PUBLISHED BY EAST AND WEST

GEOPOLITICS, , UKRAINE

Miquel Puertas from Donetsk: I

believe in the European values but
the EU has become a prison of
nations

The original interview can be found here:

https://vostokizapad.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/miquel-puertas-from-donetsk-i-believe-in-the-
european-values-but-the-eu-has-become-a-prison-of-nations/

The further a society drifts away from the truth, the more it will hate
those who speak it George Orwell

Interview with Gonzo Blogger Miquel Puertas

East and West: Hi Miquel, how are you doing?

Miquel Puertas: I am fine, thank you, I am here in Donetsk, I am enjoying

the New Years holidays.

E&W: If you read just Western media, like most people do, it looks like
Donetsk is a very scary place to be right now, occupied by Russian
forces and terrorists.

MP: This is the narrative that has been imposed by the NATO propaganda
machine. I have actually tried to look for the infamous little green men
since I arrived here, but I have not found any until now. Just volunteers
from Spain, France, Italy, Finland, Brazil, Serbia, USA, Poland that came
here to fight against the Maidan far-right battalions. The whole Maidan was
a coup, an operation against the Ukrainian Constitution and the Ukrainian
democracy. It was a violent coup organized by the US intelligence and some
EU countries to remove from power a rightfully elected President. A bloody
coup that also got support from the Soros network. George Soros himself
admitted it several times.

E&W: How did you end up in Donetsk?

MP: I arrived in Donetsk from Lithuania in July 2016 . I was living in

Lithuania until then, I was teaching there for many years in several
institutions (LCC International University from Klaipeda, International
Business School at Vilnius University, KTU gymnasium) or working as a
trainer for several companies, municipalities or institutions like the LPK
(Confederation of Lithuanian Industrialists). Since 2010 I have been working
as a lecturer at Vytautas Magnus University, in Kaunas, the second city of
the country.
E&W: How long have you been teaching there?

MP: Ten years, I started living there in 2006. In 2013 I was involved in a
project financed by the European Union. Thanks to this project I went to
Odessa (August 2013) and Lviv (November 2013). And there in Lviv I saw the
beginning of the Maidan with all the nationalist and far-right symbology
used by the militants of Svoboda party and their cult of the war criminal
Stepan Bandera. I realized that Ukraine had taken a dangerous drift. So
when I came back to Lithuania I started to post my impressions and
thoughts simply using my Facebook account. I created on this platform a
group called International Observatory of the Ukrainian Conflict (IOUCO)
and I got very positive feedback from many people around the world. The
IOUCO has two groups, one in English and the other one in Spanish language
with more than 10.000 members. In Lithuania if you say that the Maidan
was a coup against the Ukrainian Constitution, the VSD (the Lithuanian
post-KGB), the highly biased and government controlled local media and the
supporters of President Grybauskaite will automatically accuse you of doing
Russian propaganda. At some point, because of my Facebook posts, I
started to get contacted by the Lithuanian security services and by trolls
working for the VSD and I was asked by my boss, the Rector of Vytautas
Magnus University in Kaunas, to stop my Facebook posts against the Maidan
regime or I would lose my job. They asked me to delete my Facebook
account. I told them that I would not do such a thing. Then my contract was
not renewed and the Lithuanian government controlled media started a
campaign against me and other Lithuanian citizens, some of them educators
and professors. People that were posting on Facebook their point of view
against the Maidan, the regime installed in Kiev by the Euroatlantic Axis
and the militarization of the Lithuanian society by President Grybauskaite.
At least two more professors were removed from their positions. Several
operations against Lithuanian dissenters were conducted by the VSD who
even entered in the private apartments of some locals looking for a Russian
connection. A famous person, Milda Bartasiunaite, a TV celebrity who has
been very active against the Maidan coup since the very beginning was one
of their targets. VSD officials entered her house and took her laptop,
smartphone and documents. Of course they could not prove anything since
this woman has nothing to do with Russia. She is simply posting on
Facebook what she is thinking about Poroshenko and the authoritarian rule
of President Grybauskaite. The Lithuanian security services created and
trained a network of stalkers, trolls and informants that were hunting local
dissenters. They were targeting the dissenters in social media and sending
information about the dissenters to the VSD. They are also contacting their
employers. Telling them that their employees are Putin agents, vatniks,
kolorados. Virtually Lithuanian citizens are living in a new gulag where
the security services are able to destroy lives and reputation of those
citizens that dont accept the narrative imposed by President Grybauskaite
on the Ukrainian conflict. And this is happening in Lithuania, a country
member of the European Union and with a democratic Constitution where
freedom of speech and thought and academic freedom should be enshrined.
But there are not such thing in Lithuania anymore, Lithuania has morphed
into a highly repressive and authoritarian regime that I like to call
Fascisthuania in my posts, videos and writings.
E&W: It sounds really like a not very pleasant thing

MP: But there was even a more shocking moment when militants of the
crypto-fascist Aidar battalion, came to my university in Kaunas, to speak to
my students and tell all their bullshit and spread their far right propaganda.
Not only that. They came to collect money there, collect money for their
war in the Donbass. After that I sent a letter to the Rector and asked him to
gather more information about the sort of people he was inviting to the
university. Because according to Amnesty International too, the Aidar
battalion has a record of human rights violations. Even the university where
I am currently working now here in Donetsk was bombed by the Aidar
battalion and other far rights groups doing the dirty fight for the Ukrainian
government. And the best they could do was to accuse me of being an agent
of Putin. I never talked about politics with my students, not a single time. So
I had to choose between my dignity and my bread. And I chose the only
thing that could make me feel like a free citizen of the world. I started to
realize that I could not live any longer in Lithuania when the Lithuanian
security services contacted the mother of one of my former girlfriends. She
has a government job and it was made clear to her that if I continued with
my dissident activity she would lose her job. It was not a very subtle threat.
This is really sick. My ex-girlfriend was not involved at all in my activities
and I was not even having a relationship with her at the time. Also the VSD
contacted at least one of my friends who is a businessman and a member of
the council of a small municipality. He invited me to his birthday party. So I
attended the party. Days later the security services and some
pseudojournalist working for the state controlled newspaper Lietuvos
Rytas contacted him. They told him why he was inviting me, a dangerous
enemy of Lithuania, to his party. Totalitarianism came back to Lithuania
after the Maidan coup. I always have said that the first victim of the Maidan
coup were not the Ukrainian people but freedom of speech and thought in
Europe. Especially many Eastern European countries without long
democratic traditions have suffered a dramatic degradation of civil rights
and liberties.
E&W: So why Donetsk?

MP: I was then called by the rector of the Donetsk Technical University to
teach here in Donetsk. I feel very much safer here in Donetsk than in
Lithuania. I am very grateful for this opportunity which has been given to
me. Lithuania has become a crypto-fascist country, where the corrupted
local mafia, known as Landsbergis clan, is using the state propaganda
machine to criminalize the local opposition. For more than 3 years the
Lithuanian citizens have been told that they are under the threat of an
immiment Russian attack. The government has imposed a campaign based
on fear, blaming Russia for all the problems that Lithuanian citizens are
facing. Blaming others for the problems generated by the local oligarchy.
According to the local media, the government and the main institutions of
the country, the Russians are going to invade Lithuania (Russia puola) and
if somebody says that there are not any proofs of anything like this, he is
labeled by the local media and the VSD as an agent of Putin, a communist
and an enemy of Lithuania.

E&W: Lithuania entered the European Union in 2004 and you have been
there all these years. Have you seen the benefits of this choice and
could Lithuania be a model for European integration of Ukraine?

MP: Lithuania is in fact ruled by a mafia clan. The fact that one third of the
people left the country is a testimony of their great success in looting and
devastating their own country. Not much has been done in terms of
infrastructure since the country became independent. Without the money
sent by those working abroad the economy would be totally broken. All the
industry that was here has been dismantled and the young people are gone.
Lithuania is ruled by a corrupted oligarchy where a few people have made
big profits out of the integration in the European market but most people
need to live on a salary of 400 euros or less. In no way this could possibly be
a model of success for Ukraine. I am actually a progressive person, a sort of
a left-wing liberal and I respect everybodys opinion. I share the so-called
European values and I believe in democracy, human rights, sovereignty and
freedom. But after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 the EU became a
de facto protectorate of the US military-industrial-financial complex. There
is no freedom or democracy in the European Union anymore. The European
Union became a prison of peoples and nations. The old dream of Jean
Monnet morphed into the dystopian nightmare depicted by George Orwell
in 1984

E&W: Miquel, thank you this very interesting talk.

MP: Thank you for having me.

More information about Miquel Puertas can be found in his personal site:

http://mpuertas.blogspot.com/p/vdu-spanish.html

He has also his Youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/coronelbarrido1

Follow him in Facebook and Twitter @gonzo_blogger