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The reason for a very personal interest in Russia & Ukraine

It is a grievous mistake to rely largely on corporate media outlets in order to know what is going on in the world, as many do. Watching television news, even reading newspapers, is not a one-way street. What comes to us does so at the behest of its sponsors. News programmes are sliced, diced and chopped to deliver that which the producers want you to accept as verifiable truth even although for the most part content has increasingly become worthless propaganda.

Much of the original material on this website will have been written because of a personal knowledge and experience of the matter in hand. It is also my intention wherever possible to provide articles based on in-depth research. This is particularly so in the case of the Ukraine. So much that appears in the Western media is misleading propaganda and blatantly false. This cannot go unchallenged.

My wife Valerie was born in Volhynia in Western Ukraine in the interwar period of the Second Polish Republic. Ethnic Germans, the family had farmed the fruitful soil there for generations. When the German army overran Volhynia and Galicia, German farmers were moved into the homes of dispossessed Polish farmers just south of Warsaw. Wrong as this was, our family has always seen this sad affair as divine providence for almost immediately afterwards a huge massacre of largely Poles, but also of Jews and many others took place - in fact of anyone who opposed the policies of Stepan Bandera’s nationalists. Families that once had lived in relative peace now slaughtered each other even with shovels and pitchforks. Nationalists forced members of the same family to kill each other.

This is a photograph of victims in a village in the Kostopil region only a few km from where my wife was born taken on March 26, 1943. This massacre was committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) assisted by ordinary Ukrainian peasantry. Most of the massacres took place in July and August 1943 and were largely women and children. These atrocities resulted in between 50,000 and 100,000 deaths. No one knows the precise figure. It is heart-breaking and personal to us.

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