“I saw many war crimes. The only ones I saw during the days I was there were perpetrated by Ukrainian forces, and not by Russian forces.”
https://larouchepub.com/pr/2022/20220529_war_crimes.html
Le Monde Reluctantly Admits War Crimes of Ukrainian Neo-Nazi Militias
May 29, 2022 (EIRNS)—The winds are starting to change, one might hope. Now that some of the European elites are finally realizing the Anglo-American war party wants to drain the world in a long (why not nuclear) war aimed at bringing down Russia, some French media are revealing the broad scope of war crimes by Ukrainian neo-Nazi militias armed by NATO.
The initial revelations of Adrien Bocquet, a handicapped former French soldier who traveled to Ukraine during the war as a medic and whose eyewitness statements on Ukrainian acts of torture against Russian soldiers were dismissed by media (Libération, Nouvel Observateur, etc.) as “Russian propaganda,” were confirmed on May 16 by the French daily Le Monde (in French) (partner of the New York Times). Surprisingly, the “newspaper of record,” although not mentioning Bocquet by name, confirmed the authenticity of a video published on social media showing Ukrainian militia firing rifles into the knees of Russian prisoners of war who were tied up and defenseless.
This happened on March 25 in Mala Rohan, a village near Kharkiv taken back from Russian troops by the Azov Regiment, Fraikor and the Slobozhanshchyna Battalions. Andri Ianholenko, the leader of the Slobozhanshchyna Battalion, is visible and identifiable on the video. On other videos Le Monde found on Ianholenko’s social media accounts, he publishes the slogan of the Ukrainian fascists, “Glory to Ukraine!” and poses with the three Russian POWs shot in the March 25 video, a war crime Le Monde confirms, but still reluctantly presents as “a probable abuse committed by Ukrainian volunteers against Russian prisoners of war.”
Assigned to the Azov Regiment in Kyiv and then Lviv, Bocquet returned recently to France to give a shattering report on this battalion and the broader Ukrainian war. He told Sud Radio:
“I saw many war crimes. The only ones I saw during the days I was there were perpetrated by Ukrainian forces, and not by Russian forces. This does not mean that there were no Russian war crimes, but there are also war crimes on the Ukrainian side, yet no one talks about them. When I returned to France, I was really shocked…. Between what I saw and heard on TV news reports and what I saw on the ground, it was night and day.”
About the Azov Regiment, Bocquet said:
“They are 20,000 men spread here, there and everywhere with their super neo-Nazi logo across Ukraine, but it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. And they are getting weapons from Europe.” He added: “You know what they talked about, in front of me because I understand a bit of Ukrainian and Russian, and many of them spoke English? They would crack up saying that if they ran across Jews or black people, that they would cut them up. That is what they talked about, and it really gave them a good laugh.”
Bocquet stated that the March 25 torturing of Russian troops by the head of the Slobozhanshchyna Battalion is, in fact, a regular practice of Ukrainian far-right militias against Russian prisoners. He said: “I saw captured Russian soldiers who had already been really roughed up and who were tied up. We were in a sort of hangar, and the captured Russian soldiers were arriving in little vans in groups of three or four. Each time they made the soldiers get out of the vans, the Azov fighters would ask: ‘Who are the officers, who are the officers?’ ” Bocquet, who has videos on this, said that each soldier getting out of the van got a bullet in the knee, and those recognized as officers got “a bullet in the head.”
Bocquet, who was with the Azov Regiment during the massacre in Bucha, denounced the cynical media propaganda that attributes the deaths only to Russian forces. He told of a confrontation he had with U.S. journalists whose reporting falsified the events he had seen. Bocquet said:
“These Americans were shooting videos and saying, these are Russian bombardments and it’s landing in a park and it’s unacceptable. I went to see them, and I asked, why are you saying that? And they said, oh, don’t worry, it makes a good image. Do you know what these bombings really were? In fact, there was a Russian target and a team of Azov fighters I was with who were inputting settings on a little mortar to fire off bombs. And they put in the wrong range…. So these bombs, instead of landing 100 meters farther off on the Russian equipment, landed in a little park. And they were passing this off as Russian shells.”
