Media Coverage of Belarusian Airplane Arrest Fits Pattern of New Cold War

DONETSK, DONETSK PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC—The Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine reached its 90th day and the Western press continues to be inundated with unverified claims of war crimes Russian forces allegedly have committed. Accusations have been lodged against the Russian military for mass graves in Bucha, a narrative which has been widely accepted in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries. Despite requests from the Russian government and India, no independent inquiry has yet to take place.

Just four days ago, Newsweek published claims of Russian soldiers “targeting kids’ bedrooms” with explosives. Nestled far beneath the fiery headline is a soft disclaimer: “However, Newsweek has not independently verified any of the claims regarding children and explosives, which come from Ukrainian sources.” Such is the state of affairs in the U.S./EU/NATO aggression against Russia.

Perhaps these deluges of outrage would appear more sincere, if the well-documented plight of the civilians of the eastern Ukrainian breakaway region of Donbass had received passing mention in any mainstream Western outlets. In the Donbass region, two oblasts (provinces) known as Donetsk and Lugansk proclaimed their independence from Ukraine in 2015, shortly after the neo-Nazi-infected Ukrainian military began attacking their mostly Russian populations.

For eight years, war has raged in Donbass, and it has included an endless campaign involving shelling civilian areas, in violation of the Minsk Agreements between the Donbass republics, Ukraine and Russia. As of May 13, the Office of the Ombudsman in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), put the total civilian death toll in DPR at 7,321, including 105 children. More than 14,000 people have been killed in the Donbass region since 2014, according to the International Crisis Group. The Ukrainian military did not respond to Toward Freedom’s multiple attempts to ask about attacks on civilians in Donetsk.

‘We Used to Hide in the Basement… Now, We Don’t Bother’

Toward Freedom sent this reporter to Donbass for nearly a month, and it took less than one day in Donetsk to witness the effects of Ukrainian forces purposely shelling civilians. That first afternoon, April 28, a local Telegram channel devoted to “online information about the current shelling situations by Ukrainian Armed Forces” reported the Sokol Market in the western Kirovsky District had been shelled. At 11:40 a.m., among the market’s busiest hours, Ukrainian forces—just miles away in Krasnogor—fired 10 BM-21 Grad rockets, or Soviet rockets. Initial reports on the scene were two dead, including a local high school teacher, but this has since been updated to five. This reporter arrived at 1 p.m., at which point the wreckage was apparent and two bodies remained on the ground.

No military presence was seen in this neighborhood—no base, no embedded soldiers, no checkpoints. Gennady Andreevich, an employee of the neighborhood safety commission and administrator of the Sokol Market, called it a “sleepy” district, where there is only this market, a strip of shops, a  park, and a number of Soviet-era residential buildings. The area, per Andreevich and numerous local residents, had sustained relentless strikes since 2014. Those hits have only intensified since February. One of the neighboring residential buildings had been hit as recently as two weeks prior.

These sorts of markets are the central point of social gathering, commerce, and employment for working-class people, who cannot afford to frolic in more luxurious, capitalist-developed urban centers. The eyes of bourgeois mass media are never fixed on the poor. As such, the regular targeting of Donbass civilians goes unmentioned.

Even as cleanup efforts went on, artillery fire remained constant in the background.

The following day, April 29, the Donetsk News Agency reported the Petrovsky District, also in the west end of the city of Donetsk, had just been hit with nearly 80 Ukrainian shells, resulting in casualties.

Upon arrival at 8 p.m., this reporter first found a small grocery store, smoking from the roof, completely destroyed. A small clean-up crew was inside, and one elderly woman—the shopkeeper—stood alone and bewildered, and appeared not ready to speak to anyone. Behind the store was a large residential building, also apparently damaged by the shelling.

At the entrance to the building, a husband and wife were slowly cleaning up pieces of glass and wreckage at the main entrance. They were initially spooked seeing journalists, thinking anyone could have been Ukrainian operatives in plain clothes. But when they understood members of the press had arrived, they were eager to share their story of not just what had happened that night, but of the previous eight years. The woman, Elena, identified herself by first name only.

Elena, whose apartment balcony had been completely destroyed, said that this kind of attack was a daily occurrence for the residents of Donbass, many of whom—herself included—considered themselves Ukrainians. She said that U.S./EU arms shipments were the primary cause of the continued death and destruction, and wished to personally address the citizens of those countries, to ask that they might pressure their governments to cease the deliveries of weapons.

“In the beginning of the war, in 2014, all of us in the building used to hide out in the basement when the shells flew; now, we don’t bother,” said her husband. “We just have to go on with our lives.”

Their children had moved east to Russia, away from the front lines. But for them—like many others—old age, a lifetime of attachment to one community and lack of economic flexibility made relocation impossible.

This particular building, in its entirety, was made up of 60 units, and was attached to a school.

As we parted, the couple saw our delegation of foreign journalists off warmly, entreated us to share their stories with the West in any way possible, and wished us peace.

‘God Will Sort Them Out’

In the frontline city of Kirovsk, a mining town in the Lugansk People’s Republic, this reporter visited the home of a man whose home was hit April 26 by a “Hurricane” rocket—another Soviet-era weapon—capable of destroying entire floors of large apartment buildings. But it failed to detonate as it plugged into an outer wall, next to his garden. The home was situated on a long dirt road, with only a handful of similar homestead cottages within range. The man explained that he believed the attack had been targeted from what he called “Ukro-Nazi” positions in the nearby town of Pervomaisk. Victoria Ivanovna, the mayor of Kirovsk, described such shelling as “constant,” and often targeted at schools, or other non-military locations important to the community.

Back in Donetsk, on May 10, a now-notorious U.S. expat-turned-DPR-combat-veteran named Russell “Texas” Bentley gave this reporter a tour of the districts on the edge of no-man’s land. The Petrovsky district was clearly hit the hardest; in places, block after  block contained not a single home untouched. In the center of the district, where a once-active market had since been abandoned, a monument stood for the civilian lives lost from 2014 to 2016. It listed more than 200 names.

Russell was no stranger to this kind of shelling. “They hit us out here, every (expletive) day. They always target schools, markets and grocery stores, never military. We never targeted any civilian areas; even aside from the ethical questions, it would just be (expletive) stupid. These are our people here. This is a fight for liberation. The last thing the DPR or [Russian President Vladimir] Putin want is to piss off the residents of places, which we believe will become liberated parts of the Republics.”

Russell, 62, who served in the explicitly Marxist “Sut Vremeni (Essence of Time)” unit of the DPR army—as well as in the DPR special forces until 2017—lives with his wife, Lyudmila, in the Petrovsky district. Their home has not been hit to date, but a family of six just a few doors down had not been so lucky. The mother of the family showed this reporter the impact point of a shelling from the week before; it had destroyed their front wall, killing their dogs and barely missing the family room behind.

Katya ladnova, 25, a member of Donetsk-based Marxist feminist collective Aurora, said shelling is no longer news.

“We walk right past it,” she said. “Our complaint to Putin is not that he sent Russian troops into Ukraine, but that he sent them eight years too late.”

In spite of 8 years of attacks, and now endless constraints from isolation and sanctions, including a limit on running water to a few hours in the evening, the city of Donetsk, like all of Donbass around it, continues to move on with life; shops remain open, public transport runs, children go to school every day.

“There is absolutely no military reason to strike places like this. They do this to strike fear in our hearts,” said Andreevich, the Sokol Market administrator. “But it does not work.”

Andreevich’s own administrative office had been hit this past March. Two of his co-workers were killed in that attack. At the end of our exchange, he looked sternly and said, “Sooner or later, God will sort them out, the people who are doing this.”

Fergie Chambers is a freelance writer and socialist organizer from New York, reporting from eastern Europe for Toward Freedom. He can be found on Twitter, Instagram and Substack.

Editor’s Note: This article was first published by Electronic Intifada. An “own goal” is a term from soccer (football) describing a goal inadvertently scored when the ball is struck into the goal by a player on the defensive team.

For more than a decade, Lowkey has been regarded as an enemy by Israel’s lobbying network.

Back in 2011, the right-wing Jewish Chronicle described the London-based rapper’s ability to reach a young audience as a “potential nightmare.”

Judging by more recent attacks against Lowkey, it would seem that his determination to raise awareness about how Palestinians live under an apartheid system has indeed kept Israel’s supporters awake at night.

Unable to find flaws in his arguments, the lobby has told lies about him.

An example of how he has been deliberately misquoted came after he made a live appearance on BBC radio in 2017.

He performed “Letter to the 1%,” a track pledging solidarity with “victims of the globalized cosa nostra.” Despite obviously referencing the Sicilian mafia, The Jewish Chronicle falsely charged that he had uttered the anti-Semitic phrase “kosher nostra.”

Due to a threatened lawsuit, the newspaper published a retraction.

Smears Step Up a Gear

The smear campaign against Lowkey has stepped up a gear over the past six months.

In December 2021, the rapper was booked for a gig in London’s Jazz Cafe. The venue came under pressure to call off the show, which celebrated the 10th anniversary of his album, Soundtrack to the Struggle.

And in March this year, Lowkey was scheduled to speak at a conference organized by Britain’s National Union of Students (NUS), marking its centenary.

As soon as the lineup for the event was announced, the journalist Theo Usherwood wrote a series of tweets.

Usherwood, political editor with the radio station LBC, highlighted comments made by Lowkey about how the mainstream media was “weaponizing the Jewish heritage” of Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in order to “stave off” questions about far-right groups in Ukraine.

Although Lowkey’s analysis was based on demonstrable facts, Usherwood described it as “theorizing.”

New: Rapper Lowkey to appear at the NUS’s annual conference at end of month.

Also appearing at the conference is Labour MP Zarah Sultana.

Earlier, Lowkey said MSM has “weaponised the Jewish heritage” of Zelenskyy to “stave off” inquiries about far right groups in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/xMwjmooipU

— Theo Usherwood (@theousherwood) March 18, 2022

Usherwood is considered an ally by the pro-Israel lobby, as the blogger David Collier has made clear.

Vilified

Following Usherwood’s tweets, The Daily Mail, one of Britain’s most widely read newspapers, published an article on the event to which Lowkey had been invited.

The article featured comments from Nina Freedman, who heads the Union of Jewish Students. She claimed that Lowkey had “spread conspiracies about Jewish students, 9/11 and the war in Ukraine.”

Although Freedman was quoted at length, the article did not elaborate on the “conspiracies” she had in mind.

It also did not mention that the Union of Jewish Students is financed by the Israeli embassy in London, as an investigation by Al Jazeera has revealed.

The NUS was vilified by the Campaign Against Antisemitism – another Israel lobby group – over how it responded to complaints about the invitation to Lowkey.

The NUS recommended that people who took umbrage at Lowkey’s views could avoid listening to him and even offered a “safe space” where they could go during his appearance. Yet the Campaign Against Antisemitism distorted that offer as a suggestion that “the Jewish students literally segregate themselves.”

Some elected politicians even got involved in efforts to bully the NUS.

Andrew Percy, a member of the British Parliament, described the offer of a “safe space” to offended students as “sinister.” He called on Larissa Kennedy, president of the NUS, to resign.

Another MP Robert Halfon contended that Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission should investigate the NUS for what he alleged was “institutional anti-Semitism.”

Both Percy and Halfon have held senior positions with Conservative Friends of Israel, a pressure group inside Britain’s ruling party.

‘Own Goal’

The NUS capitulated to the pressure.

Lowkey was dropped from the conference to which he was invited. Instead, it was proposed that he could have a role in a fringe event marking the NUS centenary.

When Lowkey refused to accept that proposal, the NUS claimed– dishonestly – that he had simply pulled out of the conference.

The bullying did not go unchallenged.

The group Palestine Action – best known for smashing up Israeli weapons factories – protested against how Lowkey had been canceled by scaling the roof of the venue where the NUS celebrated its 100th birthday.

According to Palestine Action, a number of students active in the NUS took part in that protest.

Tonight, Students & NUS delegates scaled the roof & gate crashed the NUS' 100th birthday party venue. They acted in solidarity with @Lowkey0nline, who was cancelled from the event. Try to silence or set security on ANY of us & we'll come back louder, stronger and bolder… pic.twitter.com/BFThUwLKV9

— Palestine Action (@Pal_action) March 28, 2022

Lowkey is also the target of a campaign aimed at removing his music from the major streaming website Spotify. That campaign has been launched by Luke Akehurst from the lobby group We Believe in Israel.

Speaking to The Electronic Intifada, Lowkey pointed out that Akehurst’s group is known to work with Israel’s government.

The calls for censorship—which have been opposed by the actor Mark Ruffalo, the rapper Wretch 32 and the rock star Roger Waters among many others—are “ultimately an own goal,” Lowkey added.

“Artists and musicians should never have to fear threats to their livelihood or person for the music they make,” he added. “We will not be silenced on Palestine. Not now, not ever.”

Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Twitter: @KitKlarenberg