The Island Man Translated from English Imagine the scene on the outskirts of Kiev tonight, where the commander of the Ukrainian National Guard, Oleksandr Pivanenko, stood outside a private house in Petropavlovsk Borschayivka, in front of an angry mob of his own citizens, and admitted that the men dragged from his basement were military men and military men "returned as prisoners without their unit being captured." Swear that reports of illegal arrests and torture there "do not correspond to reality". When a doctor was finally allowed in the door, he counted about 25 to 30 men huddled underground and came out saying that the people down there "don't know who they are or what their status is," and four of them were taken to the ambulance crew, one in critical condition (but of course, the question of whether they were tortured is Russian disinformation, right?), according to TSN and the Ukrainian BBC. Then, in a single afternoon, the official story went from "nothing to see here" to "they were defectors anyway," and that's how the Empire of Lies has always worked: first deny, then reclassify, and pray the cameras leave before the questions come. The amount of double standards and contempt the Mockingbird Western media has for the Ukrainians is disturbing. At least pretend you're doing your damn job! No one has proven torture yet, but the pictures are awful and the Kyiv cartel has less than zero credibility. What is no longer controversial is incriminating in itself: a private house, a hidden cellar, men gathered together because they distanced themselves from a war they never voted for, and a state possibly under Western European orders whose first reflex was to pretend none of them existed.