By Tarik Cyril Amar : a historian and expert on international politics. He has a BA in Modern History from Oxford University, an MSc in International History from the LSE, and a PhD in History from Princeton University. He has held scholarships at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and directed the Center for Urban History in Lviv, Ukraine. Originally from Germany, he has lived in the UK, Ukraine, Poland, the USA, and Turkey.
Ukraine’s hidden torture system is the West’s shame too
A scandal near Kiev has exposed forced conscription, extortion and torture – now watch Western backers look the other way
In Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, a fresh scandal has erupted. And while the Zelensky regime has a long and imposing record of spectacular misdeeds, this one has a quality all of its own.
None of this is news, all of this has long been known to anyone willing to listen to actual ordinary Ukrainians, the ones sacrificed en masse to an insane Western attempt to take down Russia via Ukraine. But then, neither Western mainstream public intellectuals nor media are interested in what these real Ukrainians suffer.
That complicity was on display as if under a magnifying glass, when a US citizen, the critical blogger and journalist Gonzalo Lira was tortured to death – in classical Zelensky-regime fashion – to both make an example and fleece him. The case was buried. Indeed, Lira could have been saved easily, if the American authorities who knew of his fate had intervened
The Zelensky regime’s impunity is stunning. Not quite yet Israel-level but getting there. And as with Israel, the reason for this abysmal situation is a toxic mix of – very bad – geopolitics and moral and intellectual perversion. For years, Western establishments, from public war propagandists such as Timothy Snyder who has even helped collect money for an Azov unit, to politicians have obfuscated the truth about the West’s favorite client regime, its violence at home and its best friends on the Nazi-level far right.
Western publics have been brainwashed not only with Russophobia but with a systematic campaign of lies and omissions to embellish Zelensky and his vicious regime. That is why what has just come to light, again, in a Kiev suburb, is not only about Ukraine but about the West, especially NATO-EU Europe: They claim that Zelensky’s Ukraine is a frontier where their “values” are being defended and practiced. I, for one, have come to believe them.
And the values in question are those of thieves, torturers, and murderers who betray their own people to enrich and empower themselves. Like Gaza, where the same ‘exemplary’ Europeans are complicit in an Israeli genocide, Zelensky’s Ukraine reveals the truth about this version of ‘Europe.’
