Apparently two competing rallies were planned in the center of the city, one in favor of the Euromaidan coup and one opposed, and both were attracting young hooligans and soccer fans. Or so it seemed. One of the livestreamers at the rallies filmed the preparation of Molotov cocktails and showed some of the participants armed with pipes, bats and at least in one case a pistol. Militia members were part of the crowd. Police momentarily tried to keep the opposing groups apart, and then seemed to melt away, allowing -- encouraging? -- the groups to brawl in the streets.
Some distance away, at the Trades Union House, a protest encampment had been built on a broad plaza in front of the building. It had been there for some time, occupied mostly by middle age and older Russian speaking opponents of the Kiev regime. At the time, Odessa had a majority Russian speaking population, and many were deeply opposed to what they saw as an American inspired and funded fascist/Nazi takeover of their country.
This opposition was widespread in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, and it wasn't unknown in Kiev and other parts of the country. Most of the country had long been part of the Tsarist Russian Empire and later of the Soviet Union. Bits and pieces had been added over time, taken from Austria-Hungary and Poland-Lithuania. During WWII, the Ukraine had been overrun and occupied by Nazis, and Ukrainian collaborators especially in the West of the country were commonplace. Ukrainians participated in numerous massacres of Jews, Communists, Gypsies and other undesirables during the Nazi occupation, and notoriously volunteered as concentration camp guards.
None of this history was mysterious prior to 2014, nor was it controversial in the West. Ukrainian Nazis and Nazi collaborators were a real thing. They survived after the War and became an internal destabilizing force against the restoration of Soviet power over the territory. As such they were apparently supported by covert forces in the West, much as former Nazis had been rehabilitated and been granted favors and asylum in the West including the United States.
Ethnic Russians and Russian speakers had deep roots and had long lived, worked and loved in Ukraine, primarily in what was called Novorossyia, New Russia, the region east of the Dnieper River absorbed by the Russian Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great (a German princess for what it is worth who married and later had assassinated the Russian Tsar... but that's another story...)
Russification was often ham-handed and could be brutal under both the Tsars and the Soviets. On the other hand, Ukrainians were included in the Imperial regime and were fundamental to the Soviet regime. Numerous Politburo members and even the Party Chairman Khrushchev were Ukrainians, and the Ukrainian SSR was a member of the United Nations even though it was at the time an integral part of the USSR.
Upon the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine along with many of the former Soviet republics and Eastern European satrapies became independent, left to fend for themselves without central control or support from Moscow -- with interesting results.
Some maintained close ties with Russia; others became fiercely anti-Russia and tied to the West.
And from appearances and all accounts, the West has been trying to capture Ukraine, or at least cleave it off from Russian influence, since independence.
It hasn't gone well. The 2014 Euromaidan occupation and protests in Kiev were part of a series of color revolutions that sought the elimination of ethnic Russian political influence and control within the Ukrainian government, and once the Yanukovych regime was overthrown, that objective seemed to be complete.
Nazi-descendant militias roamed free and some were incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces with the upshot of the massacres in Odessa and Mariupol and the nearly total ethnic cleansing of Ukraine west of the Dnieper. Russians and Russian speakers were driven out or murdered. The objective was an ethno-state aligned with Nato and the US to act as a bulwark in opposition to Russia.
The point of a Nato cordon of allies along the western Russian border is the eventual dismemberment of the Russian Federation.
It's all very bizarre.
The massacres were triggers for a civil war that has now become a general war in Ukraine between Russia and the West that has the potential to turn into a nuclear holocaust for no conceivable reason at all. The victims of the Odessa Massacre were among the first to feel the effects of the Nazi madness unleashed in Ukraine and by implication throughout Europe and soon, we can be sure, in North America and elsewhere.
This truly may be the opening of Ragnarok. Longed for. Inevitable. Twilight of the Gods.
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