Berlin, 30 August: Germany held a rally in support of the Russian position on Ukraine.

 In Frankfurt on the Main 500 people took part in an anti-war rally against the NATO policy on Ukraine. They marched through the central streets of the city protesting against the military operation that Kiev had unleashed in the south-east of the country and against the neo-Nazi ideology gaining strength in Ukraine. People carried banners that read “Stop Fascism in Ukraine” and “Stop NATO”. Another slogan was “Save Donbass People from Ukrainian Army”.

 

A day earlier, a scandal broke when Angela Merkel’s speech in Dresden was brought to an end by boos and hisses from the crowd. Their banners said “Stop Lies in Mass Media” and “Warmongers”.

 The rally in Frankfurt continues a series of events that have been held in Germany since mid-August. It started in Berlin with a photo-exhibition “The Odessa Massacre” organized by the newspaper “Junge Welt”. The exhibition came as a shock to Germans. It was the first time that they found out the truth about the crime that the western media have been desperately trying to hush up. After Berlin, the exhibition was on view in Leipzig; Nuremberg, Munich and Bonn are next in turn.

The photo-exhibition has already been held in Spain, Italy, Serbia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, India, Bulgaria, Poland and in the European Parliament in Brussels. There are plans to show the exhibition in other European countries including Denmark, Norway and Austria.

 The organizing committee says that the main aim of the exhibition in to break through the information blockade and to draw the attention of people in Europe to numerous cases of gross human rights violations and unprecedented, horrific crimes in south-eastern Ukraine.

Oleg Muzyka, the representative of the coordinating council of Odessa’s public organization “Kulikovo Field”, says that the march helped to display 50 shocking photos devoted to the tragedy in Odessa on 2 May.

Oleg Muzyka says that members of “Kulikovo Field” put up a tent camp near Odessa Railway Station in February, 2014. There they used to collect signatures for the referendum on federalization of Ukraine and on the Russian as a state language.

On 2 May, they got involved in clashes with Ukrainian nationalists that led to the tragedy in the Trade Unions House.

“The events unfolded very quickly. Everything was broadcast on TV, and our relatives phoned us up and told us to get out of there immediately because some armed thugs were going our way”, says Muzyka. Nationalists and radicals from the Right Sector first destroyed the tent camp of the peaceful demonstrators and then literally forced people into the Trade Unions House and threw it with petrol bombs and smoke grenades. A fire broke out. There were only people from Odessa in the Trade Unions House; no one of them was from Russia.

 “There have been attempts to find a Russian trace. We have documents concerning all the detained people, 116 in all. They are either from Odessa or from Odessa Region”, says Muzyka.

The clashes left 48 people dead and 247 injured.

The event was attended by eyewitnesses to the Odessa tragedy and refugees from the south-east of Ukraine.