Introduction
I recently got back in touch with my friend in Ukraine. Because people in the West are faced with massive control of the news, they simply don’t hear voices that contradict what they’re told. That poor little Ukraine is resisting Russian aggression and Russia is losing to the brave people of Ukraine.
Since I visited Russia, people assume that I am simply ‘brainwashed’ with Russian propaganda, even though I ask and get a variety of opinions of Russians who live in Russia now, as well as those I meet in Thailand. However, I have met people from Ukraine in Thailand, too. This interview is with a friend of mine whom I met two years ago. She went back to Ukraine to take care of her mother, despite the risks.
My friend points out, and has shown me channels in the Telegram social media app, the fact, that there is huge opposition to the West’s war against Russia within Ukraine. We talked for over an hour. I am including a short clip of that conversation. I asked about the Fedorov controversy, the progress of the war and the future of Ukraine. At the end of this clip, we hear of forced evacuation from a village that may come back under Russian control…and the people there want to avoid staying under control of Ukraine.
I won’t post the entire conversation since it may contain information that puts my friend at risk. One of the most important points she made is that Russia will not direct attack and destroy Ukrainian cities with many people, like Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov. [Unlike Ukraine, which has been attacking people in their own cities who oppose the US imposed coup government, such as Mariupol, Pokrovsk, Severodonetsk]
Too late, many Ukrainians now realize that they were ‘set up’ to fight Russians but not for Ukraine, rather for the interests of foreign investors who bought up their country on the cheap, after the US coup in 2014.
What’s worse, as the army ran out of willing volunteers, a special quasi military recruitment agency now dragoons people off the street, even leaving children and pets alone. They get sent to the front with minimal training and almost certain death, unless they are fortunate enough to desert or get captured by Russian forces.
What follows is a short clip which covers the most important section of our talk.
Transcript:
Eric Arnow: So I asked you about if you know anything about this controversy about this guy [Federov]?
Friend in Ukraine: Well, yes, sure. I follow news. I know about this. But I didn’t research it. And actually, I don’t follow this too much because if you ask my opinion, my opinion would be very cynical.
What I think is that, you know, when rats are being cornered, they begin to fight each other. This is what I really think about what’s happening. They just been acting like rats. They have been cornered. And they have not much space and not much resources. And they’re making a huge fight with each other just to share those resources and everything. And everything that’s going on, it’s the beginning of the end. End of everything. End of army. End of the war, end of the conflict. It’s just beginning of the end. Well, they’re just acting like rats.
Eric Arnow: But here we are a year later and it’s still going on. So you wondered.
Friend in Ukraine: And it’s still almost over.
Eric Arnow: Yeah, right. It’s been almost over for a long time.
Friend in Ukraine: Yeah. So anyway, well... Yeah, I guess no one never expected this gonna last for so long, actually.
Eric Arnow: Right. And there’s a lot of, even within Russia, there’s people who are raising questions. Why is this taking so long? And as I said, there’s one guy who thinks, well, there’s this one school of thought that the kind of Russian oligarchs really want the war to keep going. And they control Putin. So you’ve got two, kind of like two factions. One is the people who want to just go in and, you know, basically bomb the crap out of Kyiv, march into the capital and take over. I think there’s one group of people like that.
Friend in Ukraine: And there’s... You know, what actually... What actually... Oh, sorry, I interrupted you. What actually I think, I think Kyiv is not a priority. Priority is Kharkov and Odessa. Because Kharkov is very close to the border and Odessa is very important sea front of Russia. Russia is going to take those two cities, not Kyiv. Kyiv, even they can left Kyiv to be part of new Ukraine that gonna be pro-friendly, pro-Russian.
I see. This is one of the options that I see because the Odessa is still hitting a very big way. Odessa is still suffering a big way. And Kharkov, they are taking over Kharkov. And near Kharkov, there is another area called Sumey, Sumskaya Oblast. Those two parts of Ukraine are most important because it’s on the border with Russia. Because from Kharkov and from Sumer you can hit Russia with rockets. So those two parts need to be Russian.
I guess they may be left, let’s say, Kiev and Kyivsk Oblast and maybe one more oblast that they will stay like, let’s say, demilitarized gray free zone calls Ukraine, with Ukrainian passports, with people, et cetera, et cetera, just to keep a small part, and the Western part, the totally will go to Western Europe and Western Europe, Poland and Romania, and they will took their part of Ukraine. And the part of Ukraine that will be taken by Romania and Hungary and Poland, that part of Ukraine maybe will become part of European Union officially.
Eric Arnow: Oh, I see. Yeah, that’s what I’ve, I didn’t hear that part about becoming part of the European Union, but I have heard that there are areas with a lot of Hungarians, and they would just join Hungary, and Romanians would join Romania. Yeah. And Lvov would go back to Poland, and there’s a Slovak area that would go back to Slovakia, and then whatever is left over would be what would be called Ukraine, which would go back to the way it was, you know, 200 years ago, something like that. And I also heard that, and this is, I wonder about this, I heard that Odessa is now almost completely blockaded and they’re not able to move any kind of shipping in and out of there.
Friend in Ukraine: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Eric Arnow: So does the Ukrainian news say that, or is that information that you get from?
Friend in Ukraine: No, this is the information I get from pro-Russian Ukrainian groups, because it’s not, you will never read it to Ukrainian groups because the truth hurts too much.
Eric Arnow: Right, right.
Friend in Ukraine: And you know, I have a student, a young lady, 23 years old. She recently shared some information with me. She said that her parents took her grandparent, grandmother at home because her grandmother lives in a small village 70 kilometers from Dnipro city and in her small village it was forced evacuation, announced forced evacuation. Yeah, it was announced forced evacuation for people and it’s like this military zone coming to us slowly.
Conclusion
People often ask the fundamental question, What is Truth? All too often people, especially in the USA, rely on ‘the media’, ‘trusted sources’. But the media is controlled heavily, as has been reported and documented for decades in the book, Manufacturing Consent, ‘Bought Journalists’ and exposes of CIA control in Operation Mockingbird.
So I took it upon myself to go straight to the source. I visited Crimea in 2015, and met people who organized the vote to leave Ukraine, given the murderous actions of the coup government in 2014. You were told that ‘Russians occupy Crimea’ and it’s dangerous. In fact, it was perfectly safe.
Now, Ukraine is firing drones made with Western money into Russia. How serious a threat to Russia is a matter of debate. In any case, I posted this actual conversation, not from a reporter or news organization, but with an actual person living in Ukraine.
Please consider supporting my channel since there are all too few people who actually report directly from real people in Ukraine.
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