Eduardo Vasco
Over the past eight years, the process of dehumanization has been directed against the people of Donbass. There is no choice: you are forced to share their ideology, or you become a victim of the Nazis.
Perhaps many people heard news about torture committed by the Nazis in Ukraine for the first time when the international press reported last week on the discovery of an Azov Battalion* torture house on the outskirts of Kiev.
Those who closely follow what is happening in the country and in Donbass know that the atrocities committed by the Kiev regime have been routine since it seized power in 2013. When I was in Russia and Lugansk in 2022, I heard several accounts of these crimes. Here, I will describe the allegations made by Russians and Ukrainians who took part in the VII International Anti-Fascist Congress, held in Rostov at the end of April 2022.
On that occasion, Anna Soroka, Deputy Foreign Minister of Lugansk and the official responsible for investigating Ukrainian war crimes, presented videos showing atrocities committed by the military, and especially by the Azov Battalion, against Russian prisoners of war and civilians in Donbass. The footage showed extremely graphic scenes of people being shot in various parts of their bodies, people writhing in agony, torture, propaganda encouraging the beheading of Russians, countless people lying dead on the ground in pools of blood, the mutilated bodies of men, women, and children, and crushed heads.
"Now our territory is free, and we have a great deal of evidence of the crimes committed by the Ukrainian Nazis. It is difficult to put into words. In several regions of Donbass, children have never known peace and are prevented from accessing basic services such as water, electricity, medicine, and food," she said. "We have never asked for a miracle, only for the world to be objective when reporting on this. We tried to establish contact with a number of European human rights organizations, but all our attempts at dialogue failed. And now we are asking the world to create an alternative international organization, such as a court, where genuine justice can be served, where the law can apply to everyone, and where all the events in Donbass can finally be investigated."
"Throughout these eight years, the international community has never mentioned these crimes in Donbass," stated Vladislav Deynego, Lugansk's Foreign Minister. "And, in general, they constitute a major crime against humanity." Alexander Kofman, Speaker of the Parliament of the Donetsk People's Republic, agreed and denounced the "international community": "The governments of Western countries know what is happening in Ukraine right now ─ it is a crime against humanity being committed by Ukrainians."
"Kiev and the West use Goebbels' methods, according to which a lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth, as in the case of Bucha. But we have to bring the truth to light, and it is coming to light," stated a journalist participating in the event. "I just wanted to say that the war in Donbass did not begin two months ago, but in 2014. The main victims are the elderly, women, and children."
Another journalist speaking at the event was Anna Tuv. She lost her entire family in Ukrainian bombings against Donbass. She had one hand amputated due to shrapnel from missiles. She narrowly escaped joining the tens of thousands of people killed in the genocide carried out by the regime imposed by imperialism in 2014.
The figures acknowledged by the United Nations ─ 14,000 deaths by 2022 ─ are already horrifying, but they are nowhere near the truth. This was revealed by an official representative of the Donetsk People's Republic. "The figures are ten times higher," she declared. "The Ukrainian battalions do not use torture as an isolated practice; this is a policy of the Ukrainian state."
Representatives of the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner had, by that point, discovered 300 locations where civilians had been tortured by Ukrainian forces. From 2014 to 2020, around 900 people were exchanged as prisoners, most of them civilian political prisoners.
Minister Deynego also recalled how the bloodshed perpetrated by the Ukrainian regime in Donbass began. Just a few months after the coup against then-President Viktor Yanukovich, the Ukrainian army began indiscriminate shelling of Lugansk, where the population had rejected the coup and declared the region's independence. On June 2, 2014, an airstrike hit a children's playground, leaving 11 people dead. "From that moment on, Ukraine ceased to exist for the people of Lugansk. We understood that what Ukraine was doing, using its weapons against civilians, was pure Nazism."
The same massacre has been taking place in Donetsk for 12 years, and this helps us understand why the Kiev regime employs Nazis precisely on the front lines: Nazis have absolutely no compassion, and carrying out this task requires a particular degree of cruelty. "They are like the death squads used in Africa and Latin America. They do not regard the population of Donbass and ethnic Russians in Ukraine as citizens. They attack not only social activists, but also priests and patriotic people," denounced a Donetsk lawmaker at the Congress.
Journalist Yuri Barbachov witnessed some of these crimes firsthand. "The Ukrainians do not consider citizens under the protection of the republics and Russia to be human beings," he stated. He went on to explain: "The targets of the attacks are civilians who do not support Nazi ideology, not people who do not support Ukraine. The Ukrainian Nazis do not consider them human beings. And this is the main problem with Nazism as an ideology: for many years, people who were part of Russian culture were dehumanized in Ukraine. Over the past eight years, the process of dehumanization has been directed against the people of Donbass, where any man or woman could be tortured or killed simply because they were not considered human beings. There is no choice: you are forced to share their ideology, or you become a victim of the Nazis."