For the second time in a week, Ukrainian anti-regime protesters holed up in a building were killed by fires set by pro-regime attackers with ties to newly formed neo-Nazi security forces, reports Robert Parry.In Ukraine, a grisly new strategy - bringing in neo-Nazi paramilitary forces to set fire to occupied buildings in the country's rebellious southeast - appears to be emerging as a favored tactic as the coup-installed regime in Kiev seeks to put down resistance from ethnic Russians and other opponents.
© UnknownUkraine's national security chief Andriy Parubiy, founder of the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, blending radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Last year, he became commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense forces.”
The technique first emerged on May 2 in the port city of Odessa when pro-regime militants chased dissidents into the Trade Unions Building and then set it on fire. As some 40 or more ethnic Russians were burned alive or died of smoke inhalation, the crowd outside mocked them as red-and-black Colorado potato beetles, with the chant of "Burn, Colorado, burn." Afterwards, reporters spotted graffiti on the building's walls containing Swastika-like symbols and honoring the "Galician SS," the
Ukrainian adjunct to the German SS in World War II.
This tactic of torching an occupied building occurred again on May 9 in Mariupol, another port city, as neo-Nazi paramilitaries - organized now as the regime's "National Guard" - were dispatched to a police station that had been seized by dissidents, possibly including police officers who rejected a new Kiev-appointed chief. Again, the deployment of the "National Guard" was followed by burning the building and killing a significant but still-undetermined number of people inside. (Early estimates of the dead range from seven to 20.)
Comment: One wonders how the junta in Kiev thinks that shelling the population in the south-east of Ukraine is going to make them more friends. Fear and intimidation is not going to work, but will only push the population into even greater revolt. Those who hesitated before will now be keen to separate from the junta in Kiev, who attacks its own population.
Can you imagine the response from the Western leaders and media if Yanukovych had done this?