Documentation that U.S. and EU Support Ukraine’s Nazis
15 August 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
Documentation will be presented here that the entire U.S.-and-allied ‘historical’ narrative about the war in Ukraine is loaded with blatant, demonstrable, PROVEN lies, which would have made Hitler’s master of propaganda, Josef Goebbels, proud. The first of these is the false allegation that this war started on 24 February 2022 when Russia was supposedly the aggressor and invaded Ukraine without provocation. So, that matter (guilt in this war) will be addressed first here:
The war in Ukraine is, but in reverse, actually the same situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable; Obama, Biden, and Trump, are not; and, so, the world again stands at the brink of a WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (Obama, then Biden, and now Trump — in other words, the United States Government), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink — into WW3 itself — in order to become able to achieve world-conquest (which had been Hitler’s goal to achieve). In other words: the war in Ukraine is as-if Khrushchev had said no to JFK’s proposal in 1962 — but, thankfully, he didn’t; so, WW3 was averted, on that occasion.
How often have you heard or seen the situation in the matter of Cuba being too near to the White House (near to America’s central command) for America to have accepted as a location-site for Soviet missiles in 1962, being analogized to Ukraine’s being too near — far nearer, in fact — to The Kremlin (Russia’s central command) for Russia to accept it as a location-site for U.S. missiles now? No, you probably haven’t encountered this historical context before, because it’s not being published — at least not in America and its allied countries. It is instead being hidden.
For example: on August 13th, Yahoo News and the BBC headlined “Why did Putin's Russia invade Ukraine?” and answered it by referring to Putin’s speech on 24 February 2022, the day that the invasion by Russia started:
Launching the biggest European invasion since the end of World War Two, Putin gave a fiery speech on TV declaring his goal was to "demilitarise and denazify" Ukraine.
The BBC and Yahoo didn’t quote from that speech; they hid what it actually had said, but they paraphrased some of the things he said, so as to convey a false impression of what he was saying. They denied that there has been anything in Ukraine to denazify, and they presented a bogus ‘history’ of the start of this war — allegedly that it had started when Russia invaded Ukraine on that day (24 February 2022). It’s a U.S.-and-allied fabricated ‘history’ in which the decisive facts (the ones that are esential in order to UNDERSTAND the war in Ukraine, and which will be presented and documented here), were all excluded. This will be the history that INCLUDES the decisive facts, the facts that are essential to know in order to understand how — and by whom, and when, and why — this war was actually started (none of the U.S.-and-allied lies, that Russia’s 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” or “aggression” or “illegal under international law”). We will also quote the entire opening of Putin’s speech on that day. In other words: this will be the TRUE history of how and why the war in Ukraine started. It will present the disproofs of the U.S. empire’s lies about the matter, and the proofs that all of the actual guilt regarding the war in Ukraine falls ultimately upon U.S. President Barack Obama and his successors.
The Ukrainian war started after the democratically elected President of Ukraine (an infamously corrupt country), who was committed to keeping his country internationally neutral (not allied with either Russia or the United States), met privately with both the U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010, shortly following that Ukrainian President’s election earlier in 2010; and, on both occasions, he rejected their urgings for Ukraine to become allied with the United States against Ukraine’s adjoining country Russia. This was being urged by them upon him so that America could position its nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a five-minute striking-distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow.
The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said — NOT in 2022 as is alleged in the U.S.-Government-controlled nations.
This war was started in 2014 by the U.S. against Russia — NOT by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 such as the liars allege — it was started in February 2014 by a U.S. coup which replaced the democratically elected and neutralist Ukrainian President, with a U.S. selected and rabidly anti-Russian leader, who immediately imposed an ethnic-cleansing program to get rid of the residents in the regions that had voted overwhelmingly for the overthrown President. Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already be beheaded by America’s nuclear strike. (As I headlined on 28 October 2022, “NATO Wants To Place Nuclear Missiles On Finland’s Russian Border — Finland Says Yes”. The U.S. had demanded this, especially because it will place American nuclear missiles far nearer to The Kremlin than at present, only 507 miles away — not as close as Ukraine, but the closest yet.)
Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled goverment an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate. Ukraine’s Obama-imposed government did this in order to be no mere interim government but a permanent ‘democratically elected’ U.S.-controlled government of Ukraine.
For this reason, and as a part of Obama’s plan, the U.S. Government had engaged the Gallup polling organization, both before and after the coup, in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in its Crimean independent republic (where Russia has had its main naval base ever since 1783), regarding their views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU; and they found that, generally, Ukrainians were far more pro-Russia than pro-U.S., pro-NATO, or pro-EU, but that this was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew that Crimeans would be especially resistant to the coup. However, this was not really new information. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.
Furthermore, this opposition to Ukraine joining NATO wasn’t merely Ukrainian public opinion before Obama’s 2014 coup: Ukraine’s 16 July 1990 basic law and declaration of independence from the Soviet Union swore that Ukraine would NEVER join ANY “military bloc”. Of course, that commitment by the newly independent nation of Ukraine was simply ignored by the Obama-stooge regime, up till the present day.
In other words: what Obama did was generally successful: it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it changed Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American billionaires’ neoconservative heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow (which is the U.S. Government’s goal there). Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, that figure had already risen to 42%. America’s press — and academia or public-policy ‘experts’ — have been very effective at managing public opinion, for the benefit of America’s billionaires, such as the controlling owners of firms like Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil.)
After Obama started the war, Russia, along with France, Germany, and Ukraine, negotiated the Minsk Agreements between Ukraine and its rebelling provinces, in order to have a ceasefire and to establish a process by which Ukraine and its rebelling provinces, of Donetsk and Luhansk (collectively called Donbass) would, by means of a series of steps, end the war totally. An essential provision in this agreement was that Ukraine would grant an autonomy to the two provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk that would be somewhat like the autonomy that Crimea had been granted when Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, and that Ukraine’s outlawing the Russian language and the Russian Orthodox Church — which had been done right after Obama’s coup — would be nullified so that peace could be restored to Ukraine (and the issue of Crimea would be addressed at a later time). However, though Ukraine signed, Ukraine simply refused to comply with those prerequisite conditions for moving toward peace; and, so, those accords never actually went into effect. Then during the end of 2021 and the start of 2022, Ukraine’s shelling of Donbass (which had continued right through the ‘ceasefire’) increased, and Ukraine increased its forces that were doing it. So, on 17 December 2021, Russia presented, to both the U.S. Government and its NATO military alliance against Russia, two proposed agreements for negotiation (one to U.S., the other to NATO). Central to both was that NATO and the U.S. would promise never to admit into NATO the country that has the nearest of all borders to The Kremlin — a mere 300 miles or 5 minutes of missile-flying-time away from blitz-nuking Russia’s central command (The Kremlin); but neither the U.S. nor its NATO agreed to negotiate.
Then, on 7 January 2022, the Associated Press (AP) headlined “US, NATO rule out halt to expansion, reject Russian demands”, and reported a contemptuous rejection of Russia’s proposal. This made irrefutable the U.S. Government’s intention to blitz-decapitate Russia’s central command.
Russia did not respond to that by invading NATO; Russia responded by invading Ukraine, which happened on 24 February 2022. It was a far less dangerous, and far less harmful, option, than to go straight into WW3.
On that momentous day, Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin addressed his nation to explain the invasion, and he opened (in stark contrast t what the BBC and Yahoo News allege):
I will begin with what I said in my address on February 21, 2022. I spoke about our biggest concerns and worries, and about the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia consistently, rudely and unceremoniously from year to year. I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.
It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.
Why is this happening? Where did this insolent manner of talking down from the height of their exceptionalism, infallibility and all-permissiveness come from? What is the explanation for this contemptuous and disdainful attitude to our interests and absolutely legitimate demands?
And, now, entire documents, which indisputably prove the racist-fascist-imperialist-supremacist, or “nazi,” character of the U.S. and EU, will be presented here, and these documents concern the post-WW2 American empire’s insatiable obsession to ultimately destroy Russia — to achieve what Hitler had failed to achieve with his Operation Barbarossa. That military invasion by Hitler’s forces, against Russia in WW2, was the largest military invasion in all of history (though it failed so disatrously that it caused Hitler’s defeat in WW2), and unless it will be stopped NOW by the U.S. empires’s acceptance of a Russian outright victory against America and its nazistic NATO military alliance — Russia’s victory against that nazi alliance against Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine — the war in Ukraine will suddenly expand all the way to a World War Three (WW3) between Russia and the American empire, and will thereby destroy the entire world in nuclear war, because there is NO realistic possibility that Russia will EVER accept to become a part of the nazistic American (or of any other — but there is no other — there is ONLY the American) empire.
In order to know when and why the U.S. Government decided to support Ukraine’s nazis, click here.
I shall introduce this sequence of documents by showing first the following video compilation of the pervasive nazism (racist-fascist-imperialist supremacism) of the Ukrainian government that Obama’s February 2014 coup in Ukraine has produced, so that the constant U.S.-and-allied lies about this can be starkly and indisputably displayed as being the vicious frauds that they are:
https://odysee.com/@nudaveritas:f/NudaVeritas-I-EN:b
That is how nazistic the post-Obama-coup Ukraine actually is. I had discovered this remarkable viceo compiltion-video by encountering it for the first time while reading Felix Abt’s brilliant 6 April 2023 article about the U.S. regime as being the successful embodiment of Hitlerism today (though not focused against Jews as his was). And, so, Abt’s mind-bogglingly thoroughly documented article, about this topic, comes as the first document here:
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“How Zelensky was prevented from making peace in the Donbass and avoiding war with Russia”
(This is also viewable as a 127-page pdf with many photos, at https://www.academia.edu/106031835/)How_President_Zelensky_was_prevented_from_making_peace_in_the_Donbass_and_avoiding_war_with_Russia. All versions that Abt has posted include numerous photos, such as images of Ukrainian troops wearing Nazi emblems, even in the presence of Zelensky. I have excluded all but one photo, because images are space-consuming. I have also replaced Abt’s links, so that archived ones are used in case the live links become or have been removed from the Web.)
From peace advocate to warmonger, from anti-fascist comedian to figurehead of the banderite neo-Nazi regime: the untold tragic story of a Western hero.
Felix Abt, 6 April 2023, 21,000 words
Fact-based answers to the questions: ▪ How democratic and free or fascist is Ukraine? ▪ What is behind the (legal or illegal?) change of the (democratically elected or undemocratically appointed?) government in 2014, the subsequent secession (or annexation?) of Crimea, the (real or unreal?) civil war in the Donbass from 2014 and the (legal or illegal?) invasion of Russia in 2022 ? ▪ What is the role of Jewish President Zelensky, who was elected as a peacemaker and became president in wartime of a country where Jews, Poles and Russians were slaughtered by nationalists who are being revered [by the government] as heroes?
Until recently, Ukraine’s Azov Battalion used Nazi symbols, as seen in this picture, but dropped them after being mentioned by “Russian propaganda and disinformation,” as Azov complained. The Western-backed military organization has since changed its appearance, but not its Russophobic and racist Nazi ideology. But as Ukrainian writer and journalist Lev Golinkin, a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin, writes in The Nation, the Western mainstream media have deliberately whitewashed and “denazified” neo-Nazi organizations like the Azov Battalion. [Picture by Heltsumani / CC BY-SA 4.0. Note: the NATO flag (left), the Hitler Youth flag with the swastika (right), and the Azov flag with the Wolfsangel and the Black Sun derived from the German sun wheel, both symbols used by the Nazis (center). The Black Sun is now deleted from the Azov logo.]
Ultimate victory (“Endsieg”) of the warmongering neo-Nazis over former Jewish peacemaker
Traffic came to a standstill, people in the squares and sidewalks knelt down, the bells of all churches rang, soldiers appeared in parade uniforms and a pompous state funeral began. It was an impressive event symbolizing the victory of neo-Nazis over a Jewish president: on March 10, 2023, liberal Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, representing the collective West, stood behind President Zelensky at the open coffin of Dmytro “Da Vinci” Kotsiubailo, commander of the “Da Vinci Wolves” of the fascist “Right Sector,” which advocated ethnic cleansing. The New York Times reported [https://archive.ph/fbxpA] that “his soldiers wore Nazi-style patches, including the Totenkopf” (death skull). In the days that followed, the pro-government Ukrainian media (opposition media are banned) reported on his deeds with effusive praise, and numerous squares and streets in Ukrainian villages and towns were named after Kotsyubailo.
Together with Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, President Zelensky attended the state funeral for the fallen neo-Nazi and “Hero of Ukraine” Kotsiubailo. By laying flowers at his coffin, she showed what kind of values the collective West defends in Ukraine.
Kotsiubailo suffered heroic death in the Donbass in the fight against the Russian “subhumans” and for the salvation of the Ukrainian “master race.” The 27-year-old, an ardent admirer of Bandera, who murdered thousands of Jews, was one of the youngest military commanders. The neo-Nazi leader was already awarded the "Order of the Golden Star" and the title of "Hero of Ukraine" last year in the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, by a Jewish president, of all people.
Here Kotsiubailo is seen with a picture of Bandera in the background along with his wolfhound. He liked to joke that his wolfhound could eat the bones of Russian children. [Picture Source: Grayzone / Max Blumenthal]
Five months before Kotsiubailo’s state funeral, Zelensky had already called the fascist Azov leaders “our living heroes” and honored them with the nation’s highest award.
The founder of Azov, [Andriy] Biletsky [shown here leading a Nazi salute], had formulated the historical goal of his nation as follows: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.” [https://archive.ph/O8S43] The country’s president, Zelensky, recently paid a visit to the neo-Nazi Biletsky, whom he considers a hero. Biletsky is currently leading a crusade with NATO weapons against Russian Untermenschen (subhumans) in the east of the country. (Screenshot from a video of Zelensky showing him with Biletsky at the front in the Donbass). [For a terrific video about Zelensky’s beng deeply corrupt, see this.]
The Finnish prime minister wasn’t the only one to pay her respects to a murderous Nazi. On another occasion, Prime Minister Trudeau joined President Zelensky in the Canadian Parliament in enthusiastically applauding Jaroslav Hunka, a Nazi who emigrated to Canada after World War II. “Politico” downplayed it by writing only about a “Nazi connection,” even though the honoree was actually a member of Hitler’s murderous Waffen-SS. Crucially, this division was formed from Ukrainian volunteers who so fanatically supported the Hitler regime that they volunteered for the SS. A few days before the end of the war, the SS division, was renamed as “1. Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army”. The AP news agency used this name to distract from the fact that Zelensky, Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland and with them the entire Canadian parliament gave a standing ovation to a convinced Nazi and member of the Waffen-SS. After World War II, many Ukrainian Nazis found refuge in Canada. The country became home to the second largest Ukrainian diaspora. One of the immigrating Nazis was the grandfather of Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s deputy prime minister, an ardent advocate and supporter of the Bandera neo-Nazis in Kiev. Articles about Canada’s relations with the Ukrainian Nazis can be found here.
Today's Ukraine builds its national identity on Nazi collaborators and war criminals.
Prior to his shift in allegiance, becoming an apologist and fervent advocate for the Banderite regime that catapulted him into the media spotlight, American historian Professor Timothy Snyder had articulated that Bandera’s OUN (which subsequently evolved into the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” or UPA)
“helped the Germans organize murderous pogroms of Jews, Poles and other minorities. In so doing, they were advancing a German policy, but one that was consistent with their own program of Ukrainian ethnic purity. Bandera aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities.”
Because its president and prime minister are Jews, supporters of the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine claim that their country is not Nazi.
This makes it sound as if there was no racism in the United States because America had a black president, or as if there were no Nazi crimes against Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto because there were also Jewish guards working for the Nazis.
The extraordinary memorial service in the presence of a head of state from the European Union marked the end of a transformation from the anti-fascist comedian, who campaigned against discrimination against minorities and for the end of the civil war against Russian speakers in the Donbass, to his capitulation to a regime dominated by neo-Nazis, whose figurehead he became. To understand this dramatic development, we should start at the beginning.
Scenes from the Lviv pogroms of July 1941—tragic episodes of unspeakable brutality—are documented on culturahistorica.org. This harrowing image shows a Jewish girl who has been raped and is in shock, while her mother tries to pull up her underwear. These atrocities were committed by Ukrainian nationalists in collaboration with Nazi troops, who are now being glorified in a disturbing manner by the Zelensky regime. And it is precisely this Zelensky regime that is supported by the EU and the US. (Image source: culturahistorica.org)
From Comedian to Elected Peace President
There are two Volodymyr Zelenskys: the one we have known since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, who has since been celebrated every day in the Western media as a hero with a spotless white (or green) vest, and the other, who was less well-known prior to this significant escalation of the war, which, according to NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, began already in 2014. (Here and here are details on the actual start of this war in 2014). After all, prominent British, German and other European media already referred to the “Panama” or “Pandora Papers” to describe the “former” Zelensky, who was not yet the illustrious governor of the American empire on its NATO eastern flank, as being highly corrupt. Ironically, comedian Zelensky made fun on TV at the time that Barack Obama was in fact “the real president of Ukraine” and that he had led Ukraine into NATO and made it a “henchman.”
The media’s portrayal of the “former” Zelensky, which turned 180 degrees after the Russian invasion. It now no longer fits the new Western narrative.
However, his hero status could end abruptly if Washington decides he is no longer useful, for example, if war results do not meet expectations despite NATO’s active participation: after all, the war alliance has been heavily involved with all kinds of weapons deliveries, training, reconnaissance, military “advisors,” the guidance of troop movements, artillery, and missiles at Russian targets, and the preparation of offensives to be carried out by Ukrainian soldiers, but so far without any soldiers of its own directly on the front lines, resulting in massive expenditures that far exceed Russia’s entire defense budget. In this case, the media will again go in search of dirty details about him. Wanna bet?
What the same media bubble fails to mention, however, is that Zelensky was elected to office with a large majority of the electoral votes, including the votes of many Russian-speaking citizens, with massive financial support from the richest Ukrainian oligarch at the time (who had stolen huge sums of money and was therefore banned from entering the country by the United States) and with the promise of bringing peace to the Donbass. His pledge to end the civil war that nationalists and neo-fascists had been waging against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east of the country since 2014 was to prove a tough nut to crack. Nevertheless, he made efforts to implement it at the beginning of his presidency.
Before the Storm: Zelensky celebrating his election victory in 2019. [Source: scmp.com]
Zelensky’s original peace mission
The plan of Volodymyr (actual first name at birth: Vladimir) Zelensky probably also had to do with the fact that he, the president of Jewish faith and Russian mother tongue, himself belonged to the minority. He learned fluent Ukrainian only late, when it became politically unavoidable for him.
Long before he became president, he had campaigned as a comedian against discrimination against the Russian-speaking minority. For example, in a 2014 television appearance, he declared, “In the east and in Crimea, people want to speak Russian. Leave them alone, just leave them alone. Give them the right to speak Russian. Language should never divide our country…. We have the same skin color, the same blood, regardless of language.” When he took the highest office in the country, he tried to implement his election promise.
However, this was a Herculean task in view of the very strong ultranationalist forces and the “fascists who overran the country” (according to the “Jerusalem Post” and other media) who opposed his peace mission. The influence of these circles was (and is) so great that from schoolchildren to senior citizens, all Western Ukrainians were processed to hate Ukrainian citizens of Russian descent and to believe that it is good to slaughter them. Even in schools, students were goaded by their teachers to use slogans like these against Russian-speaking Ukrainians: “Hang the Muscovites,” “Put the Russians on the pyre,” “Drink the blood of Russian babies!”
Peaceful coexistence instead of final victory (“Endsieg”)
Zelensky could only have achieved peaceful coexistence between western and eastern Ukraine if he had been permitted to negotiate as he originally desired with Russia and with representatives of the largely Russian-speaking Donbass. He needed the backing of his supporters in Washington to do so, as the Russophobic nationalists who have led the fighting in eastern Ukraine since 2014 threatened him and declared that they would only accept a “final victory” over the Donbass. But Washington did not want him to negotiate with Russia — and thus strengthened the position of the extremists. The nationalists, guided by the ideology of their idol Bandera, even told Zelensky that he would sign his own death warrant if he spoke to Russia and the Russian-speaking separatists in the Donbass.
It gradually became clear that the existential threat to the Russian-speaking population in the Donbass, and in particular the looming emergence of a highly armed and hostile NATO member Ukraine, could not be met through negotiations. The West, which did not take seriously the “red lines” Russia had proclaimed for years, was at no time interested in discussing Russia’s security needs, and Vladimir Putin’s growing critics in Moscow grew tired of giving enemies more time to prepare for war against Russia.
Nor did it heed the warnings of many prominent figures in the U.S. political establishment: Robert M. Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, warned against NATO expansion, as did Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, who wrote that NATO expansion was neither necessary nor desirable, and Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s Secretary of State, who predicted war in Ukraine. George Kennan, the intellectual father of U.S. containment policy during the Cold War, issued a stark warning against NATO enlargement in a May 1998 interview with The New York Times, calling it a “tragic mistake” and declaring that “there is no reason for it at all.” Nor were the voices of countless other prominent U.S. foreign policy leaders, including former senators, military officers, diplomats, and academics, who had warned against NATO expansion decades ago taken seriously.
President Biden could not, or would not, recall that as a senator and ranking member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he also assessed NATO expansion as a dangerous Western provocation of Russia and warned that it would provoke “a vigorous and hostile response from Russia.”
Matthew Hoh, deputy director of the Eisenhower Media Network, explains why NATO expansion went through anyway: “At the end of the Cold War, the military-industrial complex faced an existential crisis. Without an adversary like the Soviet Union, justifying massive arms spending by the United States would be difficult. NATO expansion allowed for new markets. Countries coming into NATO would be required to upgrade their armed forces, replacing their Soviet-era stocks with Western weapons, ammunition, machines, hardware and software compatible with NATO’s armies. Entire armies, navies and air forces had to be remade. NATO expansion was a cash bonanza for a weapons industry that originally saw destitution as the fruit of the Cold War’s end. From 1996–1998, US arms companies spent $51 million ($94 million today) lobbying Congress. Millions more were spent on campaign donations. Beating swords into plowshares would have to wait for another epoch once the weapons industry realized the promise of Eastern European markets.”
While Russia was accused by Western politicians and media of not wanting to honor the Minsk agreements to resolve the conflict in the Donbass, in reality it was the other side that did not want to abide by these agreements in the first place, as can be seen from the statements of the main players at the time, Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Petro Poroshenko; they only served to buy time so that the Ukrainian army could be rearmed by NATO and prepared for war with Russia. Geoffrey Roberts of Cork University argued in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies that Russia therefore felt compelled to wage what he called a “preemptative war against Ukraine.”
But instead of being provoked by American militarism and unilateralism, Russia could have taken a potentially far cheaper and more effective route than invading Ukraine: Had it formed a diplomatic “coalition of the willing” among countries in Europe and the Global South to pressure Washington to keep NATO out of Ukraine (and Georgia), it might well have achieved its goal much more easily, given the popularity of that goal and Russia’s backing in the Global South.
It should be recalled that since 2008, Russia has repeatedly warned that a Ukraine in NATO, which has been pushed especially since 2014, would pose an unacceptable threat to the country, an existential threat, because it would mean that the U.S., after Romania and Poland, could also station nuclear-capable missiles in Ukraine, which could reach Moscow within 3–5 minutes. This would deprive Moscow of second-strike capability, i.e., the deterrent balance of terror. Moscow has made it clear that it would have to intervene militarily if this existential threat were to materialize. All Russian diplomatic efforts to avert this threat have been shot down by the collective West. The Russian president’s last attempt was a letter to the U.S. president and the NATO secretary-general on December 17, 2021, urgently requesting security guarantees from NATO. The collective West was again unwilling to provide such guarantees.
To understand how this came about, we should start with the founding of NATO and its Eastern counterpart: Shortly after all the sacred oaths that Germany — like Japan — would refrain from any military buildup were made, guaranteeing that war would not come from Germany again after the civilizational catastrophe of World War II, the Federal Republic of Germany was led into the Western military alliance by its transatlantic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
Eight countries from the Eastern Bloc founded the Warsaw Pact in response to that, I repeat: in response to that. So the Eastern Defense Alliance was sparked by West Germany’s rearmament rather than the other way around.
The Warsaw Pact dissolved together with the USSR. And NATO carried out its so-called eastward expansion, growing to 28 members, contrary to the commitment to expand “Not One Inch Eastward.” As a result, Russia felt increasingly encircled — and betrayed.
To make matters worse, in 2001 — after the Sept. 11 attacks — NATO not only declared an alliance emergency, but German troops invaded Afghanistan, ostensibly to defend democracy in the Hindu Kush. Even more serious was the military intervention with German participation in the so-called Kosovo War, where NATO carried out terrorist air strikes on what was then Yugoslavia and on Belgrade, among other places. This was certainly illegal under international law, since there was no UN mandate for it; moreover, the bombing of Belgrade was very likely a war crime.
Let us also recall how the U.S. responds to the threat of being encircled by hostile forces armed with nuclear-capable missiles by using the example of the so-called Cuban missile crisis triggered by the U.S. Monroe Doctrine. This policy prohibits the deployment of missiles from adversaries in the neighborhood of the United States (i.e., in this case, Russian missiles in Cuba). Washington was determined at the time to risk World War III because of these missiles.
Two months after Vladimir Putin’s letter that achieved nothing, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. However, the goal was not to conquer all of Ukraine. There is no evidence that Moscow wants to create a Greater Russia, a kind of Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact 2.0, as is claimed in the West. Statements by Vladimir Putin, which are not mentioned by the Western media, even indicate the opposite. Nor does it make sense: the Russians know that the Soviet Union expended enormous resources to keep the Soviet republics under control, which contributed to the exhaustion and collapse of the USSR. Moreover, Moscow is aware that an occupation of all of Ukraine would end in an even greater defeat than the occupation of Afghanistan at that time in 1989. According to Moscow’s statements, Russia’s real concern is the security of the at-risk Russian-speaking community in the country’s east.
Russia invaded in February 2022 with 90,000 troops, while Ukraine had about 800,000 troops. To defeat the Ukrainian military would have required a force ratio of 1:3, meaning Russia would have needed over 2,000,000 troops on Ukrainian soil. For this, a general mobilization would have been necessary with the justification of a "war" instead of the "special military operation" for which fewer troops and mercenaries were used. Moreover, Russia limited its advances to the periphery. The reason: It expected the West to negotiate. By invading with a relatively small force, however, Russia showed that it was serious in its demand for a neutral Ukraine and an end to the oppression of the Russian-speaking population in the Donbass. But again, the West was unwilling to negotiate and preferred to escalate the war.
More than a year after invading with a mere vanguard (vastly outnumbered and outgunned by Ukrainian forces), Russia has not brought the bulk of its army with its overwhelming firepower into the conflict (but mainly the private Wagner Army), once again disproving the conspiracy theory of NATO and its supporters that supposedly imperialist Russia wants to annex all of Ukraine (and subsequently invade other European countries). And why would the largest country in the world, spanning 11 time zones, be interested in increasing its burden by incorporating a poor, corrupt and otherwise problematic country?
Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicaco provides a thorough analysis of the conflict situation in Ukraine today, the players and the prospects. Mearsheimer explains that Russia is not acting out of an alleged imperialist expansionism, but from a position of strategic defense.
Eliot Cohen is a good example of how not only the media but also the academic establishment in the West try to influence and shape the narrative of the Ukraine conflict instead of shedding independent and unbiased light on it. He is a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and holds the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Instead of a reasoned and factual article, he published another pamphlet in The Atlantic calling for the victory of Ukraine (with unlimited NATO support) and the push over the cliff of nuclear power Russia because, according to his conspiracy theory, Russia is “imperialist.” And, of course, Putin is an autocrat and Zelensky a democrat, if you believe him. The Ukrainian president is undoubtedly what Cohen and like-minded people believe him to be, a bulwark of freedom, if one disregards the fact that under massive pressure from the Banderists he has banned opposition parties and independent media, discriminated against minorities, and even had the Russian-speaking minority in the Donbass shot at (details later).
The result of the “advanced studies” by Prof. Eliot A. Cohen is a fear-mongering of Russian, not American imperialism. Would he be able to answer these two exam questions correctly: 1. Which empire has the most military bases in the world and how many; which empire has encircled Russia and China and which empire has encircled the United States? Correct answer to the 1st question: the United States has more than 800 military bases around the world, including dozens that encircle Russia and China. By comparison, Russia and China have only a small number of bases outside their borders and far from the United States. 2. Have you ever heard of the Pacific island of Saipan? Correct answer to question 2: Yes, it has become another U.S. air base. (Screenshots: Headline from Eliot A. Cohen’s article in The Atlantic, left, and FP Foreign Policy Magazine headline, right, about China being encircled by U.S. military bases in addition to Russia).
Of course, there is no tirade against the imperialist USA from Professor Cohen. He and his like-minded colleagues ignore the May 2023 Brown University study of how many lives the U.S. wars have cost since 9/11. According to the study, 4.5 to 4.6 million people have been victims of illegal U.S.-led or -supported wars of aggression, with about one million killed directly in combat operations and the rest victims of the consequences of war. In a 2020 study titled “Costs of war,” Brown University concluded that U.S. wars since Sept. 11, 2001, have also caused nearly 60 million refugees worldwide. Earlier wars such as the Vietnam War and the Korean War, which were not included in the study, have caused many more millions of deaths.
Reuters reported on the Russian president’s reaction to the US scaremongering.
U.S. Air Force general Curtis LeMay, the head of the strategic air command during the Korean War, explained the Office of Air Force History in 1984 that “we went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea. (…) Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population.” If Cohen had looked at the numbers, he would have noticed that in the last 120 years, Nazi Germany and the United States were responsible for the most war deaths.
Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Nazi Germany’s High Commissioner in the Netherlands, was tried and hanged at the Nuremberg Tribunal at the instigation of the United States for his crimes, including his attempt to flood farmland in 1944. During the Korean War, the U.S. Air Force destroyed the Kusong and Toksan irrigation dams (it was not a mere attempt) that supplied water to 75% of North Korea’s food production, resulting in agricultural flooding and mass starvation. During the Vietnam War, which the Vietnamese refer to as the “American War,” the U.S. Air Force again bombed dikes, resulting in the flooding of farmland in several provinces. The U.S. military has murdered countless innocent civilians in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
None of the American war criminals were ever prosecuted. No sanctions were imposed on the United States. No American president has been the subject of a criminal investigation by an international court. Even the “Gulag of our time” (Amnesty International’s term) at Guantanmo, where prisoners are held and brutally tortured by the United States without charge or trial, in some cases for more than 20 years, is not worth a word of criticism from the European Union. U.S. musicians have not been required to speak out publicly against the United States’ brutal wars of aggression or to distance themselves from the policies of U.S. presidents before performing in Europe, as Russian athletes do. And athletes from the U.S. have not been banned from international competitions like Russian athletes. Obviously, Cohen and like-minded “experts” have no problem with this double standard.
Cohen deliberately ignores the causes of the Ukraine conflict and Russia’s stated goals. He is a vivid example of how biased, irresponsible and unprofessional not only the media, but also a large part of the Western academic establishment calling themselves “scientists” have become.
In addition to the threat to his life, Zelensky faced direct obstacles to his peace mandate on several fronts.
When Zelensky traveled to the part of Donbass still under Ukrainian army control to campaign in October 2019, he was met by angry members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion protesting under the slogan “No to surrender.” Zelensky argued with a military commander from the Azov Battalion about the president’s demand for a troop withdrawal in a videotaped exchange. “I am the president of this country. I am 41 years old. I am not a loser. I came to you and told you: withdraw your weapons,” Zelensky demanded.
Despite his personal appearance on the ground, Zelensky encountered even further resistance: the same neo-Nazi forces set up an armed checkpoint to prevent or at least delay a withdrawal of the Ukrainian military. Thousands of nationalist demonstrators, cheered by the liberal intelligentsia and carrying flares, also marched in Kyiv.
Even Boris Johnson, the former British Prime Minister, admits that Vladimir Zelensky was “not an unreasonable guy” and wanted a peace agreement with Vladimir Putin, but was prevented from doing so by the Bandera neo-Nazis, whom Johnson belittles as “nationalists”.
Ultranationalists and U.S. government prevented peace agreement
Although Zelensky was reluctant to accept the Minsk agreements on resolving the minority issue, he continued talks on their implementation. The radical nationalists expressed their violent opposition at every opportunity — including in August 2021, when at least eight police officers were injured during armed protests in front of the presidential office. Their threats against Zelensky undoubtedly thwarted a peace agreement that could have prevented the Russian invasion.
The New York Times headline on Feb. 10, 2022
Just two weeks before Russian troops invaded Ukraine, The New York Times noted that Zelensky “would take extreme political risks to even consider a peace agreement with Russia” because his government could be “shaken and possibly overthrown” by far-right groups if he agreed to “a peace deal that they believe gives too much to Moscow.”
Yuri Hudymenko, Führer of the far-right party “Democratic Axe” at his headquarters. Note the axes on the walls of the party headquarters, which party members are eager to use against Russian speakers. [Source: nytimes.com]
Yuri Hudymenko, leader of the fascist Democratic Axe party, even threatened Zelensky with a coup d’état, according to the New York Times: “If anybody from the Ukrainian government tries to sign such a document, a million people will take to the streets and that government will cease being the government.” He also emphasized that “they [the Zelensky government, F.A.] fear the Ukrainian people [respectively his fascist followers, F.A.] more than they fear the Russian army.”
An example that these nationalists are serious about their hostility toward native Russian-speaking Ukrainians is the recent announcement by a Ukrainian soldier in the east of the country that he and his comrades will murder all Russian-born eastern Ukrainians in the Donbass as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
If you read this article to the end, you will find many more striking examples that reveal the true character of the regime.
“They should be … I don’t know … annihilated,” declares the famous actor and rock musician Volodymyr Rashchuk on Ukrainian television. He is now a company commander of the fascist Svoboda battalion and shares the demand of like-minded “Slava Ukraïni!” nationalists who call for genocide of dissenters, especially Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proposes peace talks between Kjiv and Moscow, he will commit “political suicide.” This statement was made by the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) Oleksiy Danilov in an interview with Ukrinform. And as befits a convinced Banderist, he had already vehemently opposed the Minsk agreements, since they should have protected minorities, especially the Russian-speaking ones in the Donbass, from discrimination and violence.
In his recent interview with the Ukrainian newspaper СТРАНА (STRANA) on April 6, 2023, Danilov once again repeated his warning to Zelensky against negotiating with Russia, stressing again that this would mean “political suicide.”
Suffering in Donbass acknowledged by Zelensky, censored by Western media
Katharine Quinn-Judge of the “International Crisis Group” explained that Zelensky’s press secretary at the time, Yulia Mendel, acknowledged the suffering in the Donbass because “Zelensky had promised during the election campaign to treat the residents of the Russian-backed enclaves as full Ukrainians” — a misstep for the U.S.-favored nationalists, who oppose equal rights for all Ukrainians.
Yet journalists in European and other Western countries are intimidated and prevented from reporting on Ukrainian terror and suffering in the Donbass by being defamed, losing their jobs, and even threatened with imprisonment. And reporters who provide balanced news about Ukraine are suspended.
The fact that dissent is crushed and freedom of the press is repressed in Ukraine does not bother the political and media elites in the West. They feel all the more disturbed by the handful of free journalists who dare to report on the situation in the Donbass, where the majority Russian population has been under Ukrainian fire since 2014 (more, how it came to this, later). This explains why Europeans are generally unaware of the years of violence that the Ukrainian military and neo-fascist groups have inflicted on the population in the Donbass.
After German journalist Patrik Baab dared to report from the Donbass, German universities and media accused him of “legitimizing Putin’s war of aggression with his mere presence”. As a result, he lost his job as a lecturer at a university (which, a court later ruled, was illegal).
Patrik Baab [Source: thepostil.com]
The French journalist and filmmaker Anne-Laure Bonnel had made two documentaries showing the situation of the Russian-born population in the regions attacked by Kyiv. As a result, she lost her job in Europe. Here you can see how she had to deal with biased editors in France while working in the Donbass. Incidentally, both Patrik Baab and Anne-Laure Bonnel had unequivocally condemned the Russian invasion.
Anne-Laura Bonnel [Source: beforeitsnews.com]
“I saw the war, yet we cannot speak the truth,” says Sonja van den Ende, a Dutch investigative journalist who has covered the Donbass, adding, “We’re being censored in Europe.”
Sonja van den Ende [Source: sputniknews.com]
Italian photojournalist Giorgio Bianchi became the target of a defamation campaign waged by major Italian newspapers over his reporting from Ukraine. He was accused of being a pro-Russian propaganda stooge.
Giorgio Blanchi [giorgioblanchiphotojournalist.com]
The media conjured up all sorts of wild suspicions against him, to which he responded: “All of these hypotheses are absolutely false and lack any support of evidence. It is a clumsy attempt to muzzle whoever disapproves of crazy policies by a government that is making the Italian people pay the cost of arbitrarily imposed sanctions against Russia.” He noted that most intellectuals and journalists are increasingly reluctant to come out and voice their concerns about the escalation of the conflict for fear of jeopardizing their reputations or suffering a career assassination because of the witch-hunt atmosphere.
Alina Lipp moved to Ukraine in 2021 — a year before Russia invaded — and out of sheer curiosity to Donetsk to spend some time there and find out for herself what was actually happening in the Donbass. The German freelancer journalist was little known at the time. Although Berlin loudly declared that it was protecting democracy and thus freedom of expression in Ukraine (nota bene: with heavy weapons, including tanks rolling against Russia again!), Germany wanted to punish her for this with three years in prison. Lipp saw her bank account frozen and relieved of 1,600 euros without further explanation. The German authorities also said that she would not be allowed to defend herself in court, as this could hinder the investigation.
Alina Lipp [Source: telegraph.co.uk]
▪ For those for whom atrocities, regardless of whether they were “only” preached or perpetrated nationwide, against Russian-speaking Ukrainians by Ukrainian nationalists don’t turn their stomachs, I recommend this video.
▪ And discover even more about the history of the war and its background in Ukraine in this insightful documentary by Paul Moreira, a renowned French filmmaker who has made quite a few investigative documentaries in conflict zones. Are you ready to challenge your knowledge and beliefs?
As usual for Western media, German state television never reports from inside the Donbass, but always from outside and also showed Ukrainian soldiers wearing steel helmets with swastikas and SS runes fighting against the separatists there and the Russian-speaking civilian population since 2014, and against Russian troops since 2022. The TV does not mention that the use of such Nazi symbols is forbidden in Germany — unlike in Ukraine — and is punishable by fines or imprisonment, while Ukrainian nationalists can and do use them privately and publicly. [Source Screenshot: Headline “Ukraine conflict on ZDF: Swastika and SS rune — viewers protest” from Tagesspiegel Daily in Berlin]
Western politicians and media have strongly condemned Russian censorship. Russia has restricted access to state-affiliated Western media such as the BBC and Germany’s Deutsche Welle. But the West itself also practices a growing regime of censorship that has taken hold in the United States and Europe. For example, by suppressing all Russian media, including RT and Sputnik, to ensure that media consumers in the West receive only the Western perspective on the Ukraine conflict. The Western press even cheered this on. Western social media joined this censorship campaign and even expanded it. Differentiated views on the Ukraine conflict, often denigrated as pro-Russian propaganda, no longer find a place in Western social and mainstream media.
The war against freedom of expression is being waged across all borders and continues to escalate: for example, a Spanish journalist who reported on events in the Donbass much to the displeasure of the Ukrainian government was arrested while reporting on the arrival of Ukrainian refugees in Poland for the Spanish television station La Sexta, presumably at the behest of the Ukrainian government. He also worked for the Spanish daily Publico and the regional newspaper Diario de Gara, as well as for South American news outlets.
Ruben Gibert, lawyer, journalist, family man: arbitrarily detained in Poland as a “felon” in a maximum security prison after angering the regime in Kjiv with his inconvenient reports from the Donbass. As in the case of Julian Assange, the mainstream media are not campaigning for his release.
In Poland, he was charged with espionage on a blanket basis under Article 130.1 of the Polish Criminal Code, without charges being filed or a trial date set. Since then, he has been treated as a “dangerous prisoner” in a maximum-security prison in a small solitary cell (with no contact with other prisoners), where he spends 23 hours a day, plus one hour to walk with guards outside his cell. He is not allowed to talk on the phone with his wife and children or with anyone else, except his lawyer. His children have not spoken to their incarcerated father in a year. Letters addressed to him are handed to him two months late and are opened, translated and censored beforehand.
So is this the kind of democracy and freedom that the collective West pretends to defend with weapons and billions of taxpayer dollars in Ukraine and neighboring Poland?
On the other hand, Western journalists are much better off not reporting from Donbass and spreading with great benevolence any news, true or untrue, from the Kjiv government, such as the rape of Ukrainian babies by Russian soldiers (one of the many lies of a high-ranking Ukrainian official, so absurd that even the Ukrainian parliament felt forced to dismiss her). They are rewarded by the Ukrainian president with medals of honor for their good (partisan) work, and these “journalists” gladly accept them. With her lies, Ms. Denisova, the Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsperson, made it into the news on CNN, Washington Post, BBC and others. She has also been repeatedly quoted in German media (including here, here or here and the German news magazine SPIEGEL even interviewed her).
60 cases of rape by Russian soldiers in just 2 days according to Ukraine, which media reported widely, including the British Sun (left). Newsweek (right), which had previously also spread Ukrainian horror fake news about Russia, was one of the few media outlets to inform about the dismissal of the creator of these unproven horror stories.
Ms. Denisova, has commented in an interview on why she invented these outrageous atrocities. She said, among other things: “For example, when I spoke in the Italian Parliament in the Committee on International Affairs, I heard and saw a weariness about Ukraine, you know? I spoke about these terrible things to somehow get them to make the decisions that Ukraine and the Ukrainian people need.” In plain English, she lied and made up “news” about the rape of babies by Russian soldiers and other horror stories to get the decisions she wanted in the West.
Whenever atrocities occur in Ukraine, Kjiv, NATO governments and their Western media partners almost reflexively blame Russia, as in the case of the Butcha massacre. But why does Ukraine refuse every time Russia calls for an independent investigation if it is not to blame, and why does the West support Kjiv in its refusal? And it is therefore not surprising that the U.S.-dominated majority of the U.N. Security Council also rejected an independent investigation of the Nordstream terrorist act requested by Russia.
In articles about U.S. military involvement in Ukraine, the U.S. mainstream media cite think tanks that receive funding from the arms industry 85% of the time. This also influences the mainstream media outside the U.S., which often leans on its narrative.
Quincy Institute: “While think tank experts might have myriad reasons for supporting increased U.S. military spending, some have an additional incentive: their employer is funded by military contractors profiting from the war.”
It is not unimportant, then, to be aware of the fact that the “reporting” of the U.S. and other, primarily Western, media depends to a large extent on think tanks whose funders profit from the war.
Academics are also being “canceled”: One instance is the dismissal of a renowned university professor for adopting a nuanced stance on Ukraine.
France had awarded Professor Ulrike Guérot the prestigious Order of Merit (“Ordre National du Mérite”). A German president took her along on a state visit in his delegation. Whenever an EU summit took place, television stations called to interview her about it. Her book “Why Europe Must Become a Republic!” became a bestseller and was translated into eight languages.
She lost her fame abruptly when she defied the official narrative of the Ukraine war and offered a more nuanced view instead of regurgitating the only accepted version, as she was expected to do, and blaming the Russian president exclusively and solely for the Ukraine war and leaving out the back story.
As a result, friends turned away from her, and the same media that had previously praised her began digging for dirt on her. German democracy, propped up by the pillars of speech and counter-speech, quickly began to crumble when the latter was abolished in the wake of Washington- and Brussels-directed war hysteria over the “Russian war of aggression in Ukraine” and when, ironically, it itself became more and more similar to the kind of “democracy” in Ukraine and Russia.
Cancelled in a Germany with restricted freedom of expression: Professor Ulrike Guérot, from celebrated Europe expert to “persona non grata” [Source: magazine EMMA]
The German magazine EMMA writes: “As a celebrated Europe expert, she was a guest on all channels. Now she is persona non grata. Even her own university distanced itself from her. The reason: her position on the Ukraine war. Guérot asks: What is actually wrong with our discussion culture? And she wrote a book on Europe’s role in the war that is well worth reading.”
Illegal coup d’état triggered secession of Crimea and war in Donbass
Transatlantic politicians and the mainstream media portrayed the momentous "revolution" on the Maidan in 2014 as the work of liberal, pro-Western protesters motivated by a righteous resentment of an authoritarian, corrupt president.
In line with their narrative, they simply ignored the fact that according to the Ukrainian constitution in force at the time (Article 108), the presidential term could only be terminated early for four reasons: resignation, health reasons, impeachment proceedings or the death of the incumbent.
None of the four reasons applied to the dismissal of democratically elected President Yanukovych. He had neither resigned nor was he seriously ill, and opposition leaders Vitali Klitschko, Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Oleh Tyahnybok had not conducted impeachment proceedings either. Even a fact check by the German magazine Der Spiegel, known for its transatlantic and strongly anti-Russian bias, concluded that Yanukovych’s ouster was unconstitutional. Referring to a statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the magazine concludes its fact check with the sentence: “If you look at the change in the presidency in Ukraine from a ‘purely legal’ perspective, Putin is right.”
The Maidan protest movement was a marriage of convenience between government opponents, who at best represented one half of a polarized country, and the neo-Nazis. The fact that the uprising served primarily to strengthen the neo-Nazis, while only implementing the goals of the Western powers that opportunistically supported them, was conveniently ignored in the West.
Russian-hating nationalist “Yats” (Yatsenuk), who became prime minister after the 2014 coup d’état, left, with Oleh Yaroslavovych Tyahnybok, center, the fascist leader of the anti-Semitic Svoboda party (according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz) with close ties to the Asov group, who had called for “fighting against the Muscovite-Jewish mafia,” at a meeting with former Republican Party presidential candidate Senator John McCain. The latter, with Tyahnybok at his side, fired up protesters in Kyiv’s Independence Square in the run-up to the violent coup against the democratically elected Yanukovych government. [Image source: Businessinsider.com]
Tryzub, one of the groups that came together to form the influential Neonazi “Right Sector,” had urged the Ukrainian opposition to shift “from a peaceful demonstration to a street-revolutionary plane” in March 2013. In the event that the pro-Russian forces came to power, their leader Dmytro Yarosh had already called on his compatriots in 2009 to “take up an armed struggle against the regime of internal occupation and the Moscow empire.” Yanukovych was hated by nationalists as part of the “pro-Russian forces.” However, the Brookings Institution characterized Yanukovych’s foreign policy as “more nuanced” than his pro-Russian leanings had initially suggested.
Looking outside of Kyiv, a thorough examination of more than 3,000 Maidan demonstrations revealed that the far-right Svoboda party, whose leader [Tyahnibok] alleged that a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” controlled Ukraine, and which includes a leading politician [Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn] who admires Joseph Goebbels [and that same 13 November 2014 article also noted that “some of the new MPs are not just far right but actual neo-Nazis. Take Andriy Biletsky, elected in a single-member district in Kiev with support from the People’s Front party led by Arseniy Yatseniuk”, but fails to mention that Yatsenyuk was running the country, thanks to Obama-Nuland: Nuland’s pick had sponsored Biletsky] was the most active force behind the demonstrations. They were also more likely than any other group, with the exception of the “Right Sector,” a collection of neo-Nazi activists with ties to collaborators with the Nazis who had committed mass murder, to engage in violent acts.
Senator John McCain meets with Andriy Volodymyrovych Parubiy, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, from 2016 to 2019, in his office in Washington. Parubiy is one of Ukraine’s leading neo-Nazis, whose party boasts, “we are the last hope of the white race.” After the coup, many known neo-Nazis were appointed as government officials. Although the Nazi parties did not achieve significant electoral success, their propensity for violence had an intimidating effect and helped to achieve their political goals. And although a party that openly professes fascism is not in power in Kjiv, there are true Nazis in all key positions in the army, judiciary, police, intelligence services, media, education and culture. [Screenshot source: John McCain tweet]
For good reason, the Israeli embassy advised Jews to stay in their homes while a prominent rabbi urged them to leave the city and even the country.
A massacre perpetrated by snipers during the Maidan coup, which was strongly condemned in the collective West, was a false-flag operation attributed by Western politicians and media to the Yanukovych government to lend some moral legitimacy to its overthrow.
Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian professor at the School of Political Studies & Conflict Studies and Human Rights Program at the University of Ottawa, who conducted research on the matter, refuted the Western claim:
“All the evidence shows that this massacre was not perpetrated by government snipers or led by the police…. No one has been convicted of this mass murder…. They killed and wounded police officers and Maidan demonstrators in order to falsely blame government forces….”
Indeed, the post-Yanukovych interim government, in which leading far-right figures took prominent positions, swiftly passed a law giving Maidan participants immunity for any violence.
Adds Katchanovski: “He (President Yanukovych) was blamed for the massacre and the West, including the United States, no longer recognized him as president of Ukraine. In his memoirs, Biden writes that immediately after the massacre he called Yanukovych and told him that he had to leave Ukraine.”
Katchanovski points out that there is clear evidence of involvement of nationalists and neo-Nazis in the massacre.
Also rather unknown in the West is the fact that there were large protests against the Kjiv-Maidan protests in Crimea and the Donbass, as well as in other Russian-speaking areas, the so-called “anti-Maidan movement.” After the coup, protests grew stronger not only in Crimea, but also in the Donbass and southern Ukraine. Cities such as Odessa, Melitopol and Mariupol refused to obey the new Kjiv-Maidan government. However, all this took place peacefully, there was hardly any violence and, above all, no fatalities.
After the coup, David C. Speedie, senior fellow and director of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, wrote on the CNN portal: “Far-right, anti-Semitic, anti-Russian and openly fascist groups have existed and do exist as a blight on modern Ukraine. A 2012 European Parliament resolution condemned the main — but by no means most extreme — ultra-right party, Svoboda, as racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic.” Speedie’s warning was not heeded. On the contrary, protagonists of the US government openly collaborated with them.
The smiling winning team of the coup: Victoria “Fuck the EU!” Nuland, who orchestrated the coup on behalf of the United States, with Tyahnybok, the fascist leader of the anti-Semitic Svobada party (left), former world boxing champion Vitali Klitschko (standing behind), whom Nuland had rejected as a candidate for prime minister and who instead became mayor of Kyiv after the coup, and the nationalist “Yats” (Yatsenuk), her choice for prime minister after Operation Regime Change (right). [Source screenshot: Ukraine documentary]
Oleh Tyahnybok, founder and leader of Svoboda publicly demanded at public rallies: “Purge Ukraine from the Jews and Russians!” Here you see him at a public event, where he raises his arm to perform the Hitler salute.
Ukrainian fascist and anti-Semite Tyahnybok receives a warm welcome from U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in his capital, Washington. [Source screenshot: Ukraine documentary]
However, the character of the nonviolence of the anti-coup protests changed dramatically in April 2014 for the following reason: while CIA Director John Brennan was in Kyiv, the Security Council of Ukraine under its chairman Andriy Parubiy of the Nazi Svoboda party decided on April 13 to launch the so-called “anti-terrorist operation.” Just two days later, the violent campaign began in the opposition areas, where tanks and other war equipment were used against demonstrators in what was then eastern and southern Ukraine. This marked the beginning of a relentless war against Russian-speaking civilians in the Donbass, who were labeled “terrorists.” In the process, Ukrainian government forces made, for example, “Widespread Use of Cluster Munitions” in populated areas such as the city of Donetsk (Donbass), Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported. HRW added that “the use of cluster munitions in populated areas violates the laws of war due to the indiscriminate nature of the weapon and may amount to war crimes.” (More on the use of cluster bombs and current U.S. deliveries to Kjiv here).
As of 2014, Kyiv also disconnected the Donbass region’s water supply, power grid, banking system, and pension system. Moscow prioritized the Minks talks to find a peaceful solution despite calls for Russian intervention from the separatists in Lugansk and Donetsk to shield the population from economic strangulation and a bloodbath. (It wasn’t until years later that it became clear that the Minsk agreements were a sham and that neither the West nor Kjiv had negotiated them in good faith.)
In general, the Western mainstream media preferred not to report on Kjiv’s war against the Russian-speaking population in the Donbass. CNN was an exception at the time, when it reported on an air strike against the separatists: “The carnage was sudden, unexpected. This was the middle of a city, a building adjacent to a leafy square, where civilians walked and worked. Eight people were killed, five women and three men, according to the self-declared Luhansk People’s Republic; the authorities in Kiev reported the same tally.”
4-Star General Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who has never made a secret of his Banderite convictions (portrait and bust of Bandera displayed in his office), sees the fight against the Russian invaders as a continuation of the fight against the Russian-speakers in the Donbass since 2014.
Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, takes a selfie with his idol Stepan Bandera.
In a December 15, 2022 Economist interview, he stated: “All we did when the large-scale aggression started was to implement not only our knowledge, which we already had in 2014, but also the skills and the experience we have gained since then. And the most important experience we had and one which we have practiced almost like a religion is that Russians and any other enemies must be killed, just killed, and most importantly, we should not be afraid to do it. And this is what we are doing.”
El Pais, the Spanish flagship of PRISA, one of the largest media groups in Spain and Latin America, quotes Oleksiy Melnyk, co-director of the Razumkov Center for International and Security Policy Analysis in Kyiv, that Zaluzhny and other senior officers “studied NATO regulations and applied them, but the main factor that makes them military leaders is eight years of experience in Donbas.” Other Ukrainian experts are quoted as saying these military leaders were “schooled in the war in Donbas”, where they “had eight years of apprenticeship on the front lines, on a large scale.”
So by the time of the Russian invasion in 2022, the war had already lasted nearly eight years and claimed thousands of lives, but was largely ignored by the Western media.
During the Maidan demonstrations, the West demanded that the Ukrainian government should not use force against the demonstrators, but should take their demands seriously and fulfill them. After the Maidan it was different and nobody demanded from the new government, which came to power by the coup, to negotiate with the demonstrators in the south and east of Ukraine. For two months, Kjiv refused any talks with the demonstrators and then in April — instead of a negotiating delegation — sent tanks and fighter jets against the then still unarmed demonstrators.
The fighting escalated further when Kyiv sent the “volunteer battalions” formed from the neo-Nazi “security forces” of the Maidan protests into the Donbass. These units bore names like “Azov” and “Svoboda” and quickly gained sad notoriety for their cruelty. Nazi brigades, of which there are dozens, were equipped with modern weapons, including heavy weapons of all kinds from 2014.
Moscow reacted to the declaration of the so-called anti-terrorist operation on the very day of its launch, and “Ria Novosti” reported: “Russia condemns the use of violence involving ‘Right Sector’ militants against protesters in southeastern Ukraine and calls on the West to convince Kjiv to distance itself from neo-Nazis, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement obtained by Ria Novosti on Sunday.”
The fact that Kjev explicitly wanted to use the army against the demonstrators was not mentioned in the Western media, only trivialized paraphrasing that “units of all security forces” were involved in a “special operation against pro-Russian separatists.” Moreover, governments in the West showered Moscow with recriminations.
According to Western media reports, units of the Ukrainian army defected to the protesters beginning April 16. It was a considerable number of soldiers who switched sides. Therefore, the rebels were quickly well armed, because whole barracks and military bases in the east of Ukraine supported the rebels. Earlier, Ukrainian government troops in Crimea also started turning their backs on the regime in Kyiv.
Protesters occupied squares and buildings and began to defend themselves with weapons against police forces still loyal to Kjiv, but this time the terms used in the Western media were suddenly different from those used during the Maidan demonstrations. Demonstrators were now defamed as “Russian agents,” “terrorists,” or “bandits.” It is irrelevant whether Russia controlled or influenced the events in the east or did nothing of the sort. The Maidan demonstrations were also clearly at least influenced, and even controlled, by the West. Anyone who wants to try to report neutrally should at least use comparable terms for comparable events, and not give them judgmental names according to their own sympathies.
Also on February 23, protests took place in Crimea. The Guardian reported on this under the headline “Ukraine crisis fuels secession calls in pro-Russian south” and wrote “The protest in the port city of Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula was attended by thousands, with the crowd voting for the establishment of a parallel administration and for civilian defense units. Protesters held up Russian flags — not a single Ukrainian flag was visible — and chanted “Russia, Russia” … Speakers said that at a similar demonstration the same day in the regional capital of Simferopol, some 5,000 people joined such units. The reaction is likely to be far greater in Sevastopol, where up to 200,000 people could be counted, said Dmitry Sinichkin, president of the local branch of the Night Wolves motorcycle club.”
Resistance came only from the minority of Tatars. That the relationship of the Crimean Tatars to Russia is problematic is undeniable. When President Putin spoke before both chambers of the Russian parliament about Crimea’s application for membership in the Russian Federation, he mentioned: “Yes, there was a period when the Crimean Tatars, as well as some other peoples of the USSR, suffered a brutal injustice”. Even President Putin’s full rehabilitation of the Crimean Tatars and Russia’s promotion of the Crimean Tatar language cannot close the gap in the short term. That some of them are stirred up against Russia is understandable. The Ukrainian “Glavred” wrote the same day under the headline “In Crimea, Tatars raised the Bandera flag and chanted ‘Hail Ukraine.’”
The majority of the population in Crimea opposed the new central government in Kyiv. They still considered the democratically elected but illegally ousted Yanukovych as their president.
The Crimean parliament deposed Crimea’s acting prime minister on February 27 and elected Sergey Aksyonov as the new premier. Aksyonov was one of three deputies from the pro-Russian Russian Unity party. The parliament, which consisted of a clear pro-Russian majority, also decided to hold a referendum on the status of Crimea on May 25, coinciding with the presidential election scheduled by Kyiv. Despite the presence of armed pro-Kyiv forces in the building to deter MPs, the majority of the 64 MPs present voted in favor of the referendum on Crimea’s status, according to the Unian news agency. A parliamentary spokeswoman justified the move, saying, “Due to the unconstitutional takeover of power in Ukraine by radical nationalists and with the support of armed gangs, peace and tranquility in Crimea are at risk.”
Western news coverage thereafter repeatedly invoked MP Sumulidi as a source for alleged electoral fraud, but was unable to find other MPs who could corroborate his version.
Tensions increased between Kyiv, which opposed the referendum, and Crimea. Crimean Prime Minister Aksyonov asked Russia for help on March 1: “Understanding the responsibility for people’s lives and security, I turn to President Putin with a request for help in securing calm and peace in Crimea.” The referendum, originally scheduled for May 25, was brought forward to March 16. The reasons given for bringing it forward were the tense situation and the potential danger of armed conflict over Crimea. Initially, the issue was the extension of autonomy, but later, in view of the threats made in Kyiv, the secession of Crimea was also brought up for discussion.
Russia justified the deployment of troops in Crimea with the “critical situation in Ukraine, which means danger to the lives of citizens of the Russian Federation and danger to our armed forces stationed on the territory of Ukraine (Crimea) on the basis of an international agreement.”
The fears were not groundless, because in the new government in Kyiv “Svoboda” had received the second largest share of ministerial posts, a party that only months before had been labeled by the EU, the German government and others as nationalistic, chauvinistic, hostile to Russians and Jews, etc.
The “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”, known for its transatlantic and strongly anti-Russian bias, reported from Crimea on this March 1 under the headline “Russia courts Sevastopol” and wrote: “New realities are probably to be created as quickly as possible. A strengthening of autonomy, closer ties with Russia are popular in Crimea. As the days before, pro-Russia rallies were again held in front of the city administration building over the weekend. As in all of Sevastopol, many wear the orange and black Saint George’s ribbon as a sign of attachment to Russia. They chant ‘Russia! Russia!’ Among them are many young, but also older people.”
During the referendum, Russian soldiers and their supporters took control of key positions in Crimea and besieged Ukrainian barracks and military bases. Although there were isolated critical situations, no fighting took place. Russia justified these actions as necessary to prevent the Ukrainian army from disrupting an orderly referendum process.
The vote was to decide between two alternatives: “1. Are you in favor of unification of Crimea with Russia as a subject of the Russian Federation? 2. are you in favor of the reinstatement of the 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Crimea and the status of Crimea as part of Ukraine?”
The 1992 Constitution provided that Crimea had all the rights of an independent administrative unit in the Ukrainian state, with many powers to determine its own destiny and to establish relations with any other country, including Russia.
Article 9 stated: “The Republic of Crimea belongs to the state of Ukraine and regulates its relations with it on the basis of treaties and agreements.” And Article 10: “The Republic of Crimea independently enters into relations with other states and organizations and regulates relations with them on the basis of treaties and agreements concerning cooperation in economic, cultural, health, educational, research and other spheres; it establishes its relations with them on the basis of equality, respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, non-interference in internal affairs, resolution of disputes exclusively by peaceful means and goodwill fulfillment of mutual obligations.”
The Crimean parliament invited the OSCE to observe the referendum. The organization did not act on it because Kiev refused to give it the invitation it needed to do so. Ironically, the West subsequently accused Russia and the Crimean government of not having OSCE observers on the ground.
Apart from ethnic, linguistic or national reasons, which were decisive for the high result for joining the Russian Federation, there were also other reasons for the inhabitants of Crimea to vote for it: economic. The standard of living in Russia was much higher than in Ukraine. At that time 3 million Ukrainians (or 6% of the Ukrainian population) had been living in Russia for a long time. After the accession of Crimea to the Russian Federation, there was also an immediate increase in the salaries of state employees and pensions to Russian levels. For many — not only ethnic Russians — the prospect of a tripling of salaries and pensions may also have been an incentive to vote for unification with Russia.
Kyiv called the referendum “illegal”. On the day of the referendum, Ukraine’s “Vesti” quoted Prime Minister Yatsenyuk under the headline “Yatsenyuk opens hunt for separatists across the country.” In the West, the event was condemned as a “sham referendum,” in part because of the absence of OSCE observers and the presence of Russian soldiers, and sanctions were levied against Russia. That Russia deployed soldiers in Crimea is undisputed. The extent to which Russia planned the events in Crimea or was itself surprised by the dynamics is speculative. Russia does not have as extensive a network of foundations as the U.S. and NATO, which have decades of experience in influencing states to the point of regime change.
For all the criticism voiced in the West and in Kyiv, however, not one expert could be found who would have claimed that Crimea would have made a different decision under different circumstances. The majority of the population was clearly pro-Russian, and there were economic reasons for the non-Russian segments of the population to unite with Russia as well.
In the absence of OSCE observers on the ground, Crimea invited observers from around the world, who reported no irregularities. Nevertheless, from today’s perspective, it would be easier to assess the referendum objectively if there were an OSCE election report.
From a purely legal point of view, the secession of Crimea is not a simple issue and will certainly keep state and international law experts busy for a long time to come. Nevertheless, the West has set a precedent in Kosovo. Kosovo, where unlike Crimea there was never a referendum, also declared itself independent without permission from the central government of Yugoslavia, and the West supported this and bombed Serbia, the legal successor to Yugoslavia, at the time — indisputably in violation of international law. The International Court of Justice issued a legal opinion on Kosovo on July 22, 2010, concluding that a unilateral declaration of independence would not violate international law. Thus, Crimea’s declaration of independence would be legal and its subsequent accession to the Russian Federation would also be legal, because after its secession — which was therefore legal under international law — Crimea was free to choose whether to be independent or to join another state.
Slovenia is a similar case to Crimea: On 25 June 1991, Slovenia unilaterally declared itself independent of Yugoslavia. After Slovenia adopted its own constitution in December 1991 (Crimea also had its own constitution), it was recognized by all states of the then European Community within less than a month. The term “Russian annexation” used in the West is therefore incorrect; it was a secession followed by an application for membership in the Russian Federation.
A later poll by the Gallup Institute, which is not suspected of spreading Russian propaganda, showed that the overwhelming majority of Crimean citizens consider the union of Crimea with Russia to be positive and that their situation and that of their families had improved as a result.
In 2022, referendums were held in Donbas, Kherson, and Zaporozhye, and like in Crimea, they were approved as expected by the area’s predominately Russian-speaking populace. Thus, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) were created and joined the Russian Federation. These referendums have once more been denounced as a sham by the collective West.
Kosovo, unlike Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, did not have a free expression of the populace’s will; instead, an independence declaration was adopted by a provisional self-governing body that exceeded its authority. This was sufficient at the time for the West to acknowledge Kosovo’s independence and assert that a declaration of independence was not prohibited by international law.
In the case of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who were discriminated against and fought against by Kjiv, the direct expression of the will of the people concerned was not recognized as legitimate by the same West.
The term “Nazi Ukraine” is not a creation of Vladimir Putin
Not surprisingly, the French-Israeli lawyer and anti-Semitism activist Arno Klarsfeld strongly opposes Ukraine’s accession to the European Union:
“Thirty years ago, Stepan Bandera, who called for the murder of Jews, was considered in Ukraine as a murderer, while today he is erected as a national hero”, the lawyer said about the Russophobic Ukrainian Nazi. “The country has issued postage stamps in his image, erected statues and established holidays in his honor. The largest avenue in Kyiv, five kilometers long and leading to the site of Babi Yar, bears his name. As for the extension of this avenue, it was named after Roman-Taras Yosypovych Shukhevych, who was even worse than Bandera.”
Incidentally, German citizen Heinrich Bücker condemned the German government for helping a regime that renamed the street to Babi Yar, where tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered after the person responsible, Stepan Bandera. The Kyiv regime literally renamed Babiy Yar Street “Bandera Boulevard.” For his criticism, a lawyer filed a criminal complaint against Bücker under Section 140 of the Criminal Code (StGB) “Reward and approval of criminal offenses”, which includes a prison sentence of up to three years or a fine.
The penalty order states that Bücker, in his public speech, approved “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in violation of international law, the illegality of which you knew.” To prove this, a longer paragraph from the speech is quoted, the entire wording of which is documented here (in German).
In the quoted paragraph, Bücker opposed cooperation with neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine:
“It is incomprehensible to me that German politicians are again supporting the same Russophobic ideologies on the basis of which the German [Nazi] Reich found willing helpers in 1941, with whom they closely cooperated and jointly carried out murder. All decent Germans should reject any cooperation with these forces in Ukraine against the background of German history, the history of millions of murdered Jews and millions and millions of murdered Soviet citizens in World War II. We must also vehemently reject the war rhetoric emanating from these forces in Ukraine. Never again must we as Germans be involved in any form of war against Russia. We must unite and oppose this madness together.”
Shukhevych, the man Klarsfeld mentions, is a Nazi and mass murderer of Jews and Poles who is hailed as another pre-eminent national hero in modern-day Ukraine.
Mass murderer Roman Shukhevych: a Ukrainian hero in the past and a hero in the present. [Source: ukrainiancrusade.blogspot.com]
While numerous monuments to Nazi criminals are being erected, at the same time monuments honoring such greats of world literature as Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky are being torn down: Alexander Pushkin, born in 1799, was a world-famous playwright and novelist; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, born in 1821, expressed religious, psychological and philosophical ideas in his widely acclaimed writings; and Leo Tolstoy, born in 1828, is considered one of the greatest writers of all time and has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Even the greats of science had to be extinguished, like Mikhail Lomonosov, born in 1711, who became world famous as a polymath, scientist and writer thanks to his significant contributions to literature, education and science. His discoveries included the atmosphere of Venus and the law of conservation of mass in chemical reactions.
Intellectuals from a time when parts of today’s Ukraine and today’s Russia were still one country with a common history are violently torn from their pedestals to make way for Nazi mass murderers like Bandera and Shukhevych, the new national saints.
The European Union and the United States have provided most of the funding for this demolition and renaming frenzy, including, for example, the many new memorial plaques throughout the country to Taras Bulba-Borovets, the Nazi-appointed leader of a militia that carried out numerous pogroms and murdered many Jews. Monuments were also erected in honor of Symon Petliura, who was at the head of the Ukrainian People’s Republic when 35,000 to 50,000 Jews were killed in a series of pogroms between 1918 and 1921.
Cultural cleansing: Statues of Alexander Pushkin, the 1799 born world-famous playwright, and novelist of the Romantic era are torn down everywhere in Ukraine. When he saw the light the Russian Empire and Habsburg Austria were in control of all the territories that constitute present-day Ukraine. This cultural genocide of the Russian-speaking minority could be a precursor to a physical genocide perpetrated by Russian-hating nationalists. [Source: Twitter]
80 years ago, in 1943, soldiers of General Nikolai Vatutin’s Red Army units liberated Kyiv from the Nazi reign of terror. Shortly after the liberation of Kyiv, he was ambushed and wounded by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) led by Stepan Bandera.
Recent removal of the monument to General Vatutin, the liberator from the Nazi terror regime, by the current pro-Nazi Kyiv regime. [Source: darnitskiy.org.ua]
The general was rightly celebrated as a hero, and the people of Kyiv regularly decorated his monument with flowers. The Vatutin monument was recently demolished, in the year of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Kyiv, and the Kyiv authorities desecrated his grave.
This is a tweet from Eduard Dolinsky, the 49-year-old director of the Ukranian Jewish Committee, on 11th April 2023 about Ulas Samchuk who worked for the Nazis’ Reichskommissariat Ukraine as chief editor of the Nazi newspaper Volyn. There he called for the extermination of Jews, Poles, Leftists, Russians, and other “undesirables” in Ukraine. Some of his quotes from Wikipedia: ▪ “Where the Ukrainian state will be built, there will be no Jews there.” ▪ “The element that settled our cities, whether it is Jews or Poles who were brought here from outside Ukraine, must disappear completely from our cities. ▪ The Jewish problem is already in the process of being solved.” ▪ “All elements that reside in our land, whether they are Jews or Poles, must be eradicated. We are at this very moment resolving the Jewish question, and this resolution is part of the plan for the Reich’s total reorganization of Europe. The empty space that will be created, must immediately and irrevocable be filled by the real owners and masters of this land, the Ukrainian people”. ▪ Samchuk wrote of the mass murder of Jews in Kyiv at Babi Yar: “Today is a great day for Kyiv.” The Kjev regime wants to include literature by him in the school curriculum again. — Ivan Rohach, one of his like-minded colleagues, was the editor of Stepan Bandera’s OUN-M newspaper “Ukrayins’ke Slovo”. The current Kyiv regime has also named streets in his honor. Rohach vehemently advocated the genocide of the Jews in Ukraine. On October 2, 1941, three days after Germans and Ukrainian collaborators murdered 33,771 Jews in Babi Yar, Rohach published an editorial headlined “The Jew is the greatest enemy of the people,” calling on Ukrainians to “show no mercy to the Jews.” In the Western media, fascists like Samchuk and Rohach, glorified by the current Kyiv regime, are apologetically dismissed as “controversial historical figures.” Of course, nothing about them is “controversial.” They were glowing fascists who cheered on and legitimized the murderous Nazi rule. The media merely support the historical revisionism of the Kiev regime.
The Ukrainian military unit Azov Regiment, whose emblem is the “Wolfsangel,” a Nazi symbol used in particular by units of Nazi Germany’s SS, was given the honor of renaming the street of the Ukrainian Marshal Malinovsky, one of the leaders of the Red Army in the war against Nazism, “Street of Heroes of Azov Regiment.”
Arsen Avakov, the Ukrainian Interior Minister (from 2014 to 2021), who is linked to the founding commander of the Azov battalion, Andriy Biletsky, by a personal friendship, integrated Azov into the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014. Thanks to this status, the neo-Nazi organization became a direct recipient of American aid. Established in 2014, the battalion has since evolved into a full-fledged brigade. After the coup in 2014 Ukraine became a Mecca for far-right extremists around the world, who came to learn and get training from Azov — including, ironically, Russian white supremacists who were hounded from their country by Vladimir Putin.
The best-known Russian neo-Nazi in Ukraine is Denis Kapustin, alias Denis Nikitin. He is of Jewish descent and moved to Germany as a teenager, where he became a leading figure in the neo-Nazi scene.
As Ukrainian magazine Zaborona reported, he returned to Russia and worked in various jobs alongside his political activities until he had enough money to found the clothing brand White Rex on August 14, 2008. The number “14” refers to the 14-word phrase known among neo-Nazis as “We must protect the existence of our people and the future for white children,” and the two eights are considered a coded greeting for “Heil Hitler!” The “eight” stands for the eighth letter (“H” as in Heil and Hitler) in the alphabet. These garments mainly carried Nazi symbols. The basis of the White Rex logo is the “Black Sun”, which was used in Nazi Germany as an alternative to the swastika and is also used in Ukraine by Azov and other neo-Nazi organizations. In his book “Hooligans: The World Between Football, Violence and Politics,” researcher Robert Klaus refers to Kapustin alias Nikitin as a “Nazi and a businessman.” He added: “Nikitin wants to be a kind of main supplier of Nazis.”
This is an example of the kind of clothing popular with neo-Nazis around the world, which has been advertised on Ukrainian Telegram channels. Kapustin has tapped into this lucrative market niche with his clothing brand White Rex.
The brand “White Rex” became a major force in the international neo-Nazi scene, and was involved in organizing numerous large-scale neo-Nazi events in Europe. After being expelled from Germany with a Europe-wide ban, he moved to Ukraine. Together with neo-Nazi groups such as Asov, he helped overthrow the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014. In interviews in 2022, Kapustin boasted of having met half of Ukraine’s military leadership and claimed he had been recruited as a regular soldier in the Ukrainian army.
The leading Russian neo-Nazi Denis Kapustin, who is active in Ukraine, makes it into the headlines of the New York Times, but not into those of German mainstream media. Germany is currently the Kyiv regime’s second largest arms supplier, and some of its deadly weapons may well have ended up in Kapustin’s hands.
In August 2022, he founded the Russian Volunteer Corps (RFK) with the stated goal of creating an "ethnically pure" Russian nation-state, just as his like-minded Banderist friends seek an "ethnically pure" Ukrainian nation-state. The cultural diversity of Russia is considerable: an estimated 185 different ethnic groups live mainly in the urban areas of this vast country, the largest in the world. Kapustin thus wants a Russia without the tens of millions of Russian Muslims and members of other national, religious, and ethnic minorities who are citizens of the Russian Federation. He is fighting the Kremlin, which he sees as the guarantor of this multiethnic state, with force of arms from Ukraine. The RVC uses symbols of the Vlasov Army, which collaborated with the Nazis in their war of extermination against the Soviet Union during World War II, as well as various insignia of the international far right. Under Kapustin’s leadership, the RVC began attacking villages inside the Russian border in 2023 with NATO equipment, “encouraged by authorities” as he stated, killing civilians and taking hostages.
Another RVC fighter is Russian Alexei Liovkin (or Levkin), a member of the black metal group “m8181th,” which reportedly means “Hitler’s Hammer,” and a former member of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
Long-standing cooperation between NATO and Azov. The picture shows Azov soldiers with NATO advisors in 2017. More here
The U.S. Congress banned funding for neo-Nazis like Azov in 2015 and lifted the ban six months later. Whether it backs neo-Nazi groups or not doesn’t really matter: the United States has a long history of supporting and using extreme and violent groups for its own ends: For example, it supported and sponsored Islamist groups such as the Taliban, terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State (ISIS) before turning against them when they were no longer useful — a fact better known than the CIA’s support for the Ukrainian Nazis (including the Asov precursors) and their recruitment as anti-Russian forces during World War II, which the CIA continues to use to the present, as CIA expert Douglas Valentine explains in his book.
The Ukrainian commander-in-chief Zelenskyj with a skull (“Totenkopf”) badge. [Source: Pikabu.ru]
Zelensky and his bodyguard with the military patch with the symbols of the “3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf” and the “1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler”
The Tenth Mountain Infantry Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces was given the name Edelweiss around the same time that the monument to General Vatutin was demolished in Kyiv.
Edelweiss [Source: globalespreso.tv]
The name had been used by the First Mountain Infantry Division of the German Wehrmacht during World War II. This division was responsible for the deportation of Jews, the execution of prisoners of war and the use of punitive measures against partisans in Yugoslavia, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Greece. Many members of the Ukrainian armed forces, including the current commander-in-chief, openly wear “Totenkopf” insignia, which are almost identical to the emblems of the SS “Totenkopf” division and other Nazi units.
The hate symbol of the Nazi death skull used by Hitler’s most bloodthirsty soldiers (left) has been adopted by Ukrainian soldiers and is now used unabashedly (right).
Referring to the following tweet by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, The New York Times wrote: “In April 2023, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted a photograph on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head. The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.”
Tweet with a sleeping soldier with a death skull symbol over his abdomen of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense
In contrast to the mainstream media in Europe, which tend to leave the issue out entirely, the New York Times also dared to write, more than a year after the Russians invaded, about the Nazi symbols that “now appear with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line.”
Nevertheless, the New York Times repeated the claim, often made in the collective West, that Ukraine officially distanced itself from Nazi ideology and could not be Nazi because the country’s president was Jewish.
Those who make this argument do not know the basics of Nazi ideology. It was not specifically anti-Semitic, but rather the widespread belief that Germans were a “master race” or that they were superior to other races and peoples. The Nazis referred to a number of ethnic groups as “Untermenschen” (Subhumans), and the Jews were only one of them.
The Holocaust Encyclopedia states that Nazi Germany viewed “the war against the Soviet Union as a war of annihilation between German fascism and Soviet communism; a racial war between German ‘Aryans’ and subhuman Slavs and Jews.”
Unlike other mainstream media, the New York Times dares to raise an issue that seems to contradict the official Western narrative of a Ukraine that supposedly shares Western values that must be defended with billions of Western taxpayer dollars.
The New York Times has a long history of supporting and justifying illegal U.S. wars. For example, it fired its longtime, award-winning star reporter Chris Hedges for his criticism of America’s unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq.
The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is arguably the world’s leading organization conducting humanitarian operations in conflict and crisis regions, helping to alleviate the plight of thousands of people. More than 20,000 people work for the ICRC worldwide. Peter Maurer, who was president of the ICRC for 10 years and followed the war in Ukraine closely, came to a startling conclusion: since World War I, the proportion of civilian casualties in wars has risen steadily, even more so in the destructured, terrorist-driven conflicts of recent years, he says. “I once said, looking at Syria, ‘If you want to survive in this war, it’s best to put on a uniform.” The casualties, he says, have almost all been civilians.
The war in Ukraine marked a turnaround, Maurer said, although violations of international humanitarian law occurred there as well. Most of the participants in the war belonged to a regular army. They are trained in international humanitarian law and know the internationally recognized norms of warfare, he said. “We note that there are genuine efforts on both sides not to let this conflict escalate completely. There are precautions toward civilians.”
This is a huge progress that the New York Times and the rest of the Western mainstream media have not reported. They prefer to play up the alleged Russian war crimes without independent investigation or evidence and to prejudge the Russian president as a war criminal, instead of comparing the war in Ukraine with past war atrocities, such as the massive and indiscriminate bombing of German cities at the end of World War II when the German Wehrmacht was already down, or with the atomic bombings of Japanese cities when the Japanese army was also on the verge of annihilation, or with the brutal extermination of 20% of the North Korean population by the U. S. Air Force during the Korean War.
Ukrainian journalist Lev Golinkin reported on the massive rise of neo-Nazis in the years following the coup, a fact largely ignored by Western mainstream media and politicians.[Source: Screenshot The Nation]
And as one would expect from a newspaper that has also clearly taken sides in the Ukraine conflict, a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia on Ukrainian soil, the New York Times used this excuse to try to downplay and trivialize the fact of a Ukrainian society steeped in Nazi ideology, expressed, among other things, in Nazi insignia: “Calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian propaganda”.
Commemorative procession on April 28, 2021 in downtown Kyiv in honor of the 78th anniversary of the creation of the SS Division Galicia. It was the Ukrainian branch of Germany’s SS (Schutzstaffeln) which was originally Adolf Hitler’s personal bodyguard unit and then evolved into one of Nazi Germany’s most powerful organizations which was also at the forefront of the Holocaust. Its recruits, who had to prove none of their ancestors were Jewish, received military training and were also taught they were the elite not only of the Nazi Party but of all humankind. The marchers carried the SS Galicia division’s lion-emblazoned symbol as well as flags of Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Neo-Nazi manifestations like this memorial procession are usually censored by the New York Times and the rest of the Western mainstream media.
The symbolism of the spirit of the times can be seen not only on uniforms, but everywhere in the cities and villages of Ukraine: Since the 2014 Maidan coup, more than 1,000 settlements and more than 50,000 streets have been renamed in Ukraine, according to reports including Maxim Goldarb, chairman of the “Union of Left Forces” and, before the Maidan coup, chief auditor and financial controller of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. According to conservative estimates, it has cost more than a billion euros, in one of the poorest countries in Europe, and even more so in a country at war and in urgent need of foreign financial aid, and where this year about two-thirds of state budget revenues come from abroad: mainly from EU countries and the United States. This has been a massive de-Russification and re-Nazification campaign, apparently worth the money of American and European taxpayers.
On May 10, 1933, students across Germany burned more than 25,000 “un-German” books. Among them were the works of Jewish authors such as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, leftist and liberal authors, and blacklisted American authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller. More than 100,000 people took to the streets in New York and many other places in the United States to protest this fascist act.
Russian language books in car tires at a checkpoint in Kyiv to be burned. The title of the yellow book with white stripes reads “Огнестойкость строительных конструкций”, that is Fire resistance of building structures. [Image: Tweet by Richard Engel, NBC Correspondent]
Nobody in the West objected when millions of “un-Ukrainian,” i.e. Russian-language books, were recently banned throughout Ukraine and books for the Russian-speaking minority were publicly burned.
Because the media either failed to cover this fascist act and the true nature of the banderist Ukraine, or because they chose to ignore it this time, Americans and Europeans were unaware of the striking similarity between the disappearance of countless books in Nazi Germany and in contemporary Ukraine.
And why, if they could, would those who disappear millions of books from Ukraine not also exterminate in large numbers the writers and readers they so despise, as in their great 1930s role model?
The new heroes of Ukrainian white supremacy stand with their old ideals for a future in a “cleansed” Ukraine, free of Russian speakers, Jews and other “inferior” minorities. The veneration of these bloodstained heroes is a shameful development that has been largely ignored or downplayed by the Western media. [Source: Ynet News]
“One language, one Ukraine. Long live Ukraine. Long live the nation. Ukraine above all. Bandera, Shukhevych are heroes of Ukraine. Out with Judaism. Death to the enemies. Death to Moskal [ethnic slur for Russian speakers, F.A.]. Impale the [Ukrainian] Russians with knives.”
Since 2014, nationalist mobs have been shouting the above slogans in the streets, stadiums and elsewhere in western Ukraine, from Kyiv to Odessa. Odessa already had a sad reputation for one of the worst massacres in Ukraine in 1941 and 1942, when more than 100,000 Jews were burned or shot. In 2014, Odessa saw another massacre, this time of Russian-speaking citizens, again perpetrated by fascists. This documentary depicts the new crime.
Burning building in Odessa sheltering Russian-speaking people besieged by Ukrainian nationalists. Dozens of people were burned or suffocated. [Source: tweet by Howard Amos]
Prime Minister Yatsenuk visited the scene after the crime and showed his true colors. If he were the prime minister for all the people, he would have shown compassion for the victims, condemned the murderers and vowed to bring them to justice. Instead, he was apologetic of the crime by spreading an unfounded conspiracy theory against Russia and taking a bellicose stance, talking about a war against Russia (documentary video sequence from 1:08:05–1:08:16).
[Source: screenshot of Odessa documentary with Prime Minister Yatsenuk talking to the press in Odessa]
“Yats” (Yatsenuk), a Russia-hating nationalist, still seems grateful to have been chosen by Victoria “Fuck the EU!” Nuland. She has worked for every U.S. president since 1993. Nuland has promoted a foreign policy of intervention through coups, proxy wars, aggression, and prolonged occupations. This policy has been implemented with bloody and disastrous results in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine: After the 2014 Maidan coup (also known as the “Revolution of Dignity”), in which she pulled the strings, she had chosen Yats to be Ukraine’s prime minister. She estimated that before the coup, from 1991 to the end of 2013, the U.S. spent five billion dollars on so-called civic, political, and media projects in Ukraine, which was arguably one of the largest psy-ops in recent history (not including budgets for military, paramilitary, or covert actions and funds from private oligarch NGOs such as those of Soros, Omidyar, Gates, and Thiel). Nuland proudly announced her figure at a U.S.-Ukraine Foundation meeting in 2013, with a large banner of Chevron next to her on stage, one of the largest companies in the world (primarily in the oil and gas business). [Image source: tweet by Yatsenuk]
The nationalists that have become a mighty force after the overthrow in 2014 are not only targeting Russian speakers but also other minorities, a fact that seems to be purposefully ignored or downplayed in the West. Peter Szijjarto, the foreign minister of Hungary, recently lamented on his Facebook page that the Kyiv regime had severely restricted the minority rights — including language rights — of the more than 150,000 ethnic Hungarian Ukrainians. For instance, schoolchildren who speak Hungarian are no longer allowed to receive instruction in their native tongue.
The Romanian President also complained about the discrimination against Romanian-speaking Ukrainians.
Poles, like all other minorities are discriminated against in Bandera’s Ukraine. Polish Deputy Foreign Minister: “Freedom of belief, access to learning Polish, and freedom of speech are being hampered.” [Source: REMIX]
The discrimination against Polish speakers by today’s Ukrainian nationalists is perhaps not surprising, since their predecessors, led by the Ukrainian national hero Bandera, hated Poles so much that between 1943 and 1945 they slaughtered over 100,000 Poles in Volhynia and eastern Galicia “with axes, pitchforks, scythes and knives,” in what the Polish president calls a genocide.
A first attempt after the coup d’état to repeal the 2012 “Language Law” took place on February 23, 2014, when the Rada (parliament) decided to repeal it. This law stipulated that in regions of Ukraine with a national minority of at least 10%, the language of the minority should also be the official language. The abolition of the law was a demand from the party program of “Svoboda” and other nationalist and fascist organizations such as “Right Sector”, whose leader was Dmytro Yarosh (who, by the way, on November 2, 2022 was appointed by President Zelensky as an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi). Although interim President Turchynov vetoed the new law, this momentous step by the Rada led to great fears of further discrimination in the Russian-speaking parts of the country and gave a strong boost to autonomy efforts in Crimea and the Donbass.
Later, the nationalists prevailed, even against Zelensky, who had repeatedly spoken out loudly against discrimination against the Russian-speaking minority: Article 10 of the new Constitution stipulates that Ukrainian is the only official language of Ukraine. In addition, a new law came into force in Ukraine in January 2022 that requires citizens to use the Ukrainian language in all areas of public life, including public administration, medicine, science and education, the media, and the Internet, and de facto bans the use of Russian and other minority languages.
The fact that the member of the Russian-speaking minority had to sign discriminatory laws of the nationalists as president was a bad omen for his mission to end the violence of the nationalists against the Russian-speaking population in the Donbass, which was a much more difficult undertaking. The lack of a power base relentlessly revealed Zelensky’s impotence and his true character as a mere figurehead of a Russophobic nationalist regime in the tradition of its national hero Stepan Bandera.
Zelensky’s powerlessness was also made unmistakably clear when, as commander-in-chief, he was not privy to his military’s planning and execution of a terrorist attack on the Nordstream gas pipelines. The Nation stated that “some reporting in the mainstream press even suggests Zelensky might not be in full control of these Ukrainian operations, which would imply that rogue military actors in Ukraine are driving policy.” I must qualify here by adding that the claim that Ukraine is the culprit in the Nordstream attacks may be a red herring on the part of the United States, which is suspected, for good reason, to be behind the attacks.
The refusal of Verkhovna Rada deputy from Zelenky’s “Servants of the People” party, Maksim Buzhansky, to switch to Ukrainian on TV triggered a political and media scandal in Kjiv. Even worse, he refused to give the appropriate obligatory greeting response to the greeting “Glory to the (fascist, F.A.) heroes!” of the TV presenter.
The Ukrainian medium “Detector” (Детектор медіа) concludes its coverage (screenshot) of the dangerous deviant with the sentence. “People like Maksym Buzhanskyi, you must agree, should be actively exposed.”
To this, the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC), Alexei Danilov, responded by stressing that such people had no place in the country and promised a “purge.” He stated: “The not-yet-discharged <…> who think they have the right to speak Russian on Ukrainian television have no place not only on television but also in politics and in Ukraine,” and he expressed his determination to have such people “purged to the root and kicked out of everything.”
According to a nationwide survey conducted in 2021, 22 percent of Ukrainians speak Russian as their native language (although in reality the number may be higher). The percentage is identical to that of French speakers in Switzerland. Unlike Ukraine, however, not only German, the language of the majority, is an official language in Switzerland, but French and Italian (the language of an even smaller minority) are also official languages with equal rights. Official documents such as law books and passports are issued in these three languages, schools teach in these languages, and Swiss citizens can use their mother tongue without restriction.
Unlike in Ukraine, in China’s Xinjiang province, ethnic minority (Uyghur) children receive instruction in their native language at school (alongside courses in Mandarin), and the use of their language is not restricted. On the contrary, the Uyghur language is present everywhere: on banknotes, official buildings, shops, street names, and public transportation, as in this subway (pictured). While Kjiv passed laws aimed primarily at eradicating the Russian language, Beijing passed laws to preserve minority languages. Paradoxically, the collective West vociferously accuses China of “cultural genocide,” while in the case of Ukraine, where cultural genocide is real, it has spread the cloak of silence over it.
Which raises the question: Why does Ukraine systematically discriminate against its minorities, while other countries do not, as the example of Switzerland shows, and treat minorities equally? And why don’t Western politicians and media ask this question to the Ukrainian government?
And the Roma, another minority, have become the target of the worst fascist crimes.
Ukrainian fascists are once again hunting down minorities such as the Roma without being legally prosecuted for it. [Screenshot source: The Guardian]
Even though Ukrainian nationalists now deny it, Russians and Ukrainians — both categorized as Eastern Slavs — have historically and geographically been one people with fewer differences than similarities for a long time. More than a thousand years ago, Kyiv, the present-day capital of Ukraine, served as the administrative hub of Kyivan Rus, the first Slavic state and the forerunner of both Ukraine and Russia. At that time, the two countries’ shared history began. And no one in the collective West is bothered by the fact that Lenin and Stalin didn’t give a damn about international law and the will of the citizens concerned and arbitrarily cobbled together different territories to form the Soviet Republic of Ukraine, or by the gift that Soviet General Secretary Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, gave to Ukrainians by bartering away Crimea, a time-honored part of Russian territory, to Ukraine in violation of Soviet law. The present borders of Ukraine were drawn in August 1991 by three more Soviet apparatchiks, including Boris Yeltsin, in a Belarusian forest, again without a mandate from the people and without due process of law. It is not known whether it was a sober event in the presence of the notorious alcoholic Yeltsin, one of the few Russian heroes celebrated by the West.
Without the involvement of external forces, it is unlikely that the civil war that broke out after the fall of the legitimate government in Kjiv in 2014 and was later followed by the war between (Western) Ukraine and Russia would have occurred.
Despite the genocide caused by years of bombardment of Russian-speaking civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk by the Ukrainian Army, irregular volunteer units, and the “fascists who overran the country,” the Western-dominated UN Security Council has not intervened — even though it was obligated to do so under the following paragraph 6 of the International Criminal Code a.k.a “Völkerstrafgesetzbuch”:
“Whoever, with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group as such, kills a member of the group, inflicts serious bodily or mental harm on a member of the group, particularly of the kind specified in section 226 of the Criminal Code, places the group in conditions of life likely to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part … shall be punished by life imprisonment.”
In his book “Ausnahme Zustand: Geopolitische Einsichten und Analysen unter Berücksichtigung des Ukraine-Konflikts” (State of Emergency: Geopolitical Insights and Analyses Taking the Ukraine Conflict into Account), German lawyer Wolfgang Bittner explains that Russia can invoke its Responsibility to Protect (“R2P”) vis-à-vis the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine — a generally recognized requirement under international law to prevent serious human rights violations. R2P, however, is a problematic doctrine that was originally introduced into international law by the United States and NATO — primarily to justify the war of aggression against Yugoslavia.
The serious threat of the biggest pogrom ever to take place on Ukrainian soil is looming on the horizon. Although the genocide is publicly announced by the neo-Nazi protagonists of the Kjiv regime, the collective West prefers to ignore it. In an interview with Ukrainian blogger Sergei Ivanov, Kirill Budanov, the director of the Main Intelligence Department of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, said:
“After the victory I will go to Sevastopol (the largest city in Crimea, F.A.), which is my hometown. There will be a lot of work there. We have three million people who lived under Russian propaganda. These are changed people who are waiting to be physically destroyed.”
The complete annihilation of the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine is not enough. One of Ukrainian President Zelensky’s key advisors, Mikhail Podolyak, recently said he would have every Russian in the world killed if he could be caught. Previously, he had made several statements along these lines. Among other things, he stated in an interview that it would be difficult, but still possible, to “physically destroy” every “pro-Russian” person in Ukraine.
On the Way to a Totalitarian Dictatorship
Twelve opposition parties, including the political party that came in first behind Zelensky in the presidential election, were banned. Trade unions were largely suppressed. Also, all critical media, especially those close to minorities, were banned or put on a state leash. Some Russian-speaking Ukrainians, including a democratically elected former president, were stripped of their Ukrainian citizenship, and others had their property taken away without due process.
The government published a blacklist listing all domestic and foreign critics as “pro-Russian propagandists” to be punished.
Cases have come to light in which dissidents were persecuted, tortured, killed, or disappeared without ever being seen again. The torture and killing techniques used by the SBU (the Ukrainian CIA) are reminiscent of the USA’s brutal “Operation Phoenix” in Vietnam.
Ukraine has also an “assassination program” against dissenters, The Economist candidly reports. According to the report, Ukraine’s intelligence service has been running a “murder program” to eliminate government critics inside and outside Ukraine since at least 2015. The program was started by Nalivaychenko, quoted in the article, an avowed neo-Nazi. He was a long-time friend of the founder of the neo-Nazi “Right Sector” and a member of the right-wing radical “order” “Trisub”, which was allied with the Right Sector.
There was no outcry in the Western media, showing once again what “Western values” are worth.
Ukraine — a state with the rule of law? People suspected of being looters and civilians accused without evidence of being pro-Russian saboteurs, including children, are publicly abused without trial. (Screenshot News.com.au)
The Ukrainian Myrotvorets NGO operates a fatwa-type murder call portal which publishes a kill list that bears similarities to corresponding hit lists of death squads, e.g. in South America, targeting Ukrainians and foreigners. The list even includes several hundred children whose “crime” is to have made positive comments about Russia on social media. It gained notoriety when several of the people named there were murdered, including Ukrainian writer Oles Busyna, former Ukrainian parliamentarian Oleg Kalashnikov, and Italian freelance photojournalist Andrea Rocchelli.
Myrotvorets (“peacemaker”) website was allegedly created by the Ukrainian intelligence service SBU and/or Anton Gerashchenko, a former advisor to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry in 2014. It crosses out the pictures of people after they have been assassinated with the notation “liquidated”. The servers are located in Brussels. The list contains thousands of Ukrainian politicians and journalists, but also numerous foreigners, including former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban. Russian journalist Dugina Darya was on Myrotvets’ hit list (see screenshot). After she was murdered with a car bomb, the website informed about the successful attack on the civilian.
Major General Kyrylo Budanov, the commander of Ukrainian military intelligence, also publicly claimed responsibility for the murders of civilians and promised more attacks in the future. It is remarkable that these murderers can practice their bloody craft unhindered thanks to Western politicians who shower them with taxpayers’ money.
Unian poll on which Russian civilians should be assassinated next (Telegram screenshot)
The high-reach Ukrainian news portal Unian launches polls on Telegram asking readers, for example, to vote on which Russian journalist should be the next victim of a terrorist attack. Over 300,000 readers took part in that survey. Unian is part of the 1+1 media group, owned by the controversial and corrupt Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomojskyj, who also financed Zelenskyj’s presidential campaign. Unian names as its partner media German magazine Der Spiegel, Associated Press, Reuters, and U.S. state-affiliated media Voice of America, British state-affiliated media BBC and German state-affiliated media Deutsche Welle. The fact that such polls call for the next civilian murder victim shows that Ukraine sees terrorism as a legitimate tool (as well as the complicity of its Western allies, on whom it depends and who do not oppose it). This is underscored by statements by Ukrainian politicians who openly call for the murder of Russian speakers and Russian citizens.
The canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) is the largest religious organization in Ukraine. It has three million Ukrainian citizens, 12,000 parishes (communities), nearly 300 monasteries and three so-called lavras — which are considered sanctuaries of all Orthodoxy. It became the latest target of the attempt to force all opinions to the line of the ruling nationalists.
The de-Russification campaign of the Russophobic Kjiv nationalists does not stop even at the entrance to the largest church in the country [Screenshot Reuters headline]
Historically, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, while formally affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church, the Moscow Patriarchate, enjoys extensive autonomy. For example, the highest governing bodies, including the appointment of bishops and the election of the Metropolitan, fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Ukrainian Orthodox clergy. The Church is recognized by all major ecclesiastical denominations of the world. Despite Article 35 of the Ukrainian Constitution, which states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression and religion,” authorities have launched a coordinated attack on the Church with the goal of banning it. On December 21, 2022, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Malyuk, bluntly stated, “We are now actively working against the UOC, and our commander-in-chief is setting the main pace.” Here, too, it is evident that the nationalists are using Zelensky (who supposedly “sets the pace”) as a figurehead to enforce their policy of systematic discrimination and forced assimilation.
The Kyiv regime places an electronic ankle monitor on Metropolitan Pavel, the head of the Kiev Cave Monastery.
For several months, the SBU, police, and National Guard conducted mass searches of UOC churches and monasteries. Members of the clergy were subjected to criminal prosecution, the (illegal) revocation of their citizenship, and the extrajudicial confiscation of their property.
For example, on April 21, 2023, Dmitry Zhyvitskyj, the head of the Sumy Regional Military Administration, stated unequivocally what is behind this campaign: “I will do everything to ensure that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the Sumy region no longer exists.”
The above list of arbitrary and coercive measures against the Russian-speaking minority is not complete, as the Kjiv regime is in the process of eliminating as much “Russian influence” as possible. It seems to want to fulfill the wish of its national hero Nazi Bandera, who is buried in Germany, to achieve a “purified” Ukraine.
Western politicians, media and self-proclaimed supporters of Ukraine are making a mockery of the democracy and freedom they claim to defend. This is all the more true as they prop up with billions of taxpayer dollars a government that is, in the words of Bill Gates, “corrupt, one of the worst in the world, controlled by a few rich people!”
In this context, it is also interesting to note that a damning September 2021 report by the European Court of Auditors, an agency of the European Union, which exposed “Grand Corruption” in Ukraine, i.e. the large-scale corruption that dominates all aspects of the country’s political and economic life, was carefully hidden from the eyes of EU citizens by the mainstream media and promptly stuffed down the memory hole. They know that citizens at home, who need to save money, might ask uncomfortable questions about what is happening to the tens of billions of euros that their politicians are smugly sending to Ukraine in the vain hope that this now exhausted country can defeat its overpowering neighbor after all.
The collective West has strongly condemned the Russian invasion as an illegal war. The Russians instead call it a “special military operation” to de-nazify Ukraine, motivated by their horrific experience of the murder of tens of millions of Russians by the German Nazis in the 1940s and by their fear of NATO’s nuclear-tipped missiles stationed along their 2,300 km shared border with Ukraine, which can reach Moscow within minutes.
Imagine if the Russians were defeated and the nationalists in Kjiv were left unchecked to slaughter the deeply hated Russian-speaking people in the Donbass, Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine, and in an effort to cleanse all of Ukraine, murder other minorities and create another Baby Jar. In such a case, would Israel not have the legal and moral right to send troops to save the Jews, or would the collective West also call this an illegal war of aggression against Ukraine?
It was a matter of political and physical survival
Zelensky clearly got the message. Instead of pursuing the peace program for which he was elected, he has forged alliances with the Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis, which violently oppose the program. It was not until late January 2022, in the midst of final talks to salvage the Minsk Agreement (which was supposed to give Russian and other minorities the same rights as the majority), that Zelensky-appointed Ukrainian security chief Oleksiy Danilov instead declared that “fulfillment of the Minsk Agreement means the destruction of the country.”
“Slava Ukrajini — Herojam Slava” (Glory to Ukraine — Glory to the heroes), was the rallying cry during the so-called “Euromaidan,” the Washington-backed “revolution,” in Ukraine in 2013/2014. “Slava Ukrajini” was created by the “League of Ukrainian Fascists” in the 1920s, “Herojam Slava” by the “Union of Ukrainian Nationalists,” whose leaders included Stepan Bandera, in the 1930s. After the successful regime change operation it was legally established as the official greeting of the armed forces and police. The then Minister of Interior Vadym Troyam, who until 2014 was a member of the neo-Nazi grouping “Patriot Ukrajiny,” justified this move this way: “These words have a sacred meaning, this is how all defenders and independence fighters of Ukraine should greet each other!” [Image source: Metro.co.uk]
As explained in the book excerpt above, the adoption of the salute revealed a return to the dark past: The first part of the salutation, “Slava Ukrajini,” was introduced by Ukrainian fascists in the 1920. On the eve of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists added the second part of the greeting, “Herojam Slava,” in Nazi-occupied Krakow. [Book screenshot: Mark Ames]
The Ukrainian government, army and police are riddled with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. Elena Oelke (screenshot) is Jewish, grew up in Ukraine and now lives in the United States. She is disappointed and outraged that Jews in Ukraine and the United States are not raising their voices. For example, she mentions in this video sequence (starting at 14:27) that Ukraine’s top general, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, has a Bandera portrait in his office, but had his picture taken there with Ukraine’s chief rabbi, which the latter apparently did not notice. Oelke adds, ”I am shocked that Jews support the Nazi ideology followers of Stepan Bandera. That’s beyond any comprehension to me personally.” The fact that Zelensky is Jewish is often cited by naive or manipulative people as an obvious sign that “Ukraine can’t be that fascist.” However, this ignores the strange connection between money and power politics, especially in a region that has been pumped full of aid money, gas money, corrupt investments, and propaganda for decades and has long been a battleground between the U.S., its local supporters, and Russia. It is therefore not surprising that behind Zelensky and many of the notorious nationalist-fascist militias in the Donbass war, such as the Azov Battalion, is, of all people, Jewish billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky, who has ties to controversial businesses such as PrivatBank and Burisma.
Collaboration with Nazis: The Chief Rabbi of Ukraine praises and blesses Vladyslav Shayvoronok, a veteran of the neo-Nazi Azov Brigade. A historical parallel can be drawn with Kapos, a term for Jewish collaborators and for those Jews recruited by Nazi Germany as guards in prisons and concentration camps, who were “worse than the Germans”.
At the last round of Minsk talks in February 2022, just two weeks before the Russian invasion, a “major obstacle,” as the Washington Post reported, was “Kyiv’s resistance to negotiations with the pro-Russian separatists.” Only through this opportunistic closing of ranks with the nationalists who sought his life could Zelensky ensure his political and physical survival.
At the mercy of Washington and the neo-Nazis
Zelensky’s peace efforts were undone once and for all when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled specially to Kjiv as Washington’s representative in April 2022 and instructed him not to sign the peace treaty negotiated with Russia in Turkey. Johnson made his demand with the illusory promise that NATO would give him money and weapons until Russia was defeated.
Kjiv had agreed to the peace deal negotiated in Turkey, two months after the Russian invasion. The agreement stipulated that Ukraine would remain neutral, that eastern Ukraine (occupied by Russia) would retain an autonomous status but remain with Ukraine, and that the status of Crimea and Sevastopol would be resolved in negotiations between the two countries over the next 15 years. Under pressure from the West, Kjiv rejected the agreement and instead escalated the war. The price Kjiv will have to pay for this dramatic change of heart will be high, because these relatively favorable terms will no longer be accepted by Moscow, and the territories won in the war are unlikely to be returned to Kjiv.
In addition, as a result of this peace agreement, Kiev had asked Russia to withdraw its troops from the vicinity of Kjiv, which the Russian government did and was heavily criticized in Russia for doing so. Western media portrayed this as a forced withdrawal (which it was not). After this troop withdrawal, Kjiv no longer adhered to the agreement and claimed to have won a victory. As in the case of the Minsk agreements, Kjiv behaved in bad faith.
Barely in office, President Zelensky began to capitulate to the neo-Nazis. Amnesty International stated the following in the above report (screenshot): “Ukraine’s new President Volodymyr Zelenskyj shows no interest in prosecuting far-right attacks on Roma and civil society actors more consistently than his predecessor. A climate of impunity prevails that encourages attacks.” The report is unambiguously titled “The government has no control over right-wing extremists.”
The fascist currents are so strong that even the Russophobic nationalist and first post-coup prime minister, Yatsenyuk, became a target of anti-Semitism, even though he is not even Jewish. For example, Serhiy Ratushnyak, mayor of Uzhhorod and a former presidential candidate, called Yatsenyuk a “nasty Jewish mason” and an “impudent little Jew” who was “successfully serving the thieves who are in power in Ukraine and is using criminal money to plough ahead towards Ukraine’s presidency”.
With his back to the wall and in the face of an overwhelming phalanx of Banderites and NATO, Zelensky apparently had no choice but to transform himself from a peace-seeking mediator into an obdurate hardliner and a Russophobic warmonger who, for example, had his own people bombed in Donetsk, a city that was not on the front lines. He had no choice; the Nazi-dominated regime expected this from its figurehead.
Comedian Zelensky: “I have been a Banderist for three weeks now. That’s the only way to make career in Ukraine. (…) Please send me Hitler’s book ‘Mein Kampf.’ It’s sold out here.”
To hold him solely responsible would be unfair. First and foremost, Washington is to blame for letting him hang, based on its primary strategic goals — the uncompromising weakening of Russia and, in its wake, Europe.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a member of the prominent Kennedy family and a candidate for the U.S. presidency in 2024, said in a tweet that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had the opportunity to avoid conflict with Russia if he had simply refused to join NATO.
In his tweet, Robert F. Kennedy, lawyer, and U.S. presidential candidate, stated: “Let’s face it, the Neocons wanted this war with Russia, just as they wanted war with Iraq. Listen here to NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark describe how White House Neocons justified the Iraq invasion.”
In his interview, General Clark talked about the secret strategies for regime change in a whole series of countries shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when the U.S. Department of Defense adopted a plan to overthrow the governments of seven countries by force (war) : Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
And again, the neocons hope that their war in Ukraine would also trigger regime change in Moscow and the dissolution of the Russian Federation in Washington’s favor. Zelensky was not to stand in their way.
in their way.
Degenerated into a stirrup holder for Nazis? By providing a platform for neo-Nazis in front of the Greek parliament and refusing to condemn the invasion of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus by NATO member Turkey in 1974, Zelenskyj insulted Greeks and Cypriots. [Source: Screenshot DiEM25]
The Trap of the Neoconservative War Hawks
Russia allowed Germany to reunite peacefully after the West had promised diplomatically not to move NATO an inch to the east. Moreover, in 1999, Western countries had agreed to the principle in the Charter for European Security that “the obligation of each State not to strengthen its security at the expense of the security of other States.”
Not only did the West fail to keep its promises, the U.S. even provoked Russia by trampling on its security interests until Moscow fell into a Washington-set trap à la Afghanistan (It also provoked Russia by massively arming the Kjiv nationalists after the 2014 coup and enabling them to instigate a civil war against Russian speakers in the Donbass).
Around the same time that Yahoo News (left) was reporting on how U.S. members of Congress, as war profiteers, have a vested interest in escalating the war in Ukraine, the New York Times (right) was reporting on the rapidly growing homelessness crisis in the United States. Unlike the powerful war industry, the powerless homeless do not have an influential lobby in Washington.
The invasion of Ukraine may be illegal under international law, but the Russians see it differently. They say they were passively and actively threatened and that it was a kind of war of self-defense as well as a war of liberation for the oppressed Russian-speaking minorities threatened by a regime infiltrated by neo-Nazis, again dismissed as “propaganda” in the West. What they called a violation of international law gave the U.S. and its European and other supporters a reason to implement Washington’s plan to isolate Russia economically from much of the world and intensify a proxy war that began not in February 2022 but after the U.S.-initiated regime change in Kyiv in 2014 — a crucial fact that I repeat here because Western politicians and media deliberately omit it.
A significant benefit of the Ukrainians’ war against Russia, fought under NATO training, arming, and guidance, is that no NATO troops had to be deployed on the ground, preventing the dreaded body bags that would have been returned from Ukraine. In his 1993 piece titled “Toward a New World Order: The Future of NATO,” the billionaire oligarch and financier George Soros, who was frequently portrayed as a humanist, advocated for a hard-nosed geopolitical strategy for the “new world order.” [https://web.archive.org/web/20230129194742/https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/george-soros-urged-use-eastern-european-soldiers-reduce-risk-body-bags-nato-countries] He acknowledged that NATO countries had no desire for “body bags,” suggesting instead that Eastern Europeans could take on that role. [“The combination of manpower from Eastern Europe with the technical capabilities of NATO would greatly enhance the military potential of the Partnership because it would reduce the risk of body bags for NATO countries, which is the main constraint on their willingness to act. This is a viable alternative to the looming world disorder.”] And that is exactly what the Ukrainians are doing now.
The U.S.-fueled conflict between Ukraine and Russia has indeed weakened Russia, though much less than Washington had hoped, and de facto pushed Ukraine into NATO, at least for now, and Europe away from Russia; it has also improved relations with Europe, which has become more strategically dependent on the United States. Even during the Cold War, the Soviet Union did not use energy and other natural resources it supplied to Western Europe as leverage against the West, unlike the United States, which has long weaponized its currency, products, and services against enemies and friends alike to submit them to its imperial geopolitics.
Where does the Russian fear of Western aggressors come from? In its 1,000-year history, Russia has never started a war against Western Europe. Conversely, it has often been attacked by Western Europe: ▪1245 German Crusaders ▪1612 Catholic Poles ▪1759 German Prussians ▪1812 French army of Napoleon ▪1914 Germany and Austria-Hungary ▪1941 Germany. After the persecution of the invaders in Western Europe, the Russians voluntarily withdrew: after Napoleon’s invasion, from Paris in 1815, after Hitler’s invasion, from Vienna in 1955 and from Berlin in 1990. The most traumatic experience was the death of 27 million people after the German invasion in World War II, of whom 3 million Russians were killed in captivity, many in bestial ways in concentration camps. Based on this experience, Russia is very afraid of the deployment of enemy troops on its borders, especially since this time they are heavily armed with missiles that can reach and destroy its cities within minutes. Today, NATO is once again at Russia’s gates. Russia knows that NATO is not a self-defense organization, as it claims, but an aggressive war alliance, at least since NATO’s wars of aggression in Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and Afghanistan, which have caused terrible death and destruction and have transformed, for example, prosperous Libya, one of the most developed countries in Africa with an exemplary education system for all girls, into a ruined, failed state where girls now risk ending up in slave markets. And the threat is tangible: Russia has a defense budget of $50 billion. NATO has a military budget of $1,000 billion, 20 times more than Russia, and even wants to increase it massively!
In reality, the United States has been the biggest beneficiary of Russian-Ukrainian tensions: They were able to sell huge quantities of weapons worth countless billions of dollars to Ukraine and European countries, as well as large quantities of energy at many times the price (instead of cheap Russian energy), which drastically increased manufacturing costs, and they thus contributed to the deindustrialization of Europe in favor of reindustrialization in the United States.
There are also other tangible interests behind the conflict: BlackRock, for example, the world’s largest asset owner, is in the process of acquiring large parts of Ukraine, and Russia would be an even more valuable asset. As an inexhaustible and cheap source of raw materials, Russia is a particularly lucrative target for the West. President Putin stands in their way and has long been a thorn in the West’s side and a target for regime change because he is independent and has a genuine “Russia first” policy. In addition to coercive economic measures, information warfare and psychological operations are being waged against him. Anyone who consumes the Western mainstream media can see this.
Neocons with ties to the giant U.S. war industry, like Senator Lindsey Graham, expect a high blood toll (lots of dead Russians as well as lots of Ukrainian cannon fodder) to ensure a high return on U.S. war investments. The defense of a democracy and freedom that does not really exist in Ukraine is cited as a cheap pretext for this.
It is the most amazing project of recent times to “make America great again” at the expense of Russia and Europe, and Zelensky, a bishop on America’s great chessboard, has played only a negligible role in it.
“One way or another…” According to U.S. Secretary of State Blinken, there is a succession plan in place in case Zelensky dies. Is it more likely that he will die at the hands of Russia or Ukrainian nationalists? It doesn’t seem to make any difference, at least to the United States. Even if Zelensky stands his ground, he is expendable. He has also been unable to make important decisions himself: For example, in April 2022, two months after the Russian invasion, the British prime minister traveled specially to Kyiv to ensure that Zelensky did not sign the peace agreement that he had negotiated with Russia. The would-be peacemaker Zelensky, dependent on both the Russophobic nationalists and the collective West, failed in his mission because he had no choice but to continue their war, regardless of the horrendous consequences for his country and his people. [Source: Business Insider]
Finally, it is worth remembering once again that the vile basis of Nazi ideology was not primarily anti-Semitism and the cult of the Führer. It was the racist belief that one or more ethnic groups (then called “races”) were inferior, evil, or otherwise bad that formed the basis of Nazi doctrine, and that it was therefore acceptable to discriminate against and kill them.
Andriy Melnyk, Ambassador of Ukraine to Germany, celebrated the renovated memorial at the grave of “Hero of Ukraine Stepan Bandera” in 2015, as he mentioned in his tweet (left). In the following years, he regularly laid flowers at Bandera’s grave. He is an ardent supporter of Bandera and a historical revisionist. On July 22, 2022, the Israeli Embassy in Germany issued a statement (right) on Melnyk’s remarks, condemning his views: “The Ukrainian ambassador’s remarks are a distortion of historical facts, a trivialization of the Holocaust, and an insult to those who were murdered by Bandera and his people.” It was striking how shamelessly the German media and politicians of all people, obviously oblivious to history, courted this revisionist and Nazi sympathizer. In November 2022, President Zelenskyj promoted Melnyk to deputy foreign minister.
The worst agitators against an ethnic group (Russians) at present are mainly those in the West who call themselves “anti-fascist.” They are blatantly hypocritical, as shown by their support for the Kyiv regime, which is peppered with supporters of the Nazi Führer Bandera.
“What else is there to say?”…
…asks German author Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, daughter of Heinz Galinski, a former president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany who had been incarcerated by Nazi Germany from 1943 to the end of World War II in concentration camps in Auschwitz, Buchenwald und Bergen-Belsen. Stunned, she continues:
“When the Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin together with Volodomyr Zelensky honors Dmytro Kotsiubailo (nickname: Da Vinci), a Ukrainian fallen neo-Nazi, a man of the “Right Sector”, what else can one say? The “Right Sector”: what an organization! It traces its roots to 20th century nationalist movements and counts Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhovych among its heroes. It played a crucial role in the 2014 transition of power in Kyiv, with its members staging violent clashes and seizing administrative buildings. They subsequently suppressed protests in eastern Ukraine, triggering the armed conflict in the region.”
▪ ▪ ▪
P.S.
Another must watch:
The documentary «Ukraine on Fire» (1 hour 33 min. 2016 video) shows War history, Stepan Bandera and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Svoboda party, Rights Sector, 2004 Orange Revolution, Viktor Yushchenko becomes president; gets poisoned, 2010 Viktor Yanukovych is elected president, 2013–14 Maydan uprisings, the overthrow and coup against president Viktor Yanukovych and his government, Yatsenyuk unlawfully elected prime minister of Ukraine (2014–16), the art of color revolution, Victoria Nuland, John McCain, George Soros, NED’s Carl Gersman. In parts of the video filmmaker Oliver Stone interviews in Moscow the Ukrainian de jure president Viktor Yanukovych
——
DOCUMENT #2:
[This document has no date upon it; but it apparently has gone through various drafts over time, such as this one that was likewise personally signed by Andrei Biletsky and undated:]
https://web.archive.org/web/20090609041117/http://www.slovoor.info/SO35/St35Vid.htm
Andriy Biletsky
Ukrainian Racial Social-Nationalism – the ideology of the Patriot of Ukraine Organization
"Patriot of Ukraine" is a militant organization that professes the ideology of Ukrainian Social-Nationalism. Our task is to fight for the creation of a powerful Social-Nationalist movement that will encompass the entire Nation and gain power in the State.
The main mystical idea of Social-Nationalism is the creation, instead of a bunch of disparate individuals mechanically united by the name "Ukrainians" and the presence of a Ukrainian passport, of a National Supercommunity - a single biological organism, which will consist of New People - physically, intellectually and spiritually developed individuals. A Nation should emerge from the mass of individuals, and a Superman from the weak modern man.
Social Nationalism is based on a number of fundamental principles that clearly distinguish it from other right-wing movements. This is a kind of triad: Socialism, Racialism, Great Power .
I. Sociality. We strive to create a harmonious National Community. We claim that sharp social differentiation leads to the decay and disintegration of the Spirit of the national community, as well as to the cultivation of selfishness. We do not dismiss the existence of the rich (provided that material values are acquired by them through honest and socially useful work), but we reject the possibility of the existence of the poor. Every Ukrainian, regardless of the nature of the work performed, should have a decent social status and material security. “It is a shame to be poor in a rich country, it is even more shameful to be rich in a poor country.”
From the principle of Socialism follows our complete rejection of democracy and liberalism, which generate the division of the Nation into isolated units and the power of the gray crowd over outstanding individuals (ochlocracy). Instead, we put forward the ideas of National Solidarity, natural hierarchy and discipline as the foundations of our new society. Not the “democratic voting” of the crowd, which cannot manage its own life, let alone the life of the State, but the natural selection of the best representatives of the Nation – born leaders-leaders. Anyone who believes that such a system of power is unacceptable, let him think about whether a modern system of power is acceptable, in which a prostitute and an academician have equal voting rights, where a degraded drug addict or a pedophile is equally valued in elections with the commander of a tank division. People are born with different abilities and capabilities by nature, and therefore a person's greatest happiness is when they find their own place in the National Hierarchy and conscientiously fulfill their life's mission.
II. Racism. All our nationalism is nothing – a castle in the sand, without support on the foundation of blood, the foundation of Race. Traditional (post-war, post-Stone) nationalism is inherent in putting the cart before the horse – to declare that the Nation is a linguistic, cultural or territorial-economic phenomenon. We certainly do not reject the importance of spiritual and cultural-linguistic factors, as well as territorial patriotism. But, in our deep conviction, all this is only derivatives of our Race, our Racial nature. If Ukrainian spirituality, culture and language are unique, it is only because our Racial nature is unique. If Ukraine is an earthly paradise, it is only because our Race has turned it into one.
Accordingly, the treatment of our National organism must begin with the Racial Cleansing of the Nation. And then a healthy National Spirit will be reborn in a healthy Racial body, and with it culture, language and everything else. In addition to the issue of purity, we must also pay attention to the issue of the fullness of the Race. Ukrainians are a part (and one of the largest and highest quality) of the European White Race. The Race-Creator of a great civilization, the highest human achievements. The historical mission of our Nation in this turning century is to lead and lead the White Peoples of the whole world in the last crusade for their existence. A campaign against the inhumanity led by the Semites.
III. Great Power. We replace the slogan “Independent Ukraine” with the slogan “Great Ukraine” . Ukrainians are a nation with an ancient imperial history. Throughout their existence, Ukrainians have had at least two superpowers – Great Scythia and Kievan Rus. The task of the current generation is to create the Third Empire – Great Ukraine. And this issue, oddly enough, is not so much political as biological. Any living organism in nature strives for expansion, reproduction, increase. This law is universal for both the ciliate-slipper, and for humans, and for the Nation-Race. Stopping, stopping development means extinction in nature – death. Braking population growth leads to the biological death of the Nation, the cessation of political expansion and the decline of the State. Thousands of times we have heard the groans of pseudo-nationalists about our oppression by the Poles and Moscow, their curses against empires. Social-Nationalism is not like that, it claims – if we are strong, then we will take everything that belongs to us by right and even a little more, we will build our Superpower-Empire – Great Ukraine, which will be the legal successor of the Scythian and Kievan Rus’ empires. If we are weak, then we will have a place among the conquered dying peoples. Because such is Nature! The choice is ours!
Thus, Social-Nationalism raises to the shield all the ancient Ukrainian Aryan values, forgotten in modern society. Only their revival and implementation by a group of fanatical fighters can lead to the final victory of European civilization in the world struggle.
We stand on this, and we cannot do otherwise!
Glory to Ukraine!
We appeal to the Ukrainian with a request to help the Organization financially if possible, or to provide information about us to other Ukrainians who could provide appropriate assistance. Remember that only on our joint and decisive actions depends our final victory in the struggle for the eternal life of the Ukrainian Nation and the White Race.
Bank account
of the "PATRIOTS OF UKRAINE" Organization:
MFO 351533, EDRPOU 34755804,
rr 26002052205580
Headquarters: (067) 57–27–266
——
DOCUMENT #3:
https://braveneweurope.com/michael-von-der-schulenburg-hajo-funke-harald-kujat-peace-for-ukraine
“Michael von der Schulenburg, Hajo Funke, Harald Kujat – Peace For Ukraine”
10 November 2023
A detailed reconstruction of events in March 2022
Hajo Funke and Harald Kujat
Berlin, October 2023
In March 2022, direct peace negotiations between Ukrainian and Russian delegations and mediation efforts by the then Israeli Prime Minster, Naftali Bennet created a genuine chance for ending the war peacefully only four to five weeks after Russia had invaded Ukraine. However, instead of ending the war through negotiations as Ukrainian President Zelensky and his government appeared to have wanted, he ultimately bowed to pressures from some Western powers to abandon a negotiated solution. Western powers wanted this war to continue in the hope to break Russia. Ukraine’s decision to abandon negotiations may been taken before the discovery of a massacre of civilians in the town of Bucha near Kiev.
In the following is an attempt of a step-by-step reconstruction of the events that led to the peace negotiations in March and their collapse in early April 2022.
IN EARLY MARCH 2022, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER NAFTALI BENNETT UNDERTOOK MEDIATION EFFORTS …
Naftali Bennett had undertaken mediation efforts beginning in the first week of March 2022. In a video interview with Israeli journalist Hanoch Daum on February 4, 2023, he spoke for the first time in detail about the process and the end of the negotiations. This video interview is the basis of a detailed report in the Berliner Zeitung of February 6, 2023: “Naftali Bennett wanted peace between Ukraine and Russia: who blocked? Israeli ex-premier spoke for the first time about his negotiations with Putin and Zelensky. The ceasefire was reportedly within reach.” (Berliner Zeitung, Feb. 06, 2023).
Soon after the war broke out, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had asked Bennett to help open a channel of communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin responded by inviting Bennett to Moscow: “On March 5, 2022, at Putin’s invitation, Bennett had flown to Moscow in a private jet provided by Israeli intelligence. In the conversation in the Kremlin, Putin, Bennett said, had made some substantial concessions, in particular, he had renounced his original wartime goal of demilitarizing Ukraine. … .In return, the Ukrainian president agreed to renounce joining NATO – a position he also repeated publicly a short time later. This removed one of the decisive obstacles to a ceasefire ….”. According to the Berliner Zeitung, other issues, such as the future of the Donbass and Crimea, as well as security guarantees for Ukraine, had also been the subject of intensive talks during these days. (Ibid)
In the interview, Bennett explained further: “I had the impression at the time that both sides were very interested in a ceasefire (…). According to Bennett, a cease-fire was within reach at that time, and both sides were prepared to make considerable concessions…. But Britain and the U.S., in particular, wanted this peace process to end and set their sights on a continuation of the war.” (Ibid)
In early March 2022, President Zelensky contacted not only Naftali Bennett, but also former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and asked him to use his close personal ties to Putin to mediate between Ukraine and Russia in hope to find ways to end this war quickly. In an interview published in the weekly edition of the Berliner Zeitung on October 21/22 of this year, Schröder spoke publicly for the first time about his role in the efforts that led to the peace negotiations in Istanbul on March 29, 2022. Like Bennet, also he came to the conclusion that the reason why these peace negotiations were abandoned was because the Americans obstructed them. He said: “At the peace negotiations in March 2022 in Istanbul with Rustem Umerov (then security advisor to Zelensky, now Ukrainian defense minister), the Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to. They first had to ask the Americans about everything they discussed,” and continued: “But at the end (of the peace negotiations) nothing happened. My impression was that nothing could happen because everything else was decided in Washington. That was fatal.”
The Turkish Foreign Minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, who organized the Istanbul meeting at the time, had previously made similar comments. In an interview with CNN Turk on April 20, 2022, he said: “Some NATO states wanted the Ukraine conflict to continue in order to weaken Russia.”
… WHILE PARALLEL PEACE NEGOTIATIONS BETWEEN UKRAINIAN AND RUSSIAN NEGOCIATORS WERE UNDERWAY
Direct negotiations between a Ukrainian and a Russian delegation had already been underway since late February 2022, and in the third week of March, “only a month after the outbreak of the war, they (had) agreed on the broad outlines of a peace settlement. Ukraine promised not to join NATO and not to allow military bases of foreign powers on its territory, while Russia promised in return to recognize Ukraine’s territorial integrity and to withdraw all Russian occupation troops. Special arrangements were made for the Donbas and Crimea.” (Cf. Michael von der Schulenburg: UN Charter: Negotiations! In: Emma of March 6, 2023)
To further the peace negotiations, the Turkish President offered to host a Ukrainian-Russian peace conference in Istanbul on 29 March, 2002. During the negotiations mediated by Turkish President Erdogan, the Ukrainian delegation presented a position paper, which led to the Istanbul Communiqué. Ukraine’s proposals were translated into a draft treaty by the Russian side.
The text of the Istanbul Communiqué of March 29, 2022 included 10 proposals:
Proposal 1: Ukraine declares itself a neutral state and promises to remain non-aligned and to refrain from developing nuclear weapons in exchange for international legal guarantees. Possible guarantor states include Russia, Britain, China, the United States, France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland, and Israel, but other states would also be welcome to join the treaty.
Proposal 2: These international security guarantees for Ukraine would not extend to Crimea, Sevastopol, or certain areas in the Donbas. The parties to the treaty would have to define the boundaries of these areas or agree that each party understands these boundaries differently.
Proposal 3: Ukraine commits not to join any military coalition and not to host any foreign military bases or troop contingents. Any international military exercises would be possible only with the consent of the guarantor states. For their part, the Guarantor States confirm their intention to promote Ukraine’s membership in the European Union.
Proposal 4: Ukraine and the Guarantor States agree that (in the event of aggression, armed attack against Ukraine, or military operation against Ukraine) each of the Guarantor States, after urgent and immediate mutual consultations (to be held within three days) on the exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense (as recognized in Article 51 of the UN Charter), will provide assistance (in response to and on the basis of an official appeal by Ukraine) to Ukraine as a permanently neutral state under attack. Such assistance will be facilitated by the immediate implementation of necessary individual or joint measures, including the closure of Ukrainian airspace, the provision of necessary weapons, and the use of armed force with the aim of restoring and then maintaining the security of Ukraine as a permanently neutral state.
Proposal 5: Any such armed attack (any military operation at all) and any action taken in response will be reported immediately to the UN Security Council. Such action will cease as soon as the UN Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.
Proposal 6: In order to protect against possible provocations, the agreement will regulate the mechanism of fulfillment of Ukraine’s security guarantees based on the results of consultations between Ukraine and the guarantor states.
Proposal 7: The treaty will apply provisionally from the date of its signature by Ukraine and all or most of the guarantor states.
The treaty will enter into force after (1) Ukraine’s permanent neutral status is approved in a nationwide referendum, (2) the relevant amendments are incorporated into the Ukrainian Constitution, and (3) ratification occurs in the parliaments of Ukraine and the guarantor states.
Proposal 8: The desire of the parties to resolve the issues related to Crimea and Sevastopol will be included in bilateral negotiations between Ukraine and Russia for a period of 15 years. Ukraine and Russia also commit not to resolve these issues by military means and to continue diplomatic resolution efforts.
Proposal 9: The parties continue consultations (involving other guarantor states) to prepare and agree on the provisions of a treaty on security guarantees for Ukraine, ceasefire modalities, withdrawal of troops and other paramilitary formations, and opening and ensuring safely functioning humanitarian corridors on a continuous basis, as well as the exchange of bodies and release of prisoners of war and interned civilians.
Proposal 10: The parties consider it possible to hold a meeting between the presidents of Ukraine and Russia to sign a treaty and/or take political decisions on other unresolved issues.”
APPARENT INITIAL SUPPORT OF MEDIATION EFFORTS BY WESTERN POLITICIANS.
Proof of initial Western politicians’ support for the negotiations emerges from the sequence of telephone calls and meetings during the period from early March to at least mid-March. On March 4, Scholz and Putin spoke on the phone; on March 5, Bennett met Putin in Moscow; on March 6, Bennett and Scholz met in Berlin; on March 7, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany discussed the issue in a videoconference; on March 8, Macron and Scholz spoke on the phone; on March 10, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov met in Ankara; on March 12, Scholz and Zelensky and Scholz and Macron spoke on the phone; and on March 14, Scholz and Erdogan met in Ankara. (Cf. Petra Erler: Re: Review March 2022: Who did not want a quick end to the war in Ukraine, in: “News of a Lighthouse Keeper,” Sept. 1, 2023)
NATO SPECIAL SUMMIT OF MARCH 24, 2022 IN BRUSSELS OPPOSES ALL NEGOCIATIONS
But this initial support quickly turned sour, with NATO opposing any such negotiations before Russia doesn’t withdraws all its troops from Ukrainian territories. This, in fact, killed all negotiations. Michael von der Schulenburg, former UN Assistant Secretary-General (ASG) in UN peace missions, writes that “NATO had already decided at a special summit on March 24, 2022, not to support these peace negotiations (between Ukraine and Russia).” (Cf. Michael von der Schulenburg: UN Charter: Negotiations! In: Emma, March 6, 2023). The US president had flown in especially for this special summit to Brussels. Obviously, peace as negotiated by the Russian and Ukrainian negotiating delegations was not in the interest of some NATO countries.
AT FIRST ZELENSKY STICKS TO THE OUTCOME OF THE PEACE NEGOTIATIONS
“As late as March 27, 2022, Zelensky had shown the courage to defend the results of the Ukrainian-Russian peace negotiations in public before Russian journalists – and this despite the fact that NATO had already decided at a special summit on March 24, 2022, not to support these peace negotiations.” (Ibid)
According to von der Schulenburg, the Russian-Ukrainian peace negotiations had been a historically unique feature, made possible only because Russians and Ukrainians knew each other well and “spoke the same language and probably even knew each other personally.” We know of no other war or armed conflict in which the conflict parties agreed on specific peace terms so quickly.
On March 28, Putin, as a sign of goodwill and in support of the peace negotiations, declared readiness to withdraw troops from the Kharkov area and the Kiev area; this apparently occurred even before his public announcement.
THE PEACE NEGOTIATIONS UNRAVEL
On March 29, 2022, the day of the Istanbul meeting, Scholz, Biden, Draghi, Macron, and Johnson again spoke on the phone about the situation in Ukraine. By this time, the stance of key Western allies had apparently hardened. They formulated preconditions for negotiations that were in blatant contrast to Bennett’s and Erdogan’s peace efforts: “The leaders agreed to continue to provide strong support to Ukraine. They again urged Russian President Putin to agree to a ceasefire, to cease all hostilities, to withdraw Russian soldiers from Ukraine and to allow for a diplomatic solution (…)” (Petra Erler: Re: Review March 2022: Who Didn’t Want a Quick End to the War in Ukraine (in “News of a Lighthouse Keeper” September 1, 2023).
The Washington Post reported April 5 that in NATO, continuing the war is preferred to a cease-fire and negotiated settlement: “For some in NATO, it’s better for Ukrainians to keep fighting and dying than to achieve a peace that comes too soon or at too high a price for Kiev and the rest of Europe.” Zelensky, he said, should “keep fighting until Russia is completely defeated.”
BORIS JOHNSON’S MESSAGE TO UKRAINIANS ON APRIL 9, 2022: WE MUST CONTINUE THE WAR
On April 9, 2022, Boris Johnson arrived unannounced in Kiev and told the Ukrainian president that the West was not ready to end the war. According to Britain’s Guardian on April 28, PM Johnson had “instructed” Ukrainian President Zelensky “not to make any concessions to Putin”:
“Ukrainska Pravda” reported on this in detail in two articles on May 5, 2022:
“No sooner had the Ukrainian negotiators and Abramovich/Medinsky agreed in broad terms on the structure of a possible future agreement after the Istanbul results than British Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in Kiev almost without warning.
Johnson brought two simple messages with him to Kiev. The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. The second is that even if Ukraine is willing to sign some agreements with Putin on guarantees, but that the collective West is not. We can sign [an agreement] with you [Ukraine], but not with him. He will screw everyone over anyway,” one of Zelensky’s close associates summed up the essence of Johnson’s visit. There is much more behind this visit and Johnson’s words than just reluctance to engage in agreements with Russia. Johnson took the position that the collective West, which as recently as February had suggested that Zelensky should surrender and flee, now feels that Putin is not really as powerful as they had previously imagined. Moreover, there is an opportunity to put pressure on him. And the West wants to take it.”
The Neue Züricher Zeitung (NZZ) reported on April 12 that the British government under Johnson is counting on a Ukrainian military victory. Conservative Member of the House of Commons Alicia Kearns said, “We’d rather arm the Ukrainians to the teeth than give Putin a success.” British Foreign Secretary (and later Prime Minister) Liz Truss professed in a keynote speech that “victory for Ukraine (…) is a strategic imperative for us all and therefore military support must be massively expanded”. Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins warned: “Liz Truss risks inflaming the war in Ukraine for her own ambitions.” This, he said, was probably the first Tory election campaign “to be fought on Russia’s borders.” Johnson and Truss wanted Zelensky “to keep fighting until Russia is completely defeated. They need a triumph in their proxy war. In the meantime, anyone who disagrees with them can be dismissed as a weakling, a coward, or a Putin supporter. That this conflict is being exploited by Britain for a sleazy upcoming leadership contest is sickening.”
Following his second visit to Kiev on April 25, 2022, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the U.S. wants to use the opportunity to permanently weaken Russia militarily and economically in the wake of the Ukraine war. According to the New York Times, the U.S. government is no longer concerned with a fight over control of Ukraine, but with a fight against Moscow in the wake of a new Cold War.
At the April 26, 2022, meeting of defense ministers from NATO members and other countries convened by Austin in Ramstein, Rhineland-Palatinate/ Germany, the Pentagon chief declared the military victory of Ukraine as a strategic goal.
The American magazine “Responsible Statecraft,” wrote on September 2, 2022:
“Did Boris Johnson help prevent a peace deal in Ukraine? According to a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Kiev and Moscow may have reached a tentative agreement to end the war as early as April. According to several former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim solution in March 2022,” write Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. “Russia would retreat to its Feb. 23 position, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in return Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries. The decision to let the deal fail coincided with Johnson’s visit to Kiev in April, during which he urged Ukrainian President Zelenskiy to break off talks with Russia for two main reasons: Putin is impossible to negotiate with, and the West is not ready for an end to the war.
In his article, the authors asked questions that have become increasingly important as the war has progressed:
“This apparent revelation raises some important questions: Why did Western leaders want to prevent Kiev from signing what appeared to be a good negotiating deal with Moscow? Do they view the conflict as a proxy war with Russia? And most importantly, what would it take to return to a negotiated outcome?”
In his announcement of the partial mobilization, Putin stated on September 21, 2022:
“I would like to make this public for the first time today. After the start of the special military operation, especially after the talks in Istanbul, the Kiev representatives expressed quite positive views on our proposals. These proposals were mainly about ensuring Russia’s security and interests. But a peaceful solution obviously did not suit the West, which is why Kiev, after agreeing on some compromises, was actually ordered to nullify all these agreements.”
On the occasion of the visit of an African peace delegation on June 17, 2023, Putin demonstratively showed the agreement accepted and initialed in Istanbul ad referendum to the cameras.
CONCLUSION: MISSED OPPORTUNITY
Based on the publicly available reports and documents, it is not only plain that there was a serious willingness to negotiate on the part of both Ukraine and Russia in March 2022. Apparently, the negotiating parties even agreed on a draft treaty ad referendum. Zelensky and Putin were ready for a bilateral meeting to finalize the outcome of the negotiations. Fact is that the main results of the negotiations were based on a proposal by Ukraine, and Zelenskyy courageously supported them in an interview with Russian journalists on March 27, 2022, even after NATO decided against these peace negotiations. Zelensky had already expressed similar support beforehand in a sign that proves that the intended outcome of the Istanbul negotiations certainly corresponded to Ukrainian interests. This makes the Western intervention, which prevented an early end to the war, even more disastrous for Ukraine. Russia’s responsibility for the attack, which was contrary to international law, is not relativized by the fact that responsibility for the grave consequences that Ukraine’s Western supporters that ensued must also be attributed to the states that demanded the continuation of the war. The war has now reached a stage where further dangerous escalation and an expansion of hostilities can only be prevented by a cease-fire. It may now be the last time that a peaceful resolution through negotiations could be achieved. There are peace proposals from China, the African Union, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and a proposal developed at the invitation of the Vatican as early as June 2022. On 3 October this year, we presented the German Government our own peace proposal that tried to incorporate all other peace proposals made earlier. See Ending the war by a negotiated peace – Legitimate self-defense and the quest for a just and lasting peace are not contradictory HERE.
Since the failed Istanbul negotiations The course of the war and the current extremely critical timing should be reason enough for a responsible world community and UN member states to rethink and press for a ceasefire and peace negotiations.
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COMMENTS:
anaisanesse says:
NOVEMBER 14, 2023 AT 11:38 AM
An absolutely essential contribution which should convince those people who are reticent or very much Russophobic that this would have allowed Ukraine, which they claim to support, to survive and be a real country in Europe. Now it is emptied, destroyed, of course not in NATO. NATO wanted to win but is weakened. (since it is obsolete it should now disintegrate!!)
Frank Doyle says:
NOVEMBER 16, 2023 AT 1:05 AM
Biden and Johnson following in the footsteps of Bush and Blair. All criminals.
REPLY
Etienne says:
NOVEMBER 16, 2023 AT 8:53 PM
I have absolute revulsion at the Wests collective encouragement of the war in Ukraine.
The absolute tragedy that is was preventable and unnecessary.
A half a million Ukrainian soldiers and fifty thousand Russian soldiers blood cry out from the ground.
REPLY
Jason says:
NOVEMBER 24, 2023 AT 9:28 AM
This is such a brilliant article, and it’s so flabbergasting that this is not widely known.
REPLY
James Morrell says:
NOVEMBER 30, 2023 AT 4:57 PM
Ukraine’s 1990 declaration of independence: “The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs . . . ” What a great concession it made in these 2022 negotiations! To return to its own “solemn” declaration
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And here is that document (which still remains in force)
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DOCUMENT #4:
https://static.rada.gov.ua/site/postanova_eng/Declaration_of_State_Sovereignty_of_Ukraine_rev1.htm
“Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine” [STILL IN FORCE]
Passed by the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
Kyiv, July 16, 1990
The Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR,
Expressing the will of the people of Ukraine;
Striving to create a democratic society;
Acting on the need of comprehensive guarantees of human rights and freedoms;
Respecting national rights of all nations;
Caring for the full-fledged political, economic, social, and spiritual development of the people of Ukraine;
Recognizing the necessity to develop a constitutional state;
Aiming to establish the sovereignty and self-rule of the people of Ukraine;
PROCLAIMS
State Sovereignty of Ukraine as supremacy, independence, integrity, and indivisibility of the Republic's authority within the boundaries of its territory, and its independence and equality in foreign relations.
I. Self-Determination of the Ukrainian Nation
The Ukrainian SSR as a sovereign national state develops within the existing boundaries to exercise the Ukrainian nation's inalienable right to self-determination.
The Ukrainian SSR protects and defends the national statehood of the Ukrainian people.
Any violent actions against the national statehood of Ukraine undertaken by political parties, non-governmental organization, other groups or individuals shall be legally prosecuted.
II. Rule of the People
Citizens of the Republic of all nationalities comprise the people of Ukraine.
The people of Ukraine are the sole source of state authority in the Republic.
The absolute authority of the people of Ukraine is exercised directly through the Republic's Constitution, as well as via people’s deputies elected to the Verkhovna Rada and local councils of the Ukrainian SSR.
Only the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR can represent all the people. No political party, non-governmental organization, other group or individual can represent all the people of Ukraine.
III. State Power
The Ukrainian SSR is independent in determining any issue of its state affairs.
The Ukrainian SSR guarantees the supremacy of the Constitution and laws of the Republic on its territory.
State power in the Republic is exercised on the principle of its division into legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
The Prosecutor General of the Ukrainian SSR, appointed by the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR, and responsible and accountable only to it, has the highest authority in the oversight of the precise and uniform application of law.
IV. Citizenship of the Ukrainian SSR
The Ukrainian SSR has its own citizenship and guarantees each citizen the right to retain citizenship of the USSR.
The citizenship of the Ukrainian SSR is acquired and lost on the grounds determined by the law on citizenship of the Ukrainian SSR.
All citizens of the Ukrainian SSR are guaranteed the rights and freedoms stipulated by the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR and standards of international law recognized by the Ukrainian SSR.
The Ukrainian SSR guarantees equal protection of the law to all citizens of the Republic regardless of their origin, social or economic status, racial or national identity, sex, education, language, political views, religious beliefs, type and character of occupation, place of residence or other circumstances.
The Ukrainian SSR regulates immigration procedures.
The Ukrainian SSR cares for and undertakes measures to protect and defend the interests of the Ukrainian citizens beyond the Republic's borders.
V. Territorial Supremacy
The Ukrainian SSR has the supremacy over all of its territory.
The territory of the Ukrainian SSR within its existing boundaries is inviolable and cannot be changed or used without its consent.
The Ukrainian SSR is independent in determining the administrative and territorial system of the Republic and the procedures for establishing national and administrative units.
VI. Economic Independence
The Ukrainian SSR independently determines its economic status and secures it by law.
The people of Ukraine have the exclusive right to control, use and direct the national resources of Ukraine. [This means that the privatization to U.S.-and-allied investors, during Trump’s second term, of Ukraine’s land and other assets that had previously been Government-owned, was in violation of Ukraine’s Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, which is still in force, and is therefore illegal under Ukrainian law.]
The land, its interior (mineral wealth), air space, water and other natural resources found on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR, the natural resources of its continental shelf and exclusive (maritime) economic zone, and all economic and scientific-technical potential created on the territory of Ukraine are the property of its people, the material basis of the Republic's sovereignty, and is used to meet material and spiritual needs of its citizens. [This yet again means that the privatization to U.S.-and-allied investors, during Trump’s second term, of Ukraine’s land and other assets that had previously been Government-owned, was in violation of Ukraine’s Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, which is still in force, and is therefore illegal under Ukrainian law.]
The Ukrainian SSR has the right to its share of the all-union wealth, especially in all-union gemstone and hard currency stocks and gold reserves, which were created through the efforts of the people of the Republic.
Issues concerning the all-union property (joint property of all republics) are solved through agreements between the republics entitled to the above property.
Businesses, institutions, organizations, and objects belonging to other states and their citizens, and international organizations may be located on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR and may use the natural resources of Ukraine in accordance with the laws of the Ukrainian SSR.
The Ukrainian SSR independently establishes banking (including a foreign economic bank), pricing, financial, customs, and tax systems, develops a state budget, and, if necessary, introduces its own currency.
The highest credit institution of the Ukrainian SSR is the national bank of Ukraine accountable to the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR.
Businesses, institutions, organizations, and manufacturing companies located on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR pay a fee for the use of land and other natural and labour resources, and deductions from their foreign currency earnings, and pay taxes to local budgets.
The Ukrainian SSR guarantees protection to all forms of ownership.
VII. Environmental Safety
The Ukrainian SSR independently determines procedures to organize nature protection on the territory of the Republic and procedures for the use of natural resources.
The Ukrainian SSR has its own national committee for protection of the population from radiation.
The Ukrainian SSR has the right to ban construction and to halt the operation of any businesses, institutions, organizations, and other objects that threaten environmental safety.
The Ukrainian SSR cares about the environmental safety of its citizens, about the gene pool of its people, and about its young generation.
The Ukrainian SSR has the right to compensation for the damages to the environment of Ukraine brought about by the acts of union authorities.
VIII. Cultural Development
The Ukrainian SSR is independent in solving issues associated with science, education, as well as cultural and spiritual development of the Ukrainian nation and guarantees all nationalities living on the territory of the Republic the right to free national and cultural development.
The Ukrainian SSR guarantees national and cultural recovery of the Ukrainian nation, its historical consciousness and traditions, national and ethnographic characteristics, and functioning of the Ukrainian language in all spheres of social activity.
The Ukrainian SSR strives to meet national and cultural, as well as spiritual and linguistic needs of the Ukrainians living outside the Republic's borders.
National, cultural, and historical values located on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR belong exclusively to the people of the Republic.
The Ukrainian SSR has the right to return into the ownership of the people of Ukraine its national, cultural, and historical values found outside the borders of the Ukrainian SSR.
IX. External and Internal Security
The Ukrainian SSR has the right to its own armed forces.
The Ukrainian SSR has its own internal armies and bodies of state security subordinated to the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR.
The Ukrainian SSR determines procedures for military service by citizens of the Republic.
Citizens of the Ukrainian SSR perform their military service, as a rule, on the territory of the Republic, and cannot be used for military purpose beyond its borders without the consent of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR.
The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three nuclear free principles: to accept, to produce and to purchase no nuclear weapons. [This means that the U.S.-sponsored Yushchenko regime in Ukraine 2005-2010, which supported joining the EU, which was extremely unpopular in Ukraine at that time, was violating not only his people, but the spirit of this document.]
X. International Relations
The Ukrainian SSR, as an international law subject, maintains direct relations with other states, enters into agreements with them, exchanges diplomatic, consular and trade representatives, and participates in the activity of international organizations to the full extent necessary for effective guarantees of the Republic's national interests in political, economic, ecological, informational, scholarly, technical, cultural, and sports spheres.
The Ukrainian SSR acts as an equal participant in international affairs, actively promotes the reinforcement of general peace and international security, and directly participates in the general European process and European structures.
The Ukrainian SSR recognizes the prevalence of general human values over class values and the priority of generally accepted standards of international law over the standards of the domestic law.
Relations of the Ukrainian SSR with other Soviet republics are built on the basis of agreements concluded on the basis of the principles of equality, mutual respect, and non-interference in internal affairs.
The Declaration is the basis for a new constitution and laws of Ukraine and determines the positions of the Republic for the purpose of international agreements.
The principles of the Declaration of the Sovereignty of Ukraine are used for preparation of a new union agreement.
Passed by the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
Kyiv, July 16, 1990
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CONCLUSION:
This shows that Ukraine — or at least its Government — was entirely NON-nazi at the time when it separated itself from the Soviet Union. All of the rampant nazism of today’s Ukraine is the result of Obama’s successful coup that replaced Ukraine’s Government in February 2014
The U.S. Government is ultimaely responsible for the nazi character of today’s Ukraine.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
A bit of an impressive tour de force here, Eric. Thank you very much for it. A valuable addition to the armoury. Almost any of the common objections and accusation I encounter from the 'other side' in regard to this conflict can be refuted or countered by material from this I think.
And that's pretty wonderful.
I is an excellent piece for me to pass around and I will.
Thanks again. Impressive journalism/scholarship/sheer hard work/devotion..... :)