Extraordinary revelations about foreign involvement in Maidan 2013-2014 events in “Ukraine: the Hidden Truth”

Gian Micalessin, “Ukraine: the Hidden Truth” (2017)

A short but very pithy Italian documentary, “Ukraine …” focuses on the notorious episode in Kiev in mid-February 2014 when mysterious snipers in a building overlooking the Maidan shot at both civilians and police. This incident led to then President Viktor Yanukovych fleeing Ukraine for Russia and the takeover of the country by politicians associated with the political opposition and far right extremist groups. The incident has been blamed on the Berkut police (and by extension on Yanukovych’s government and its supposed backers in the Russian government). Therefore any information that can reveal the identities of the killers or lead police to them would be valuable in helping to establish a lawsuit against them that would bring some justice to victims’ families. However Western governments and the Western mainstream media seem uninterested in pursuing such a case.

Through interviews the programme reveals that the killers (or some of them anyway) were Georgian mercenaries brought over from Georgia by a former military advisor associate of ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and trained by an American military instructor. (This instructor would later turn up as a fighter with the Ukrainian military in the Donbass region against rebel fighters there.) The interviewees reveal among other things that they did not know until the very last minute that they were going to shoot at civilians as well as police and that when they did discover what they were going to do, as opposed to what they had initially been told (to shoot to create confusion and incite the police to shoot at Maidan protesters), they realised they had been duped over their mission in Kiev. What’s more, the Georgians were not the only foreigners among the snipers; there were Lithuanian shooters as well.

The bombshell revelation is that the sniper attacks had been organised by the very political opposition that was dead set against the Yanukovych government and which claimed that the government was behind the killings.

The film is fairly brisk but not so fast that viewers would lose the conversation thread. Not much background is given about the snipers apart from their nationality and viewers would be entitled to ask what role Saakashvili and other Georgians are playing in turning Ukraine away from Russia and destabilising the whole eastern European region around that country and the Black Sea. After revealing the foreigners’ role in the shootings, the film ends very quickly leaving viewers to absorb all the information that has been offered and the full implications of what they have just learned: that the current government of Ukraine is a criminal government that used deception and violence to get rid of a legitimate if incompetent and corrupt leader, and did so with the tacit support of Western governments and news media.