We took note of the Reuters-authored article ‘Ukraine latest: Woman and two children killed in Russian shelling in southern Ukraine’ of 5 March 2023, published on TimesLIVE. After a year of being in the middle of a violent Western-backed propaganda campaign, we cannot stop wondering how come that mainstream media won’t stop accusing Russia of all Ukraine’s misfortunes, while remaining completely blind to what Ukraine does in Donbass?

According to the mayor of Donetsk Alexey Kulemzin, since the beginning of the special military operation his city alone over 3,000 times came under shelling by the Ukrainian militants.

During the nine years of the armed conflict, hundreds of children were killed by Ukraine in Donbass, thousands more were injured. The smallest victim of Ukraine was only 27 days old. Children die as a result of targeted artillery fire, indiscriminate shelling, tripping mines that Ukrainian military planted back in 2014-2015, and receive severe injuries.

On 14 March 2022, Ukrainian forces hit a residential neighbourhood in Donetsk with a Tochka-U missile with a cluster munition warhead killing 23 and seriously wounding 28, including children, women and seniors. Western media blamed the strike on Russia at once, but later admitted to publishing a fake.

On 8 April 2022, Ukrainian troops fired a missile at Kramatorsk railway station claiming lives of 52 and leaving around 100 more wounded. Ukrainian trace in this crime is proved by the missile’s serial number leaked by Western media. Once again, initially Russia was blamed for the attack.

On 6 July 2022, Ukrainian militants shelled a children’s playground (!). A boy was killed on the spot, a girl died from wounds on her way to the hospital, another boy died later during the operation.

On 29 July 2022, the Armed Forces of Ukraine struck a detention centre in Elenovka, Donetsk People’s Republic, where Ukrainian militants were kept, with US-supplied HIMARS, leaving 51 dead and injuring 73.

The above-listed are but a few of Ukraine’s most outrageous war crimes in Donbass, which in fact take place almost daily. And we haven’t even begun to talk, for instance, about killing and torturing Russian POWs, or using civilians as ‘human shields’ by Ukraine militants. Kiev officials cynically admit that resorting to ‘human shield’ tactics on mass scale is the only reason why Ukraine ‘can resist a longer time,’ and is able to inflict losses on Russians because the latter do their best not to harm civilians.

To learn all that, a journalist who declares himself ‘independent’ must only go to Donbass and have a talk with local residents who have been living with it for years. But most of those working for mainstream media will never do so, for their reports from Donbass will contradict the approved narrative. And if they will – they are sure to be named ‘Putin agents’ with all that it entails.