The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, gave a green signal to what he calls a “special military operation … to de-militarise and de-Nazify Ukraine.”
The Western media wasted no time labeling it as “Putin propaganda” or Russian “disinformation,” and everyone whose sole source of information is the Western bourgeois media conveniently repeated the same without any hesitance. Apart from this, they also try to whitewash Nazis in Ukraine by saying something like this: “Zelensky is Jewish. How can there be nazis in his country?”
Former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, showed no sign of ignorance while saying, “He’s [Putin] talking about denazification. There are no Nazis in Ukraine.”
In order to develop an unbiased opinion regarding the Nazis in Ukraine, we must go back a few decades when the entire world was under the Nazi threat. The period in history, which is most commonly referred to as WWII.
Both Russians and Ukrainians used to live together in relative harmony prior to 1941 when the Nazis invaded the USSR. The relative peace between the two ethnicities was violently disrupted when the German armed forces invaded the USSR in 1941 and took control over much of Ukraine.
According to John-Paul Himka, “One-quarter of all Holocaust victims lived on the territory that now forms Ukraine.”
The ultra-nationalists of Ukraine collaborated with the Nazis and helped them in achieving their evil goals. The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), along with its armed forces, Ukrainian Insurgent Army, formed a coalition with the advancing Nazis and carried out what Ion Sayer and Douglas Botting call “the extermination of the Jews and other ‘undesirables.’ ” The OUN portrayed Russians, Poles, Hungarians and Jews — most of the minorities in western Ukraine — as aliens and encouraged locals to “destroy” Poles and Jews, according to the Times of Israel.
After the war was over, it was time for the criminals to be prosecuted in the Nuremberg trials. Many of the Nazi war criminals were punished and the Western textbooks only mention them and declare that fascism was defeated in WWII. No, it wasn’t.
Why? Because the CIA protected many Nazis from facing the consequences of their contribution to the Holocaust in order to use them as an asset in its anti-Soviet propaganda.
( I will write about it in a detailed fashion in my future writings. )
One of the Nazis that the CIA tried to protect was Stepan Bandera.
He was the anti-Soviet leader of the OUN who collaborated with the Nazis and killed many Poles, Jews, and other non-ethnic Ukrainians. It can be said that he was the man who brought Nazism to Ukraine as he is the “Hero” of the ultra-nationalist political parties like Svoboda and armed groups like the Azov battalion (I know you have heard this name.)
The ultra-nationalists constantly admire and praise a Nazi collaborator.
Now that we know the roots of Nazism in Ukraine. Let’s fast forward to the Maidan coup of 2014.
It was the period in Ukraine when the democratically-elected leader, Viktor Yanukovich, was overthrown by the ultra-nationalists because he refused to sign off the deal with the EU and indicated to move towards Russia. The coup was supported by the Western imperial powers as they saw it as an opportunity to install the government that favors the West, and the Western media masqueraded the coup as a “revolution” like they always do.
The post-coup government included three members of the Svoboda party, which is an ultranationalist political party in Ukraine and openly admires Stepan Bandera.
The white supremacist and confederate flags were draped in Kiev’s occupied City Hall. The statues of Lenin and the Soviet Union fighters who fought the Nazis were toppled down. Lenin Square in Dnepropetrovsk was renamed into Heroes of Maidan Square along with many other streets in the Ukraine. Sieg heil salutes and Nazi Wolfsangel symbols have become the norm.
In 2014, some 15,000 people marched through Kiev to honor Stepan Bandera on his 105th birth anniversary. Again, to refersh your memory, he was a Nazi collaborator involved in the ethnic cleansing that slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles and other minorities.
In January 2010, Bandera was granted the Hero of Ukraine award by then-president Viktor Yushchenko, which was annulled in 2011, under President Viktor Yanukovich, by a court after the harsh criticism from Jewish and Russian groups.
The anti-Russian hate and fascism has been on the rise in Ukraine since 2014, when around 42 people who were anti-Maidan coup/pro-Russian/anti-ultra-nationalism were burnt alive in a Trade Union House in Odessa, which has been called as the worst Nazi attrocity since the WWII.
The ousted President, Viktor Yanukovich, compared the events to the rise of Nazi ideology in 1930.
This gives you a context regarding how the Russophobia, and ultra-nationalism spread across Ukraine, which brings us to the rise of Azov battalion.
[ The next letter will be about the rise of the Azov and Nazism after 2014, how it received funding, support, training from the West, and what the current situation regarding Nazis look like in Ukraine.]
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