Was bombing of Mariupol theater staged by Ukrainian Azov extremists to trigger NATO intervention?

international | anti-war / imperialism | news report

Tuesday March 22, 2022 23:16

by 1 of Indy

The GrayZone has been at the forefront of debunking much of the propaganda around this conflict and here they challenge one of the more recent incidents

Testimony by evacuated Mariupol residents and warnings of a false flag attack undermine the Ukrainian government’s claims about a Russian bombing of a local theater sheltering civilians

Western media have reported that Russia’s military deliberately attacked the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, claiming that it was filled with civilians and marked with signs reading “children” on its grounds.

The supposed bombing took place just as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to US Congress for a no fly zone, fueling the chorus for direct military confrontation with Russia and apparently inspiring President Joseph Biden to brand Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, as a “war criminal.”

A closer look reveals that local residents in Mariupol had warned three days before the March 16 incident that the theater would be the site of a false flag attack launched by the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which controlled the building and the territory around it.

Civilians that escaped the city through humanitarian corridors have testified that they were held by Azov as human shields in area, and that Azov fighters detonated parts of the theater as they retreated. Despite claims of a massive Russian airstrike that reduced the building to ashes, all civilians appear to have escaped with their lives.

Video of the attack on the theater remains unavailable at the time of publication; only photographs of the damaged structure can be viewed. The Russian Ministry of Defense has denied conducting an airstrike on the theater, asserting that the site had no military value and that no sorties were flown in the area on March 16.

While the Russian military operation in Ukraine has triggered a humanitarian crisis in Mariupol, it is clear that Russia gained nothing by targeting the theater, and virtually guaranteed itself another public relations blow by targeting a building filled with civilians – including ethnic Russians.

Azov, on the other hand, stood to benefit from a dramatic and grisly attack blamed on Russia. In full retreat all around Mariupol and facing the possibility of brutal treatment at the hands of a Russian military hellbent on “de-Nazification,” its fighters’ only hope seemed to lie in triggering direct NATO intervention.

The same sense of desperation informed Zelensky’s carefully scripted address to Congress, in which he invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech and played a heavily produced video depicting civilian suffering to make the case for a no fly zone.

By instigating Western public outrage over grisly Russian war crimes, Ukraine’s government is clearly aiming to generate enough pressure to overcome the Biden administration’s reluctance to directly confront Russia’s military.

But Kiev’s most emotionally potent allegation so far – that Russia deliberately bombed innocent children cowering inside a theater – has been undercut by testimonies from Mariupol residents and a widely viewed Telegram message explicitly foreshadowing a false flag attack on the building.

Full article at link below

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Comments (4 of 4)

What total rubbish to call it a false flag attack.

by English Anarchist

Wed Mar 23, 2022 23:06

What total utter rubbish to call the bombing of that Ukrainian theatre a false flag attack! That sounds like Qanon nonsense! What the hell has happened to the Irish anarchist movement? I can remember when the Irish anarchist movement was far more sussed during the Mayday protests in Dublin of 2000, 2001 and 2002. And how the Irish anarchist movement strongly rejected the war on terrorism in 2001. Now the Irish anarchist movement seems to be be following the Alt Right into conspiracy theories!

FRAUD IS THEIR BRAND

by lem

Tue Apr 26, 2022 19:50

americans are undergoing a long term, methodic attack on free speech, of which the fraud committed during 911 and covid are just small parts. the secret govt created by bush after 911 has taken precedence over real world activities, and fantastic dramatic story telling has become the order of the day....i am undergoing extreme cyber attacks by american military and mormon forces of the nsa whenever i try to run storys on twitter or fb that do not dovetail with the zionist outlook.

Neo Nazis off camera

by Ironic

Fri Jun 10, 2022 07:25

The BBC want you to pretend you didn’t see their segment on the Nazi problem in Ukraine in 2017.

Click to Play Video or download 5.67 Mb

Download: 5_6132154709508622021.mp4 5.67 Mb

Bucha another false flag too

by Anon

Wed Jun 29, 2022 20:09

#Bucha #Investigation Contradicts Itself, Confirms Ukrainian Responsibly For The Atrocities.

Dozens of civilians who allegedly died during presence of the Russian army at the Ukrainian city of Bucha were killed by tiny metal arrows from shells of a type fired by artillery, forensic doctors claimed.

Despite the anti-Russian point of view presented in the research, the results show that it was the Ukrainians who shelled civilians in Bucha.

Pathologists and coroners who are carrying out postmortems on bodies found in mass graves in the region north of Kyiv, where Russian forces have been accused of atrocities, said they had found small metal darts, called #fléchettes, embedded in people’s heads and chests.

“We found several really thin, nail-like objects in the bodies of men and women and so did others of my colleagues in the region,” Vladyslav Pirovskyi, a Ukrainian forensic doctor, told “The Guardian”.

“It is very hard to find those in the body, they are too thin. The majority of these bodies come from the Bucha-Irpin region.”

“According to a number of witnesses in Bucha, fléchette rounds were fired by artillery a few days before Russian forces withdrew from the area at the end of March”, – “The Guardian” reported.

According to Neil Gibson, a weapons expert at the UK-based Fenix Insight group, who has reviewed the photos of the fléchettes found in Bucha, the metal darts came from a 122mm ZSh1 artillery round. It fits the D-30 howitzers, which is in service with both Russia and Ukraine.

“Another uncommon and rarely seen projectile,” said Gibson on Twitter. “This time it’s the equivalent of the US ‘Beehive’ series of Anti-personnel (APERS) projectiles … It operates like a true shrapnel projectile, but is filled with fléchettes and a wax binder.”

The same fléchettes were used by the Ukrainians in 2014 in Lugansk Republic in South East Ukraine

https://southfront.org/bucha-investigation-contradicts-itself-confirms-afus-atrocities/

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Was bombing of Mariupol theater staged by Ukrainian Azov extremists to trigger NATO intervention?

Comments (4 of 4)