Ukraine's Nightmare Drags On

Ukraine's Nightmare Drags On

08/19/14

James W. Carden

Media, Security, Foreign Policy, Ukraine, United States

In recent weeks, the American media has seemed focused on reporting on nearly every newsworthy event—except the Ukraine crisis.

Recent events in Missouri, Iraq, Gaza and, yes, even Hollywood, have emerged in quick succession over the past couple of weeks to provide Washington’s courtier press with a near perfect alibi for its rather marked unwillingness to report on the unfolding humanitarian crisis engulfing the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

The numbers, as they often do, help tell the tale. According to UN spokeswoman Cecile Pouilly, the number of fatalities in eastern Ukraine has doubled from 1,129 on July 26 to 2,086 over the past two weeks. According to what the UN has described as these “very conservative estimates,” 5,000 people have been wounded and there are now well over 110,000 internally displaced people (IDP’s) who have fled their homes, while Moscow reports that roughly 730,000 Ukrainian refugees have crossed the border into Russia.

By way of comparison, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has reported that 1,948 Palestinians and sixty-six Israelis have been killed since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge on July 8, and yet one would be hard pressed to find any coverage of the mounting death toll in the Donbas on our puerile cable news outlets. And given the OSCE’s estimable on-the-ground reporting in Ukraine, the media’s collective decision to overlook the ongoing humanitarian crisis is all the more egregious. Take, for instance, this report from Donetsk by the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) on August 7:

Two hundred meters from the high rise buildings [two residential high-rise buildings had been shelled in the city center], the SMM observed that all the windows on the second floor of a public hospital had been destroyed. On entering the hospital, the SMM observed that the entire second floor had been destroyed…with only rubble remaining. The SMM saw many evidently traumatized and crying civilians and medical staff.

Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/ukraines-nightmare-drags-11099