russians by having the FSB explode a series of bombs in apartment buildings in Moscow in order to justify a new war in Chechnya and seize dictatorial powers. All known evidence indicates that the FSB was responsible for those bombings, because they stopped only when local Russian cops on the beat caught FSB agents red-handed in the act of planting explosives for the next “terrorist” attack.

Those who exposed these crimes internationally, including former FSB operative Aleksandr Litvinenko, Putin had murdered, using polonium — a radioactive element that is not commercially available except in minute quantities for scientific uses — as the poison, so that everyone would know who did it, and accordingly fear his FSB for its unlimited capacity to commit evil.

So there is no question that Putin had the motive, capability, and character to arrange for the Odessa massacre. Furthermore, he is the only one of the potential suspects to have, in addition to those characteristics, a history of prior comparable acts. The method and timing of the slaughter — coming a week before Victory Day, thereby maximizing its resonance with World War II memories — fit his needs with unique perfection, and, since then, he has been openly exploiting it for all it is worth. In combination, these facts would be enough to make Putin the prime suspect in any police investigation of the mass murder. But the evidence of premeditated culpability goes further.

Specifically, on March 9 — that is, before the March 15 Crimea referendum and subsequent annexation, and well before the early-April initiation of attacks on government buildings in Donetsk and other parts of eastern Ukraine — top Kremlin fascist ideologue and geopolitical strategist Aleksandr Dugin published the entire plan for the currently unfolding “Scenario Russian Spring” on his Russian-language Facebook page. This scenario, whose name “Russian Spring” has become a slogan carried on banners in many of the demonstrations by the Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, lays out a plan for creating havoc resulting in a civil war in Ukraine and consolidation of totalitarian dictatorship in Russia. In Dugin’s scenario, this would be followed by a Russian invasion of Ukraine, with further operations leading to complete Russian domination of Europe and the subsequent creation of a Moscow-centered Eurasian Union stretching “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.”

A key section reads as follows:

3. . . . In Russia itself, the regime evolves, and starts to clean out the fifth column.

4. In Novorossia [the Kremlin’s revived tsarist term for a large region of eastern and southern Ukraine], resistance increases and gradually moves to the phase of direct rebellion against the Kiev henchmen. There is a bloody civil war. Russia deploys massive effective support structure; symmetrically, the West supports Kiev. At a certain moment, in response to the sabotage in Russia and bloody actions of the nationalists and the repressive apparatus of Kiev against civilians and the east of Ukraine, Russia sends its troops into the east.

In short, all the violence currently occurring in Ukraine, including but by no means limited to the Odessa massacre, as well as the concurrent crackdown on dissent in Russia (opposition and independent media outlets are being shut down, the Voice of America has been shut down, new laws requiring citizens to spy on each other are being set forth, social media is being restricted, etc.), is clearly part of a preplanned script.

So, that being the case, how could Putin’s stage managers have put the script into effect in Odessa? It’s really rather straightforward.

It was known well in advance that there would be a pro-Ukraine march of football fans in Odessa on May 2. Accordingly, Moscow agents in Odessa put out the call for ethnic Russians to gather and confront the demonstration with one of their own. But they also sent in Russian military operatives from Crimea and Transnistria to take control of the pro-Russia crowd. When the day came, the Ukrainian marchers were about a thousand strong, while the Russians had a group of only about 200. Across Europe, football fans are notorious brawlers, and the Ukrainian marchers included a preponderance of burly young men who could be expected to fight back hard if their demonstration was assaulted. Nevertheless, despite the fact that they were outnumbered five to one, the special-forces officers controlling the pro-Russian mob chose to lead it to attack the Ukrainian parade.

As recent events have shown, the Russian special military operatives are superbly competent. Why would they launch a street fight with such inferior forces? Surely they must have known that they would be beaten into retreat? They surely did.

The street battles between opposing mobs that have been taking place in Ukraine recently bear a close resemblance to pre-modern warfare, in that the fighting is predominantly through direct physical contact and the forces involved are undisciplined. In this kind of combat, when one side retreats, the other virtually inevitably is drawn to follow. It is thus a classic stratagem in such battles for a clever commander to launch an attack with an inferior force in order to have it thrown back, thereby luring the enemy into hot-blooded pursuit, and thus into ambush. This tactic was used, for example, with great success by Hannibal at the battles of the Trebia and Lake Trasimene, and by William the Conqueror at Hastings.

The Kremlin operatives controlling the pro-Russian crowd followed these examples to the point of inciting the Ukrainians into pursuit, but instead of leading the Ukrainians into an ambush, they led their own followers into a trap. And once they had them there, in the Trade Union building surrounded by an angry Ukrainian mob, and someone started to throw Molotov cocktails down from the roof, the horrific outcome was predictable.

Who set off the fire bomb that ignited the fatal blaze? The Ukrainians say it was the Russian partisans on the roof, or on the third floor. The Russians claim the bomb was thrown into the building by someone in the mob outside. At this point it is impossible to sort these claims out, but it doesn’t matter. If the fire bomb came from inside the building, then case closed. If it came from outside, it could have easily have been tossed by an FSB provocateur planted in the crowd, as the employment of bomb-throwing agents for the purpose of discrediting opposition forces has been a standard tactic of Russian secret police since the days of the tsarist Okhrana.

This supposition is strongly supported by the fact that on April 25, seven days before the fire, the Ukrainian security service, the SBU, caught a group of Putinite terrorists led by an operative from Crimea attempting to set fire to an Odessa bank using Molotov cocktails. According to the SBU, the group had actually been commissioned by one of the Russian TV channels to create “footage,” and received financial rewards for each organized incident.

But even if the fatal gasoline bottle was thrown by an actual Ukrainian hooligan not on the FSB payroll, the primary blame must still lie with the Kremlin stage managers. For they are the ones who planned and set up the whole bloody show — and who are exploiting it to the hilt for hate promotion and public manipulation, including by editing out inconvenient photographs that show the Ukrainians trying to rescue those trapped in the burning building.

The Russian people are fighting mad about Odessa. Across the nation, they are displaying slogans that say things like “Odessa: We will not forget. We will not forgive.”

They have a point. Those who invented, planned, and engineered the fractricidal slaughter in Ukraine should be held accountable. Let us hope that the Russians catch on in time, and bring the real fascist conspirators to justice.


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; Front Page News; News/Current Events; Russia
KEYWORDS: cabal; globalists; odessa; putin; reichstagfire; soros; ukraine; ukrainecrisis
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To: dangus
The Orthodox Church (and to be fair, the Catholic Church) has been an arm of the Russian government since the beginning of the Cold War.* And if the Russians don't approve of a church, they close it.

____
*historians will note that the influence goes back even farther

61 posted on 05/13/2014 1:02:10 PM PDT by 1rudeboy
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And before anyone misunderstands, I’m speaking of the Russian flavors.


62 posted on 05/13/2014 1:03:00 PM PDT by 1rudeboy
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To: dangus
LOL! This is too funny! Your theory was that the National Bolshevist Dugin was a close buddy of Putin, yet you’re now citing his conspiracy theory that his fellow Bolshevists abandoned him because they’re trying to suck up to the Russian Orthodox Church?

Where did I say Dugin was a "close buddy" of Putin? I don't know if they are personal friends. This is your distortion. I said that Dugin has a top position in a University and is featured on state-run Russian media, on top of having ties with the Kremlin. All of this is true, and, being true, that obviously means he has support from the regime, otherwise he would never be allowed to maintain such a position. And where in the quote that I provided is there any indication that Dugin is blaming the communist party of acting reflexively as national conservatives and Orthodox Monarchists? This is merely an observation, not an accusation.

I didn’t attack the subjective portions of your post because they are subjective. I attacked your objective assertion because it was plainly, objectively, ridiculously false, thus impeaching your subjective interpretations.

I can't help but to notice that perfectly normal Freepers in the past, now basically write posts like they are fighting a propaganda war against their opponents. Your posts consistently spin and distort what others write.

63 posted on 05/13/2014 1:04:50 PM PDT by Greetings_Puny_Humans (I mostly come out at night... mostly.)
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To: Greetings_Puny_Humans

Nonsense. And here we see your continued reliance on any hammer to beat your point with: Litvinenko was a neo-communist. Middle Eastern terrorism was developed by the IRA, based on an ideology developed by Hitler.

The US invaded Eastern Europe and handed land sacred to Russia, Kosovo, to bin Laden and his pals. Yes, that’s right: bin Laden wasn’t in Afghanistan in the 90s, he was fighting with Clinton in the former Yugoslavia. Then the Clinton administration created a power vaccuum in Afghanistan which only then bin Laden filled. Our “ally” in Egypt imported every terrorist in the Middle East to his “prisons” which he ran like Terrorism University, until he became too independent-minded for Obama and opposed the Muslim brotherhood.

We didn’t have Qadaffi killed when he was a terrorist; we killed him when he ceased being one.


64 posted on 05/13/2014 1:07:27 PM PDT by dangus
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To: dangus; GeronL
Putin isn’t exactly praising Cromwell; he’s concurring with Churchill’s assessment that Cromwell was a genocidal, regicidal tyrant but as insanely evil as Cromwell was, he is historically included in the founding of British society.

I think you better hope that Freepers don't know anything about history, or, at least, are so demoralized by Kremlin psyops that they do not flinch with such comparisons.

65 posted on 05/13/2014 1:09:03 PM PDT by Greetings_Puny_Humans (I mostly come out at night... mostly.)
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To: dangus

Putin sounds like he was praising Stalin


66 posted on 05/13/2014 1:10:02 PM PDT by GeronL (Vote for Conservatives not for Republicans!)
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To: Greetings_Puny_Humans

>> I can’t help but to notice that perfectly normal Freepers in the past, now basically write posts like they are fighting a propaganda war against their opponents. Your posts consistently spin and distort what others write. <<

Are you serious? You’re citing National Bolsheviks and neo-communists in an effort to defend an article accepting Islamofascists’ crazed conspiracy theories as facts, and you say I write like I’m fighting a propaganda war when I call your absurd untruths absurd? Write like an American and I’ll respond to you like an American. Write like a staff member for the Banderites, and I’ll respond to you like a staff member for the Banderites.


67 posted on 05/13/2014 1:15:26 PM PDT by dangus
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To: dangus
The US invaded Eastern Europe and handed land sacred to Russia, Kosovo....

Interesting to note that you believe land in the former Yugoslavia is "sacred" to Russia.

68 posted on 05/13/2014 1:16:43 PM PDT by 1rudeboy
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To: dangus; GeronL; All
Nonsense. And here we see your continued reliance on any hammer to beat your point with: Litvinenko was a neo-communist. Middle Eastern terrorism was developed by the IRA, based on an ideology developed by Hitler.

I don't know if Litvinenko is really a neo-communist, or even what a "neo-communist is" (what not loyal to Moscow?) But, I do know he was a member of the Russian intelligence service, and therefore has access to the things he claims to know about, who was also poisoned with Polonium-210, with killers who fled to Russia whom the regime refuses to do anything about.

As for your statement, I do not know if the Islamists became Hitlerians at some point, but the KGB's work with Middle Eastern terrorism is certainly undeniable.

"Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same....

I was given the KGB's "personal file" on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth."

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/arafatkgb.html "Incredibly, Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, was educated in Moscow at a KGB-run school. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini was also trained by Moscow. And even the top man in Al-Qaida, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was trained by the KGB, as revealed by KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated by Polonium poisoning."

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/07/ex-spy-chief-how-kgb-created-islamic-jihad/#bXLsAXLofKdiTU8M.99

The US invaded Eastern Europe and handed land sacred to Russia, Kosovo, to bin Laden and his pals. Yes, that’s right: bin Laden wasn’t in Afghanistan in the 90s, he was fighting with Clinton in the former Yugoslavia.

What land 'sacred to Russia' is that? And are you about to tell me that Bin Laden is a CIA agent? I think the forum will be interested with this.

69 posted on 05/13/2014 1:23:34 PM PDT by Greetings_Puny_Humans (I mostly come out at night... mostly.)
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To: dangus
Are you serious? You’re citing National Bolsheviks and neo-communists in an effort to defend an article accepting Islamofascists’ crazed conspiracy theories as facts, and you say I write like I’m fighting a propaganda war when I call your absurd untruths absurd? Write like an American and I’ll respond to you like an American. Write like a staff member for the Banderites, and I’ll respond to you like a staff member for the Banderites.

Are you seriously trying to use Alexandr Dugin, a known Kremlin ideologist, back on me in return? If I start to quote Putin quoting Stalin, would you accuse me of being a Stalinist?

70 posted on 05/13/2014 1:26:26 PM PDT by Greetings_Puny_Humans (I mostly come out at night... mostly.)
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To: 1rudeboy

>> The Orthodox Church (and to be fair, the Catholic Church) has been an arm of the Russian government since the beginning of the Cold War.* And if the Russians don’t approve of a church, they close it. <<

Tell that to the 85,000 Orthodox priests that Stalin had killed in a single year. By 1940, there were fewer than 500 Russian churches with an Orthodox pastor.

Yes, by the time that Stalin was done killing MOST of the Russian priests, those that remained were those that were aquiescent to Stalin, to their everlasting infamy. But that half of one percent of survivors are the exception, not the rule, and it is beyond obscene to paint the victims of Stalin’s crimes as the perpetrators.

In fairness, I’m a Catholic, and the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church, being based in a single nation, was capable of being destroyed is a fundamental reason I subscribe to the notion of catholicity over national churches; there is a foundational flaw in the ROC which made it vulnerable. But that doesn’t make what you wrote of those 85,000 martyrs any less horrible; I pray you wrote it out of pure ignorance.


71 posted on 05/13/2014 1:26:49 PM PDT by dangus
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To: DesertRhino

“Nothing happened in Ukraine till Putin stopped Obama from helping Al Qeida in Syria. Then Nuland and Obama dumped 5 billion onto the heads of Ukrainian opposition groups.

We started this nightmare for those people.”

BINGO....

If the government hadn’t been violently overthrown with OUR MONEY, there would still be a Ukrainian Flag flying over Crimea, and no Civil War in the Southeast.

I don’t think that Obama and the minions ever calculated that Putin would counter-move the way he did. They just thought this would create a thorn in his side big enough to distract from Obama attacking Syria again.

OOPS....


72 posted on 05/13/2014 1:27:55 PM PDT by tcrlaf (Q)
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To: dangus; 1rudeboy
Tell that to the 85,000 Orthodox priests that Stalin had killed in a single year. By 1940, there were fewer than 500 Russian churches with an Orthodox pastor.

I guess you're helping us understand why the partriarch Kirill is a known agent of the KGB?

In fairness, I’m a Catholic, and the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church, being based in a single nation, was capable of being destroyed is a fundamental reason I subscribe to the notion of catholicity over national churches

So how'd you feel about those Catholic priests that were kidnapped in Crimea and threatened?

73 posted on 05/13/2014 1:30:43 PM PDT by Greetings_Puny_Humans (I mostly come out at night... mostly.)
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To: dangus
In the days of the Soviet Union, one could not join the priesthood without approval of the State. Think about that for a minute.

Yes, the Bolsheviks killed priests who opposed them. So what? The ones who remained, and joined, were compromised. And funneled information to the KGB.

74 posted on 05/13/2014 1:34:39 PM PDT by 1rudeboy
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To: Greetings_Puny_Humans; All

We get it already...

The not-a-Nazi Nazi’s, with the Nazi flags, Nazi salutes, and Nazi celebrations, aren’t Nazi’s, they are Not-a-Nazi Nazi’s.

And the coup that wasn’t a coup was actually a Not-A-Coup coup.

Doesn’t that all sound a little cuckoo to you??


75 posted on 05/13/2014 1:35:13 PM PDT by tcrlaf (Q)
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To: tcrlaf

Didn’t RT report that it was eleventy billion million dollars? You should know. They probably tweeted it.


76 posted on 05/13/2014 1:36:14 PM PDT by 1rudeboy
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To: Greetings_Puny_Humans

>> I guess you’re helping us understand why the partriarch Kirill is a known agent of the KGB? <<

Actually, yes, I’m explaining that the only survivors are those that the KGB thought would be useful. But I don’t know how to hold that against Kirill; Pope John Paul II was the greatest anti-communist that ever lived, and the communists signed off on his elevation to Archbishop of Gdansk.

>> So how’d you feel about those Catholic priests that were kidnapped in Crimea and threatened? <<

The one Catholic priest I read about IN HIS DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS had a little shrine set up in his living room in honor of Bander. This is unbelievable, since Bander anaihilated an entire community of 10s of 1000s of Polish-Ukrainians in a futile attempt to win favor of the fuhrer. I was deeply scandalized by reading that account. But then, there are Catholic nuns in America who support Obamacare, so I’ve learned long ago that clerics can put worldly concerns ahead of the true faith.


77 posted on 05/13/2014 1:38:57 PM PDT by dangus
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To: tcrlaf
The not-a-Nazi Nazi’s, with the Nazi flags, Nazi salutes, and Nazi celebrations, aren’t Nazi’s, they are Not-a-Nazi Nazi’s.

The not-aNazi Nazis who poll at about 1 to 2 percent in Ukraine? If you want to make us believe that Nazis run Ukraine, you have to hope we don't actually have enough sense to check.

78 posted on 05/13/2014 1:40:15 PM PDT by Greetings_Puny_Humans (I mostly come out at night... mostly.)
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To: 1rudeboy

Your BS has become tiring...


79 posted on 05/13/2014 1:41:18 PM PDT by tcrlaf (Q)
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To: dangus
Actually, yes, I’m explaining that the only survivors are those that the KGB thought would be useful. But I don’t know how to hold that against Kirill; Pope John Paul II was the greatest anti-communist that ever lived, and the communists signed off on his elevation to Archbishop of Gdansk.

Was Pope John Paul an agent of the KGB or Gustapo, or a collaborator with any Nazis or communists that we aren't aware of?

The one Catholic priest I read about IN HIS DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS had a little shrine set up in his living room in honor of Bander. This is unbelievable, since Bander anaihilated an entire community of 10s of 1000s of Polish-Ukrainians in a futile attempt to win favor of the fuhrer.

Really? Can you post the evidence for that?

80 posted on 05/13/2014 1:42:52 PM PDT by Greetings_Puny_Humans (I mostly come out at night... mostly.)
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