By: Lucas Leiroz
VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israe
$ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct “aid” and $ 130B in “Offense” contracts
Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.
By Edvard Chesnokov / Moscow, Russia
Promoting Critical Race Theory, the UK along with the West desperately fight against ‘white suprematism’ — from toppling colonial monuments to staging promotional videos about Muslim militants among the British army.
But when it comes to Chechnya — a predominantly Muslim land in the Caucasus which has become the part of Russia 165 years ago — the Western media uses a quite opposing narrative. It depicts thousands of Chechen troopers fighting alongside the Russian army in Ukraine as violent killers who brutally slaughter innocent Ukrainian neo-Nazists — apparently following the German racist propaganda of WW1 and WW2 which claimed itself ‘the protector of United Europe from the wild Asian Horde’.
Surprisingly, just 25 years ago, the Western position on Chechnya was also absolutely different. At that time, Baron Frank Judd, the ex-UK foreign ministry and the then-international rapporteur on Chechnya (just imagine an opposite: London would let a Russian authority to visit Northern Ireland and to write an official report on violence outbreaks there) was traveling across Northern Caucasus to check human rights at the territory where terroristic attacks of the local Al Qaeda branch used to spark nearly every day. You know, at that time, during Vladimir Putin’s first term, only a decade after the USSR bloody dissolution, Chechnya was an extremely dangerous place and the new Kremlin leader worked hard to reintegrate it into Russia.
Thereby, for Mr. Judd’s reviews, the pro-Kremlin Russian troops deployed in Chechnya were bad guys, while the Chechen paramilitants were good guys; in 2003, he even argued against the local plebiscite which would approve the reunification of Chechnya and Russia — the that-time analogue of the 2016 Scottish independence referendum when the same London authorities campaigned for the eternal unity of their Lowlands and the British analogue of Highland Chechnya.
The reason for such a dual approach is clear: if you fight against Russia’s Putin, you’re a freedom fighter; if you fight alongside Putin, you’re a dangerous aggressor no matter your religion or nationality.
But back to our story. On March 4, 2024, The Times issued a sensational article entitled ‘I was a prisoner of war. Russia traded me on the black market’ — as if there also were some white, official and London-approved market for trading the prisoners of war (PoWs). Beneath, in the subtitle, the leading British newspaper promised to reveal the story of how ‘president Putin’s forces’ sent Ukrainian PoWs to Chechnya where one of the captives had had its legs and hands cut.
As a decade-experienced journalist, I teach students at the media faculty of one of the leading Russian universities. With all my respect, such an article does not suit even a first-year student’s draft, not to mention the 239-year outlet.
The only fully truthful fact in this article are the words in its subtitle that the Chechens fighters, as well as most Russians, are loyal to Vladimir Putin. Speaking about the main topic, the PoWs at the Ukrainian conflict, The Times cites only one side, such as Petro Yatsenko, a member of the Kiev team on the PoWs’ affairs. Thereby, the newspaper violates the basic media standard of opinion balance, totally silencing the Russian position regarding the case.
In Moscow, there are well-known media persons moderating an extremely complicated PoW-exchange process. One of the most notable of them is Shamsail Saraliev, the Chechen member of the Russian parliament. Almost every month he posts unique videos with recently-released ex-PoWs which hundreds of thousands of views on his social, but the English journalists even did not try to approach anybody on the Russian side.
Despite the subtitle of the article announcing the story of ‘Ukranian PoWs (in plural form) in Chechnya’, the body text exposes the single story of Vyacheslav Levitskiy, a former Ukrainian soldier.
According to The Times, having captured this 41-year old man in the town of Adveevka (Donetsk People’s Republic), the Russian squad ostensibly tortured him to recognize ‘the wavelength of the Ukrainian military radio’.
The problem of this quotation is that wavelength is a physical term necessary for mathematicians; the military men on the battlefield would be more likely to ask about frequency, but even this plot is absurd as most of radio communications at the frontline are hardware encrypted. This means, The Times fed its readers with hoax and the author has not even basic knowledge in war science.
Then Levitskiy was taken by the Chechen troopers and was relocated to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, where the Chechens cut all his legs and hands — as it was pointed out in the article’s caption. Doesn’t it sound terrible?
But let the other side speak. Anatoly Shariy, an independent blogger who criticised both Moscow and Kiev throughout the conflict, revealed a video testimony of Levitskiy. The footage was made in Russia, prior to the former soldier’s release to Ukraine during a round of the PoW-exchange.
So this is the story: after a brutal fight on the frontline, Levitskiy — according to his own testimony in the above-mentioned video — got both his legs injured and had to lay for 10 days in the trenches with frostbitten hands. His feet became gangrenous. Then he was captured by the Russians. As it was impossible to repair his severe injuries on the ground, he was moved to the Grozny hospital. ‘[The Chechen doctors] have brought me back to life’, he says. All in all, they treated him well, and the man was returned to his home country.
Moreover, Shariy cites the testimonies of Chechen doctors who recall Levitskiy’s diagnosis and the treatment protocols — a data massive that is easily to check and hardly to fabricate.
So this is the real story of how ‘Chechens cut all four limbs of a Ukrainian PoW’.
But back to the main problem of the article, its bombshell caption, ‘the Chechen black market of the Ukrainian PoWs’. Such a claim has neither a single evidence, nor even a single mention in the very same text it entitled. Just imagine that I would issue an article under caption ‘King Charles is dead’ and write a story about my home British Shorthair kitten in the body text.
Another part of the story — that ‘some Chechens in Chechnya feel sympathy for Ukraine and want to combat Russia along with Ukraine’ — is a pure example of modern post-truth journalism: such anonymous claims are basically unverifiable. On the other hand, in reality, we see thousands of Chechens fighting among the Russian army against what they call ‘Western satanists’ in Ukraine.
It is not even boulevard-press journalism. It is an Islamophobic, chauvinistic, Geobbels-style pamphlet objected to depict the Chechen ethnic minority as ‘danger’ to Western Europe. So when the current UK shows its anti-racist and anti-colonial attitude, do not let yourself be distracted. Modern Great Britain is the same when its soldiers executed the Hindus and Muslim freedom fighters after the Sepoy Mutiny in 1859.