Donbass: The Grey Zone---Life in the frontline villages

The breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk republics next to the border with Russia are known as Donbass. The two republics declared independence from Kiev in 2014, and there has since been an ongoing civil war.

Under the Minsk Agreement, the sides agreed to pull troops back from the separation line by two kilometres. But instead of being the buffer zone, these villages witness war every day and suffer from its consequences.

Locals live without water or electricity for days. Children play with the remnants of war. They call their villages the ‘grey zone’. For years, Ukrainian troops have been engaging in what the media calls a creeping offensive, getting closer to the ‘grey zone’ villages.

Donbass: The Grey Zone explores life on the frontline, as locals share their accounts of the war. Aleksandr, 80, describes how he lost his entire family killed in a mortar attack. Now he’s the only one in his village who fixes damaged electrical cables. We meet Margarita, who talks casually about mortar ammunition her daughter finds in the yard. Finally, high school student, Denis gives us a tour around his abandoned school.

Nearly 4,000 civilians have been killed since the start of the civil war.

[rtd.rt.com]

More recent numbers have been reporting at least 14,000 people.

I found the 48 minute mark to be a profound moment to finally provide a sense of reality. The Ukraine army actually think they're fighting the Russian army? They think the separatist are supporting an invasion---they're simply bandits who need destroyed? Until one is captured---a woman scolds him----he seemingly sees the side of reality. These are common citizens forced only to support themselves from a genocide. Look outside you window or door and try to envision this as your neighborhood. Dependent on an 80 year old man to fix your electric lines. Your sons, daughters, and husbands your only means to protect you with light fire arms. This is what the western nations take to innocent civilians.

This weekend RT America's TV show (Documentary) is playing a more intensive look inside the political aspect of how the Ukraine situation played out. You can find an expanded aspect of the politicians within a time line being drawn out and how they effected what we see today. It plays every few hours. Here it looks like 12:30 again at 6:30 and 11;30 pm. It also seems to be replacing scheduled programing as it's now being played in place of The Keiser Report. Maybe due to the current agenda to ban RT in which at least 3 countries I've seen have done so. It may be the last time you can see the side of the issue they want to suppress from the public. Which much already has been which you'll see within this episode. Much of what I've been exposing here.

ROBERT PARRY: The Mess that Nuland Made

Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s “regime change” in early 2014 without weighing the likely chaos and consequences, wrote Robert Parry on July 13, 2015.

[consortiumnews.com]

{To sell this latest neocon-driven “regime change” to the American people, the ugliness of the coup-makers had to be systematically airbrushed, particularly the key role of neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalists from the Right Sektor. For the U.S.-organized propaganda campaign to work, the coup-makers had to wear white hats, not brown shirts.

So, for nearly a year and a half, the West’s mainstream media, especially The New York Times and The Washington Post, twisted their reporting into all kinds of contortions to avoid telling their readers that the new regime in Kiev was permeated by and dependent on neo-Nazi fighters and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who wanted a pure-blood Ukraine, without ethnic Russians.}

The video of Nuland discussing who will take power in Ukraine before the 2014 coup they manufactured is embedded in this article. She is a product of the Clinton administration machine.

{From 1993 to 1996, during Bill Clinton's presidency, Nuland was chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott before moving on to serve as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs.[12] From 2003 to 2005, Nuland served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, exercising an influential role during the years the U.S. invaded and occupied Iraq. From 2005 to 2008, during President George Bush's second term, Nuland served as U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels, where she concentrated on mobilizing European support for the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.[13] In the summer of 2011, Nuland became special envoy for Conventional Armed Forces in Europe[14] and then became State Department spokesperson.[15]

In May 2013, Nuland was nominated to act as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs[16] and was sworn in on September 18, 2013.[17] In her role as assistant secretary, she managed diplomatic relations with 50 countries in Europe and Eurasia, as well as with NATO, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.}

She managed to work through both democratic and republican administrations and all their wars built for profits. Not just corporation and military complex profits, but our politicians who bought stock in the companies they gave preference to to profit from these wars. Quite frankly, the families who lost loved one's in these wars should sue these politicians taking their wealth from them. Give them a taste of their own measures, proverbially sanctioning them. [en.wikipedia.org]

{Her husband (and arch-neocon) Robert Kagan had co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1998 around a demand for “regime change” in Iraq, a project that was accomplished in 2003 with President George W. Bush’s invasion.

As with Nuland in Ukraine, Kagan and his fellow neocons thought they could engineer an easy invasion of Iraq, oust Saddam Hussein and install some hand-picked client in Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi was to be “the guy.” But they failed to take into account the harsh realities of Iraq, such as the fissures between Sunnis and Shiites, exposed by the U.S.-led invasion and occupation.

In Ukraine, Nuland and her neocon and liberal-interventionist friends saw the chance to poke Putin in the eye by encouraging violent protests to overthrow Russia-friendly President Yanukovych and put in place a new regime hostile to Moscow.

Carl Gershman, the neocon president of the U.S.-taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy, explained the plan in a Post op-ed on Sept. 26, 2013. Gershman called Ukraine “the biggest prize” and an important interim step toward toppling Putin, who “may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”}

{Nuland saw her big chance on Feb. 20, 2014, when a mysterious sniper apparently firing from a building controlled by the Right Sektor shot and killed both police and protesters, escalating the crisis. On Feb. 21, in a desperate bid to avert more violence, Yanukovych agreed to a European-guaranteed plan in which he accepted reduced powers and called for early elections so he could be voted out of office.

But that wasn’t enough for the anti-Yanukovych forces who led by Right Sektor and neo-Nazi militias overran government buildings on Feb. 22, forcing Yanukovych and many of his officials to flee for their lives. With armed thugs patrolling the corridors of power, the final path to “regime change” was clear.

Instead of trying to salvage the Feb. 21 agreement, Nuland and European officials arranged for an unconstitutional procedure to strip Yanukovych of the presidency and declared the new regime “legitimate.” Nuland’s “guy” Yatsenyuk became prime minister.

While Nuland and her neocon cohorts celebrated, their “regime change” prompted an obvious reaction from Putin, who recognized the strategic threat that this hostile new regime posed to the historic Russian naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea. On Feb. 23, he began to take steps to protect those Russian interests.}

{What the coup also did was revive long pent-up antagonisms between the ethnic Ukrainians in the west, including elements that had supported Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union during World War Two, and ethnic Russians in the south and east who feared the anti-Russian sentiments emanating from Kiev.

First, in Crimea and then in the so-called Donbas region, these ethnic Russians, who had been Yanukovych’s political base, resisted what they viewed as the illegitimate overthrow of their elected president. Both areas held referenda seeking separation from Ukraine, a move that Russia accepted in Crimea but resisted with the Donbas.

However, when the Kiev regime announced an “anti-terrorism operation” against the Donbas and dispatched neo-Nazi and other extremist militias to be the tip of the spear, Moscow began quietly assisting the embattled ethnic Russian rebels, a move that Nuland, the Obama administration and the mainstream news media called “Russian aggression.”

Amid the Western hysteria over Russia’s supposedly “imperial designs” and the thorough demonizing of Putin, President Barack Obama essentially authorized a new Cold War against Russia, reflected now in new U.S. strategic planning that could cost the U.S. taxpayers trillions of dollars and risk a possible nuclear confrontation.

Yet, despite the extraordinary costs and dangers, Nuland failed to appreciate the practical on-the-ground realities, much as her husband and other neocons did in Iraq. While Nuland got her hand-picked client Yatsenyuk installed and he did oversee a U.S.-demanded “neo-liberal” economic plan slashing pensions, heating assistance and other social programs the chaos that her “regime change” unleashed transformed Ukraine into a financial black hole.}

Unfortunately, she didn't get fired as Parry's conjecture went. She did however leave during the Trump administration stating she opposed Trump's efforts to seemingly be willing to work with Putin. Even though Trump did his part in creating strife with Putin in regards to diplomatic relations and sanctions. She got a promotion from Biden for helping to cover up his crimes in Ukraine. Recent reports are that she's working on interfering in Columbia's upcoming elections towards securing their current puppet presidents reelection.