Via comment by
indyjonesouthere on
83 Fighters out of the 4,700 of the 30th Mechanise...
Not that we're surprised.
Ivan Winters returns with a guest-essay that takes a look behind the curtain of media hype at the crisis in Ukraine.
What’s the Real Story in Ukraine?
I am writing this article to help interested persons make head or
tail of the ongoing shambles that is the situation in Ukraine and to
give some (hopefully accurate) information about the main players in the
situation. One of the things that has driven me to contacting the team
to offer to write this article has been the disgraceful, shallow,
ill-informed coverage in much of the UK Press. The coverage on the two
main TV News providers, BBC and ITN has been pathetic and has been
propagandising an EU version of events (I will give some examples of
this in the article).
Most of the print media has been nearly as bad. In fairness, during the past few weeks, since mid-February, the
Daily Mail
has started to take the situation seriously and provided much more
accurate coverage, particularly in some of the op-eds. The best TV news
coverage has been from Al-Jazeera (AJ). I suppose AJ is giving unbiased
coverage for the simple reason that as an Islamic-funded broadcaster
they have no particular brief for any of the parties in the region.
There is also a channel for non-EU-tainted coverage on Russia Today
(RT). RT is as you would expect: pro-Russian, putting the official
‘Moscow spin’ on all its reporting. It is also on occasions hilariously
technically incompetent and some of its presenters speak very strongly
accented English (some of the other staff are, however, Western
European).
The first thing to get straight about the situation is the claim that
the document that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign
was a ‘EU Trade Pact’ (or similar names). This was in fact an innocuous
and misleading wrapper put around a preliminary agreement for Ukraine
to begin accession procedures with the EU, a process that can take
decades (for example, Turkey!). Why was this misleading name used?
In the discussion that follows please note the difference between
‘Europe’ and the ‘EU’. Some reporters use the two names interchangeably.
They are
not the same. Europe is a geographical entity, a
continent, consisting of over 40 countries. The EU is a group of 28
countries within Europe that have decided democratically (!) to form a
supranational bloc. Reasons for the use of the misleading name for the
rejected treaty are numerous and include: