Russian soldiers have shot dead a Ukrainian Conductor Yuriy Kerpatenko in his home after he refused to take part in a concert in occupied Kherson, “intended by the occupiers to demonstrate the so-called ‘improvement of peaceful life’”, the ministry said in a statement on its Facebook page.
Via The Guardian:“The concert on 1 October was intended to feature the Gileya chamber orchestra, of which Kerpatenko was the principal conductor, but he “categorically refused to cooperate with the occupants”, the statement said. Kerpatenko, who was also the principal conductor of Kherson’s Mykola Kulish Music and Drama Theatre, had been posting defiant messages on his Facebook page until May. The Kherson regional prosecutor’s office in Ukraine has launched a formal investigation “on the basis of violations of the laws and customs of war, combined with intentional murder”. Family members outside Kherson lost contact with the conductor in September, it said.”
There’s Russian “culture” for you, ladies and gentlemen.
We send our deepest condolences to his family and friends and salute his courage and integrity while condemning the fascist brutality of the Russian forces.#PetTexthttps://t.co/PTTD3bMSM1
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has welcomed to Kyiv a congressional delegation led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Zelensky said on his Instagram account that the visit “is a strong signal of bipartisan support for Ukraine from the United States Congress and the American people.” He added: “Thank you for your leadership in helping us in our struggle not only for our country, but also for democratic values and freedoms. We really appreciate it.”
In other words: Zelenskyy met with a bunch of people who thought Trump trying to extort him wasn’t worth impeaching him over.
Other than Moscow Mitch, Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, John Barrasso of Wyoming and John Cornyn of Texas were also present.
President Zelensky welcomed US delegation to Kyiv led by Sen Mitch McConnell today. Zelensky said it’s “a strong signal of bipartisan support for Ukraine.” “Thank you for your leadership in helping us fight not only for our country, but also for democratic values and freedoms.” pic.twitter.com/amTIudErkb
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) May 14, 2022
Tomorrow Steamworks Chicago is collecting donations in-house and online to benefit Sunflower of Peace to bring aid the Ukrainian people.
“If you are like us, you are horrified by the atrocities and devastation the people of Ukraine are facing every day as they try and fight back the Russian aggression against a sovereign nation. The people of Ukraine have become soldiers and their hospitals are being bombed. They need medical supplies to keep the wounded alive until they can get proper medical care.”
Steamworks will match all donations up to $10,000. The donations will go to Sunflower of Peace which “acquires and distributes first-aid backpacks, medicine, medical instruments, and other means of survival” to paramedics and doctors in Ukraine.
It has been reported that Chechen general Magomed Tusayan was killed on Saturday during fighting in the Ukraine. . Tusayan was responsible for leading the anti-gay purge in that country that led to torturing and murdering of hundreds of gay men and other memeber of the LBT community.
Both the Pakistani Times and a defense reporter for The Kyiv Independent, confirmed: “Magomed Tushayev, one of Ramzan Kadyrov’s top warlords, has been killed in action in Hostomel. Ukraine’s elite Alpha Group is reportedly fighting Chechens in the airfield.”
Since 2017, Chechen security operatives and other officials in the Kadyrov regime, including Tushayev sources confirmed, have rounded upcountless numbersof men on suspicion of being gay, held them in unofficial detention facilities for days, humiliated, starved and tortured, and in some cases murdered them in what is dubbed Chechnya’s ‘anti-gay purge,”
One former detainee said that the torturers showed him a graphic video of a suspected terrorist having a plastic pipe inserted into his anus and then barbed wire forced into the pipe and ripped out of his rectum. The torturers videotaped the torture, showed it to a gay man and revealed that they had brought a similar plastic pipe and barb wire to use on him. The man then confessed, revealing his gay associates to avoid a similar fate.
Russian singer Zelimkhan Bakaev an early victim was arrested, tortured, and murdered by Chechen authorities due to suspicion of homosexuality.”
Over 8,000 people people turned out on Sunday for Kiev’s annual Gay Pride parade amid tight security as far-right activists sought to disrupt the celebration.
Hundreds of far-right and Orthodox religious counter-protesters, were kept away from the march, held up anti-gay banners and shouted “Shame!” as the procession began.
Parade participants waved rainbow and Ukrainian flags as they marched through the center of the capital as thousands of police and National Guard troops stood by to ensure order.
The Ukraine, which ousted a pro-Russia regime in a uprising in 2014, hopes to become a member of the European Union as it seeks to overcome widespread poverty and corruption.
Homophobia backed by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is still commonplace, even though Kiev authorities have allowed gay pride marches to be held, unlike in neighboring Russia.
At least nine counter-protesters were arrested on suspicion of preparing attacks against participants in the Kiev Pride event, police said.
Neo-Nazis Attack LGBT Equality Festival in Lvov, Ukraine – Video
Despite a court ban on public Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) events in the city of Lvov, Ukraine LGBT activists in the city decided to organize a private gathering in the Dnestr hotel, where 200 people were registered to take part in an “Equality Festival.”
The organizers placed private security at the entrance and local police units reinforced the security for the closed door festival.
But the event never took place, as a crowd of neo-Nazi youth, some covering their faces with rags and bandannas surrounded the Dnestr hotel demanding that authorities stop the event.
Police refused to physically clash with the protestors.
“We are blocked at the hotel,” organizer Olena Shevchenko said on Facebook from the hotel. “Police don’t want to react, they are saying all those people in masks (are here) just meet their friends.”
Additional police reinforcements were deployed to the hotel and tried to quell the mob chasing them into a nearby park, where the attackers regrouped and began pelting stones at the police while shouting SS slogans, repeating “SS” and “Hitler Youth.”
A video of the incident posted online shows riot police retreating from potential clashes with several dozen of angry Ukrainian youth.
Police also state that they received an anonymous bomb threat. The Equality Festival was cancelled and bomb squad units were sent to the hotel t explosives. While festival attendees were escorted out and boarded into buses by the officers, the ultra-nationalist neo-Nazi group started throwing stones and firecrackers at the attendees and attempted to break through the police lines shouting “Kill! Kill! Kill!”
Despite the tense incident Shevchenko says the LGBT community will continue to fight for the “freedom and equality of all people.”
“Because today they hunt us, and tomorrow they will hunt others. There are no guarantees you won’t fall into the next group of ‘abnormals’ or ‘unnaturals’,” Shevchenko wrote. “It is necessary to stand up to this mayhem and lawlessness now.”
After Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko voiced support for the ‘KyivPride2015’ equality march stating that he didn’t see “any reason to impede this march because it’s a constitutional right of every citizen of Ukraine.” Today dozens of members of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Right Sector Party viciously attacked the event leading to at least 25 arrests.
The BBC reports that five riot police were injured, one seriously.
Several dozen unknown assailants attacked a gay pride rally in Kiev on Saturday, throwing flares and wounding two policemen, a Reuters witness reported. Organizers for ‘KyivPride2015’ said the march along the Dnipro river would go ahead despite warnings from city mayor Vitaly Klitschko, who advised the event be canceled because of a threat of violence from far-right groups. Despite the presence of several hundred police in riot gear, the march of around 150 LGBT supporters carrying rainbow banners and placards came under attack and 25-30 “hooligans” were arrested, parliament member Serhiy Leshchenko said on Twitter. Leshchenko said police had prevented any direct clashes between participants in the march and the attackers.
The gay Nazis label was simultaneously an attempt to tie the new pro-Europe camp in Kiev to the hated German Third Reich while also taking advantage of the growing acceptance of gay marriage in the West, particularly in the United States. “Putin has said homosexuality is not our values, and that sense of tolerance of homosexuality is not part of Euroasia,” said Schmidt, who will be in Ukraine monitoring the May 25 elections that are being overseen by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Euroasia is the name for the empire Schmidt believes Putin is trying to construct. Schmidt says Putin is driven by the goal of rebuilding a Euroasian empire with Moscow as its capital. Putin also has written extensively on the subject of Euroasia, which would generally follow the geography of the former Soviet Union. Bringing Ukraine into Moscow’s camp would be crucial to seeing that dream come to reality. Russian media also have called the Maidan square, where protests led to the demise of former pro-Russian Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych, the “Gayeuromaidan,” thus tying together Europe and the gay rights movement, writes Yale history professor and author Timothy Snyder in The New York Review of Books.
Pretty rich coming from a murderous dictator who has Neo Nazi gangs roaming the country and beating up foreigners and gays for him.
A Ukrainian man tried to hijack a Turkey-bound flight to Sochi, Russia, as the Winter Olympics were kicking off Friday, but the pilot tricked him and landed in Istanbul instead, where he was arrested after a four-hour stand-off on a plane full of passengers, an official said.
The hijacking drama came as the Winter Olympics opened in the Russian city, with thousands of athletes from around the world amid serious warnings of terrorist attempts.
Turkish F-16s fighter was scrambled as soon as the pilot on the Pegasus Airlines flight from Kharkiv, Ukraine, with 110 passengers aboard signaled there was a hijacking attempt. It escorted the plane safely to its original destination at Sabiha Gokcen airport in Istanbul.
Officials credited the pilot and crew for convincing the 45-year-old-man, who claimed he had a bomb, that they were following his wishes.
“Through a very successful implementation by our pilot and crew, the plane was landed in Istanbul instead of Sochi,” Istanbul governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu told reporters at the airport. “He thought it was going to Sochi but after a while he realized that (the plane) was in Istanbul.”
The hijacker was arrested after a stand-off during which a negotiator convinced him to first allow women and children to be evacuated and later agreed to let all other passengers off the plane as well.
“Our security units sneaked through various entrances during the evacuation of the passengers and with a quick and effective intervention the hijacker was subdued,” Mutlu said. No bomb was found, he said.
The man’s motive was unclear, but Mutlu said he had “requests concerning his own country” and wanted to relay a “message concerning sporting activities in Sochi.”
“We were receiving through various channels information that there could be initiatives to sabotage the spirit of peace arising in Sochi, but we are saddened that such an event took place in our city,”
Habib Soluk, the Turkish Transport Ministry undersecretary, told NTV earlier that the man rose from his seat, shouted that there was bomb on board and tried to enter the locked cockpit. The pilot signaled that there was a hijack attempt and the airport was placed on high alert.
Air traffic at Sabiha Gokcen was halted throughout the incident but had returned to normal after the man’s arrest.
The plane landed at about 6 p.m. Turkish time, just as the opening ceremony for the Olympics was about to begin. The executive creative director of the Olympics opening ceremony told reporters afterward he heard of the threat but didn’t alter the show’s plans in any way.
For the very first time a gay pride march has happened in Kiev in the Ukraine but not before, a court ruled to cancel the march amidst security concerns. However, police stepped in at the last minute to offer protection to those marching so the march went on and Kiev police arrested 13 people for trying to disrupt it.
The assistance and support provided by authorities in Ukraine is in stark contrast to the hard-line anti-gay actions taken by their counterparts in Russia and is not lost on the pro-gay activists in Ukraine who are not underestimating the significance of today’s march:
“‘This event will go down in the history of Ukraine as one of the key developments in the fight for equal human rights,’ said Olena Semenova, one of the organizers, expressing gratitude to the police and the authorities for their action.”
