Oh, we lost the big battle – better go brag to the Western media about all of our successful terrorist attacks!
A senior Ukrainian official has admitted that his country has assassinated “quite a few” Russian civilians who support Putin and his war to assert control of the Donbas region. In interviews first reported by The Times of London, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, who heads Ukraine’s military intelligence service, also promised more attacks are to come.
“We’ve already successfully targeted quite a few people,” said Budanov. He didn’t name any of the victims, but said “there have been well-publicized cases everyone knows about, thanks to the media coverage.”
Since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, several prominent Russian supporters of the invasion — and many innocent bystanders — have been killed or wounded in the campaign.
One of the most prominent such attacks happened last August, when a car bomb killed journalist Darya Dugina — in a possible attempt to kill her father, the political scientist-philosopher Aleksandr Dugin.
Like her father, Darya was a vocal supporter of Putin and his invasion. Both she and her father were sanctioned by the United States after the war began. Given her profile, it’s possible Ukraine may have intentionally murdered her in a sinister two-for-one act of punishment.
Most recently, novelist Zakhar Prielepin was wounded in a May 6 car-bombing, and Russian military blogger Vladen Tatarsky was killed at an April public appearance after a woman presented him a statuette with a bomb concealed inside it. Fifteen others were injured.
Here’s a longer video of Tatarsky being given the bust of himself by a woman who called herself Nastya. He invited her to sit closer. It was made of plaster covered in gold paint. https://t.co/itNryquxZl
— XSovietNews 🇺🇦 (@XSovietNews) April 3, 2023
For perspective, a hypothetical parallel for this campaign would be Iraq’s intelligence service blowing up Iraq-invasion cheerleaders like Bill Kristol, Jeffrey Goldberg, Ann Coulter and Max Boot in 2003. Ukraine’s targeting of civilians doesn’t merely violate vague “international norms” that Washington pretends to hold dear — they are explicitly war crimes.
What’s more, if one accepts the definition of terrorism as “the intentional use of violence against civilians in order to obtain political aims,” Budanov has implicated Ukraine as a state sponsor of terror — one that’s received $37 billion in US military aid since the war started, and perhaps double that in other assistance.
Budanov isn’t merely an unapologetic terrorist, he’s a boastful one. “These cases have happened and will continue,” he said. Such people will receive a well-deserved punishment, and the appropriate punishment can only be liquidation and I will implement it.”
Frankly, bragging to a major newspaper about your terrorist attacks – and then saying “yeah and we’re planning way more of these” is so weird and bold that I really do have to respect it.
I mean, announcing publicly through a major English media outlet that “yeah, we just like, do bombings of people who write blogs against us” is fundamentally hilarious.
This is the same thing I said about their kill list, which they host online.
Anyway, I guess it’s cool that we see that Ukraine supporters actually do not have any principles, and believe the Ukraine has a right to do terrorism because they are fighting for child rimjobs and equal opportunity employment. But we actually already knew that. You can go on Twitter after any of these attacks and see these Ukraine flag people laughing and cheering.
We know the rules-based order does not have any rules and is not even actually an order.
We don’t need more proof of that fact.
No one who supports the Ukraine is going to see this guy bragging about bombing bloggers and say “oh I guess I’ll side with Russia now.” Yet, right-wingers continue to believe they can convince the left of something if they get their arguments right.