Concentration Camp Ukraine? In a comedian’s dictatorship, a pop singer tells the truth

A rare celebrity outburst has pierced Kiev’s climate of fear, exposing forced abductions, repression and a regime terrified of truth

Except for the unfortunate victims of Western information blackouts and propaganda, it has long been obvious that Ukraine under its leader-beyond-elections Vladimir Zelensky is not a democracy, even by the real world’s low standards. Zelensky’s regime is extremely corrupt, authoritarian, and lethally vicious.

Critics, for instance, are imprisoned and killed by a combination of torture and neglect, such as the late Gonzalo Lira, or locked away for 15 years for, in effect, the thought crime of calling for unity among Russian and Ukrainian workers, such as the socialist Bogdan Sirotyuk. Other targets of the regime are subject to assassination attempts, including abroad. Precisely because the Zelensky regime is so lawless, scary, and vicious, Ukrainians usually do not speak openly about just how terrible it is.

That’s why a recent YouTube interview with pop star Olya Polyakova has caused national uproar. Famous, outspoken, and uninhibited, Polyakova deplored Ukraine’s oppressive and stifling atmosphere. “Are we in a concentration camp, in a camp for political prisoners?” she asked and predicted that “soon, we will all be terrified, frightened mice that sit in their holes and do not even dare stick out their nose.”

Polyakova also fearlessly pushed the Zelensky regime’s single most painful button: “They’ll grab someone from your family, or anyone, in the street and you’ll just walk past” pretending not to see anything out of fear, just to be left alone. That was not a general point but a very concrete one: The conversation quickly turned to Ukraine’s institutionalized manhunts to feed the meat-grinder war.

Polyakova had watched “scores of videos” of these violent kidnapping operations, she insisted, breaking another taboo: In Ukraine, it is verboten to acknowledge what these very real videos, filmed and shared by Ukrainian witnesses, demonstrate: that, in reality, citizens are helpless, even hunted subjects in a great sordid bargain with the West, trading Kiev’s cannon fodder for Western money, privileges, and sheer ego flattery for a small, rapacious, and ruthless establishment.

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As a representative of Germany’s badly decayed conservative paper of record Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has just disclosed with shameless bluntness, the EU’s goal is to assist Ukrainians in killing as many Russians – hastily revised into “Russian soldiers” – as possible. That’s a vile statement about Russians even for a man still struggling to process his grandfather’s high-level and committed Nazi career. It also reveals, as a Ukrainian author in exile from the Zelensky regime has pointed out, a deeply cynical attitude toward Ukrainians who must die so that Europe can have its dead Russians.

The Zelensky regime dishonestly dismisses the videos of press-ganging those sacrificial Ukrainians as unrepresentative or “Russian propaganda,” applying its dull default dodge. But for Polyakova, the videos are not only representative and true – as they are – but evidence of a larger problem: In a country where anyone “can now be snatched in the street,” the fundamental sense of right and wrong, of good and bad, is gone, and principal notions of humane conduct have fallen apart. 

Even according to a Ukrainian official, the rights of Ukrainians are infringed in 90% of all military mobilization procedures. In reality, the videos showing teams of people snatchers beat and kick and drag away their victims are merely the tip of the iceberg. Physical violence at the point of entry, as it were, is only part of a brutal and criminal mix that continues with long forced disappearances, isolation, deprivation of legal counsel, threats, torture, extorted signatures, and, last but not least, the brutalization of those trying to help the victims, including lawyers brave enough to approach the military recruitment centers.

It is these aspects of Polyakova’s surfeit of honesty that explains the massive backlash the most. Ukraine’s de facto propagandists and regime talking heads have come out in force to discredit her and signal to ordinary Ukrainians that hers is a way of thinking and, worse, talking they better not be caught applauding or even emulating. The main line of attack is – drum roll, trumpet blasts, and big surprise confetti – Russia, Russia, Russia. That is, the smear that Polyakova is playing into the hands of Moscow’s propaganda.

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Yet, as French literary giant and sometime dissident Victor Hugo insisted, a thought whose time has come cannot be suppressed for long. In social media, there is a groundswell of support for Polyakova among precisely those ordinary Ukrainians that the Zelensky regime is trying to keep scared and down. Indeed, even show business colleagues have started coming out on her side, acknowledging her “balls of steel.”

Neither the Western proxy war, sacrificing Ukraine – and masses of ordinary Ukrainians – for a perverse and futile Western dream of defeating and demoting Russia, nor the Zelensky regime that would long be gone without that war, can survive the truth. It may be ironic that it takes a pop star combining conventional beats with revealing outfits to state that truth loudly, but then the regime she is up against is led by a low-taste comedian gone very, very dark. Polyakova may stand her ground or she may be forced to recant. The genie is out of the bottle either way: The showman Zelensky can be upstaged.