maidan snipers
Interviews med tre snigskytter af georgisk nationalitet, gjort af den italienske journalist Gian Micalessin og udsendt i sidste uge som en imponerende dokumentarfilm på den Milan baserede Kanal 5 (Matrix program), har endnu ikke fundet vejen frem til de internationale mainstream medier. Det er knapt overraskende i betragtning af de hårdtslående beviser imod de egentlige gerningsmænd og organisatører af kuppet i 2014 i Kiev, almindeligt kendt som "revolution of dignity" (revolution for værdighed).

Dokumentarfilmen karakteriserer Alexander Revazishvili, Koba Nergadze og Zalogi Kvaratskhelia, georgiske militærofficerer som blev rekrutteret til at udføre en "special mission" i Kiev af Mamuka Mamulashvili, en nær forbundsfælle af Mikhail Saakashvili's tidligere forsvarsminister Bacho Akhalaia. De hævder at de den 15. januar, 2014 landede i Kiev forsynet med falske dokumenter og hvor de blev transporteret til Maidan. Mod at have modtaget $1000 hver og med udsigt til at blive betalt yderligere $5000 after at "missionen var udført", var de blevet instrueret til at klargøre snigskyttestillinger indeni bygninger af Hotel Ukraine og Konservatoriet, som vender ud mod Maidan pladsen.

maidan map
Map of the Maidan square in Kiev and surrounding buildings

The facts they exposed afterwards, were shocking. Along with other snipers (some of them were Lithuanians) they were put under command of an American military operative Brian Christopher Boyenger (his Facebook page is here). The coordinating team also included Mamulashvili and infamous Segrey Pashinsky, who was detained by protesters on Feb 18, 2017 with a sniper rifle in the boot of his car and later headed the first post-Maidan interim president administration of Ukraine. The weapons came on stage on February 18 and were distributed to the various Georgian and Lithuanian groups. "There were three or four weapons in each bag, there were Makarov guns, AKM guns, rifles, and a lot of cartridges." - witnesses Nergadze.

The following day, Mamulashvili and Pashinsky explained to snipers that they should shoot at the square and sow chaos. "When Mamulashvili arrived, I also asked him. Things are getting complicated, we have to start shooting - he replied that we cannot go to presidential elections. "But who to shoot?" I asked. He replied that who and where it did not matter, you had to shoot somewhere so much to sow chaos."
"It did not matter if we fired at a tree, barricade, or those who tossed a Molotov, what counted was making panics."
"I listened to the screams," recalls Revazishvili. "There were many dead and injured downstairs. My first and only thought was to leave in a hurry before they caught up with me. Otherwise, they would tear me apart."

Four years later, Revazishvili and his two companions report they have not yet received the promised 5000 USD bills as a payment and have decided to tell the truth about those who "used and abandoned" them.

The full documentary with English subtitles is available below (in two parts):



[Two days later a Macedonian news agency Infomax organized a 52-minutes long night talk with Koba Nergadze and Zalogi Kvaratskhelia (in Macedonian) in which they provided more details about their backgrounds and mission to Kiev.]

These three men are presenting themselves as repented military officers who were simply "obeying orders" and did not know that they "had to kill people". A naive attempt for professional death squads operatives, to put it mildly. Meanwhile the fact and time of these confessions and revelations are absolutely synchronized with the ongoing agony of the incumbent regime in Kiev.

Bacho Alakhaia
Since the very beginning the talking Georgians explicitly claim that the operation was initiated by the former president of Georgia Mikhail Saakashvili. Mamulashvili's chief Bacho Akhalaia was a very close associate and trusted person of the Georgian leader who lost parliamentary elections in October 2012 following the prison abuse scandal (the Human Rights Watch dedicated a special report to the "Georgian Abu-Ghraib", Gldani Prison, same month). At the time when the Georgian sniper trio was hired for dirty job in Kiev, Akhalaia was under criminal trial on charges of abusing the power while heading the penitentiary branch of the Ministry of Justice, illegal detention and tortures of inmates (in October 2014 he was pleaded guilty by the Tbilisi City Court and sentenced to 7,5 years in prison). One month earlier, in November 2013, Mikhail Saakashvili, facing multiple criminal charges in Georgia, left the country for the United States, and officially settled at the Tufts University. He and his stooges, having suffered a painful defeat at the homeland, would hardly initiated a risky and adventurous project in a neighboring country if only they were not forced to do so by their masters to make up for failing to comply with their mission in Georgia.
Anyway, on the early days of the Ukrainian crisis the vast Soros-financed network in Georgia (Bacho Alakhaia, a bright offspring of the notorious Mengrel criminal clan, was got on Soros money at the Georgia Liberty Institute since his studentship in early 2000s) was activated to conduct special operations in Kiev.
Four years later the situation has drastically changed. A showcase democratic alliance of Poroshenko & Saakashvili was broken into shatters. Saakashvili again proved to a be a psychopath unable to build any stable political relationship (since September 2017 Ukraine is considering extradition of Saakashvili to the Georgian authorities meeting their request). Meanwhile on Nov 1 one of the closest aides of Bacho Alakhaia and Saakashvili, former chief of the military police at the Georgian defense ministry, Megis Kardava, wanted to face the same criminal charges in Georgia, was detained with false passport on the Ukrainian border. The Ukrainian security service has already announced that he would be extradited to Tbilisi within 40 days. Several other Georgians from Saakashvili personal protection team were arrested in Ukraine and expelled to their homeland earlier in late October.

All these factors could have made the Georgian sniper trio to appear preventively on the Italian TV as "voluntary whistle-blowers exposing the truth" about Euromaidan before they are captured and punished as the scape-goats.
Prudently enough they named a number of iconic personalities of the incumbent regime in Kiev - Andriy Parybiy (currently the Chairman of Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine), Segrey Pashinsky (member of parliament representing pro-government People's Front) and Vladimir Parasyuk (another charismatic parliament member) - as organizers and coordinators of the massacre on the Maidan square on Feb 20, 2014.
Their claims are confirmed by other evidence. The most comprehensive collection of such facts so far was carried out by Professor of the University of Ottawa Ivan Katchanovsky (he also commented on the Italian documentary last week).


Comment: Prof. Katchanovsky's statement:
The information given by the purported Georgian snipers in the Italian documentary appears to be generally consistent with various publicly available evidence that I examined in my studies and that was revealed at the Maidan massacre trial. This includes locations of many of the snipers in the Hotel Ukraina and the Music Conservatory, exact calibers of firearms used to massacre protesters, the involvement of the Right Sector-linked special Maidan armed company under Parasiuk's command, and a well-known video of a Maidan leader who was filmed evacuating a Maidan protester with a rifle.

My paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and a new paper recently presented at the World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities in Columbia University noted statements by former Ukrainian and Georgian senior officials and commanders. They referred to specific Maidan politicians as the massacre organizers and stated that snipers included Georgians and Lithuanians along with special Maidan armed company commander and member, and named some of them or said that their names were identified.

My study also noted that one of snipers, whose communication was briefly recorded when they were shooting, had an apparent Caucasian accent. This recording is included in my new 55-minute long video appendix, which contains brief synchronized segments of various videos and evidence from the Maidan massacre trial which all point to snipers in the Maidan-controlled locations.

But I have no ability to do a definite verification if the Georgians who confessed in the Italian documentary were the Maidan snipers. This can be done by investigators, government officials, and journalists in the West, Ukraine and Georgia. My academic study only analyzes publicly available evidence and is concerned with the research question as to which side of the conflict was involved in the massacre and not with involvement of specific persons and with identities of specific snipers and massacre organizers. But it is striking that such bombshell public confessions identifying purported snipers and organizers of the Maidan massacre are ignored by the governments and nearly all media in the West and in Ukraine, in contrast to reactions to statements of sexual harassment and abuse of Western politicians and other public figures. Similarly, over 100 testimonies of wounded protesters revealed by the Maidan massacre trial and investigations and close to 100 publicly available testimonies of eyewitnesses point to snipers in the Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled locations.

Whatever we feel towards the repented snipers, their public confessions do not exonerate them from responsibility for deliberately killing people. They were not soldiers at the battlefield during the declared war. They could not be ordered by their commanders. They were hired for money to do a dirty job and they were aware that what they were going to do was a dirty job. Their jabbering in attempt to prove the opposite is ridiculous. So this trio, Alexander Revazishvili, Koba Nergadze and Zalogi Kvaratskhelia, as well as those who hired and ordered them - Mamuka Mamulashvili (currently he is the commander of the Georgian Legion in Donbass), Brian Boyenger (he fought on the Ukrainian side in Donbass in 2015-2016) - and other snipers from Georgia, Lithuania and Ukraine have to face trial in Ukraine or any other country whose citizens perished during the Euromaidan. Next should come the turn of the Ukrainian politicians, principal beneficiaries of that massacre - those named (Andriy Parybiy, Segrey Pashinsky and Vladimir Parasyuk) and still unknown to the public.
maidan heavenly hundred
The "Heavenly Hundred", perished on Maidan square in 2014
As a matter of fact, this still underreported story totally undermines the legitimacy of Poroshenko's regime. The crocodile tears of the incumbent rulers of that long-suffering nation over the graves of the victims of "revolution of dignity" since now onwards will every time only emphasise and highlight the former's role in mass killing of their own supporters. Having paid a puny 1000 USD to every foreign sniper, they came to power to abuse dreams and trust of the millions of citizens of Ukraine. That was the real price of the Ukrainian "dignity" for the masterminds of their national catastrophe.

poroshenko
Poroshenko at Heavenly Hundred memorial in 2014