One of the Russian Government’s main accusations against the Government of Ukraine’s President Volodmyr Zelensky is that Zelensky’s forces are using Ukraine’s civilians as “human shields” in order to prevent Russian forces from bombing Ukrainian Government forces: in other words, Russia says that a major reason for civilian casualties in this war is the Ukrainian Government’s using its own citizenry as hostages to the conflict, so as to rely upon the non-brutality of Russia’s forces in order to protect Ukraine’s own forces.

On Tuesday, March 15th, CNN headlined “Mariupol deputy mayor says Russian troops are destroying his city” and reported that “Sergei Orlov, deputy mayor of Mariupol, said Russian forces are ‘destroying’ the besieged Ukrainian city and that patients in a hospital were used as captives.”

CNN wasn’t intentionally confirming a Russian-Government accusation, but merely reported what their source, Orlov, had said. No context was provided for his statement which would call attention to the fact that Orlov was actually confirming what Russia’s Government has been saying about this war. The CNN report didn’t even so much as just mention that Mr. Orlov is an official of the existing Ukrainian government in Mariupol, and that the Russian forces are trying to take over the city from that government — the government of which he is an official.

The CNN report went on to quote Orlov as saying, “the Russian army used doctors and patients as hostages in this building,” but that is obviously false, because the attacking forces there are the Russian soldiers, and the defending forces there are the Ukrainian soldiers — and, consequently, any “human shields” there would be used as “shields” BY the Ukrainian soldiers. The report went on to assert that “A Ukrainian official has also accused Russian troops of holding people captive at the hospital,” and this is yet more of the Ukrainian government’s assumption that CNN’s audience are incredibly stupid — stupid enough to think that “human shields” are used by attacking forces instead of by only the most despicable type of defending forces: ones that protect themselves at the expense of the civilians they’re supposed to be protecting.

Mariupol happens to be a city just outside the Donbass breakaway region from Ukraine in Ukraine’s southeast, and its citizenry were publicly protesting against the February 2014 forced overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych, for whom Mariupol’s residents had overwhelmingly voted in the latest Ukrainian Presidential election, which was in 2010. U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration had hired Ukraine’s highly organized racist-fascist anti-Russian “Right Sector” and other far-right forces to prepare and lead the 2013 “Maidan” demonstrations against Yanukovych and subsequently to be appointed themselves to the top national-security positions in the new, U.S.-installed, post-coup Ukrainian government. Here is a video, on 9 May 2014, showing Mariupol residents protesting peacefully against the overthrow of their President, and being shot by the newly installed government’s police:

The pro-coup-regime (i.e., pro-U.S.) national Ukrainian newspaper Kyiv Post headlined “Avakov says 21 dead in Mariupol after clashes between police and separatists” and reported violent actions by the opponents of this new government:

Kremlin-backed “terrorists” kidnapped Mariupol police chief Valeriy Androshchuk during today’s firefight over the local police headquarters, said lawmaker Oleh Liashko on his Facebook page who is in the Donetsk Oblast city at the moment.

He “fought until the end” but “terrorists” took him from the “burning police station in a car that was cut off by a sports utility vehicle,” wrote Liashko. “The fighters stabbed the jeep driver with a knife and placed Androshchuk inside the car trunk and drove off in an unknown direction.”

Liashko was one of Ukraine’s leading far-right politicians and a strong backer of the U.S.-installed government; so, Liashko called the protesters “terrorists‘; and, soon thereafter, the Ukrainian government officially introduced what they called an “Anti Terrorist Operation” in order to kill as many resisting people as possible anywhere in the country. (To resist the coup-installed government was to be a ‘terrorist’.) This was virtually the beginning of Ukraine’s civil war. But, even earlier, on 2 May 2014, the new government’s murderous character was displayed in Odessa (in south-central Ukraine), where Right Sector forces trapped an unknown number of protesters in the Trade Unions Building — and burned them alive in it. The most heart-rending compendium of videos of that was shown here. This horrific event immediately sparked the protests throughout Ukraine’s southeast, which started on May 9th, which began the civil war.

So, it’s not surprising that, in the current battles, between the invading Russian soldiers and the soldiers of today’s Ukraine (the defenders of the U.S.-imposed Ukrainian regime), human shields are being used for protecting (‘shielding’) the latter (America’s proxy-forces in Ukraine).

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