The Odessa massacre

"Right sector" fascists in Odessa murdered dozens of people. Forty-six people were burnt alive.

Everyone in that city knows full well who did what. There is no question. The Right Sector thugs were wearing insignia and chanting death threats.

Nevertheless, our own media is trying to pretend that the identity of the killers is unknown.

Very carefully worded commentary on the tragedy in Odessa came from the mainstream Western media, as if they were trying to avoid assigning the blame to those who actually set the building on fire. Their coverage of the event was heavily reliant on statements from Kiev that blamed the violence on pro-autonomy activists, as well as witness accounts given by the nationalist Right Sector members.

Based on their reports, it may seem that the House of Trade Unions just caught fire.

Actually, it's worse than that. Look at Time's coverage. Utterly vile stuff, this. People skimming the story might actually get the impression that Putin set the fire!

Michael McFaul, who served as President Obama’s ambassador to Moscow until February, has warned that the Ukraine crisis is approaching a state of war that could trigger a large scale invasion by Russian military forces.

“The last 24 hours was a major escalation,” McFaul told TIME in a Friday interview, as Ukraine’s military began an operation to reclaim eastern cities and towns taken over by pro-Russia militants.

Amid reports that pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine are urging Russia’s military to intervene on their behalf, McFaul says he’s now reconsidering the widely-shared assumption that Russian President Vladimir Putin would prefer to destabilize Ukraine from a distance, without staging a cross-border invasion that would compel the west to take new retaliatory steps, possibly including arming the Ukrainian military.

“It would be very costly for Russia to invade Ukraine,” McFaul said. “It’ll be real fight — maybe guerrilla warfare for years. That’s not something one does lightly. But it got a lot more likely in the last 12 hours.”

This is pure, concentrated propaganda. Not a single mention of the Right Sector. The wording conveys the impression that Pro-Russian forces set the fire, and that the victims were Ukrainian nationalists.

Have you ever seen this level of press control before? The only comparison goes to -- well, to Russia. Under Stalin.