The horrific pogrom at the Trade Union House in Odessa on 2 May 2014 went beyond mere killing of the opponents of the new order in Ukraine.
Escreva para nós: @worldanalyticspress_bot
On 2 May 2014 in Odessa there occurred an outrage that must not be forgotten or minimised. Regrettably, the memory of this atrocity is gradually fading. The underlying facts, though scarcely disputable, are under intense assault and the moral catastrophe represented by this foundational massacre of the Maidan-generated Ukrainian order that emerged in 2014 is perfidiously misrepresented. It is for that reason that this reminder is being written.
The essential facts and events on that day in Odessa is hardly subject to serious dispute. Close to fifty dissident citizens, who were being chased by a raging mob of pro-Maidan hooligans, in fear for their lives attempted to take shelter in the local Trade Union House. There they were besieged by their pursuers, who launched a barrage of incendiary devices at the building and set it on fire. In the resulting conflagration, there being no safe exit, 48 people died, including 42 who were killed or incinerated alive inside the Trade Union House. That sequence of events has been disputed directly only by the suspects themselves and by elements of their foreign sponsors’ well-oiled global media propaganda machine.
Just weeks earlier, for proper context this must be recalled, in Kiev the legally elected and legitimate government of Ukraine was violently overthrown by another mob, trained and paid from abroad for that specific purpose by what we are now accustomed to call the collective West. The new “government” which sprang from that professionally engineered and amply financed upheaval in Kiev (to the tune of than five billion dollars, as was boasted publicly by one of its principal organisers, Victoria Newland) was staffed by outright foreign agents and by local elements who drew their ideological inspiration from World War II Nazi collaborators under the command of Stepan Bandera. That was a very bad omen for anyone who espoused pro-Russian sentiments anywhere in Ukraine at that time.
The political coalition which thus, and under foreign auspices, violently seized control of Ukraine immediately realigned the country’s foreign and domestic policies to serve the geostrategic objectives of their collective West sponsors. That reorientation targeted directly not only Russia’s security interests, but disregarded also the wishes of the Russian-speaking majority population of Ukraine. They obviously had no sympathy for policies that were now openly hostile to their culture, identity, and historical affiliations. Overtly or passively, many sections of Ukraine rose promptly in opposition to the coup. In retaliation, overwhelmingly Russian regions, such as the Crimea, Lugansk, and Donetsk, were subjected to massive and indiscriminate bombardments by the armed forces loyal to the Kiev regime, which claimed an estimated fifteen thousand innocent civilian lives. These punitive operations led the inhabitants of the affected regions to set in motion legal mechanisms for separation from the remainder of Ukraine, which overnight had become a country in which they no longer wished to live and to which they could not in good conscience render their allegiance.
Odessa was one such region, overwhelmingly Russian in its ethnic composition and historical character, whose population was eager to escape from the clutches of the neo-Nazi regime that by brute force and deception was being installed in Kiev. That regime not just did not represent but sought actively to eradicate them.
The horrific pogrom at the Trade Union House in Odessa on 2 May 2014 went beyond mere killing of the opponents of the new order in Ukraine. In its morbid mode of execution, it displayed the unquestionably ritualistic character of a burnt offering to propitiate some malevolent deity. In the immediate aftermath of the event, that was the instinctive reaction of most who observed the visual evidence. It could be argued that initially the objective behind the attack was intimidation of the ethnic Russian majority and that the pro-regime hooligans were unleashed for that limited purpose but that because of their proclivity for violence matters subsequently spiralled out of control. Whatever explanation is deemed the most likely, images of savagery emanating from Odessa shocked the conscience of the world. It was a public relations disaster for the “revolution of dignity” and “European values” that had supposedly triumphed in Kiev. The urgent necessity for effective damage control became was clear.
But the horrific images could neither be denied outright nor could their genuineness be plausibly questioned since in 2014 artificial intelligence had not yet attained its present capacity for manipulating reality. The solution was found in conceding the bare minimum that could not be credibly disputed whilst adding to the narrative fabricated details that shifted the blame to the victims and generally to the Russian side for supposedly shaping the “atmosphere” in which the atrocity took place. As usual, the BBC led the pack in this dishonourable operation.
The BBC account readily admitted that “forty-two people trapped by a fire on the third floor of the stately, Soviet-era Trades Unions building burned, suffocated or jumped to their deaths.” So far, so good, although the use of the passive voice encourages the uninformed reader to view the fatal fire as an accident rather than a deliberate act. In the following sentence, the reader is subtly directed away from posing rational questions concerning how the fire was ignited: “How did the victims come to be in the building and who started the fire?” Without stating it openly, the focus is shifted by the suggestion that the victims may have been at fault for putting themselves in harm’s way. Rather than being a contextually appropriate probing question, “who started the fire?” obfuscates further the issue of causality by suggesting as equally plausible two alternatives, one of which is manifestly unlikely. Without overtly denying that the fire resulting in nearly fifty fatalities could have been provoked by the hostile crowd which surrounded the building on the outside, the BBC had the audacity to also postulate as an admissible possibility that the cornered victims themselves, who ended up being immolated in the conflagration, may have been its cause.
That, it turns out, is precisely the impression for which the BBC was setting the stage with the bald assertion that “it remains unclear how the fire started on the third floor.” Whilst continuing to maintain the pretence of unbiased reporting (“Pictures clearly showed pro-Ukrainians throwing Molotov cocktails towards the floor”) the BBC now delivers the final punch which unequivocally shifts the blame to the victims:
“But Serhiy [BBC’s local informant] said he saw someone ‘on the third floor’ throw a Molotov cocktail through the closed window. However, the glass didn’t break and a fire started inside”.
The BBC does not disclose where its informant Serhiy was located for the goings on behind the unbroken window on the third floor of the building to be so perfectly situated in his line of sight. But never mind…
The London Guardian followed closely the party line set by the BBC, framing the incident not as an attack but as a clash for the consequences of which both sides must share responsibility:
“ than 30 people were killed in violent and chaotic clashes in the southern Ukrainian city of Odessa on Friday as pro-Ukraine activists stormed a building defended by protesters opposed to the current government in Kiev and in favour of closer ties with Russia.”
The question of who may have provoked the fatal violence is dealt with by the Guardian without even a pretence of subtlety:
“Pro-Russia fighters mounted a last-ditch defence of the burning building, throwing masonry and petrol bombs from the roof on to the crowd below. Medics at the scene said the pro-Russia fighters were also shooting from the roof.”
Could it be then that the besieging hooligans set the building on fire in self-defence?
The Deutsche Welle version of events is equally mendacious.
It describes the literal holocaust nonchalantly as “the climax of hours of pitched street battles between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian activists which had already seen six men shot dead. Hundreds were injured. For many, this was the darkest day in the recent history of the Black Sea port.”
Dr. Goebbels should have approved Deutsche Welle’s complete lack of empathy for the victims as well as its distorted version of context and causality:
“It also seems to have been a key event for Eastern Ukraine, as it happened just one week ahead of the so-called ‘referendums’ on secession from Kyiv that would take place in the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Russian television broadcast images of charred bodies and reported that ‘Ukrainian Nazis’ had ‘burned alive’ fellow citizens that were friendly towards Russia. In interviews, Russian fighters on the separatists’ side said that they had been motivated by ‘the inferno of Odessa.’”
At the behest of some of the victims’ surviving relatives, the matter eventually ended up before the European Court of Human Rights. The Court’s shamefully deficient judgment was published in 2025 and may be perused here. Like the collective West media, the court does not directly deny the undeniable, but instead spins and reframes it. The event that every decent person would regard as an act of unspeakable savagery and an extremely grave crime against humanity leaves the judges of the European Court of Human Rights unimpressed. They identify Russian propaganda and disinformation as the paramount cause which provoked the carnage:
“The Court considers that such disinformation and propaganda might have had an impact on the tragic events in the present cases … The pro-Russian ‘Kulykove Pole’ movement in Odesa relied heavily on aggressive and emotional disinformation and propaganda messages about the new Ukrainian government and Maidan supporters voiced by Russian authorities and mass media.”
Having pinpointed the ultimate perpetrator, the Court then permits itself the luxury of an appearance of even-handedness by also rebuking the Ukrainian authorities. They were found to be at fault for the “inaction” of the police and delayed response of the fire brigade. That is comparable to an accused war criminal at Nuremberg being indicted for the equivalent of running a traffic light. In the entirety of the Judgment there is not the slightest allusion to structural responsibility, above the local level, for the deliberate incineration of at least forty-two human beings in Odessa, one of Russia’s and Eastern Europe’s most sophisticated and cosmopolitan cities. There is no hint in the Court’s contemplation of underlying circumstances that the recent violent coup which had taken place in Kiev, with the active participation of pro-Nazi elements, and which was characterised by comparable levels of lethal violence, might have had anything to do with it.
So the case can now safely be closed, with an authoritative legal judgment containing everything that we need to know about it. It is indeed a tribute to the perversity of a certain strain of jurisprudence which boasts of its commitment to “universal values.”
,
