Need debunking: The Maidan sniper attack was a false flag

[TheNZThrower]

Hi everyone! I have encountered this paper by a political scientist called Ivan Katchanovski which alleges that the 2014 sniper attacks during the Euromaidan Protests were a false flag by far right elements of the Euromaidan:

This academic investigation concludes that the massacre was a false flag operation, which was rationally planned and carried out with a goal of the overthrow of the government and seizure of power. It found various evidence of the involvement of an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland. Concealed shooters and spotters were located in at least 20 Maidan-controlled buildings or areas. The various evidence that the protesters were killed from these locations include some 70 testimonies, primarily by Maidan protesters, several videos of "snipers" targeting protesters from these buildings, comparisons of positions of the specific protesters at the time of their killing and their entry wounds, and bullet impact signs. The study uncovered various videos and photos of armed Maidan "snipers" and spotters in many of these buildings.

However, I have already noticed a few red flags. The first one being that the paper is written for the ''Annual Meeting of American Political Science Association in San Francisco'' in 2015, and thus it isn't peer reviewed. The second issue is that Katchanovski does not have any expertise in ballistics or forensics. This doesn't automatically mean he is wrong, but it does mean that he isn't very qualified to comment on where the culpability for the Maidan sniper attack lies.

If anyone has any more leads regarding this paper, it would be welcomed, as I am not an expert in modern Ukrainian history, or in ballistics or forensics myself, and I don't have the resources alone to be able to write a proper response to it.

 

[FatPhil]

Hi everyone! I have encountered this paper by a political scientist called Ivan Katchanovski which alleges that the 2014 sniper attacks during the Euromaidan Protests were a false flag by far right elements of the Euromaidan:

https://ukrainian-studies.ca/2014/12/01/taras-kuzio-study-ukrainian-nationalism-university-ottawa/ contains many criticisms of Katchanovski's paper at varying levels of persuasiveness:

Katchanovski alleges that the majority of Donbas inhabitants (54-61 per cent) supposedly support separatism, which figure is far higher than the 30 percent given by KIIS senior sociologist Volodymr Paniotto (Tserkalo Tyzhnya, 27 June). Katchanovski's claim of such high support is based on adding the 31 per cent who responded in favor of secession in order to join another country or to form an independent state with the 23 per cent of respondents who favored autonomy within a federal Ukraine.

Hotel Ukryaina is a large, former Soviet hotel, and it would simply have been impossible for the Euromaidan to have controlled the entire building (as Katchanovski alleges) during a period of chaotic violence and protests. At the same time, it is difficult to believe that supposed Euromaidan "shooters" could have used weapons in the hotel without any foreign journalists noticing and reporting upon this.

Another building in which Katchanovski claims Euromaidan and far right "shooters" were allegedly based is on Museyni Provulok, which is just off of European Square and begins where the monument to dissident and Rukh leader Vyacheslav Chornovil stands. Photograph no. 3 that appears in Katchanovski's paper as alleged proof of his claims is extremely blurry and as such cannot credibly be relied upon as "evidence" of anything.

Condemnations of Katchanovski's writings have been widespread. The University of Alberta historian David Marples has expressed the view that Katchanovski's paper on the snipers "appears politically driven" and is a "veritable jumble of illogical reasoning and statements that do not seem warranted by the findings, which are themselves confusing…." Marples described the paper – as did other critical commentators at the University of Alberta conference – as a "political tract"*.

I visited Odessa in October to conduct academic research for a book I am writing on eastern Ukraine, and I investigated the tragic deaths of pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian protesters. Katchanovski's views of the Odessa deaths dovetail completely with Russia's, and they both ignore the most important detail relating to this incident: namely, that unarmed, pro-Ukrainian protesters marching peacefully in Odessa were shot by pro-Russian supporters from behind police lines thereby killing a number of pro-Ukrainians. This fact is clearly visible on video footage.

* link to http://ukraineanalysis.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/the-snipers-massacre-in-kyiv/

 

[Mendel]

Article:

The deaths of three protesters have been reconstructed in detail, drawing from videos as well as spatial and forensic evidence. SITU's findings and relevant evidence are presented for each victim in this section.

Source: http://maidan.situplatform.com/

The reconstruction assigns a group of law enforcement officers as the source of 3 lethal shots.