It Could Happen Here - Genocide in Ukraine

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

Robert sits down again with Romeo Kokriatski, Ukrainian journalist, to discuss the Russian government's intentions in Ukraine.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and some other stuff from time to time. I'm Robert Evans. And today we are going to chat once again with Romeo Kokriatsky. Romeo, you are a Ukrainian journalist and an anarchist.

We chatted with you right before the Russian expanded invasion of Ukraine. And now we're talking with you again now that the war has entered. Ukraine. And now we're talking with you again, now that the war has entered, certainly a different phase as Russian troops pull out of the north of the country, pull out from around Kiev and focus their remaining unblowed up forces to the fight around the Donbass. How are you doing, Romeo? Yeah, thanks for having me on um it's been it's been tough uh we'll get into this a little later on but obviously learning that um a town not far from your home has undergone a genocide is not the easiest thing to live through yeah and knowing that that is not even the worst of the atrocities that we're going to

discover in the coming weeks and months is is put the put the mental strain on yeah let me tell you yeah i don't think i think thankfully very few people understand the experience of of learning that a genocide has occurred next door essentially um yep and yeah what you wanted to talk about specifically obviously when we talk about the act of genocide we're talking about the massacre in bucca um an exact death count bucha sorry an exact death count is is not available right now but i think at least 280 uh civilians killed is the last number i've gotten yeah that's the last like confirmed number,

but obviously a lot of these people have been tossed into mass graves. They're lying around in various residences. It's going to be a long time before we're able to come to any kind of accurate count of how many residents were killed. Yeah, and for a brief overview of just kind of like what

has been seen in the executions there we have civilians often hands tied behind their backs so they were clearly restrained uh executed after having been restrained some of them were just left in the street some of them dumped into mass gravesatellite imagery from before the town was liberated by Ukrainian forces shows corpses lying in the street in the same position they were discovered in when the Ukrainian military moved in, which is as solid open source confirmation of the genocide as you're going to get with any kind of genocide. So that's the situation. Obviously, the usual crew of bad actors and Russia defenders have kind of slid into the most common allegation I'm seeing,

at least online, is people saying it must have been Azov battalion that did it, even though they're 440 miles away, encircled by the Russian army. Yeah. Yeah. But, but you know it's the it's the you you're seeing like a lot of kind of bad open source responses to it with people being like well why would the bodies if you look at the satellite imagery why are the bodies so evenly spaced which is just like they're not it's it's it's just like people people recognizing that if

you like circle shit on a grainy image and tweet about how it's suspicious, you'll provide enough plausible deniability for other people to doubt a genocide. It's the same shit we saw with Syria. claiming that they could see bodies being carted away um by the ukrainians for you know investigation and reburial um that the corpses were quote-unquote moving uh you can see you can see this guy's hand move yeah you're looking at dead bodies by the way no one's fucking moving there and by the way when you move dead bodies they move like pieces of the what a shock it's it's a shock when you're driving over a street that has been churned over by tank treads yeah and you're you're transporting human corpses those corpses are going to get jostled around yeah it's uh um definitely i don't know you know i don't want to belabor on this too much because i think we've talked a lot about how this this disinfo works i think

what you came on specifically to talk about and what's really worth getting into in some detail is this manifesto that was published on RIA, which is a Russian government-controlled news agency. It's this, I don't know how- It's a fascist manifesto. Yeah, it's a fascist manifesto. I'm going to be clear and honest.

it's this, I don't know how it's a fascist manifesto. It's a fascist manifesto. You can find it if you just Google RIA publishes Russian fascist manifesto. The new voice of Ukraine has a translation of it up if you want to read this thing. But it's pretty striking. And the kind of focus of this is on justifying the denazification campaign. And it opens, one of the opening lines is, when the theory that people are good,

the government is bad, no longer holds true. Admitting this fact is the basis of the denazification party, all of its associated measures, and the fact itself is the subject matter of the policy. The fact that this came out within a day or two of the discovering of the elements of genocide in Bucha is pretty predominant, I'd say, pretty noteworthy. predominant i'd say like pretty noteworthy yeah uh so i had to translate this and let me tell you it took um a pretty big pretty big toll on my sanity for a couple of days here um and i'm gonna be honest as a ukrainian reading this this was if you have ever i don't know if some of your listeners already may have like been at protests, counter protests against fascist or, or far right demonstrators where they're chanting that they will murder you.

This is exactly how I felt. This is, this was nothing less than someone reaching through the screen and telling me that they want to kill me and everyone I love personally because I am, because I want their independence. so there's this the the kind of theme of this article the term that they use most often is denazification and i think it really um it is incredibly vital to explain just what this denazification means, because normally, like you and I, Robert, I think we both call ourselves anti-fascists and we are pretty anti-Nazi. I think that's a pretty mainstream position to not like Nazis and be anti-Nazi.

and be anti-Nazi. So the Russians use this term denazification to someone that has no context, no idea of what it refers to beyond the obvious meaning, get rid of Nazis, sounds like something even laudable. The problem is what the Russians mean by Nazis is not what you and I or any other normal, sane, rational human being would consider a Nazi. This article does not justify its thesis that Ukrainians are Nazis at all. In fact, there is a whole series of paragraphs that states that Ukraine does not meet any criteria of being Nazi. To quote a bit from this um as horrible as it is um it reads there isn't after all a single important nazi party no fewer no fully racist laws only their curtailed variants in the form of repressions against the rest language as a result there is no opposition and resistance to the regime a particular feature of nazified ukraine is its amorphousness imminent

and ambivalentness which allows for the masking of nazism as a desire to move towards a quote-unquote independent and quote-unquote european uh western and pro-american path of development in reality towards degradation while insisting that quote-unquote, Ukraine doesn't have any Nazism, only private and singular excesses. So the article itself admits that Ukraine is not Nazi in any way that we would recognize the term. Yeah. And it's basically saying that like it's Nazi. It's not there's no Fuhrer and there's no race like racialist laws. But the thing that makes it a Nazi is one in closer union with Europe as opposed to Russia. And of course, it notes like the so-called laws against the Russian language, which I'm not aware of anything happening.

I think what they're referring to is like attempts to encourage the Ukrainian language in Ukraine. Yeah, there are no laws or sanctions or repressions of the Russian language in Ukraine. There never have been. And in fact, when I was there, one of the difficulties I had with my interpreter is he he he only spoke Ukrainian. And so you can obviously you can speak with people who speak Russian if you speak Ukrainian. but it's a little bit like confusing. And most people we were talking to spoke Russian natively. Like it's the idea that it's somehow like been that the Russian language has been somehow like attacked in Ukraine feels very silly as someone who like repeatedly encountered the Russian language while in Ukraine. Yeah, it's it's simply propaganda.

And the fact is that the Russians define Ukrainian Nazism not as having Nazi values or a Nazi party or anything that we would associate with with Nazism but in fact simply the simply that ukraine wants to be independent of russia that in itself is proof positive to the russians of our nazism and nothing else so when people hear this word denazification what they don't mean getting rid of far-right elements in Ukraine. No, they mean being anti-Russian or simply wanting to be separate from Russia is itself a far-right position in Russia's eyes. And that is enough to call for our pretty much complete extermination. extermination. Yeah. And, you know, to kind of go into this article a little more, one of the things that I find interesting about it is this line here. The fact that the Ukrainian electorate shows Poroshenko's piece, Poroshenko is the president before Zelensky and Zelensky's piece should not be misled. I think they probably meant misread. Maybe Ukrainians are quite satisfied with the shortest path to peace through blitzkrieg which the last two ukrainian presidents transparently hinted at when they were elected

i how i don't understand how anything ukraine has done could be considered a blitzkrieg um since they never invaded russian territory and in fact lost territory to russia in 2014 um that's a weird definition of a blitzkrieg. I'm wondering if you can shed some light on what they might even mean on that, or is it just complete fallacy? What they mean is basically that Ukraine, so within Russian propaganda,

you have to understand, we're talking about a completely separate universe a different reality so the way every every single aspect of what you and i know does does not apply like they don't live in our consensus whatsoever so what they mean is that ukraine blitzkrieg the elimination of russian speakers and and pro-Russian culture and pro-Russian sentiments in Ukraine during the year of my dawn. In Russia's in Russia's reality, Ukraine carried out a genocide against these people in Ukraine, in everywhere except the puppet authorities of the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics. So basically, Ukraine carried out this blitzkrieg. The reason Ukraine is so, quote unquote, not suffied is because in the this Russian alternative reality, Ukraine genocided all the Russians, all the ethnic Russians, the Russian speakers, anyone with pro Russian sentiments. speakers anyone with pro-russian sentiments and this is what they mean when they refer to this uh this blitzkrieg that they that well um ukraine went through they quickly killed everyone

who was pro-us and now uh and now everyone out everyone who is left is a nazi um like the the latter part of this paragraph really makes that clear. They say it was this method of quote unquote, appeasement of internal anti-fascists through total terror that was used in Odessa, Kharkiv, Mariupol and other Russian cities. So not only are,

are these Ukrainian cities, Russian, this quote unquote appeasement that they're referring to is a sarcastic way of referring to their supposed genocide of these people, of Russian speakers, of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. Again, that is not only untrue, it's also ludicrous because everyone in Ukraine is has some Russian ancestry because it's a mixed country everyone is everything like the entire eastern european region is not some ethnic enclave it is in fact a melting pot um which the soviet union worked very hard to change yeah one of the things i kept encountering in evdivka which was is still under fire today and was under fire in 2014 for an idea of like how long chunks of the

country have been in like now it's spread all over ukraine but parts of ukraine have been under continuous artillery fire for nearly a decade um but i kept encountering these old ladies who had grown up in the soviet union and were saying like um i don't understand why they're doing this they they like i've always considered myself russian and and now this is happening like i don't understand why they're doing this. I've always considered myself Russian, and now this is happening. I don't understand it. I don't understand it. It doesn't make any sense. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know it. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America

since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. in terms of like the denialism that we've been seeing lately um one of the reasons i i argued for because we had a debate in the um in the editor's room at envy when we were um when we were looking at this piece we had a debate over whether we were going to translate and um publish it and i pushed really hard um to do so because i think there is no greater way to push back these claims of genocide denial that we are seeing popping up across various parts of the Western left and the anti-imperialist left or whatever you call it. And I think there's no better way to push back against these arguments

than to present the russians own words to them yeah like this is such an openly genocidal fascist piece um using pure the pure logic of of quite like of just fascism that is impossible i think to really um say that this is like a fabrication or the like the russians aren't like this well they're telling you in their own words this is what they're like yeah and i think the like putting focus on this isn't this wasn't written by, you know, some like far right extremist for some minor like online site that has like an audience of 2000 like Russian fascists or whatever. No, this was a major article published in one of the Russian main media outlets by a respected political scientist within Russia. main media outlets by a respected political scientist within Russia. Yeah. And that's that's the thing that I think really needs to be gotten across is the degree to which I think there's a desire to believe that the Putin regime is like on its last legs and that most people recognize how fucked up the political status quo is there, and that support for the regime is pretty minimal as a result. I'm not seeing the evidence of that.

When I talked to him, we just did an interview with a Russian anarchist, his attitude was very much like, yeah, most people broadly buy the propaganda. It is not like the the it's possible that's going to change over time because, again, the severe casualties Russia has taken have not really had a chance to totally filter out socially into Russia. to totally filter out socially into Russia. I think people are still becoming aware of the scale of losses, and it's going to take some time for that knowledge to really circulate. But I think this article represents how a very large chunk of the Russian populace are seeing what's going on in Ukraine. And that's problematic for a number of reasons. For one thing, with this kind of logic that we see in this article, there's not much you can't justify, right? Like there's very little that if people believe what's being said in this article,

there's very little you couldn't do. There's very few weapons you couldn't deploy, right? That's one of the arguments this is making, is that you have to... Soldiers who have been Nazified have to be wiped out completely. There's no... And it's not soldiers who have been Nazified. Anyone who has ever taken arms against Russia and anyone who has ever supported anyone who has taken arms against russia which at the current moment is over 90 percent 95 percent of the ukrainian population must and i quote from this must be liquidated yeah not not um the the it makes an argument a little higher up that these people can't be re-educated so they

can't even be sent to camps to gulags um they can't be made to do forced labor they must be liquidated eliminated uh and this is nothing less than simply saying well we are going to have to kill the grand majority of ukrainians yeah and i i don't i don't know uh what more like you can for the folks who are kind of on the uh because there's there's this tendency i think within the chunks of the left that are not they haven't lost their minds they They're not, they don't buy the Russian propaganda. They do see what's happening in Ukraine is terrible. They see the war is terrible, but they still have this attitude of, well, the best thing is to end it quickly. And like, you know, we should, we should push for some sort of negotiation. I'm first off, I'm saying like,

whatever the Ukraine as a country decides is acceptable to them in terms of peace. I'm not going to argue against one way or the other because that's not my place. But I don't see how you can negotiate with people who have this attitude towards you and towards the existence of your people. I really don't see long term where there's kind of an option for peace for Ukraine with this kind of rhetoric existing in Russia outside of smashing the Russian military to the greatest extent possible. Yeah, I mean, I feel the same way, and that is a very terrifying thought. It's not great.

Like, yeah, because my attitude towards wars is that it's best when they're over. Yeah, exactly. Right. I have no, I have no strong desire to see,

to like bomb Russian cities. Well, I mean, okay, that's, that's a little bit of lie, but no one, no one can blame someone living in Ukraine right now for feeling a bit of a desire for for vengeance even though i don't think that's particularly likely to help

matters yeah probably not and i i generally don't want to um see like a world war in europe or anything like that but i i really when i rack my brains of what can be done like how you can live with like the these people aren't you know thousands of kilometers away or on the other side of the continent they're literally the neighboring state um and i i just i i don't have any answers of how Ukraine is supposed to move forward while Russia remains in its current configuration. Like, I don't see a future, a coexistence of any kind that's possible when they are literally calling for our extermination. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I think that's also kind of the question of how do we have, there's this phrase that you heard a lot, particularly kind of in the post-World War II period of like the need for a rules-based international order. And the United States was as much a part as anyone of making sure that that was never anything more than a friendly lie, right? You had a couple of brief moments here and there where it was attempted to be imposed. Yugoslavia or, well, Bosnia being kind of a clear example. But it was always, you know, in between a bunch of illegal wars on behalf of a bunch of different states and illegal fundings of insurgent groups and all sorts of sketchy stuff and kind of culminated. important part of like what allowed what's happening in ukraine to happen but the the invasion of iraq by the united states was another one right this idea that like and and the things that like torture and stuff by u.s forces this this the fact i mean that's what the russian

diplomats yeah that's what russian diplomats always bring up in um in the un and in other like international bodies whenever they're pressed on this question, human rights, they always invariably point to the US and say, well, the US did this, this and this in Iraq. How come the US gets to do whatever it wants with no pushback? And the implication being that Russia also believes it should be able to do whatever it wants with no pushback. And obviously, like the fact that the United States committed war crimes does not mean that Russia should get to commit war crimes. But from a point of view of like,

if we're looking at things from an international perspective, yeah, if the United States is going to do shit like that, well, other countries are going to do shit like that and see it as like, well, there there isn't like, why? Why are we bound by an international order, but not you? And I one of the things that's so frightening about the kind of rhetoric coming out of Russia is that it it shows those kind of dreams that people had in the wake of World War Two, which, again, there was no like golden age after World War Two. The United States went right to regime change in africa and latin america all sorts of fucked up shit but it shows that like any kind of international hope of something like that ever existing has uh has fallen apart we are we are

if if people want something like that and i do believe that some sort of rules-based international order, and I'm not talking about like UN global government, I'm talking about broad ranging international agreements that, for example, you don't get to fire chemical weapons at civilians, you know, like, I think that would be nice, a nice thing to exist. And I think part of what we're seeing here is that any chance of having that has kind of been reset to zero. Um, not that it was ever a reality,

but it, I think the kind of, I think the rhetoric around the fact that that ever existed has completely dissolved now. Um, and I, maybe that's not like particularly bad because it's bad for people to believe something exists when it doesn't because that that international order never did really exist but

um i i think what we're seeing here is kind of the final collapse of any belief that uh there's an inner there are international standards of morality and behavior for states. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why Ukraine's President Zelensky gets a lot of props from a lot of people right now. But one of the things that I personally rate as absolutely, as the kids say, based in recent days was Zelensky's address in front of the UN where he called them basically cowards. If they don't kick Russia out and they can't even enforce their main their main goal, which is peace, then they should dissolve.

And honestly, I don't see any any issues with that argument. That seemed, yeah, completely rational. What is the point of this organization if it cannot even do something as simple or not simple, but if it cannot do something as straightforward as punish the perpetrators of genocide? Yeah. What exactly is the point of it? Yeah. What exactly is the point of it? That's exactly kind of where I am, which is like, why are we like right now? We have this issue where like after Russian evidence of Russian genocide was uncovered, Russia set to the the UN, the human rights, whatchamacallit, that they are. Human rights cancel. Yeah. Human rights cancel that they're a permanent member of. And like it like basically filed a complaint against Ukraine for doing the genocide that they did. And, you know, there's talk about, we could dissolve and reform the council without

Russia, we could kick them like there's there's options, I guess, in a parliamentary sense. But broadly speaking, when one of the people sitting on that council has, is in the process of carrying out a genocide, which they are justifying in this way through their through their media organs. What is the fucking point of having that? It's just like it was like the night of the invasion. I sat and I watched everything happening in the U.N. the UN. And my thought the whole time as like every all of these international representatives were like, you can't do this, right? You have to stop. You have to stop like, try like begging for there to be some sort of peace and Russia just going ahead and doing it.

It was like, you know, what we what we saw it not dissimilar to some of the shit that happened in the lead up to the Iraq war where it was like, OK, well, a lot of people agree this is fucked up. I guess that doesn't mean anything. And it didn't mean anything. And that's why have it like why? Why pretend that it means anything? I guess that's where I am. I guess that's where I am. I mean, it's the same to draw parallel to U.S. politics. It's the same as like the Democratic Party during the Trump era saying, oh, Mr. President, you can't do all of these obviously legal things you're doing. That's bad. You should stop.

Yes. Like here's here investigations that prove that you're doing the bad things. Please stop, Mr. President with all due respect. You violated the emoluments clause. Okay. Like, okay.

Are you going to enforce? Are you going to enforce any of this? Like without enforcement, all of this common condemnation is literally just noise. It doesn't react. It doesn't result in anything in the material world that will have an effect in curtailing or restricting this behavior now or in the future. And if you cannot do that, then what I like to call it, what you have is a job program for yuppies. Yeah. Yes. Yes.

International rules based order. I when I was in Iraq during the war against ISIS and hanging out primarily with not just Kurds, but like Kurds who were natives of Mosul, when we were kind of back in Erbil away from the front, the number one organization, the number one group that they complained about was not the United States, nor was it ISIS. It was the United Nations, who were generally viewed to be a bunch of, like they saw them the way like people see like trust fund kids. They were a bunch of rich assholes tooling around in Land Rovers, staying in nice hotels and burning money on fucking bullshit. And that's, I don't know. It's so the idea of the United Nations as what it was supposed to be, which is like, yeah, we should – things like what the Nazis did shouldn't be allowed to get nearly as far as they did. And perhaps if all of the nations were sitting together and saying, well, that's bad, right? We don't want people doing that. Maybe some of these bad things would stop happening.

of these bad things would stop happening. And what it has turned into is, yeah, it's a jobs program for fucking yuppies. It's not that there aren't individual things within the UN. I've certainly been to a lot of places, particularly refugee camps that had infrastructure because of UNHCR, even though that's a very flawed organization. I can't deny that a lot of people got access to some basic survival gear that was necessary because of UNHCR, United Nations humanitarian crisis relief. But overall, it's just – it's nothing. There was a really – I think my favorite piece of graffiti ever, which was spotted in Sarajevo during the Serbian encirclement and shelling of that city. And it's a spray painting of UN in the style of the UN's logo, and then underneath it, United Nothing. And that was the attitude of a lot of people in the city as they watched the

UN bicker over what was to be done about the fact that an army had surrounded a city full of civilians and was pounding high-rise apartment buildings with artillery and tank cannons all day long. Man, that sure sounds real familiar. It's a good thing that never happened again. I don't know what you're talking about. That sounds... thing that never happened again i don't know what you're talking about that sounds um but i mean yeah it's it's anyway um romeo is there anything else you wanted to get through today as we stare at this thing this bad thing honestly i just as much as normally i would

encourage people to not pollute their brains with with fat just agit prop in this case i would recommend people read through um my translation at the new voice if you don't trust me for whatever reason you can pull up the original and google translate it machine translate it yourself it'll be a serviceable translation and just read it for yourself um because i want to make it very clear that russia is no longer simply like some hyper capitalist kleptocratic oligarch state it is literally fascist it is using fascist rhetoric and fascist techniques to eliminate an ethnic group.

It considers to be inferior to its own in order to take its land and resources for itself. It is, there is no greater distillation of fascism on this planet right now than the Russian Federation. Yeah. They are doing and i really would like people to understand especially if you consider yourself anti-imperialist or

anti-fascist or anything the russian federation is a fascist government um on the level of nazi germany and it is attempting to uh to literally this article is called is called what shall we do with the Ukrainians yeah the Ukrainian question they're asking the Ukrainian question and this article is proposing a solution to the Ukrainian question so again

mostly that's what I would like to leave uh your listeners robert with an understanding um and again you don't have to trust me you can go and read this for yourself um that the the greatest fascist threat on this planet right now is not the united states of america as shocking as that may sound um and as hard as that may be to buy uh it is the russian federation and it is right now trying to uh genocide the country and the people that i belong to yeah um so i don't know maybe make a note of that, folks. Put that in your mental Rolodex. I don't know. I hope you continue to stay safe. I'm glad your area of Ukraine is at least less under the gun than it was earlier in this war. war um i'm glad broadly speaking that uh the russian federation has bitten off a hell of a lot more than they were able to chew um and now are doing their chewing without nearly as many teeth um and yeah i hope that process continues and i hope uh the siege of maria pole is lifted

yeah thanks a lot. I really appreciate letting me make an appearance and going through this with me and yeah, I think we share the same hopes here. Yeah. All right, everybody. That's the episode. Go away. It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone

Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of rife. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Lord of Latin America.

Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.