As the United States celebrated on July 4 its 1776 independence movement, terrified residents of the world’s current trouble spots struggled to survive war and misery.

The picnic-like atmosphere on the Washington Mall before a huge evening fireworks display contrasted sharply with the horrors of a new war in the Ukraine between separatists and the United States-backed new government.

From the rooftop of my office on Pennsylvania Avenue, I took the photo at left of the capital city’s elaborate fireworks display. The Washington Monument is faintly visible at the left of the display, which the federal government organizes annually to commemorate the colonists’ Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. The Washington Post headlined part of its July 5 print edition “Capital knows how to party” to capture the festive mood on the mall.

Meanwhile, the United States and its onetime enemy, the United Kingdom, have been closely allied in fostering revolutions against existing governments worldwide, including the Mideast, Africa and South America.

Most prominent recently is the two nations’ alliance via NATO in the Ukraine. They and Western powers orchestrated the overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government in February following U.S-supported riots in the capital city of Kiev, most visibly via the machinations exposed in a leaked cable from U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Victoria Nuland.

Then the West backed the new government against separatists in the industrial eastern region, which is largely comprised of ethnic Russians.

On July 1, the recently elected Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko halted a 10-day ceasefire in the country’s east and ordered the Ukrainian National Guard to resume fighting rebels, who sought to create during the spring to create an independent country aligned with Russia.

The photo at right is from the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, which reported that Ukraine’s central government attacked on July 2 civilians in the village of Luganskaya and nearby.

Such images should be part of Western news accounts even if debate can occur, as often in a war zone, regarding the specific circumstances.

The Russian news agency asserted that the damage came from Kiev-backed artillery shelling of civilian targets. But the agency also quoted Kiev authorities as denying they caused the damage. Kiev officials attributed the horrors to self-inflicted harm by rebels.

Most United States mainstream media have ignored the photos, attributed to RIA’s Valeriy Melnikov. Suppression helps keep news coverage focused on story lines advocated by the State Department, CIA and White House and those of like-minded news managers in other nations.

My recent book, Presidential Puppetry, argues that powerful entities exercise hidden controls over the media and government. The Washington Post, for example, has long had a close working relationship with the CIA and its Wall Street allies. The Post’s new owner, Amazon.com founder Jeffrey Bezos, illustrated that relationship last fall when Amazon.com won a $600 million contract from the CIA to handle the agency’s cloud computing.

Fortunately, independent journalists are providing alternative information. What follows on the next page is a snapshot of such coverage involving the Ukraine. As a warning, some of the photos are too graphic for comfortable viewing.