Putin Ally Andrei Turchak Openly Floats Arming Ukraine Proxies as MH17 Victims Gather in France
In a beautiful display of shamelessness or total delusion, one of the Vladimir PutinRussia’s allies have publicly called on Russia to send more weapons to Kremlin-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
“We must stop the Kyiv regime,” said Andrei Turchak, a member of Putin’s United Russia and first deputy spokesman for the upper house of parliament, saying the Ukrainian government was like an “army” and suggested “provide certain weapons” to stop them. —It appeared to be the first public admission of the Kremlin arming the separatists. He made the public appeal Wednesday, perhaps relying on the comments to gain traction in state media and incite “patriots” who supported the claim. of him that the Nazis who loved Hitler were about to “invade” Donbass of Ukraine, where up to 14,000 people have died since 2014.
It sucks that Turchak made this statement while tens of thousands of Russian troops were massing along the border with Ukraine and the Kremlin. arouse fear of an invasion.
And what’s worse is that he thinks the world is naive enough to believe that Moscow hasn’t sent weapons to the separatists for years. (Just as the Kremlin clearly believes the world is stupid enough to believe it was simply a “mistake” when a Russian court inadvertently ignored the presence of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine.)
No, the real gut-wrenching punch is what’s quietly happening more than 1,500 miles from Moscow: Relatives of the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 are still trying to get justice for their loved ones. and all 298 people killed when the passenger plane was brought down by separatists in Donbas in 2014.
They were killed by a Russian-supplied Buk surface-to-air missile system.
Hearings on Ukraine and the Netherlands’ lawsuit against Russia over the downing of a passenger jet resumed on Wednesday at the European Court of Human Rights.
Russia’s special envoy to the hearing, Mikhail Vinogradov, asked the court to drop the lawsuit, noting that Moscow was not responsible for the downing of the plane.
Moscow is in the minority that believes it has nothing to do with the fatal crash. ONE the investigation lasted many years Using a “massive amount of evidence”, including first-hand witnesses and thousands of intercepted phone calls, concluded in 2019 that the missile came from Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade in Kursk. Investigators determined it had been delivered to the separatists just hours earlier, and that its launch pad had been smuggled back to Russia after the disaster.–The deadliest passenger plane crash in history.
(There is also the inconvenient fact — for Russia at least — that separatists proudly brag on social media about shooting down a Ukrainian transport plane at the same time MH17 crashed, only to quickly clear the column after it became apparent that they had crashed into a passenger plane.)
At least 10 family members of those killed in the incident stood before a court in Strasbourg, France, on Wednesday as a jury began looking into the feasibility of the case, according to the Ukrinform news website. In addition to the joint lawsuit by the Netherlands and Ukraine, Russia has also been sued separately by nearly 400 people from 14 different countries who lost loved ones when the plane was shot out of the sky.
If Turchak really believes that Russia “must” send more weapons to proxies in Ukraine, it makes sense to ask: Has he forgotten the hundreds of passengers who died as separatists gripped their fists? Russian weapons? Or is he just hoping that the rest of the world has?
