Beware...the Wild East is full of villains

HOW all the Russophobes hurried to believe in the faked death of the Russian Arkady Babchenko in Kiev last week. These people believe huge amounts of rubbish about Russia already.

They think (without proof or facts) the Kremlin stole the US presidency from Hillary Clinton and gave it to Donald Trump. They claim that Russian planes and ships regularly violate our airspace and waters (they don’t). So for them, this was an easy one.

It works the other way, too. The Russophobe BBC recently managed not to notice a major piece of real news – that Russia, like the USA, had called at the UN for an independent inquiry into the alleged gas attack at Douma in Syria. Instead they reported falsely that Moscow had ‘rejected calls for an independent inquiry’.

But their gullibility was turned up to maximum as soon as they heard of Mr Babchenko’s supposed death, a ludicrous fake involving bags of pig’s blood, and the coldly cruel deception of Mrs Babchenko, all more Jeremy Thorpe than Sherlock Holmes.

Once Mr Babchenko had been resurrected by the buffoons of the Ukrainian KGB the next day, the main response of the antiRussian media was not ‘sorry, we messed up and didn’t check properly because we’re biased’.

It was ‘how wicked of Mr Babchenko and Kiev to play into the hands of Putin by behaving in this way’. I’d say this. Don’t rush to conclusions too easily about this part of the world. The Wild East is a murky place, with more than one villain in it.

It’s easy to accuse the Kremlin of directly killing people because they are nasty, dishonest, violent and secretive, which they are. But it’s as likely that such murders (when genuine) are the work of gangsters not under direct government control. I’d guess such gangsters probably killed the brave reporter Pavel Sheremet, whose car was blown up, captured rather spectacularly on CCTV, in Kiev in July 2016 shortly after he’d criticised pro-Western Ukrainian militia leaders and their links with organised crime.

But you heard less about that killing because it didn’t fit the anti-Russian agenda. Just as Russia’s call for an independent inquiry into the alleged Syrian gas outrage didn’t fit the antiRussian agenda. Beware of this, when reading or watching coverage of this confusing region.