OpEd: What Russian TV won’t show about the events in Odessa

http://khpg.org.ua/en/index.php?id=1399333622

What Russian TV won’t show about the events in Odessa

06.05.14 | Halya Coynash

A lot has been reported about the events in Odessa on May 2, and the following is no attempt to repeat reliable chronicles of witnesses, just to add certain points – and certain images - that either get forgotten or which Russian TV channels are assiduously muffling or distorting.

Viewers of Russia Today can easily switch channels – to BBC, CNN, others - and find a markedly different version of events. This is not the case for the majority of television viewers in Russia and, at present, in some parts of Ukraine, including the Crimea.

They hear only about the fire in the Trade Union House which they are told was set alight by “radicals”, that those who died had tried to escape into the building, and those who survived the fire were then arrested.

They hear next to nothing or a distorted version of the run-up to the fire: the fact that a group of well-armed pro-Russian militants attacked a peaceful pro-unity procession. Although the procession preceded a scheduled soccer match, there were very many people present of different ages, and levels of interest – or none – in soccer (see the photo).

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More at link. It's an interesting read.

While I suspect members of both sides were throwing incendiary devices to and from the Trade Union Building, making the question of who ultimately started the fire somewhat unclear, what is lost in most Pro-Russian narratives is the run-up to the fire, and the fact that members of the Pro-Russian crowd were shooting and killing people in the Pro-Ukrainian demonstration. This I saw happen live with my own eyes:



Thus the notion that the Pro-Ukrainian crowd came up to the trade union unprovoked and set fire to it for no ascertainable reason is just simply a false narrative.

Don't get me wrong--there was definitely a mob mentality amongst many in the Pro-Ukrainian side at the Trade Union building, and that mob mentality is at least in part responsible for the deaths there. But without excusing mob violence, the proper context should still be shown as to why people at the scene were so angry. And we should reject outright such black and white narratives of this tragic event.