TheNZThrower
Active Member
When confronted with the possibility that the Russians have committed a war crime by bombing a theatre in Mariupol housing civilians on March 16, 2022:
He starts off by claiming that Russia had nothing to gain from targeting a civilian building, while Ukraine had everything to gain from a false flag.
The first flaw is that this line of reasoning can be used to justify the proposition that any war crime can be a false flag, including war crimes committed by the US such as the Mahmudiyah Killings:
The third flaw is the assumption that Ukraine had anything to gain from conducting a false flag. This is predicated upon the assumption that Russia hasn't already had a track record of targeting civilian infrastructure from the start of the invasion. This is false as there has been documentation of deliberate targeting of civilian areas by Amnesty International:
To be continued...
some pro-Russian media outlets have alleged that the bombing was a false flag. To use an example, the alternative media outlet called The Grayzone has echoed those claims. This is of no surprise when the author of the article, Max Blumenthal, has been working for Russian state media such as RT himself according to this RT article:As the port city of Mariupol was being razed to rubble by Russian bombs, hundreds of civilians, mostly women and children, went to hide in a theatre near the waterfront, a grand Soviet-era building. Last Wednesday, a bomb hit and - within seconds - the building had been split in two and left in ruins.
While this doesn't necessarily mean that Blumenthal is wrong, it does mean what he says must be taken with a huge dump truck full of salt. This also makes his later accusations of conflicts of interest towards certain pro-Ukraine sources even more ironic.An open letter has slammed the Guardian for "wildly inaccurate coverage of Nicaragua."...
The open letter, which was co-signed by journalists and RT contributors Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton as well as lawyers...
He starts off by claiming that Russia had nothing to gain from targeting a civilian building, while Ukraine had everything to gain from a false flag.
However, this argument does not hold under close scrutiny.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.
The first flaw is that this line of reasoning can be used to justify the proposition that any war crime can be a false flag, including war crimes committed by the US such as the Mahmudiyah Killings:
The second flaw is that Russia did seek to gain something by targeting civilian buildings such as the theatre. Civilians are often targeted for the purposes of inducing a negative impact on the morale of the defenders, to weaken their will to fight and to crush any potential resistance, to reduce the number of people that could potentially take up arms against the invaders. Targeting civilians also increases the total amount of medical supplies required to treat injured people, which can stretch the already limited medical supplies thin and make it so that less soldiers could potentially be adequately treated.A U.S. soldier under court-martial at a Kentucky military base broke down in tears on Wednesday as he described how he and others planned the rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, murdered along with her family.
The third flaw is the assumption that Ukraine had anything to gain from conducting a false flag. This is predicated upon the assumption that Russia hasn't already had a track record of targeting civilian infrastructure from the start of the invasion. This is false as there has been documentation of deliberate targeting of civilian areas by Amnesty International:
and the same incident has been confirmed by Human Rights Watch:A Russian air strike that reportedly killed 47 civilians in the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv may constitute a war crime, Amnesty International said today following an investigation into the attack...
Amnesty International was not able to identify a legitimate military target at, or close to, the scene of the strike.
HRW also documented a case where the Russian invaders have launched cluster munitions into residential areas in Kharkiv, killing 3 civilians:Russian aircraft dropped multiple unguided bombs simultaneously on March 3, 2022, that hit an intersection in a residential neighborhood of Chernihiv, a city in northeastern Ukraine, Human Rights Watch said today...
Although Human Rights Watch was unable to conclusively exclude the possibility of a military target in the area at the time, it found no evidence of any such significant target in or near the intersection when it was hit.
And the Associated Press has interviewed civilians who have gave accounts of Russian soldiers killing civilians (timestamp from 0:58):Russian forces fired cluster munitions into at least three residential areas in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city, on February 28, 2022, Human Rights Watch said today. These attacks killed at least three civilians...
Given the inherently indiscriminate nature of cluster munitions and their foreseeable effects on civilians, their use as documented in Kharkiv might constitute a war crime...
The two witnesses, interviewed separately, said that they were not aware of any Ukrainian military activity in the area prior to the attack. An open-source online map shows an area labeled as belonging to the military about 400 meters from where the cargo section of one of the rockets landed. Satellite imagery from February 20 shows a small compound at that location with about 20 military vehicles. Even if the site served a military function, the use of cluster munitions in a residential area with civilians violates the prohibition on indiscriminate attacks.
So henceforth, Ukraine has nothing to gain from a false flag attack when the Russians have already shown a lack of concern for the lives of Ukrainian civilians.Yurii Bushinskii: We stayed for 14 days in shelters. It was very scary. Three people were killed in our shelters by Russians. They shot people with an automatic gun. They threw a stun grenade and first three people who tried to escape were shot.
To be continued...