Since the news is hot, I may as well comment on it, knowing in particular that I have some Canadian readers who are unlikely to get it on CBC.
It seems that one of the secrets of the rapidly collapsing Azovstal base at Mariupol was that it was sheltering a 4-star Canadian general, Trevor Cadieu, rumoured to be recently retired and, somehow, independently travelling to Ukraine and taking charge of “Biolab No. 1.” A rapid career change from soldier to scientist, it seems. But the timeline is interesting.
October 2021: accused of historical sexual misconduct just days before he was due to take over command of the entire Canadian army. Yes, that kind of general. Pleads his complete innocence, but appointment is delayed pending investigation for the sake of probity.
April 5th 2022: Several helicopters shot down at Avostol trying to get something or someone important out from the besieged Azov regiment people. This had been tried before, but after losing so many helicopters, you may remember a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to get people off by ship. Someone meant business – there was something bad to hide.
April 5th 2022: according to Canadian sources, Cadieu retires and decides to fight in Ukraine independently. Despite ongoing disciplinary investigation and his paramount military status (lots of juicy military secrets) he is allowed to go, much to the chagrin of his female accuser.
May 2nd (or thereabouts): Azov create a disturbance and civilians leave tunnels to cover escape of Cadieu along drainage pipe. He is nevertheless captured and taken to Moscow, where he is now under interrogation as a mercenary.
So in the interim, we are supposed to believe, although neither helicopters and ships, nor “a single fly” could get in or out of the Azovstal steel works, General Cadieu, eager to take up his new role as an independent fighter whose sympathies to Nazis had been kept hidden of his entire career, managed to break in. His chosen role, unless we believe the conspiratorial stories of Biolab 1 being down in the tunnels, was simply to skulk underground until bombed to smithereens by the encircling Russians and Donbas militia. Perhaps he considered such a wasted and terminal journey a better way to go than a dishonourable discharge back home.
Or here’s an alternative, and more plausible, account. Cadieu was sent by the Canadian government to Mariupol at or before the start of hostilities: maybe it was that or face exposure for his sexual misconduct. Either he was to assist the Azov Nazis, or to run a bio-weapons lab that might be used against the Russians or as a false flag. Neither possibility is attractive.
Numerous, very costly, attempts were made to extract him (and possibly other senior NATO military operating illegally in this non-NATO “democratic” country), and when they failed, he was hastily “retired” to give plausible deniability to his official NATO presence (though how plausible it is to say he got into Azovstal after April 5th is another matter).
Since we already know that Canada has been training the Azov regiment for years, and that the SAS and the Americans have also been equipping and training the Ukrainians (including the SBU, accused of war-crimes by the US State Department itself) since the US-backed coup of 2014, the picture adds up to this. NATO has been determined to make Eastern Ukraine a front-line against Russia for years, but has been determined to cover up the fact and blame Russia for being needlessly belligerent, with a madman for a president. No, I mean Putin, not Trudeau or Biden or Johnson or Macron or Morrison or Ardern , who are all as sane as each other.
Excuse me if I call this vile warmongering, backed by pervasive mind-poisoning propaganda used on the ordinary people of our nations to get them to play along willingly. Here is divine judgement indeed on the apostate West: to give us such loathsome creatures as our political leaders. And as far as the British involvement goes – which by all accounts is stronger than Canada’s and second only to the US Deep State (well, one can scarcely credit it to the senile Biden, can one?) – I have to say (before it becomes illegal to do so), “Not in My Name.”
why should we believe he is (was ever) in Mariupol at all?
they’ve previously claimed to capture a different general, that did not pan out: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-cloutier-captured-idUSL2N2W914L
i’m russian and have been reading your blog for years, and it is surprising to me that you are willing to entertain these shaky claims to such an extent, for someone who has done a lot of good work on propaganda. if it makes the west look bad that doesn’t mean it’s automatically true. the west is clever about its lies, warping the truth and peppering it with deception, and russia is not — they’ll just lie to your face, there’s no sophistication in it — you have to keep that in mind when you read anything coming from russia
> NATO has been determined to make Eastern Ukraine a front-line against Russia for years
ukraine has a lot of people who hate russia, and that share of population has increased since 2014 and of course even more so since 24th of feb. unfortunately putin’s inept incursions have proven the haters right, in ukrainian people’s eyes. sadly, there’s little space for western conspiracy in any of that…
Hi Pierre, and an official welcome to the Hump, with thanks for support over the years.
I accept I may have been premature in endorsing the Cadieu story, realising after I posted that I’d not actually checked to see if official Russian sources claimed his capture or not – that still seems to be in question. That said, his mysterious presence in Ukraine came from Canadian sources and would be a scandalous suggestion of under-the-counter NATO involvement in itself, given the story we have been consistently sold of an independent democratic nation being arbitrarily invaded out of the blue.
The eight year civil war against Donbas using NATO-trained Azov fighters never surfaces enough to be examined, and likewise the preponderance of Donbas militias, rather than Russians, in fighting the Ukrainian army now. The propaganda effort to involve us in an all-out war, rather than just a proxy-war, to destroy Russia is becoming more troubling daily.
We’ll see how events emerge.
To some extent, given the almost totally one-sided narrative over here, trying to provide balance almost inevitably makes one tilt the scales the other way. I have no doubt about the duplicity of my own country and its allies. It may well be that Russia is no better in the bar-room brawl, or it may even (as I’ve occasionally speculated) be playing on the same side of some bigger “Great Reset” scheme, though I doubt it.
To me, it looks like Russia trying to retain its existence, and the West trying to extend its hegemony, with Ukraine as a long-corrupted piggy in the middle.
Overall, though, positive Russian claims seem to have generally turned out to be true, whereas those of the West/Ukraine government appear to fall apart as soon as you poke them (a bit like the COVID narrative).
Still, it’s good to have the viewpoint of a Russian here. You seem to have much the same position as Konstantin Kisin on these things, and I wonder if there may be some difference, in general, between ex-pat Russians and those living in Russia. It is, after all, likely to be Americans unhappy with US governance who end up living in Moscow.