‘…there has not been sufficient precaution taken to preventing death and injury to civilians’ (My emphasis) And the control was tenuous, as evidenced by the continuing attacks by armed groups that have killed and wounded soldiers and many civilians.’ But the price was high with at least 30 civilian deaths, many wounded, and a great deal of destruction to the recaptured villages, towns and cities. ‘After the ceasefire ended on 30 June, the Government mounted an intense offensive, recapturing territory including the main strategic base of the armed groups in the Donetsk region - the city of Slovyansk - and stating it had regained control of the Ukraine-Russian Federation border areas that had previously been under the control of the armed groups. ‘The current intense fighting using heavy weaponry in and around population areas, has devastated towns and villages, demolishing residential buildings and killing an increasing number of their inhabitants. I am just urging you to be careful, when being outraged, that you do not confine your outrage only to the death that are caused by those of whom you disapprove. I am not defending any violent action here. By contrast, the incompetent use of surface to air missiles (though indefensible) was actually not as likely to cause innocent death (though on this occasion it did) as the shelling or bombing of inhabited residential buildings. They occupy a middle zone between deliberate killing and accidental killing. I have said of Israel’s attack on Gaza that the civilian deaths caused by shelling and bombing populated urban areas are so predictable and so inevitable that they cannot really be described as accidental, even if they are unintended.

In fact, there’s a disturbing moral calculation to be made here. This view lies behind my condemnation of the EU’s resort to lawlessness and force, which licensed lawlessness and force by Russia and turned a diplomatic conflict into an undeclared war of great severity, whose horrors have also been visited on the innocent and uninvolved passengers and crew of MH17, and on their devastated families.īut I cannot see why the estimated 800 deaths of Ukrainian civilians in the war-ravaged East( and the 2000 wounded) should be taken any less seriously than the deaths of those aboard MH17. I would not dream of mentioning the one evil without mentioning the other, as I believe that atrocities are committed by both sides in war, and that this is one of the main reasons to avoid war where possible. But it also criticises the Ukrainian armed forces for using heavy weapons in built-up areas (I have read elsewhere, in newspaper accounts, that they have used ‘Grad’ rockets, one of the most indiscriminate forms of artillery known to man). I also do not pretend that Russia is not directly aiding the rebels with advice, equipment, intelligence and manpower, though I await any sort of independent, verifiable proof of claims (accepted as fact by many western journalists) that large weapons are being brought across the border from Russia into Ukraine A recent UN report ( poorly covered in western media) which can be found hereĭenounces the secessionist pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine for kidnapping large numbers of hostages and torturing them, both disgraceful and indefensible actions. I do not pretend that ‘my’ side is blameless, or that its activities are saintly. Here is some news, as it were, from nowhere.Īs a defender of Russia’s reaction to undoubted EU aggression in Ukraine, I have always been careful not to fool myself. You may have thought that the furious little war between Russia and the EU had gone away, or that the area had disappeared into a timewarp or black hole, and ceased to exist.

Pitchperfect pr the war on drugs