Talk:Mass graves in Ukraine

Slavyansk
Something coming up? -- Petri Krohn (talk) 09:09, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Украина попытается выдать убитых карателями за "жертв террористов" (Ukraine try to pass punitive killed for "victims of terrorists") – Novorossiya, July 07

BREAKING: 8 unknow bodies found near morgue. All the usual allegations. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 10:53, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Human Rights Watch: Mass grave found in Ukraine – CNN / Anderson Cooper 360, July 24, 2014

American Kulak said... Also this, from a fanatically pro-Kiev anti-Russia source:
 * Did Strelkov's Men Really Execute 14 People in Slovyiansk?
 * Interesting piece. From the details there, I had to leave this comment:
 * Hmmm... less like Soviet purges, then, and more like the Libyans murdered mostly "for their cars," almost all black-skinned, killed by fleeing loyalists, executed and dumped around Tripoli in August 2011, as rebels overran it. Interesting. --Caustic Logic (talk) 13:22, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Grave found

 * Mass grave in E. Ukraine: Terrorist torture or power cut-off in morgue? RT, July 26, 2014
 * The grave exhumation started on Thursday, conducted by authorities loyal to Kiev. They discovered 14 bodies - one of them female and the rest male, according to media reports.
 * Local residents told Human Rights Watch activist, Yulia Gorbunova, they had witnessed the exhumation of the grave on June 11. The city was in control of the militia at the time.
 * Bodies wrapped in cellophane were brought in by a truck in two runs and dumped in the grave, the witnesses said. Later in the day, the militias brought in two priests to the grave to conduct a burial prayer at it.
 * “We don’t really know who the people in this grave are and what happened to them. What is important is that there is an investigation,” Ole Solvang, researcher and security adviser for Human Rights Watch, told RT.
 * But Ukrainian officials didn’t even wait for the exhumation before saying the grave would produce evidence of atrocities committed by the militias.
 * “I met a police team of criminal investigators in Slavyansk. They discovered a grave of Slavyansk civilians tortured to death by the terrorists. There are dozens of them. They were cut and burned alive,” media presidential aide Yury Lutsenko said.

Zaporozhye

 * ''Moved to Talk:Ukraine war casualties

Location and control?
Minepit 22 Kommunarskaya is located about midway between Nyzhnia Krynka and Zhdanivka --Resup (talk) 12:57, 26 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Non-Russian sources reporting this in English, as a main story: TeleSur Global Research (just citing Itar-Tass). AFP and RFE-RL include it in stories about the cease-fire. AFP reports "the Kremlin appeared ready to ratchet up tensions further by focusing state media on claims of the bodies of four tortured civilians being discovered in an eastern coal mine that had allegedly served as a Ukrainian military base. ... Both the press office of Ukraine’s eastern campaign and the National Guard — a part-volunteer force Moscow frequently brands as “fascists” — denied ever having control of the Donetsk industrial region mine." --Caustic Logic (talk) 22:52, 25 September 2014 (UTC)
 * This seems to be only AFT photo of UN meeting, used in a publication by Malaysian Rakyat post.
 * Russia has sent its investigation committee, and also asked for international help to investigate. According to KP reports above, quoting locals, Ukraine forces were there, in Nyzhnya Krynka, from around 20 August, to some 3 days before KP publication, which would be around 20 September. Pro-rebel maps of military activities for that period,  show that Ukrainian forces were present;   Pro-Ukraine sources are not inconsistent/apper to show the same. --Resup (talk) 00:56, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

I've collected both the "ATO" maps and the Kot-Ivanov/Hartin maps since mid August. Well, most of them. Comical Andriy's disinfo map is a complete joke and far too undetailed to have any value here. It shows the region in "rebel" hands all the time. As to the other maps. They start showing the region in "rebel" hands. Then, on August 18, "as a result of fierce fighting in Lower Krynka militia destroyed 32 units of military equipment". On the next map August 20 a mini-cauldron appears there. Two maps later it has disappeared and one map later indicates that fighting happened from 18-22.

Following maps show the region again in "rebel" hands, undisturbed. Then on August 31, the mini-cauldron appears again, with the description "As a result of strike by militia's artillery of the enemy's position, one tank, five armored vehicle, four vehicles with supplies of armor and fuel were destroyed. Additionally, up to thirty punishers were killed and wounded". Maps in early September show "rebel" artillery fire on the mini-cauldron. It stays unchanged until September 10, when Kot-Ivanov seem to have stopped (or paused) with their maps and someone else took over with far less useful maps.

It seems that the Slavyangrad team took it upon themselves to continue the English maps based on the Kot-Ivanov material as they reappeared on September 15, showing a now much larger cauldron with a corridor leading north-west out of the "rebel" territory. I read somewhere that this was kept open for the remaining troops to leave, but they refused for a while. The map of September 21 shows the cauldron disappeared and has two points saying that the troops left on Sep 20, 22:40h, and Sep 21, 20:09h.

To me this all sounds like it was initially a stay-behind Ukie unit that went unnoticed for a while hiding in that mine, maybe with the Aug 18-22 fighting being a supply convoy. --CE (talk) 11:38, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Organs Stolen?

 * Pravda.Ru Victims found in mass graves in Ukraine lack internal organs Sept. 25
 * According to Zakharchenko, an examination of the bodies showed that the victims lacked internal organs. However, he noted, it remains unclear whether the organs had been harvested at the time when the victims were alive or dead. 
 * ...Noteworthy, the Facebook account of Yulia Tymoshenko's former lawyer, Sergei Vlasenko, was hacked in July. His correspondence with German doctor Olga Wieber and commander of "Donbass" battalion of the National Guard, Semyon Semyonchenko, was exposed to the general public. In the correspondence, the sides discussed organ trafficking. Thus, in one of the messages, Wieber wrote in detail, which organs were needed: "17 hearts, 50 kidneys, new livers - 35 pieces, 30 pancreases and 5 lungs." Vlasenko responded with a promise to deliver all the organs. Vlasenko also wrote that Semenchenko should collect organs appropriately, not to deliver "bad quality" organs again. --Caustic Logic (talk) 22:29, 26 September 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't know for a fact, but Olga Wieber story is likely fake, Die russischen Staatsmedien ergehen sich in dieser Übung, sie versorgen ihr Publikum mit einem geschlossenen Weltbild wie aus alten, totalitären Tagen. (When Cyberberkut is quoted, may be worth checking whether old story still there; with Pravda, it was last reliable perhaps a 100 years ago). Organ trade, in general, is still fairly probable as such --Resup (talk) 22:49, 26 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Little surprise, I agree with that. The usual hacked FB leak exposes serious crimes, hints of doublecross and borderline comical idiocy in the same package, over and over. This is the formula again. I always doubt this scripted-sounding stuff. The organ removal itself, likely enough. Just this leak part is no good. --Caustic Logic (talk) 23:31, 26 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Pravda is John McCain favorite; however his resent publication there received such comments" Some were mostly perplexed that McCain chose Pravda.ru to publish his op-ed. In Soviet times, the "Pravda" newspaper was the official mouthpiece of the state, but it fell into disarray in the 1990s. There is now a newspaper version run by the Communist Party, but the Pravda.ru website is unrelated to the print edition. Ilya Yashin, leader of the opposition Solidarity movement said, "McCain obviously doesn't know that the Pravda.ru website isn't related to the Cold War-era newspaper," but is just a Kremlin-connected parody " rferl.org
 * Spiegel: Russland vs. Ukraine: Der Propagandakrieg (Von Moritz Gathmann, Moskau) --Resup (talk) 22:59, 26 September 2014 (UTC)