In the shocking letter, which has been leaked to online media, the advice offers a step by step brutal guide in how to deal with the population in eastern Ukraine. The authenticity of the document which bears the US-based RAND corporation logo, however, could not be independently verified, Russia Today reported on Friday.
When asked to comment on the leaked ‘classified’ document, RAND told RT it had nothing to do with that report and directed enquiries to the publicly available sections of its website.
“RAND has produced no such document,” RAND’s media relations director Jeffrey Hiday said in a written statement to RT. “To see RAND’s actual research and commentary on Ukraine and Russia click here or here.”
The RAND Corporation is supposedly a non-profit global think tank which offers research and analysis to the US armed forces.
In the first line the memorandum notes that the peace plan outlined by new president Poroshenko is likely to fail. However, it soothes, the political and material downsides of the operation will be “outweighed” by the gains.
The shocking memorandum then lists a three stage military campaign to guarantee victory. Stage one, called the total isolation of the opponent regions, presuming that all civilians who have stayed behind are “complicit in the unrest or supportive of it.”
Then begins Stage Two of the operation, called mop-up, which involves a gradual tightening of the circle of troops round the region, followed by airstrikes and then artillery and mortar assaults against the “enemy’s” strategic facilities.
Stage Three, which is absurdly called ‘Back to Normal’, says that all refugees “from the warzone” should then be allowed to return home. This is presuming that in the first place they would have a home to return to and in the second place they would want to return home to a region now so divided along Ukrainian and Russian ethnicities.
However men aged 18-60 shall be “checked” in internment camps, while the property of convicted and displaced resident of Donetsk and Luhansk regions shall be nationalized.
The area of the punitive operation shall be made “off limits” to foreign media, the memorandum concludes.
NTJ/MB