The voices are clear, but the tone is downhearted and dispirited.
The call, in English, apparently came from EU Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton’s office on Feb. 26, seeking an update from Estonian Foreign Minister Umas Paet the day after he visited Ukraine. It is not known who recorded the call or who posted it on YouTube under the name “Michael Berman.
“My impression is that it is sad, that there is no trust. There are also these politicians who will return to the coalition. Well, People from Maidan (the protesters) and civil society say they know everybody who will be in the new government, all these guys all have dirty pasts,” Paet tells Ashton.
The nearly 11-minute call is nothing short of exasperated. “There is enormous pressure against members of parliament, there are uninvited visitors during the night to party members,” Paet relates. “Journalists with me saw, during the day, that one member of parliament was just beaten in front of parliament by these guys with guns on the streets.”
The Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, is the only elected authority that has remained intact since President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country.
“People will not leave the streets before they see real that the real reforms will start … it’s not enough that there was this change of government,” Paet says.
Ashton reacts slowly in the call, but focuses on financial aid and how to get it through the chaos. “We have to see change, we have to support the civil society and break through the corruption, but we have to have a functioning Rada to do it.”
This is not the part of the phone call that erupted in a firestorm, however.
Paet relays a story that was circulating at the time, alleging that snipers who fired on the Feb. 20 protest at Maidan Square were, in fact, members of the opposition, not the old regime of Yanukovych
“All evidence shows that the people were killed by snipers from both sides — among policemen and people from the streets — that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides,” he tells Ashton.
He continues, “And it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition [government], they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened, so that there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.”
The accusation is that the Ukrainian opposition placed the snipers and fired indiscriminately into the crowd, killing dozens of people simply to stir up resentment against the government. Days later, the government collapsed in a coup and Yanukovych fled to Russia.
This was quickly picked up by RT, formerly known as Russia Today, an English-language channel from Russia’s largest broadcaster, NTV. It became part of a narrative that Ukraine has been taken over in a fascist coup backed by the West, which threatens Russia directly.
The charge is not an idle one. There are members of far-right parties in the governing coalition, and Paet, himself, noted the suppression of basic rights and threats to the Rada. Ukraine has a long history with such groups, owing its 1918 independence to the German Imperial Army. After annexation by the Soviet Union and a brutal repression by Stalin through the 1930s, many Ukrainians welcomed the arrival of the Nazis in 1941, even forming an SS division.
The hacked call fed into a media assault on the new Ukrainian government and general repression of any alternative view. Lev Gudkov, head of a respected independent Moscow-based polling agency, told the propagandist tone of Russian state television has reached new levels. “For intensity, comprehensiveness and aggressiveness, this is like nothing I have ever seen over the whole post-Soviet period,” Gudkov said, according to The Associated Press.
Independent websites and other media outlets are also being systematically shut down, forcing unanimity on the story that Ukraine is in the grips of a dangerous fascist takeover.
“Russian authorities are unabashedly cleansing the media landscape of independent voices that have the power to shape minds,” Committee to Protect Journalists representative Nina Ognianova told the AP. “We condemn this ban on alternative sources of news and opinion, and call on Moscow to cease this Soviet-style crackdown.”
In this media landscape, the charge repeated by Paet is often cited as proof that the Ukrainian government is responsible for the murder of protesters, but his office has denied this.
While acknowledging the authenticity of the call, the Estonian foreign ministry said in a statement, “We reject the claim that Paet was giving an assessment of the opposition’s involvement in the violence.”
“It is extremely regrettable that phone calls are being intercepted,” it said.
“The fact that this phone call has been leaked is not a coincidence,” it added, backhandedly decrying its use as a media tool.
Other witnesses to the event have also denied the existence of proof that the government was responsible. Respected doctor and protest leader Olga Bogomolets, mentioned frequently on the call as the source of the story, said, “What I saw were people who were killed by snipers and only on [protesters’] side.”
Another eye witness, Alexander Tonskikh, told the AP that riot police withdrew suddenly and snipers began firing from at least two different directions an instant later — a position more consistent with the Yanukovych government being responsible.
The new Ukrainian government, formerly the opposition, has fired back with its own conspiracy theory, alleging that Russian special forces were the snipers firing at protesters that day.
“I think it wasn’t just a part of the old regime that (plotted the provocation), but it was also the work of Russian special forces who served and maintained the ideology of the (old) regime,” Health Minister Oleh Musiy said. No proof has been offered for this charge.
What exactly happened on that February day in Kiev’s Maidan Square? What we do know is that the truth has become the first casualty in a war of words — a war between different interests using everything at their disposal to promote their particular cause. Much of what is reported as fact is actually just speculation, and in the case of the hacked phone call, it is secondhand speculation.
The phone call between the two foreign ministers is far more enlightening, however. It relates the ongoing despair of Ukraine and the exasperation of the European Union over its inability to improve the situation. What is clear in the conversation between Ashton and Paet is that the EU does not know how it can bring stability to Ukraine and support the demands of the protesters who are still at Maidan Square. Because of this, the war of words is likely to continue to feed into the chaos for quite a while longer.