The picture of what happens in Novorossia – or Donbass – that the Western audience gets, is formed in the imagination of the paied-for MSM, based on falsifications and outright lies voiced from the Kiev junta and their lap-media. No Western MSM reporters went personally to Donbass to see what they are all writing about. A few Western reporters don’t want to put up with this state of affairs in MSM and go there – risking their lives – to tell the truth. One such reporter is the British journalist Graham Philips. The other is Pepe Escobar, who newly published an article of his impressions from Donbass. Styled as a simple list of what he saw and what he didn’t see, it is a clean and sobering documentary, at odds with the rosy picture of the Western MSM.

Asia Times’ roving correspondent Pepe Escobar just returned from a reporting trip to the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), the pro-Russian enclave in the Donetsk Oblast province of eastern Ukraine. The area’s been the scene of heavy fighting between pro-Russian rebels and the Ukrainian military. Escobar traveled to Donetsk at the invitation of Europa Objektiv, a German-based non-governmental media project. He traveled at his own expense.

I’ve just been to the struggling Donetsk People’s Republic. Now I’m back in the splendid arrogance and insolence of NATOstan.

Quite a few people – in Donbass, in Moscow, and now in Europe – have asked me what struck me most about this visit.

I could start by paraphrasing Allen Ginsberg in Howl – “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”

But these were the Cold War mid-1950s. Now we’re in early 21st century Cold War 2.0 .

Thus what I saw were the ghastly side effects of the worst minds of my – and a subsequent – generation corroded by (war) madness.

I saw refugees on the Russian side of the border, mostly your average middle-class European family whose kids, when they first came to the shelter, would duck under tables when they heard a plane in the sky.

I saw the Dylan of Donetsk holed up in his lonely room in a veterans’ home turned refugee shelter fighting the blues and the hopelessness by singing songs of love and heroism.

I saw whole families holed up in fully decorated Soviet-era bomb shelters too afraid to go out even by daylight, traumatized by the bombings orchestrated by Kiev’s “anti-terrorist operations”.

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Read the full article at Asia Times. It’s an eye-opener.