The world's largest travel website TripAdvisor offers British citizens a private excursion that will allow to see with their own eyes consequences of the war in Donbas. Citizens of the United Kingdom will have to pay 300 pounds, or 344 euros, or 25623 rubles.
"War in Ukraine is the hugest and bloodshed military conflict since WWII. During 2014-2019 more then 10000 military and civilians were killed. The war still goes on. You can have an opportunity to become a part of new European history," the advertisement reads.
The tour organizers offer tourists a trip to Donbas, where they will be able to visit Sloviansk and Kramatorsk and "explore the former frontline zone of Russia’s War aggression against Ukraine." As part of the tour titled "Donbas Tour: War Experience" tourists will be able to see destroyed buildings, hospitals and schools, talk with local residents who witnessed hostilities and take pictures wearing helmets and bullet-proof vests.
Tourists will also be offered to visit bomb shelters, pass through Ukrainian military checkpoints and attend the Sloviansk ceramic market where they can buy "souvenirs which are famously made in the form of war weapons, grenades and Kalashnikov machine guns."
Indeed, the initiative looks a bit sensational. An attempt to make business on curiosity of people who crowded squares to see public executions in the Middle Ages – and this still happens in some Arab countries where people either voluntarily or forcibly come to see how a criminal will be hanged, beheaded, stoned to death - likely has the right to live. Life is full of surprises!
An attentive reader has definitely paid attention to the fact that Britons invite their tourists not to the Middle East, Iraq or Syria, where bombers of the USA, the UK, France, Germany and other NATO countries ruined for example once prosperous Iraqi city of Mosul with 1.5 million people of population. It is reported that dead bodies can still be found on its streets, in ruined buildings and basements.
Probably, TripAdvisor should have invited its clients to Syria's Raqqa that was catastrophically damaged by strikes of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces for which the anti-ISIL coalition led by the USA provided air support. There, just as in Donbas, civilian infrastructure, including schools, hospitals, water plants, the sewer system, is heavily damaged…
British travelers could be offered a trip to Libya, where petrol used to cost less than sparkling water, to see into what French, American, and British bombers turned the once independent and richest country of Northern Africa. But it is not safe in Libya now.
Army helmets and bullet-proof vests, wearing which tourists in Sloviansk and Kramatorsk are offered to take pictures, may fail to protect from various terrorist gangs in Tripoli. British tourists may be taken to Belgrade, for example. There is no shooting there now, but the results of NATO and in particular British bombings can easily be seen there. The Serbs, even after 20 years after the aggression, haven't restored ruined maternity hospitals, heating plants, a TV station… Not military facilities that could have been raided by British Tornado and F-16 aircraft, but residential buildings, hospitals, and shops.
Let an English or Serbian guide tell them that during the NATO aggression, for the first time after WWII, against Yugoslavia, an independent European country, 3,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched, around 80,000 tons of bombs, including cluster ones and ones with depleted uranium that are still causing death from cancer of thousands residents of this Balkan state were delivered, killing from 3,500 to 4,000 people during the Serbia bombings and wounding an maiming more than 10,000 people, the majority of who are civilians.
Material damage to the Balkan state amounted to more than $100 billion, and the destruction of oil processing and petrochemical plants poisoned Europe's largest river, Danube, with toxic agents. Danube water can be used for washing even now only after thorough filtration.
But I don’t think that such trips will be offered. And there are many reasons for this. Not even because there are no people willing to make such a trip. There will be no problem with that. It is simply because such public offers, and moreover their advertising, will rapidly bring a Western company to bankruptcy. The freedom of entrepreneurship in the UK, just as elsewhere in the Western world, is quite a peculiar notion.
As soon as there is at least slightest criticism of so-called "values of the free world," it will be as good as dead. But criticizing Russia and presenting it as "an evil empire" is easy and made with great pleasure. You will even get support from the ruling authorities.
I think that many have paid attention to the offer "to explore the former frontline zone of Russia’s War aggression against Ukraine." No one cares that there was and there is no Russia's aggression. The notion – more likely a stereotype – of "the Russian aggression" thanks to many-year efforts of Western politicians and media outlets under their control has been taken for granted in the West, in particular in the UK.
The ultimate truth. All policies of Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and other NATO capitals and their war business is based on it. Their at least information space is filled with almost every-day reports that Russia's aggression is highly likely. And they are profiting from everything possible. So, it is possible that a tour to a war with Russia will be in great demand and will become another proof for another information and propaganda sabotage act against Russia. This time under the mask of business.
