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#ihor savchenko
rrrauschen · 4 months
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Ihor Savchenko, {1945} Иван Никулин (Ivan Nikulin)
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natalihall · 2 years
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Heroes of Ukraine not only at the front 🇺🇦
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In this digital drawing — my beloved husband Ivan Savchenko. And today is his birthday. Anniversary, 30 years ❤️
Alas, on this significant day, we are not together... The fact is that, he has been in our native Kharkov for a month already — as part of the team of our mayor Ihor Terekhov — and is working hard for the benefit of our beloved city 💙💛 Despite to the constant shelling of Kharkiv, my husband engaged in providing humanitarian aid to Kharkiv people. He delivers provisions and medicines to all those in need in his personal car. He is one of those, whom I call home front heroes in this war.
Therefore, today I want to congratulate my beloved man and gift him this a large-scale and symbolic digital picture with all my loving heart! ✍🏻
Happy birthday, my love! 🥳🎂🎁 You have always been, are and will be my Hero 💪🏼❤️‍🔥🇺🇦
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architectnews · 4 years
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EQ by Andrey Sokruta, Kyiv House
Modern Kyiv House, Equilibrium Family Home, Ukraine Real Estate, Kiev Architecture Photos
EQ by Andrey Sokruta, Kyiv, Ukraine
30 Oct 2020
EQ House in Kyiv, Ukraine
Architecture: Andrey Sokruta, Andrey Sokruta Workshop
Location: Kyiv, Ukraine
The EQ by Andrey Sokruta
Photos by Andrey Sokruta
Background
Private residence designed and built for sale. The owner turned to Andrey Sokruta Workshop to create a property that everyone could potentially enjoy!
The architecture was intended to be modern and functional. The interior was supposed to be as neutral as possible, but stylish and attractive. It was important to strike a balance and not go too far in the direction of too pretentious minimalism, to avoid particulars. Therefore, the designer-architect Andrey Sokruta decided to work in the direction of a comfortable minimalism. The working title of the project is also understandable and natural EQ – Equilibrium, which means “place of balance”.
Architecture
The architectural shape of the house can be divided into two large parallelepipeds, which are in perpendicular contact with each other. The first floor “lies” along the street, while the upper one is opposite to it: thus creating canopies, which are supported by columns. Both overhangs have their own functions: a shelter for two parking spaces and, from the side of the courtyard, the canopy is a roof for the lower terrace and an exit from the kitchen.
Working with a turnkey private house, Andrey Sokruta Workshop paid attention to the unity of the exterior and interior solutions. They continue in each other stylistically, formally and textured. For example, wood-like tiles on the facade also penetrate the interior, which is visible from the street through a large panoramic window.
Feature of the architecture of the house: the most practical use of the area. Striving to minimize the number of non-functional areas, such as corridors and other spaces where no one spends time. In accordance with this idea, the original plan of the house and the layout of the internal premises were laid.
“When there is an opportunity to design a house from the foundation, you can envisage the desired location, size and combination of rooms, as well as the location of windows,” Andrey Sokruta explains. In the project “Equilibrium”, the designer provided various floor-to-ceiling windows and all of them face the courtyard.
This allowed to literally flood all the rooms with daylight. In addition to the “beauty” function, there is also a quite practical reason for such an arrangement: you can see the gates, cars, becoming clear who has arrived or left. Also, thanks to this layout, the interior looks light, filled with air. It does not seem to be squeezed into a frame, fenced off and outlined from the outside world, but continues with it”.
The view into the courtyard also opens from the stairs that lead to the second floor. It also has an exit to the roof of the first floor, where you can organize a stylish patio for relaxing with friends.
Interior
Since the project involved a reasonable investment, Andrey Sokruta Workshop thought over and developed many of the installations individually, so as not to resort to factory methods. For example, the need to mount tires on the ceiling under track lights has disappeared, thanks to the plasterboard construction of the ceiling with laminated chipboard, where black lights were embedded. This created long black niches on the ceiling, visually identical to the factory track systems.
Decorative lamps in the interior were provided by the company “S.V.E.T. plus”, which works with Spanish and Italian brands. The designer lamps, which look like two sheets of metal bent in a chaotic geometry, are located also in the kitchen above the dining table. The other is in the living room area, underneath is a pots with stabilized moss – Moss Decor, florist Ihor Avramenko. The third element in this series is located at the entrance to the house and goes around a wooden wall and illuminates the clothes hooks.
A distinctive feature of the living room interior is the plasterboard structure behind the TV, reminiscent of a modernist wall decor. Thus, the designer diversified the furnishings without using unnecessary decor. In general, the entire interior: color fragments, furniture – are broken down into clear, simple shapes. They are diversified by texture and modern decor, such as landscaping by the floral designer Ihor Avramenko and panels in the style of constructivism by Dmitry Davydovsky.
All materials and colors: as simple and understandable as possible, there is a desire for eco. The kitchen most vividly embodies the main idea of Andrey Sokruta Workshop: a working area and an island in the form of strict monoliths of stone and wood-veneered facades. All storage systems in the house and bathrooms are designed according to the same principle. According to the principle of Occam’s Blade, everything is reduced to the essence: ergonomics, functionality, full rights of daylight and natural, solid textures!
EQ by Andrey Sokruta, Kyiv House – Building Information
Format: turnkey private house – architecture, plot, interior Author: Andrey Sokruta, Andrey Sokruta Workshop Style: contemporary Location: Kyiv House area: 240 m2 Plot area: 1200 m2
Photographer: Andrey Sokruta Website: http://sokruta.com.ua/ Instagram: @andrey_sokruta_workshop
EQ by Andrey Sokruta, Kyiv House images / information received 291020
Location: Kyiv, Ukraine
Ukraine Architecture
Ukraine Architecture Designs – chronological list
Ukraine Architecture News
Kiev Buildings
Artistic Residence Interior Architects: Dreamdesign photo : Andrey Avdeenko Kyiv Apartment Interior Design
REBERBAR Pub, Velyka Vasylkivska Street Architects: YUDIN Design photograph : Sergey Savchenko REBERBAR in Kyiv
Silenza Boutique in Kiev Architects: Dreamdesign photo : Andrey Avdeenko Silenza Boutique Kyiv Store
Maison de Charme Architects: Dreamdesign photography : Igor Karpenko Maison de Charme, Kiev
Ukraine Architecture
Comments / photos for the EQ by Andrey Sokruta, Kyiv House page welcome
Website: Ukraine
The post EQ by Andrey Sokruta, Kyiv House appeared first on e-architect.
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reneeacaseyfl · 5 years
Text
Oliver Stone’s Latest Piece of Pro-Putin Propaganda May Be His Most Shameless Move Yet
When Oliver Stone announced at the end of June that he would be premiering a new documentary, Revealing Ukraine, at the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily, not many people noticed. That’s not itself so surprising given his slide over recent years from producing acclaimed Hollywood blockbusters into bootlicking hagiographies of dictators with axes to grind against the United States. The only media that did take an interest was controlled by either the Russian government or a certain Ukrainian businessman.
The trailer for Revealing Ukraine is a mess. Half-finished lines of dialogue are cut with sinister, dramatic music as if they are of great importance when they often seem to be cut from the middle of phrases, leaving them incomprehensible. The promotional material on the film’s website is exceptionally embarrassing, with grating Ringlish abundant:
In the move the main speaker—heavyweight Ukrainian politician, opposition leader—Viktor Medvedchuk is being interviewed by the filmmaker Oliver Stone. Oliver Stone also sit with Russian president Vladimir Putin to ask him a questions about Ukrainian crisis.
The re-use of so many elements from Stone’s previous documentary, Ukraine on Fire, screams of a bargain-bin production. In fact the promotional poster for Revealing Ukraine even uses the exact same photo of Stone from that of Ukraine on Fire—and in the same position no less.
Stone’s opening line in the trailer is: “Good morning Mr Medvedchuk, I’m Oliver Stone.”
Viktor Medvedchuk has remained an ominous figure in Ukrainian politics, despite a period lying low after the 2014 Maidan revolution, during which his office was raided by activists who discovered, inter alia, a portrait of the man often dubbed Ukraine’s prince of darkness in full, Napoleonic-era imperial military regalia.
Medvedchuk’s reputation dates back to 1980 when, just before the Olympic Games were due to be held in Moscow, the Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus was arrested for “anti-Soviet activity” and the young lawyer was appointed his state defense attorney, against Stus’s own requests. During his closing speech at the trial, Medvedchuk denounced his client and said that all of Stus’s “crimes” deserved punishment and further claimed that his serious health problems did not affect his ability to work. Stus was sentenced to 10 years of forced labor in the notorious Perm-36 Gulag camp where he died, while on hunger strike, in 1985. Notably, Medvedchuk also defended Viktor Bryukhanov, director of the Chernobyl nuclear power station, during the 1987 trial that served as the climax of HBO’s recent television series.
Having entered business and politics in the ‘90s, Medvedchuk made a fortune, estimated by various sources as between 270 and 800 million U.S. dollars. In 2002, he was appointed head of Kuchma’s presidential administration—this in spite of his known criminal record for violently assaulting a student while a member of the volunteer Druzhina militia in the 1960s, and accusations of having been an agent of the KGB, operating under the codename ‘Sokolovsky.’ Leaked tape recordings of conversations between Kuchma and the heads of the Ukrainian Security Service and Interior Ministry confirm that Kuchma was made aware of these reports, but considered Medvedchuk’s influence too great to dislodge him.
In 2004, as future president Viktor Yushchenko was campaigning against Kuchma’s intended successor Viktor Yanukovych, Medvedchuk was accused of orchestrating a rally for an openly neo-Nazi “virtual party,” the Ukrainian National Assembly, during which the party leader Eduard Kovalenko declared his support for Yushchenko. Notably Kovalenko reappeared in 2017, this time as an ostensibly pro-Russian activist, a strange turn for supposed Ukrainian nationalist.
After the 2004 Orange Revolution which saw Yushchenko defeat Yanukovych, Medvedchuk founded the amorphous Ukrainian Choice organization, which funded everything from political candidates to holiday camps across the country. Ukrainian Choice was an ideologically flexible outfit, utilizing language of both the left and the right, but their propaganda generally stuck to anti-European and pro-Russian lines. Some of this veered directly into the far-right, such as an article published on the organization’s website that espoused the classic tropes of Soviet-era anti-Semitism, claiming that prominent politicians opposing Viktor Yanukovych during the Maidan protests all had “secret Jewish surnames.” Ukrainian Choice also played upon homophobic attitudes by campaigning against the Association Agreement with the European Union with billboards declaring that the deal would lead to gay marriage.
Medvedchuk’s relationship with the Russian state is close, to say the least. Vladimir Putin is godfather to his daughter, Darya, and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s wife Svetlana is her godmother. When Putin addressed the annual Kremlin-organized showpiece conference in Valdai in 2016, Medvedchuk was seated front and center in the audience, next to the Russian president’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov.
When the U.S. imposed sanctions in March 2014, after Russian troops occupied the Crimean peninsula, Medvedchuk was on the list, highlighted for:
…threatening the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine, and for undermining Ukraine’s democratic institutions and processes.  He is also being designated because he has materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support to Yanukovych.
But following the outbreak of war between Russia’s thinly disguised forces and Ukraine in the east of the country months later, Medvedchuk emerged as a key player in prisoner exchanges, with Putin negotiating directly with him rather than the Ukrainian government itself. In connection with this, he received a seat on the Minsk peace talk team, led by his former boss Kuchma. Medvedchuk was most notably central to the release of Nadia Savchenko, a Ukrainian officer and former pilot who was captured in 2014 and finally released following a long hunger strike and trumped-up conviction for murder in 2016. Savchenko herself returned a hero but soon became more erratic and was transformed into a pariah after making anti-Semitic statements and holding unauthorized meetings with Russia-backed separatists across the front line. In 2018, she was arrested and charged with plotting an armed coup d’état.
“Another interesting Western connection of Medvedchuk’s emerged in 2017, when Reuters was told by officials familiar with the FBI investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign team and Russia that Medvedchuk was one of those contacts.”
Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, Yuriy Lutsenko, said that he suspected Medvedchuk of involvement in the alleged plot. Nothing came of this aspect of the investigation and Savchenko has still yet to face trial, though was recently released and allowed to return to parliament in April this year. In March, Lutsenko announced that he had opened a criminal case against Medvedchuk and another pro-Russian politician, Yuriy Boyko, for illegally traveling to Moscow to meet with government officials.
In spite of all his public censure, Medvedchuk has leveraged this position to stage something of a comeback over the last year, worming his way back into front-line politics as leader of the “For Life” party which, following a schism in the Opposition Bloc, made up of former members of Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, has now formed an umbrella alliance of pro-Russian MPs with 27 seats in the current parliament.
He has also gone on a spree buying up media outlets, taking control of them either directly or via loyal associates. In the last 18 months he has taken over the 112, Zik and NewsOne television channels, swiftly changing their output to his favor, with rumors of moves on at least two other major broadcasters in the works.
Ihor Krymov, a broadcast editor at Zik, told the independent Hromadske TV channel that channel bosses had banned coverage of protests against the registration of pro-Russian candidates for upcoming parliamentary elections as they were “not interesting.” Krymov defied the order and relayed Hromadske’s own coverage of the protest on the channel. He has since been taken off air.
While the Ukrainian government and several other parties in parliament have roundly condemned Medvedchuk’s growing influence on the media, some Western politicians have ridden to his aid, most notably members of the UK Independence Party, which has often sided with Russia in international affairs. Another interesting Western connection of Medvedchuk’s emerged in 2017, when Reuters was told by officials familiar with the FBI investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign team and Russia that Medvedchuk was one of those contacts, something Medvedchuk himself denies.
So is Medvedchuk’s star role in Stone’s new film simply a reflection of his rising prominence or is it his own PR vehicle?
The fact that his wife, a former X Factor Ukraine presenter with a suspicious history of Russian business connections herself, Oksana Marchenko, receives title billing as a “journalist” certainly indicates the latter. Indeed 112 and NewsOne have been running indulgent reports on the lavish festival, broadcasting footage of Medvedchuk and Marchenko ostentatiously delivering a bouquet of flowers to Nicole Kidman, and attending a soiree with Stone and Domenico Dolce, whose garments Viktor apparently wears exclusively, and who considers him a “friend.”
Apart from the Medvedchuk family and President Putin, the other names attached to this film are pretty low-grade. Director Igor Lopatonok (Stone is the star and executive producer but was not behind the camera for this venture) has little to his name than his previous work on Ukraine on Fire, several colorized remasters of Soviet-era films and a quantity of real-estate videos. Lopatonok demonstrated either spectacular ignorance or mendacity regarding one of his subjects when he recently claimed on Facebook that Putin was never an agent of the KGB, something the Russian president has often publicly reminisced about.
The other “stars” listed on the film’s IMDB page are Ivan Katchanovski, an academic promoting conspiracy theories claiming that the protesters shot dead on the Maidan in 2014 were the victims of a “false flag” operation, and Lee Stranahan, an American host on the Russian state-owned Radio Sputnik and former Breitbart journalist. Stranahan was profiled in a 2016 New York Times piece for his role in spreading racially charged misinformation around the yogurt company Chobani in Twin Falls, Idaho.
Revealing Ukraine will receive its public premiere on Medvechuk’s 112 channel on July 13, with Russian state media already highlighting choice, if rather boring, lines from Stone’s interview with Putin. At Taormina, the film received the Best Documentary prize, despite the presence of Stone on the festival’s feature film competition jury. This whole affair looks sordid for Stone, who has for some time gone out of his way to bat for any regime as long as they are an opponent of the United States, but had hitherto refrained from quite so obviously doing the bidding of a private businessman.
Credit: Source link
The post Oliver Stone’s Latest Piece of Pro-Putin Propaganda May Be His Most Shameless Move Yet appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.
from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/oliver-stones-latest-piece-of-pro-putin-propaganda-may-be-his-most-shameless-move-yet/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=oliver-stones-latest-piece-of-pro-putin-propaganda-may-be-his-most-shameless-move-yet from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.tumblr.com/post/186278442707
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velmaemyers88 · 5 years
Text
Oliver Stone’s Latest Piece of Pro-Putin Propaganda May Be His Most Shameless Move Yet
When Oliver Stone announced at the end of June that he would be premiering a new documentary, Revealing Ukraine, at the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily, not many people noticed. That’s not itself so surprising given his slide over recent years from producing acclaimed Hollywood blockbusters into bootlicking hagiographies of dictators with axes to grind against the United States. The only media that did take an interest was controlled by either the Russian government or a certain Ukrainian businessman.
The trailer for Revealing Ukraine is a mess. Half-finished lines of dialogue are cut with sinister, dramatic music as if they are of great importance when they often seem to be cut from the middle of phrases, leaving them incomprehensible. The promotional material on the film’s website is exceptionally embarrassing, with grating Ringlish abundant:
In the move the main speaker—heavyweight Ukrainian politician, opposition leader—Viktor Medvedchuk is being interviewed by the filmmaker Oliver Stone. Oliver Stone also sit with Russian president Vladimir Putin to ask him a questions about Ukrainian crisis.
The re-use of so many elements from Stone’s previous documentary, Ukraine on Fire, screams of a bargain-bin production. In fact the promotional poster for Revealing Ukraine even uses the exact same photo of Stone from that of Ukraine on Fire—and in the same position no less.
Stone’s opening line in the trailer is: “Good morning Mr Medvedchuk, I’m Oliver Stone.”
Viktor Medvedchuk has remained an ominous figure in Ukrainian politics, despite a period lying low after the 2014 Maidan revolution, during which his office was raided by activists who discovered, inter alia, a portrait of the man often dubbed Ukraine’s prince of darkness in full, Napoleonic-era imperial military regalia.
Medvedchuk’s reputation dates back to 1980 when, just before the Olympic Games were due to be held in Moscow, the Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus was arrested for “anti-Soviet activity” and the young lawyer was appointed his state defense attorney, against Stus’s own requests. During his closing speech at the trial, Medvedchuk denounced his client and said that all of Stus’s “crimes” deserved punishment and further claimed that his serious health problems did not affect his ability to work. Stus was sentenced to 10 years of forced labor in the notorious Perm-36 Gulag camp where he died, while on hunger strike, in 1985. Notably, Medvedchuk also defended Viktor Bryukhanov, director of the Chernobyl nuclear power station, during the 1987 trial that served as the climax of HBO’s recent television series.
Having entered business and politics in the ‘90s, Medvedchuk made a fortune, estimated by various sources as between 270 and 800 million U.S. dollars. In 2002, he was appointed head of Kuchma’s presidential administration—this in spite of his known criminal record for violently assaulting a student while a member of the volunteer Druzhina militia in the 1960s, and accusations of having been an agent of the KGB, operating under the codename ‘Sokolovsky.’ Leaked tape recordings of conversations between Kuchma and the heads of the Ukrainian Security Service and Interior Ministry confirm that Kuchma was made aware of these reports, but considered Medvedchuk’s influence too great to dislodge him.
In 2004, as future president Viktor Yushchenko was campaigning against Kuchma’s intended successor Viktor Yanukovych, Medvedchuk was accused of orchestrating a rally for an openly neo-Nazi “virtual party,” the Ukrainian National Assembly, during which the party leader Eduard Kovalenko declared his support for Yushchenko. Notably Kovalenko reappeared in 2017, this time as an ostensibly pro-Russian activist, a strange turn for supposed Ukrainian nationalist.
After the 2004 Orange Revolution which saw Yushchenko defeat Yanukovych, Medvedchuk founded the amorphous Ukrainian Choice organization, which funded everything from political candidates to holiday camps across the country. Ukrainian Choice was an ideologically flexible outfit, utilizing language of both the left and the right, but their propaganda generally stuck to anti-European and pro-Russian lines. Some of this veered directly into the far-right, such as an article published on the organization’s website that espoused the classic tropes of Soviet-era anti-Semitism, claiming that prominent politicians opposing Viktor Yanukovych during the Maidan protests all had “secret Jewish surnames.” Ukrainian Choice also played upon homophobic attitudes by campaigning against the Association Agreement with the European Union with billboards declaring that the deal would lead to gay marriage.
Medvedchuk’s relationship with the Russian state is close, to say the least. Vladimir Putin is godfather to his daughter, Darya, and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s wife Svetlana is her godmother. When Putin addressed the annual Kremlin-organized showpiece conference in Valdai in 2016, Medvedchuk was seated front and center in the audience, next to the Russian president’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov.
When the U.S. imposed sanctions in March 2014, after Russian troops occupied the Crimean peninsula, Medvedchuk was on the list, highlighted for:
…threatening the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine, and for undermining Ukraine’s democratic institutions and processes.  He is also being designated because he has materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support to Yanukovych.
But following the outbreak of war between Russia’s thinly disguised forces and Ukraine in the east of the country months later, Medvedchuk emerged as a key player in prisoner exchanges, with Putin negotiating directly with him rather than the Ukrainian government itself. In connection with this, he received a seat on the Minsk peace talk team, led by his former boss Kuchma. Medvedchuk was most notably central to the release of Nadia Savchenko, a Ukrainian officer and former pilot who was captured in 2014 and finally released following a long hunger strike and trumped-up conviction for murder in 2016. Savchenko herself returned a hero but soon became more erratic and was transformed into a pariah after making anti-Semitic statements and holding unauthorized meetings with Russia-backed separatists across the front line. In 2018, she was arrested and charged with plotting an armed coup d’état.
“Another interesting Western connection of Medvedchuk’s emerged in 2017, when Reuters was told by officials familiar with the FBI investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign team and Russia that Medvedchuk was one of those contacts.”
Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, Yuriy Lutsenko, said that he suspected Medvedchuk of involvement in the alleged plot. Nothing came of this aspect of the investigation and Savchenko has still yet to face trial, though was recently released and allowed to return to parliament in April this year. In March, Lutsenko announced that he had opened a criminal case against Medvedchuk and another pro-Russian politician, Yuriy Boyko, for illegally traveling to Moscow to meet with government officials.
In spite of all his public censure, Medvedchuk has leveraged this position to stage something of a comeback over the last year, worming his way back into front-line politics as leader of the “For Life” party which, following a schism in the Opposition Bloc, made up of former members of Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, has now formed an umbrella alliance of pro-Russian MPs with 27 seats in the current parliament.
He has also gone on a spree buying up media outlets, taking control of them either directly or via loyal associates. In the last 18 months he has taken over the 112, Zik and NewsOne television channels, swiftly changing their output to his favor, with rumors of moves on at least two other major broadcasters in the works.
Ihor Krymov, a broadcast editor at Zik, told the independent Hromadske TV channel that channel bosses had banned coverage of protests against the registration of pro-Russian candidates for upcoming parliamentary elections as they were “not interesting.” Krymov defied the order and relayed Hromadske’s own coverage of the protest on the channel. He has since been taken off air.
While the Ukrainian government and several other parties in parliament have roundly condemned Medvedchuk’s growing influence on the media, some Western politicians have ridden to his aid, most notably members of the UK Independence Party, which has often sided with Russia in international affairs. Another interesting Western connection of Medvedchuk’s emerged in 2017, when Reuters was told by officials familiar with the FBI investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign team and Russia that Medvedchuk was one of those contacts, something Medvedchuk himself denies.
So is Medvedchuk’s star role in Stone’s new film simply a reflection of his rising prominence or is it his own PR vehicle?
The fact that his wife, a former X Factor Ukraine presenter with a suspicious history of Russian business connections herself, Oksana Marchenko, receives title billing as a “journalist” certainly indicates the latter. Indeed 112 and NewsOne have been running indulgent reports on the lavish festival, broadcasting footage of Medvedchuk and Marchenko ostentatiously delivering a bouquet of flowers to Nicole Kidman, and attending a soiree with Stone and Domenico Dolce, whose garments Viktor apparently wears exclusively, and who considers him a “friend.”
Apart from the Medvedchuk family and President Putin, the other names attached to this film are pretty low-grade. Director Igor Lopatonok (Stone is the star and executive producer but was not behind the camera for this venture) has little to his name than his previous work on Ukraine on Fire, several colorized remasters of Soviet-era films and a quantity of real-estate videos. Lopatonok demonstrated either spectacular ignorance or mendacity regarding one of his subjects when he recently claimed on Facebook that Putin was never an agent of the KGB, something the Russian president has often publicly reminisced about.
The other “stars” listed on the film’s IMDB page are Ivan Katchanovski, an academic promoting conspiracy theories claiming that the protesters shot dead on the Maidan in 2014 were the victims of a “false flag” operation, and Lee Stranahan, an American host on the Russian state-owned Radio Sputnik and former Breitbart journalist. Stranahan was profiled in a 2016 New York Times piece for his role in spreading racially charged misinformation around the yogurt company Chobani in Twin Falls, Idaho.
Revealing Ukraine will receive its public premiere on Medvechuk’s 112 channel on July 13, with Russian state media already highlighting choice, if rather boring, lines from Stone’s interview with Putin. At Taormina, the film received the Best Documentary prize, despite the presence of Stone on the festival’s feature film competition jury. This whole affair looks sordid for Stone, who has for some time gone out of his way to bat for any regime as long as they are an opponent of the United States, but had hitherto refrained from quite so obviously doing the bidding of a private businessman.
Credit: Source link
The post Oliver Stone’s Latest Piece of Pro-Putin Propaganda May Be His Most Shameless Move Yet appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.
from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/oliver-stones-latest-piece-of-pro-putin-propaganda-may-be-his-most-shameless-move-yet/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=oliver-stones-latest-piece-of-pro-putin-propaganda-may-be-his-most-shameless-move-yet from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.tumblr.com/post/186278442707
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weeklyreviewer · 5 years
Text
Oliver Stone’s Latest Piece of Pro-Putin Propaganda May Be His Most Shameless Move Yet
When Oliver Stone announced at the end of June that he would be premiering a new documentary, Revealing Ukraine, at the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily, not many people noticed. That’s not itself so surprising given his slide over recent years from producing acclaimed Hollywood blockbusters into bootlicking hagiographies of dictators with axes to grind against the United States. The only media that did take an interest was controlled by either the Russian government or a certain Ukrainian businessman.
The trailer for Revealing Ukraine is a mess. Half-finished lines of dialogue are cut with sinister, dramatic music as if they are of great importance when they often seem to be cut from the middle of phrases, leaving them incomprehensible. The promotional material on the film’s website is exceptionally embarrassing, with grating Ringlish abundant:
In the move the main speaker—heavyweight Ukrainian politician, opposition leader—Viktor Medvedchuk is being interviewed by the filmmaker Oliver Stone. Oliver Stone also sit with Russian president Vladimir Putin to ask him a questions about Ukrainian crisis.
The re-use of so many elements from Stone’s previous documentary, Ukraine on Fire, screams of a bargain-bin production. In fact the promotional poster for Revealing Ukraine even uses the exact same photo of Stone from that of Ukraine on Fire—and in the same position no less.
Stone’s opening line in the trailer is: “Good morning Mr Medvedchuk, I’m Oliver Stone.”
Viktor Medvedchuk has remained an ominous figure in Ukrainian politics, despite a period lying low after the 2014 Maidan revolution, during which his office was raided by activists who discovered, inter alia, a portrait of the man often dubbed Ukraine’s prince of darkness in full, Napoleonic-era imperial military regalia.
Medvedchuk’s reputation dates back to 1980 when, just before the Olympic Games were due to be held in Moscow, the Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus was arrested for “anti-Soviet activity” and the young lawyer was appointed his state defense attorney, against Stus’s own requests. During his closing speech at the trial, Medvedchuk denounced his client and said that all of Stus’s “crimes” deserved punishment and further claimed that his serious health problems did not affect his ability to work. Stus was sentenced to 10 years of forced labor in the notorious Perm-36 Gulag camp where he died, while on hunger strike, in 1985. Notably, Medvedchuk also defended Viktor Bryukhanov, director of the Chernobyl nuclear power station, during the 1987 trial that served as the climax of HBO’s recent television series.
Having entered business and politics in the ‘90s, Medvedchuk made a fortune, estimated by various sources as between 270 and 800 million U.S. dollars. In 2002, he was appointed head of Kuchma’s presidential administration—this in spite of his known criminal record for violently assaulting a student while a member of the volunteer Druzhina militia in the 1960s, and accusations of having been an agent of the KGB, operating under the codename ‘Sokolovsky.’ Leaked tape recordings of conversations between Kuchma and the heads of the Ukrainian Security Service and Interior Ministry confirm that Kuchma was made aware of these reports, but considered Medvedchuk’s influence too great to dislodge him.
In 2004, as future president Viktor Yushchenko was campaigning against Kuchma’s intended successor Viktor Yanukovych, Medvedchuk was accused of orchestrating a rally for an openly neo-Nazi “virtual party,” the Ukrainian National Assembly, during which the party leader Eduard Kovalenko declared his support for Yushchenko. Notably Kovalenko reappeared in 2017, this time as an ostensibly pro-Russian activist, a strange turn for supposed Ukrainian nationalist.
After the 2004 Orange Revolution which saw Yushchenko defeat Yanukovych, Medvedchuk founded the amorphous Ukrainian Choice organization, which funded everything from political candidates to holiday camps across the country. Ukrainian Choice was an ideologically flexible outfit, utilizing language of both the left and the right, but their propaganda generally stuck to anti-European and pro-Russian lines. Some of this veered directly into the far-right, such as an article published on the organization’s website that espoused the classic tropes of Soviet-era anti-Semitism, claiming that prominent politicians opposing Viktor Yanukovych during the Maidan protests all had “secret Jewish surnames.” Ukrainian Choice also played upon homophobic attitudes by campaigning against the Association Agreement with the European Union with billboards declaring that the deal would lead to gay marriage.
Medvedchuk’s relationship with the Russian state is close, to say the least. Vladimir Putin is godfather to his daughter, Darya, and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s wife Svetlana is her godmother. When Putin addressed the annual Kremlin-organized showpiece conference in Valdai in 2016, Medvedchuk was seated front and center in the audience, next to the Russian president’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov.
When the U.S. imposed sanctions in March 2014, after Russian troops occupied the Crimean peninsula, Medvedchuk was on the list, highlighted for:
…threatening the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine, and for undermining Ukraine’s democratic institutions and processes.  He is also being designated because he has materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support to Yanukovych.
But following the outbreak of war between Russia’s thinly disguised forces and Ukraine in the east of the country months later, Medvedchuk emerged as a key player in prisoner exchanges, with Putin negotiating directly with him rather than the Ukrainian government itself. In connection with this, he received a seat on the Minsk peace talk team, led by his former boss Kuchma. Medvedchuk was most notably central to the release of Nadia Savchenko, a Ukrainian officer and former pilot who was captured in 2014 and finally released following a long hunger strike and trumped-up conviction for murder in 2016. Savchenko herself returned a hero but soon became more erratic and was transformed into a pariah after making anti-Semitic statements and holding unauthorized meetings with Russia-backed separatists across the front line. In 2018, she was arrested and charged with plotting an armed coup d’état.
“Another interesting Western connection of Medvedchuk’s emerged in 2017, when Reuters was told by officials familiar with the FBI investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign team and Russia that Medvedchuk was one of those contacts.”
Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, Yuriy Lutsenko, said that he suspected Medvedchuk of involvement in the alleged plot. Nothing came of this aspect of the investigation and Savchenko has still yet to face trial, though was recently released and allowed to return to parliament in April this year. In March, Lutsenko announced that he had opened a criminal case against Medvedchuk and another pro-Russian politician, Yuriy Boyko, for illegally traveling to Moscow to meet with government officials.
In spite of all his public censure, Medvedchuk has leveraged this position to stage something of a comeback over the last year, worming his way back into front-line politics as leader of the “For Life” party which, following a schism in the Opposition Bloc, made up of former members of Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, has now formed an umbrella alliance of pro-Russian MPs with 27 seats in the current parliament.
He has also gone on a spree buying up media outlets, taking control of them either directly or via loyal associates. In the last 18 months he has taken over the 112, Zik and NewsOne television channels, swiftly changing their output to his favor, with rumors of moves on at least two other major broadcasters in the works.
Ihor Krymov, a broadcast editor at Zik, told the independent Hromadske TV channel that channel bosses had banned coverage of protests against the registration of pro-Russian candidates for upcoming parliamentary elections as they were “not interesting.” Krymov defied the order and relayed Hromadske’s own coverage of the protest on the channel. He has since been taken off air.
While the Ukrainian government and several other parties in parliament have roundly condemned Medvedchuk’s growing influence on the media, some Western politicians have ridden to his aid, most notably members of the UK Independence Party, which has often sided with Russia in international affairs. Another interesting Western connection of Medvedchuk’s emerged in 2017, when Reuters was told by officials familiar with the FBI investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign team and Russia that Medvedchuk was one of those contacts, something Medvedchuk himself denies.
So is Medvedchuk’s star role in Stone’s new film simply a reflection of his rising prominence or is it his own PR vehicle?
The fact that his wife, a former X Factor Ukraine presenter with a suspicious history of Russian business connections herself, Oksana Marchenko, receives title billing as a “journalist” certainly indicates the latter. Indeed 112 and NewsOne have been running indulgent reports on the lavish festival, broadcasting footage of Medvedchuk and Marchenko ostentatiously delivering a bouquet of flowers to Nicole Kidman, and attending a soiree with Stone and Domenico Dolce, whose garments Viktor apparently wears exclusively, and who considers him a “friend.”
Apart from the Medvedchuk family and President Putin, the other names attached to this film are pretty low-grade. Director Igor Lopatonok (Stone is the star and executive producer but was not behind the camera for this venture) has little to his name than his previous work on Ukraine on Fire, several colorized remasters of Soviet-era films and a quantity of real-estate videos. Lopatonok demonstrated either spectacular ignorance or mendacity regarding one of his subjects when he recently claimed on Facebook that Putin was never an agent of the KGB, something the Russian president has often publicly reminisced about.
The other “stars” listed on the film’s IMDB page are Ivan Katchanovski, an academic promoting conspiracy theories claiming that the protesters shot dead on the Maidan in 2014 were the victims of a “false flag” operation, and Lee Stranahan, an American host on the Russian state-owned Radio Sputnik and former Breitbart journalist. Stranahan was profiled in a 2016 New York Times piece for his role in spreading racially charged misinformation around the yogurt company Chobani in Twin Falls, Idaho.
Revealing Ukraine will receive its public premiere on Medvechuk’s 112 channel on July 13, with Russian state media already highlighting choice, if rather boring, lines from Stone’s interview with Putin. At Taormina, the film received the Best Documentary prize, despite the presence of Stone on the festival’s feature film competition jury. This whole affair looks sordid for Stone, who has for some time gone out of his way to bat for any regime as long as they are an opponent of the United States, but had hitherto refrained from quite so obviously doing the bidding of a private businessman.
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Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi MPs
Факты, которые  подконтрольные ЦРУ СМ»И»  в России скрывают...
Dictatorship USA – Run By A Plundering and Murderous Ruling Class  — 2019 (362)
The Alarming Rise of Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi MPs Since the 2014 “Pro-democracy Revolution”
GlobalResearch, April 26, 2019
Less than two years ago, the Ukraine’s parliament (Verkhovna Rada) voted to outlaw the St George’s Ribbon, an emblem often worn to commemorate those who liberated the Soviet Union from Hitler’s rule.
By winter 1943, the once apparently indestructible Wehrmacht was spinning on its tail, their officers with their heads turning about westward, as they gradually retreated towards the German frontiers. Come the spring of 1945, dead Ukrainian soldiers lay strewn across central and eastern Europe.
The decision by an increasingly far-right Ukrainian parliament to ban remembrance symbols which commemorate those who fought against the Third Reich is, therefore, a desecration of their memory. It is an attempt to wash over that awful suffering the Ukrainian state endured during the Nazi occupation, with Hitler outlining plans to turn the country into a servile colony of Germanic dominion.
Over elapsing time from the February 2014 US-instituted “pro-democracy revolution”, an ever expanding group of neo-Nazis has been elected to office. Notable amid these menacing figures is the far-right military commander Yuriy Bereza, an MP since November 2014 who was elected under the title “People’s Deputy of Ukraine”.
Bereza is a member of the fascist party People’s Front, which counts among its prominent MPs the neo-Nazi Andriy Parubiy, Chairman of the Ukrainian parliament since April 2016. In the early 1990s, Parubiy co-founded the far-right Social-National Party of Ukraine with fellow extremist Oleh Tyahnybok, that later became known as the Svoboda (Freedom) party.
When, in May 2017, a few of the Ukraine’s conscientious MPs objected to moves in banning the St George’s Ribbon, Bereza roared down from his parliamentary seat that he would like to “grab a machine gun and shoot those bast*rds”. Bereza cuts an intimidating figure. He is a tall man routinely clad in full army fatigues, with tightly-cropped hair, broad shoulders and stern expression.
In December 2018, Bereza punched in the face Nestor Shufrych, an MP with the centre-left party For Life, after the latter removed a poster from the parliamentary podium which accused the Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk  of being a Kremlin “agent”.
Bereza is familiar with the use of arms. Since April 2014, he has held the position of Dnipro Battalion leader: A fascist-linked unit which has fought Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukrainian regions such as the Donetsk Oblast, an area which rests directly upon Russia’s south-western border, and is a mere 400 miles from Volgograd (Stalingrad). The Dnipro Battalion is subordinated to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine.
Bereza and his regiment were involved in fighting during the autumn 2014 Battle of Ilovaisk, ending in decisive victory for the Moscow-supported Donetsk People’s Republic.  Bereza’s cause has drawn sympathy and backing from commercial media outlets like the Los Angeles Times.
Over Christmas 2014, Bereza’s regiment was accused of war crimes by human rights groups, such as the deliberate starvation of Ukrainian civilians. His battalion has received more than $10 million of financial support from billionaire businessman Ihor Kolomoyskyi.
Kolomoyskyi has provided critical support too for Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukraine’s president-elect, by guaranteeing him widespread exposure on television networks that the tycoon owns. Kolomoyskyi is one of the most powerful and affluent Ukrainians in the world. His corporate influence extends from the Caucasus of Eurasia to the Appalachian mountains of North America.
In a plot befitting a Hollywood film noir, Kolomoyskyi is presently under investigation by the FBI regarding claims of “ordering contract killings” and “financial crimes”, including money laundering and embezzlement. In 2016, Kolomoyskyi was accused of defrauding the Ukraine’s largest bank (PrivatBank) of hundreds of millions of dollars.  Also that year a criminal case was opened in Russia against Kolomoyskyi, purporting that he had organized the killings of civilians.
Kolomoyskyi, who lived in the US for a period and retains vast business interests in states like Ohio and West Virginia, moved to Israel last September – which may well complicate a potential extradition to America, as he also possesses Israeli citizenship.
Kolomoyskyi has bankrolled other far-right regiments fighting in eastern Ukraine, such as the Azov, Aidar and Donbas battalions. These armed groups have been cited by human rights activists for committing an array of offences, including war crimes – which have gone unpunished – like torture, abductions, possible executions, unlawful detention, sexual assault, etc.
An alarming number of neo-Nazis have indeed been elected to office in the Ukrainian parliament. Over the past five years of what the Washington Post calls “fledgling democracy”, the following fascist figures have all enjoyed work as Ukrainian MPs, and they each comprise past and current members of the neo-Nazi Svoboda party: Oleh Tyahnybok, Ihor Mosiychuk, Oleh Osukhovskyi, Yuriy Bublyk, Oleksandr Marchenko, Oleh Makhnitskyi, Andriy Ilyenko, Ruslan Koshulynskyi, Mykhailo Holovko, Yuriy Levchenko, Igor Miroshnychenko, Pavlo Kyrylenko and Eduard Leonov.
The above’s presence in the corridors of power has been almost undocumented in mass media reporting. There are other fascists receiving continued employment in the Ukrainian parliament – like Andriy Biletsky, co-founder of the now defunct white supremacist Social-National Assembly. Since late 2016, MP Biletsky has held the leadership of National Corps, a far-right party.
For over two years from May 2014 Biletsky commanded the Azov Battalion, which enjoyed tacit Western support whilst fighting Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Azov Battalion soldiers can be seen in photographs giving Nazi salutes, while flanked with swastikas and other symbols based on SS insignia.
More far-right individuals are holding seats like Andrey Artemenko, a Canadian citizen and MP since November 2014, who claims to be a “neo-conservative” and has membership of the fascist-led Radical Party. The Radical Party leader and MP is far-right extremist Oleh Lyashko, whose militant activities in the east of Ukraine were condemned by human rights organizations.
Among the Radical Party MPs is the briefly above-mentioned Ihor Mosiychuk, a neo-Nazi who is a past member of both the Svoboda party and Social-National Assembly. Mosiychuk, sworn to office in November 2014, is also a journalist and editor-in-chief of the hardline newspaper Vechirnaya Vasilkov.
Serhiy Melnychuk, former leader of the Aidar Battalion, is likewise a Radical Party MP, as he has been since November 2014. Melnychuk is currently under investigation over allegations regarding a false assets declaration, while he has previously been the subject of multiple legal cases and accused of abduction. Melnychuk was stripped of his parliamentary immunity in June 2015.
There are further far-right Ukrainian MPs embedded in seemingly respectable parties like the People’s Front. Among them is Ihor Lapin, a multi-decorated militant commander who comprised part of the Aidar Battalion, which draped Nazi-style insignia over its armoured vehicles.
Holding membership of the People’s Front too is the aforementioned Parubiy, who has enjoyed trips to America and Canada, and is acquainted with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. The far-right military figure, Mykhailo Havryliuk, is himself a People’s Front member and MP, with Yuriy Bereza as stated also claiming a position in that party.
There are in addition fascists posing as “independents” in parliament such as Volodymyr Parasyuk, a former soldier in the Dnipro Battalion, commanded by Bereza. Parasyuk is a past member of the neo-Nazi party, Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists. He was elected in November 2014, and still enjoys a place as MP more than four years on. Parasyuk has a reputation for physically assaulting people he does not like, including cowardly attacks on statesman Oleksandr Vilkul and security chief Vasyl Hrytsak, kicking the latter in the head while he was seated.
Boryslav Bereza is a separate extreme right-wing independent MP, and was elected in November 2014; he is a former spokesperson for Right Sector, a fascist party, and despite his surname he is no relation to Yuriy Bereza.
Boryslav Bereza is an open admirer of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, speaking warmly of his “three classic principles” in interviews. Moreover, in December 2014 Boryslav Bereza acknowledged that during the fighting in eastern Ukraine, Right Sector provided important assistance for Biletsky’s notorious Azov Battalion.
MP Dmytro Yarosh, the one-time head of Right Sector, is yet another neo-Nazi who in the past was placed on Interpol’s international wanted list. Since late 2014, Yarosh constitutes a Ukrainian MP, and for many years he has been leader of the Tryzub (Trident) paramilitary group, whose full title is the Stepan Bandera All-Ukrainian Organization.
In Western establishment dialogue – pertaining to regimes they support – the terms “neo-Nazi” and “fascist” have been virtually erased from official records and reporting. These unequivocal labels are instead replaced with descriptions like “ultra-conservative”, “nationalist” and “maverick”. The latter ambiguous words blur the lines of neo-Nazism and fascism, sowing seeds of doubt and confusion in the reader’s mind. A fascist now becomes an ultra-conservative or nationalist.
There are other post “revolution” MPs who have been part of fascist regiments, like Nadiya Savchenko, an Iraq War veteran and former instructor in the Aidar Battalion. Savchenko is a far-right extremist, and had been held in a Ukrainian jail for over a year until her unexpected release last week – after being suspected of planning a terrorist attack on the Ukrainian parliament building, and intending to overthrow the government. Savchenko still faces trial regarding these claims, and prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko said her departure from prison suggests that the country’s court apparatus is “gravely ill”.
In June 2014, Savchenko was arrested by Russian authorities, placed on trial, and after long deliberation was charged in March 2016 with complicity in the killing of two state journalists. President Petro Poroshenko championed Savchenko’s cause, describing her as “a symbol of the struggle for Ukraine”; and in March 2015 he awarded her the title “Hero of Ukraine”, the highest honour that can be bestowed upon a Ukrainian citizen.
Semen Semenchenko, the far-right Donbas Battalion commander, was sworn in as a Ukrainian MP in November 2014. Semenchenko’s election to parliament came weeks after his regiment was accused by a UN monitoring mission of executing war crimes on Ukrainian civilians, such as torture, beatings and sexual assault.
In September 2014, Semenchenko had arrived in Washington where he met Congress and Pentagon representatives. That same month he publicly called for US military backing, and enjoyed further visits to America later that year. In June 2017, an appeal was expounded against Semenchenko by former Donbas Battalion soldiers, who wanted an investigation conducted after accusing him of criminal acts.
In December 2018, Semenchenko was detained in Tbilisi, Georgia and suspected of “illegal possession and acquisition of arms”. He was not arrested due to having a diplomatic passport.
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Перед нами - коварный и опасный мошенник, расист, лжец и фашист Дональд Трамп, порочный Конгресс, нацистские ФБР - ЦРУ, кровавые милитаристы США и НАТО >>> а также и лживые, вредоносные американские СМ»И».
Нынешние киевские власти — фашистские агенты американского империализма...  Именно то, чего хотят Трамр/ США и в Венесуэле!
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Правительство США жестоко нарушало мои права человека при проведении кампании террора, которая заставила меня покинуть свою родину и получить политическое убежище в СССР. См. книгу «Безмолвный террор — История политических гонений на семью в США» - "Silent Terror: One family's history of political persecution in the United States» - http://arnoldlockshin.wordpress.com
Правительство США еще нарушает мои права, в течении 15 лет отказывается от выплаты причитающейся мне пенсии по старости.  Властители США воруют пенсию!!  
ФСБ - Федеральная служба «безопасности» России - вслед за позорным, предавшим страну предшественником КГБ, мерзко выполняет приказы секретного, кровавого хозяина (boss) - американского ЦРУ (CIA). Среди таких «задач» -  мне запретить выступать в СМИ и не пропускать отправленных мне комментариев.   А это далеко не всё...
Арнольд Локшин, политэмигрант из США
BANNED – ЗАПРЕЩЕНО!!
ЦРУ - ФСБ забанили все мои посты, комментарии в Вконтакте, в Макспарке, в Medium.com... и удаляют ещё много других моих постов!
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rrrauschen · 4 months
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Ihor Savchenko, {1946} Старинный водевиль (The Lucky Bride)
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rrrauschen · 2 years
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Ihor Savchenko, {1943} Партизаны в степях Украины (Partisans in the Ukrainian Steppe)
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