The Odesa Disaster

Robert van VorenWhatever way you look at it, what happened in Odessa now three days ago is a real disaster. It is a disaster because over 40 people died, it is a disaster because it sharpened the conflict in Ukraine enormously and brought the war to a part of the country that hitherto had escaped such horrific violence.

However, reading all the posts, watching all the videos and commentaries, and reviewing all the analyses, have not taken away my deep-down conviction that this was planned. All the time when watching the materials I think of Andrei Nekrasov’s films, the ones about the bombing of the flats in Moscow that provided the pretext for the Chechen war and were almost certainly carried out by the FSB, the film about the invasion into Georgia in 2008 and the film on Litvinenko which gives more evidence on FSB involvement in acts of terror – including the killing of Litvinenko himself…

For me the most suspicious are the photos of the victims inside. What do you do when a building is on fire? You race to the escapes, right, you race to the windows to get out. In this case we have the horrible photo of a pregnant woman bent over backwards over a desk, who died basically “on the spot” clearly not from fire or smoke and with a window almost within reach. We have bodies strewn around in the most unusual places, with their faces burnt and the lower parts of their body not, clearly the result of individual fires put artificially on each and every of the victims, and you have plenty of victims who have been shot dead with a bullet straight into their face.

In addition, we have videos that clearly show fire inside the building that cannot be the cause of Molotov cocktails from outside. It is not big fire – but it is clearly visible. Is this the fire that was created on each and every individual body inside?

I would not be surprised – rather, I am pretty convinced – this was a special operation of the FSB, a provocation aimed at getting a large number of victims, and unfortunately for them the fire did not spread enough and as a result the fact that it was artificial, man-made and deliberate could not be concealed.

I think we see here a repetition of what we have seen before, and if I were the Ukrainian government I would immediately call in an international UN-dominated team of experts to carry out a full scale investigation.

I might be pre-dispositioned, but I think we are looking at a partially failed FSB operation on foreign territory. In other words: an act of war.

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