Truth: A Casualty of War

For a brief moment, just prior to the horrific attacks in Brussels on March 22nd, the unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, conflict in Ukraine seemed to be sneaking back onto the American media’s radar. The Huffington WorldPost noted with alarm that "on March 13, Ukrainian military outposts were attacked 71 times by Russian backed militants,” while on March 12th, Newsweek published a lengthy story on the conflict by the American journalist Nolan Peterson who had recently embedded with Ukrainian troops on the front line.

According to Peterson’s report, "combined Russian-separatist artillery, tank, mortar and small arms attacks occur daily at hotspots near Donetsk” the capital of the rebel-held Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). Indeed, Ukrainian soldiers near Karlivka said that the "combined Russian-separatist forces attack Ukrainian positions in the area every day.” What is more, the Ukrainian forces are fighting at a disadvantage due to their fidelity, near absolute, if the Newsweek report is to be believed, to the Minsk II protocol. The report notes that, "Ukrainian forces have pulled back all heavy weapons from the front lines under the terms of the February 2015 cease-fire called Minsk II.”

A week later, however, the Associated Press reported that actually, "the cease-fire is constantly violated by both sides.” Recent reports on the conflict by the OSCE as well as by theUN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) have also noted that both sides have violated the ceasefire agreement.The OHCHR "continued to observe a disregard for the principle of distinction between civilians and those taking active part in hostilities.”

Still worse, according to the OHCHR, "Ukrainian armed forces and armed groups maintained their positions and further embedded their weapons and forces in populated areas, in violation of their obligations under international humanitarian law.” The OHCHR also "documented extensive use of civilian buildings and locations by the Ukrainian military and the Azov regiment, and looting of civilian property…” And yet the WorldPost and Newsweek reports place the blame for the ceasefire violations solely on the combined Russian-separatists forces.

In their reporting on the crisis in Ukraine, Newsweek and the WordPost (and many other American media outlets besides) prove what the anti-interventionist US Senator Hiram Johnson said one hundred years ago: The first casualty when war comes is truth.