
-
Eva Bartlett's Exclusive Interview with Maria Zakharova, Russia’s FM Spokeswoman (2019)
EvaKareneBartlettJournalismMaria Zakharova sits down with Eva Bartlett. Zakharova weighs in on Syria, Crimea, the Moscow protests and more. ** -Eva Bartlett: In a simple meeting room at the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry building, Maria Zakharova gave me a generous hour of her time in a conversation peppered with bemused laughter at Western allegations about Russia and clear frustration at the West’s incessant vilification of all things Russia. I traveled to Moscow in August, where to my delight I had the opportunity to interview Zakharova. Given that Russia is the focus of obsessive and largely negative Western media reporting, and also the country’s role in eliminating the proliferation of terrorist groups that once controlled large swaths of Syria, I wanted to ask Zakharova for her take on a variety of topics related to both Russia and Syria. In our wide-ranging discussion, Zakharova spoke of the U.S. sanctions regime against Russia and of the Western interference in Russian domestic issues — such as the protests seen in Moscow in July and August. On Syria, she addressed the issue of exploitation of children in propaganda against Syria and Russia — notably Omran Daqneesh, a child whose image was splashed across newspapers and screens worldwide in 2016, incriminating Russia and Syria in an airstrike that was later proven to have never happened. An official apology from one of the most adamant perpetrators of that narrative, CNN’s Christian Amanpour, also never happened. One cannot discuss the war in Syria and related propaganda without addressing the massively-funded White Helmets. In discussing the group, Zakharova gave examples of its role in fomenting support for Western military intervention, including in pushing responsibility on the Syrian government for the alleged but unproven and, by most honest accounts, staged chemical attack in Douma, eastern Ghouta, in 2018. Footage of the attack included video starring the White Helmets and another exploited Syrian boy, Hassan Diab, whose testimony of the events ran in stark contrast to the allegations against the Syrian government that were being circulated in the Western media. Zakharova also addressed the inconsistencies around the Skripal case, the historic importance of Crimea’s referendum, and the U.K. “media freedom” conference of July 2019, where cases of imprisoned journalists like Julian Assange and Kirill Vyshinsky were notably not part of the conference program. My Related: https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2019/09/13/mintpress-sits-down-with-russias-foreign-ministry-spokesperson-maria-zakharova/ https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/accused-of-treason-and-imprisoned-without-trial-journalist-kirill-vyshinsky-recounts-his-harrowing-time-in-a-ukrainian-prison/365 views 6 comments -
(2019) Imprisoned Without Trial: Journalist Kirill Vyshinsky Recounts Time in a Ukrainian Prison
EvaKareneBartlettJournalismOctober 2019: In November 2018, I became aware of the case of Kirill Vyshinsky, a Ukrainian-Russian journalist and editor imprisoned in Ukraine without trial since May 2018, accused of high treason. Soon after, I interviewed Vyshinsky via email. He described his arrest and the accusations against him as politically-motivated, “an attempt by the Ukrainian authorities to bolster the declining popularity of [then] President [Petro] Poroshenko in this election year.” Vyshinsky noted that his arrest was advancing the incessant anti-Russian hysteria now prevalent among Ukrainian authorities, as he holds dual Ukrainian and Russian citizenship. He noted that the charges against him, which pertain to a number of articles he published in 2014 (none of them authored by Vyshinsky), became of interest to Ukrainian authorities and intelligence services four years after they were published. To Vyshinsky, this supports the notion that neither the articles nor their editor were a security threat to Ukraine, instead, he says, they were a political card to be played. In early 2019, I traveled to Kiev to interview Vyshinsky’s defense lawyer Andriy Domansky about the logistic obstacles of his client’s case. Domansky viewed the Vyshinsky case as politically motivated and expressed concern that he could himself become a target of Ukraine’s secret service for his role in defending his client, an innocent man. Domansky told me at the time, The Vyshinsky case is key in demonstrating the presence of political persecution of journalists in Ukraine. As a legal expert, I believe justice is still possible in Ukraine and I will do everything possible to prove Kirill Vyshinsky’s innocence.” To the surprise of those following the case against Vyshinsky, in late August 2019 he was released with little fanfare after serving more than 400 days in a Ukrainian prison but still faces all of the charges brought against him by the Ukrainian government and is “obliged to appear in court or give testimony to investigators if they deemed it necessary.” By early September, Kirill Vyshinsky was on a plane to Moscow. Despite never being tried or officially convicted, he found himself the subject of a prisoner exchange between the Russian and Ukrainian governments. I interviewed Vyshinsky in Moscow in late September. He told me about his harrowing ordeal, the Ukrainian detention system, other persecuted journalists, and what lies ahead for him. He also touched on the inhumane conditions he experienced in Ukrainian prisons. He noted that a pretrial detention center as we know it in Western nations is a very different entity in Ukraine and that Ukrainian prisons were so over-crowded that it was common for inmates to sleep in three shifts in order to allow enough standing room for inmates crammed into a cell. Ukrainian prisons like a “concentration camp” Aleksey Zhuravko, a Ukrainian deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of V and VI convocations recently published photos taken inside of an Odessa pretrial detention center showing utterly unsanitary and appalling conditions. Zhuravko noted, “I am shocked at what was seen. It is a concentration camp. It is a hotbed of diseases.” Another Ukrainian journalist, Pavel Volkov, was subjected to the same types of accusations lobbed against Vyshinsky. Volkov spent over a year in the same pretrial detention center as Vyshinsky. He was arrested on September 27, 2017, after Ukrainian authorities carried out searches of his wife and mother’s apartments without the presence of his lawyer and with what he says, was a false witness. Volkov spent more than a year in a pretrial detention center on charges of “infringing on territorial integrity with a group of people” and “miscellaneous accessory to terrorism.” On March 27, 2019, he was fully acquitted by a Ukrainian court. Volkov shared his thoughts on the persecution of journalists in Ukraine, saying: The leaders of the 2014 Euromaidan movement, who subsequently occupied the largest positions in the country’s leadership, repeatedly stated that collaborators from World War II who participated in the mass extermination of Jews, Russians, and Poles are true heroes in Ukraine, and that the Russian and Russian-speaking population of Ukraine are inferior people who need to be either forcibly re-educated or destroyed. They also believe that anyone who wants peace with the Russian Federation, and who believes that the Russian language (the native language for over sixty percent of Ukraine’s population) should be the second state language, is the enemy of Ukraine. These notions formed the basis of the new criminal law, designed to persecute politicians, public figures, journalists, and ordinary citizens who disagree with the above. Since 2014, security services have arrested hundreds of people on charges of state treason; infringing on the territorial integrity of Ukraine; and assisting terrorism for criticizing the current government in the streets or on the Internet. People have been in prison for years without a conviction. And these are not only the journalists included in the ‘Vyshinsky list’. Activists from Odessa, Sergey Dolzhenkov and Evgeny Mefedov, have spent more than five years in jail just for laying flowers at a memorial to the liberators of Nikolaev [Ukrainian city] from Nazi invaders. Sergeyev and Gorban, taxi drivers, have spent two and a half years in a pretrial detention center because they transported pensioners from Donetsk to Ukraine-controlled territory so that they could receive their legal pension. The entrepreneur Andrey Tatarintsev has spent two years in prison for providing humanitarian assistance to a children’s hospital in the territory of the Lugansk region not controlled by Ukraine. Farmer Nikolay Butrimenko received eight years of imprisonment for paying tax to the Donetsk People’s Republic for his land located in that territory. The 85-year-old scientist and engineer Mekhti Logunov was given twelve years because he agreed to build a waste recycling plant with Russian investors. The list is endless. People often incriminate themselves while being tortured or under the threat of their relatives being punished, and such confessions are accepted by the courts, despite the fact that lawyers initiate criminal proceedings against the security services involved in the torture. These cases are not being investigated. The only mitigation that has happened in this direction after the change of government was the abolition of the provision of the Criminal Procedure Code stating that no other measure of restraint other than detention can be applied to persons suspected of committing crimes against the state. This allowed some defendants to leave prison on bail, but not a single politically-motivated case has yet been closed. Moreover, arrests are ongoing. The only acquittal to date from the so-called journalistic cases on freedom of speech is mine. However, it is still being contested by the prosecutor’s office in the Supreme Court. Ninety-nine percent of the media continue to call all these people ‘terrorists’, ‘separatists’, and ‘enemies of the people’, even though almost none of them have yet received a verdict in court.” Volkov’s words lay bare the true nature of the allegations made against Kirill Vyshinsky as well as the countless other journalists and citizens of Ukraine that have fallen victim to the heavy hand of Ukrainian authorities. https://www.mintpressnews.com/interview-journalist-kirill-vyshinsky-ukrainian-prison/262498/ https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/accused-of-treason-and-imprisoned-without-trial-journalist-kirill-vyshinsky-recounts-his-harrowing-time-in-a-ukrainian-prison/519 views -
Conversation with Alon Mizrahi (“Anti-establishment, pro-humanity, ex-Israeli. Free Palestine”)
EvaKareneBartlettJournalismAlon and I had an informal conversation yesterday which I think listeners will find very informative. -His father was born in Palestine, "before the catastrophic, disastrous, establishment of Israel." -He became disillusioned with Israel, what it stands for, what is Zionism, and what Western culture and colonialism really are and really stand for. -Zionism has become, "the most hated ideology on the planet, only survives by unending US support. When an ideology embraces an insane agenda, it is going to crumble, its unsustainable. Zionism is unsustainable. Israel is now in a situation where it can't survive without US support. Israel and Zionism are fiercely hated the world over." -The political opposition to Western colonialism is growing daily. -More people questioning the story of Israel: "there is a limit to how much you can mass murder children & cover it up with stories that you're only able to tell because you control the media." -Only hope for Syria lies in the decolonization of the middle east from Western forces. -"People remember the Iraq war, the assassination of Gaddafi, the chaos that the West unleashed on Africa and on Arab countries over the past generation, what it is doing in Gaza and in Syria. Western colonialism is reaching the end of its days, humanity is woken up to this. It is in a frenzy now, trying to set fire wherever they can, trying to create a huge war." -"The people in Gaza who are being massacred by Israel, most of them are refugees from Palestine, that Israel pushed into Gaza in 1948. Those people who lived in Gaza were being occupied, murdered, and humiliated by people who just came to Israel 10, 20 years ago from Europe and other places, and took their land, took their homes, and then came after them in the refugee camps in Gaza." Follow him: https://alonmizrahi.substack.com/about https://x.com/alon_mizrahi https://linktr.ee/AMizrahi My Related Links: https://opt2007.wordpress.com/category/my-entries-from-occupied-palestine-apr-dec-2007/ https://opt2007.wordpress.com/category/bilin/ https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2018/06/27/welcome-to-hadar-a-village-under-siege-by-al-qaeda-and-israeli-forces-alike/ https://ingaza.wordpress.com/syria/syria-my-published-articles-from-and-on-syria-2014-2022/ https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/observations-from-occupied-palestine-in-gaza/ https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/updates-and-excerpts/ https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2008/11/08/on-board-the-dignity-en-route-to-besieged-gaza/680 views 2 comments -
"Now is the time to finally look critically at 9/11. It's the foundation of the current war machine"
EvaKareneBartlettJournalismI spoke with Ted Walter, International Center for 9/11 Justice, on why now, 23 years on, speaking about 9/11 is important. Excerpt: "I would encourage people to look at 9/11 as a possible opportunity to expose the true nature of the national security state, of the war machine. It's about becoming more educated so that it's harder for the powers that be to carry out future deceptions. People who dedicated their careers or spend much of their free time battling Western imperialism, battling the war machine, refuse to look at 9/11—which I think is the foundation of the current war machine. At 23 years, I think its time that people who have avoided it in the past, either for career-oriented reasons or because they themselves have fallen prey to the propaganda of the war machine that they are dedicated to taking down. Whatever it may be, now is the time to finally look critically at 9/11. If we don't understand 9/11, we really don't understand the world we live in." Related Links: https://ic911.org/ten-reasons/ on the “Hannibal Directive” https://x.com/Truth_InMedia/status/1810675316261838968 https://x.com/DoubleDownNews/status/1832855065092075676 https://x.com/RichardGage_911/status/1843157368479346912 https://electronicintifada.net/tags/hannibal-directive https://ic911.org/journal/articles/the-instantaneous-free-fall-of-world-trade-center-building-7-and-nists-attempt-to-hide-it/ 23 years later, you owe it to yourself to finally trust your eyes https://x.com/ic911justice/status/1833873999945781520 Perhaps these first responders can help you see what is actually going on here https://x.com/ic911justice/status/1858595704249446897 Peace, War and 9/11 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28757454/ https://www.ae911truth.org/evidence/technical-articles/articles-by-ae911truth/696-how-36-reporters-brought-us-the-twin-towers-explosive-demolition1.22K views 8 comments -
JACQUES BAUD: NATO THREATENED RUSSIA DECADES BEFORE 2022
EvaKareneBartlettJournalismThis is a must-listen interview for those who think Russia “invaded Ukraine without reason”, and those who believe the West's propaganda about Russia “failing” in its objectives, and many other lies put out by Washington and parroted by Western corporate media. Former Swiss intelligence, Jacques Baud, on the Ukraine-NATO history that forced Russia to start its Special Military Operation in February 2022. He is the author of numerous books, including: “The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat”and “Operation Z: The Hidden Truth of the War in Ukraine Revealed”.12.4K views 19 comments -
Dr. Assal Rad on How Media Whitewash (and Enable) Israeli War Crimes
EvaKareneBartlettJournalismDr. Assal Rad, Middle East Historian & author, breaks down the manifold tactics media use to dehumanize Palestinians and Lebanese (among many others) and whitewash Israel when it bombs, starves and commits acts of terrorism against them. Follow her: https://x.com/AssalRad Related Links: https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2024/07/24/the-uncounted-hundreds-of-thousands-of-palestinians-in-gaza-being-killed-by-israel/ https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2024/03/11/israel-is-now-killing-palestinians-in-gaza-by-starvation-media-downplaying-this-are-complicit-in-these-preventable-deaths/863 views 1 comment -
Tarik Cyril Amar on Palestine, Zionism, and Ukraine's failed tactics
EvaKareneBartlettJournalismTarik is an author, a historian and an 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. Follow him at: https://substack.com/@tarikcyrilamar https://www.rt.com/op-ed/authors/tarik-cyril-amar/ https://x.com/TarikCyrilAmar920 views 5 comments -
Camila Escalante on Venezuela's Presidential Election & Opposition Violence
EvaKareneBartlettJournalismI spoke with Latin America correspondent for Press TV, Camila Escalante, about what she saw and heard on the ground in Caracas, Venezuela, before, during and after the recent Presidential Election. A well-travelled, longtime correspondent all over Latin America, Camila brings a deep understanding of the history of the country and region, and of the people. With ample experience in Venezuela in years prior, she speaks with first hand knowledge on the positive changes in the country, in spite of the brutal Western sanctions against the Venezuelan people. Follow Camilla at: X: camilapress Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/CamilaPress My Related Links: -My Venezuela (2019) playlist: https://rumble.com/playlists/YCmDnKNOVWc -The US is manufacturing a crisis in Venezuela so that there is chaos and ‘needed’ intervention https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2019/03/31/us-is-manufacturing-a-crisis-in-venezuela-so-that-there-is-chaos-and-needed-intervention/734 views 3 comments -
Bertrand Scholler On Why France Should Stop Arming Ukraine
EvaKareneBartlettJournalismRecently, on a prime time French television show, panelists discussed whether France should stop arming Ukraine. An online poll conducted during the conversation resulted in 76.7% of participants wanting an end to arming Ukraine. Bertrand Scholler, one of the panelists, outlined why he believes France should not be sending arms to Ukraine. RELATED LINKS: C'est Cyril Hanouna qui a le courage de le faire. Chapeau mec ! 76,7 % des Français sont opposés à continuer de livrer des armes à l'Ukraine Il est temps que nos députés SE RÉVEILLENT ! https://twitter.com/SinedWarrior/status/1582122560006672384 The French TV channel abruptly "lost touch" with the correspondent, who began to tell that Ukraine was striking at civilian infrastructure and even hospitals: https://t.me/dimsmirnov175/39107 https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2022/04/08/they-saw-and-heard-the-truth-then-lied-about-it-media-on-donbass-delegation-omitted-mention-of-ukraines-8-year-war-on-the-autonomous-republics/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/under-fire-from-ukraine-everyday-life-in-the-donetsk-peoples-republic/262363/ https://www.thepostil.com/the-military-situation-in-the-ukraine/ DPR Civilians On Why They Wanted A Referendum To Join Russia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWs8TQG5Ds8 Interviews With Donetsk Residents After Joining Russia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq-pM-JPBCQ "Il faut arrêter d'armer l'Ukraine pour la paix" déclare Bertrand Scholler, consultant politique https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn_pLpZsxoU&feature=youtu.be92 views 1 comment -
Steve Sweeney Exposes RSF's Call For Censorship of Russian Media As Ukraine Bombs Donbass Civilians
EvaKareneBartlettJournalismSteve Sweeney has reported from hot spots around the world, exposing Imperialist war crimes and attempts to interfere in and destabilize sovereign nations. He is Morning Star International Editor, founder of Media Workers for Palestine, and reports on global liberation movements, press freedom & resistance. Steve contacted me the other day to ask for a statement on Reporters Without Borders' (RSF) recent appeal to censor Russian media, on their premise that Russian media is "inciting hatred" and "condoning war crimes." He also contacted RSF with an excellent list of questions including why a (supposed) press freedom group is demanding that alternative media narratives are censored, could they give concrete examples regarding what they've accused Russian media of doing (no), and whether RSF would comment on journalists like me being put on Ukraine's kill list because of my reporting from on the ground in Donbass, where I've just returned incidentally. After a series of insightful exchanges, I asked Steve to please have a conversation with me about all of this. What a conversation it was! In our conversation, he details how RSF panicked and stalled replying, only to essentially give lengthy non-answers and flat out refuse to address some questions (including the one about me and Ukraine's kill list). A spoiler: Steve notes that RSF is not the neutral body it pretends to be, instead receiving obscene amounts of money from NED, Soros' Open Society, USAID, the Ford Foundation...a "rogue's gallery of the worst kind of regime change organizations." As RSF endeavours to shut down Russian media, I joined my Russian colleagues today in going to sites that were bombed by Ukraine yesterday in Gorlovka, killing one civilian & leaving two others in critical condition. This is the sort of crimes Ukraine has been perpetrating for over eight years, and its courageous journalists like my colleagues who have been putting their lives on the line to expose Ukraine's genocide of the Donbass people. RSF by whitewashing Ukraine's crimes is abetting in genocide. Follow Steve: https://twitter.com/SweeneySteve https://morningstaronline.co.uk/author/6182 https://english.almayadeen.net/authors/1493703/steve-sweeney **RELATED LINKS on this post: https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2022/07/27/journalist-steve-sweeney-exposes-rsfs-call-for-censorship-of-russian-media-as-ukraine-bombs-donbass-civilians/97 views