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Introduction: This broadcast illustrates the concept of institutionalized political inertia as applied to the crisis in Ukraine. Highlighting the imprisonment of U.S. intelligence analysis and policy formation because of this country’s immersion in the milieu of the Gehlen organization, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and the Underground Reich, we are witnessing the fascist roots nurtured and watered during the Cold War blossom into Nazi flowers.
After updating the active role of Germany and the EU in promoting the anti-Yanukovich coup in Ukraine, the program notes the tactics of the Poroshenko government in the civil war in the country’s East. Bombarding heavily populated urban areas with artillery and air forces, the Ukrainian military then follows up with street combat by fascist militias such as the Azov Battalion.
The program reviews the role of the OUN/B in the Republican Ethnic Outreach organization. The latter was an outgrowth of a covert operation called the Crusade for Freedom.
A major aspect of the CFF was the use of “fascist freedom fighters” in Europe, foremost among whom were the OUN/B combatants of the UPA. The UPA coalesced under Roman Shukhevych during World War II. The CFF also involved the elevation of these same Third Reich allies into a major element of the GOP.
The element of the Republican Party that grew out of the CFF was comprised largely of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations–essentially a renaming of the Committee of Subjugated Nations, formed by Hitler in 1943.
Conceived by Allen Dulles, the CFF was overseen by Richard Nixon. Its chief spokesperson was Ronald Reagan. The State Department official responsible for bringing “fascist freedom fighters” like the OUN/B into the United States was William Casey (Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager in the 1980 Presidential race and later Reagan’s CIA director.) The Nazi wing of the GOP was installed as a permanent branch of the Republican Party when George H.W. Bush was the head of the Republican National Committee.
It is noteworthy that the organizations that were represented in the GOP ethnic subgroup were all affiliated with the SS during World War II. Prior to the commencement of hostilities, the SS formed effective liaison with the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Romanian Iron Guard, the Bulgarian National Front and the OUN/B, among other organizations.
This relationship was cemented and strengthened during the war and remained operational when these elements jumped to U.S. intelligence and, through that relationship, to the Republican Party.
Next, the broadcast excerpts an article featured in AFA #36. We highlight the role in the de-stabilization of the former Soviet Union of the OUN/B and the other SS-connected fascist organizations incorporated into the GOP ethnic organization. Heavily overlapping the Free Congress Foundation of Paul Weyrich, the GOP “ethnics” and the OUN/B, in particular, played a leading role in the political tutoring of Boris Yeltsin’s IRG organization. Ultimately, Yeltsin’s forces were instrumental in breaking up the U.S.S.R.
Consortium News give us another good article on the ongoing suppression on resurgent World War II and Third Reich allied fascism in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
This recreation of World War II fascism manifested by elements directly evolved from the ABN allies of the Third Reich can be seen as a direct outgrowth of the Free Congress Foundation’s efforts in Eastern Europe and the former U.S.S.R.
We note, again, that the head of the liberation sub-group of the Free Congress Foundation was Hungarian Arrow Cross veteran Laszlo Pasztor, the head of the GOP “ethnics.”
Of paramount importance in this discussion is the fact that the NATO countries that are the source for the “intelligence” on the “Russian invasion” of the Ukraine are the same countries that are manifesting their Nazi-allied World War II heritage!
We also note that the satellite photos purporting to show Russian armor and self-propelled artillery in Ukraine come from a private company called DigitalGlobe, founded by people with backgrounds in Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative or “Star Wars” program.
One of the founders, Douglas Gerull, has a background with the Zeiss firm, discussed in FTR #272 as one of the companies that purchased Tinsley Laboratories, an important company involved with the development of satellite imaging intelligence.
Highlighting individuals and institutions at the epicenter of the evolution and perpetuation of the OUN/B, the program notes the development of the UNA-UNSO, evolved from Roman Shukeyvuch’s UPA and its morphing into Pravy Sektor.
Jaroslv Stetsko, Roman Shukhevych and OUN/B chief Stephan Bandera established the Nazi ethnic cleansing model for the OUN/B during the war. Their influence has been maintained through the ABN, Roman Svarych (Jaroslav Stetsko’s secretary in the early 1980’s, a three-time Justice Minister in Ukraine and adviser to current president Poroshenko), Stetsko’s widow Slava Stetsko (along with Roman
Svarych the founder of the Ukrainian National Congress), Ykaterina (Chumachenko) Yuschenko, former Reagan aide and wife of Viktor Yuschenko, and Yuriy Shukhevych, Roman’s son and a former head of Pravy Sektor.
The broadcast concludes by underscoring the apparent role of Chechens in the military prowess of ISIS. One wonders if the UNA-UNSO cadre may have imparted some of their military skills to ISIS?
Program Highlights Include: Review of the Ukrainian government’s establishment of anonymous “informer” networks in cities they captured in Eastern Ukraine; review of the celebration of the Nachtigall battalion in contemporary Ukraine; review of the overt persecution of the Russian ethnic population of Eastern Ukraine; an important article by Robert Parry noting the spurious nature of claims of a “Russian invasion” of Ukraine, backed by analysis of veteran intelligence officers.
(We have covered the ascension of the OUN/B heirs in the Ukraine in a number of programs: FTR #‘s 777, 778, 779, 780, 781, 782, 783, 784, 794, 800, 803.)
1. A revealing article from the Telegraph [UK] informs us of the size of the EU’s funding of Ukrainian civil society in its drive to bring that country into the EU’s (read “Germany’s”) orbit. Having committed 496 million Euros to civic organizations in Ukraine, EU poured roughly 11 Euros into the country for every man woman and child in its population.
That pales by comparison with the $5 billion the U.S. has invested in Ukrainian civil society (this according to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.)
Also interesting is an account in the story below that an electrician employed in Ukraine received the equivalent of a month’s pay to join in pro-EU demonstrations. The money was said to be paid by a German bank.
The story correctly places the onus of this crisis on the West and not on Putin.
How odd it has been to read all those accounts of Europe sleepwalking into war in the summer of 1914, and how such madness must never happen again, against the background of the most misrepresented major story of 2014 – the gathering crisis between Russia and the West over Ukraine, as we watch developments in that very nasty civil war, with 20,000 Russian troops massing on the border.
For months the West has been demonising President Putin, with figures such as the Prince of Wales and Hillary Clinton comparing him with Hitler, oblivious to the fact that what set this crisis in motion were those recklessly provocative moves to absorb Ukraine into the EU.
There was never any way that this drive to suck the original cradle of Russian identity into the Brussels empire was not going to provoke Moscow to react – not least due to the prospect that its only warm-water ports, in Crimea, might soon be taken over by Nato.
And still scarcely reported here have been the billions of dollars and euros the West has been more or less secretively pouring into Ukraine to promote the cause: not just to prop up its bankrupt government and banking system, but to fund scores of bogus “pro-European” groups making up what the EU calls “civil society”.
When the European Commission told a journalist that, between 2004 and 2013, these groups had only been given €31 million, my co-author Richard North was soon reporting on his EU Referendum blog that the true figure, shown on the commission’s own “Financial Transparency” website, was €496 million. The 200 front organisations receiving this colossal sum have such names as “Center for European Co-operation” or the “Donetsk Regional Public Organisation with Hope for the Future” (the very first page shows how many are in eastern Ukraine or Crimea, with their largely Russian populations).
One of my readers heard from a Ukrainian woman working in Britain that her husband back home earns €200 a month as an electrician, but is paid another €200 a month, from a German bank, to join demonstrations such as the one last March when hundreds of thousands – many doubtless entirely sincere – turned out in Kiev to chant “Europe, Europe” at Baroness Ashton, the EU’s visiting “foreign minister”.
However dangerous this crisis becomes, it is the West which has brought it about; and our hysterical vilifying of Russia is more reminiscent of that fateful mood in the summer of 1914 than we should find it comfortable to contemplate.
2a. In Ukraine, the government is using heavy weaponry–artillery, armor, helicopter gunships and fixed-wing combat aircraft–to bombard dense urban areas. Afterward, the Nazi special battalions such as the Azov are sent in for street fighting.
Kiev throws paramilitaries – some openly neo-Nazi — into the front of the battle with rebels
The fighters of the Azov battalion lined up in single file to say farewell to their fallen comrade. His pallid corpse lay under the sun in an open casket trimmed with blue velvet.
Some of the men placed carnations by the body, others roses. Many struck their chests with a closed fist before touching their dead friend’s arm. One fighter had an SS tattoo on his neck.
Sergiy Grek, 22, lost a leg and died from massive blood loss after a radio-controlled anti-tank mine exploded near to him.
As Ukraine’s armed forces tighten the noose around pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country, the western-backed government in Kiev is throwing militia groups – some openly neo-Nazi — into the front of the battle.
The Azov battalion has the most chilling reputation of all. Last week, it came to the fore as it mounted a bold attack on the rebel redoubt of Donetsk, striking deep into the suburbs of a city under siege.
In Marinka, on the western outskirts, the battalion was sent forward ahead of tanks and armoured vehicles of the Ukrainian army’s 51st Mechanised Brigade. A ferocious close-quarters fight ensued as they got caught in an ambush laid by well-trained separatists, who shot from 30 yards away. The Azov irregulars replied with a squall of fire, fending off the attack and seizing a rebel checkpoint.
Mr Grek, also known as “Balagan”, died in the battle and 14 others were wounded. Speaking after the ceremony Andriy Biletsky, the battalion’s commander, told the Telegraph the operation had been a “100% success”. “The battalion is a family and every death is painful to us but these were minimal losses,” he said. “Most important of all, we established a bridgehead for the attack on Donetsk. And when that comes we will be leading the way.”
The military achievement is hard to dispute. By securing Marinka the battalion “widened the front and tightened the circle”, around the rebels’ capital, as another fighter put it. While Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, prevaricates about sending an invasion force into Ukraine, the rebels he backs are losing ground fast.
But Kiev’s use of volunteer paramilitaries to stamp out the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”, proclaimed in eastern Ukraine in March, should send a shiver down Europe’s spine. Recently formed battalions such as Donbas, Dnipro and Azov, with several thousand men under their command, are officially under the control of the interior ministry but their financing is murky, their training inadequate and their ideology often alarming.
The Azov men use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook) symbol on their banner and members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites.
“Personally, I’m a Nazi,” said “Phantom”, a 23-year-old former lawyer at the ceremony wearing camouflage and holding a Kalashnikov. “I don’t hate any other nationalities but I believe each nation should have its own country.” He added: “We have one idea: to liberate our land from terrorists.”
The Telegraph was invited to see some 300 Azov fighters pay respects to Mr Grek, their first comrade to die since the battalion was formed in May. An honour guard fired volleys into the air at the battalion’s headquarters on the edge of Urzuf, a small beach resort on Ukraine’s Azov Sea coast. Two more militiamen died on Sunday fighting north of Donetsk. Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, called one of them a hero.
Each new recruit receives only a couple of weeks of training before joining the battalion. The interior ministry and private donors provide weapons.
...
Mr Biletsky, a muscular man in a black T‑shirt and camouflage trousers, said the battalion was a light infantry unit, ideal for the urban warfare needed to take cities like Donetsk.
The 35-year old commander began creating the battalion after he was released from pre-trial detention in February in the wake of pro-western protests in Kiev. He had denied a charge of attempted murder, claiming it was politically motivated.
A former history student and amateur boxer, Mr Biletsky is also head of an extremist Ukrainian group called the Social National Assembly. “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,” he wrote in a recent commentary. “A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
The battalion itself is founded on right wing views, the commander said in Urzuf, and no Nazi convictions could exclude a recruit. “The most important thing is being a good fighter and a good brother so that we can trust each other,” he said.
Interestingly, many of the men in the battalion are Russians from eastern Ukraine who wear masks because they fear their relatives in rebel-controlled areas could be persecuted if their identities are revealed.
Phantom said he was such a Russian but that he was opposed to Moscow supporting “terrorists” in his homeland: “I volunteered and all I demanded was a gun and the possibility to defend my country.”
Asked about his Nazi sympathies, he said: “After the First World World War, Germany was a total mess and Hitler rebuilt it: he built houses and roads, put in telephone lines, and created jobs. I respect that.” Homosexuality is a mental illness and the scale of the Holocaust “is a big question”, he added.
Stepan, 23, another fighter, said that if leaders of the pro-Russian separatists were captured they should be executed after a military tribunal.
Such notions seem a far cry from the spirit of the “Maidan” protests that peaked in Kiev in February with the ousting of Mr Yanukovich, who had refused to sign a trade agreement with the European Union. Young liberals led the way but the uprising, which ended with the president fleeing to Russia, provoked a huge patriotic awakening that sucked in hardline groups.
Azov’s extremist profile and slick English–language pages on social media have even attracted foreign fighters. Mr Biletsky says he has men from Ireland, Italy, Greece and Scandinavia. At the base in Urzuf, Mikael Skillt, 37, a former sniper with the Swedish Army and National Guard, leads and trains a reconnaissance unit.
“When I saw the Maidan protests I recognised bravery and suffering,” he told the Telegraph. “A warrior soul was awakened. But you can only do so much, going against the enemy with sticks and stones. I had some experience and I though maybe I could help.”
Mr Skillt says he called himself a National Socialist as a young man and more recently he was active in the extreme right wing Party of the Swedes. “Now I’m fighting for the freedom of Ukraine against Putin’s imperialist front,” he said.
...
Ukraine’s government is unrepentant about using the neo-Nazis. “The most important thing is their spirit and their desire to make Ukraine free and independent,” said Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Arsen Avakov, the interior minister. “A person who takes a weapon in his hands and goes to defend his motherland is a hero. And his political views are his own affair.”
Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian and Ukrainian security affairs at New York University, fears battalions like Azov are becoming “magnets to attract violent fringe elements from across Ukraine and beyond”. “The danger is that this is part of the building up of a toxic legacy for when the war ends,” he said.
Extremist paramilitary groups who have built up “their own little Freikorps” and who are fundamentally opposed to finding consensus may demand a part in public life as victors in the conflict, Mr Galeotti added. “And what do you do when the war is over and you get veterans from Azov swaggering down your high street, and in your own lives?”
2b. Insight into the nature of the “liberation” manifested by the Ukrainian government forces occupying Slovyansk can be gleaned by reading between the lines of the following story. In FTR #803, we noted that the Pravy Sektor flag was flying over the Interior Ministry building after the city was captured by government forces.
“A Test for Ukraine in City Retaken from Rebels” by Andrew Higgins; The New York Times; 8/1/2014.
. . . . The new authorities, promising anonymity, have set up a hotline for residents to inform on rebel collaborators, and they have printed fliers warning that a new law mandates up to 15 years in jail for separatism. “Of course people are afraid,” Dr. Glushenko said. “They are frightened of being punished.” . . . .
3a. Consortium News give us another good article on the ongoing suppression on resurgent World War II and Third Reich allied fascism in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
This recreation of World War II fascism manifested by elements directly evolved from the ABN allies of the Third Reich can be seen as a direct outgrowth of the Free Congress Foundation’s efforts in Eastern Europe and the former U.S.S.R.
“The Hushed-Up Hitler Factor in Ukraine” by Dovid Katz; Consortium News; 8/16/2014.
Behind the Ukraine crisis is a revision of World War II history that seeks to honor eastern European collaborators with Hitler and the Holocaust by repackaging these rightists as anti-Soviet heroes, a reality shielded from the U.S. public, as Dovid Katz explains.
Would America support any type of Hitlerism in the course of the State Department’s effort to turn the anti-Russian political classes of Eastern Europe into paragons of PR perfection that may not be criticized, howsoever mildly?
It was frankly disconcerting to see Sen. John McCain, R‑Arizona, embracing the leaderof Ukraine’s far right, anti-Semitic, pro-fascist Svoboda party last December. It was disturbing to learn of the neo-Nazi elements that provided the “muscle” for the actual Maidan takeover last February (BBC’s Newsnight was among the few major Western outlets to dare cover that openly).
Most disturbing of all has been the mainstream Western media’s almost Soviet-grade wall somehow erected against critical mention of the far-right component of Ukraine’s 2014 history, rendering any such thought as worthy of ridicule on New York Times opinion pages last spring.
Most hilarious was the Times’s May 2014 publication of an (obviously ghost-written, State Department-scripted) op-ed by Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia V. Tymoshenko which quotes Churchill writing to Roosevelt, “Give us the tools, as we will finish the job,” rumbling on about “the just and open democracy that is America’s greatest bequest to the world.”
This, from the far right politician who had shortly before that expressed genocidal musings for the millions of Russian-speaking citizens of her country, and who was, during her tenure as prime minister, a prime devotee of the wartime fascist leader Stepan Bandera, whose organization slaughtered tens of thousands (many historians put it at hundreds of thousands) of Polish and Jewish civilians based on ethnicity, in the Aryanist drive for an ethnically pure state precisely on the Nazi model.
It was therefore refreshing to read in last Saturday’s Times a report that had, albeit buried near the end, a single line informing readers that “One [militia active in the Kiev government’s military campaign] known as Azov, which took over the village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag.” By contrast, London’s right-of-center Daily Telegraph ran a whole report Monday titled “The neo-Nazi brigade fighting pro-Russian separatists,” rightly including the observation that the neo-Nazi forces being used by the Ukrainian government to do military heavy lifting “should send a shiver down Europe’s spine.”
This goes to the heart of what is being kept from so many Western, and especially American readers. Putin — for all his authoritarianism, anti-democratic bent and revanchism — is not the cause of the Ukrainian conundrum (though he is certainly exploiting it). There is a genuine divide in Ukraine between a nationalist-dominated west and a Russian-speaking east.
Anybody who has traveled the country will tell you that these “Russians” in the east, and wherever else they are to be found, would much rather be living in a European Union-type country than in a Russia-type country. What then is the problem? They do not want to live in an ultranationalist-dominated state that is anti-Russian in a 1930s Aryanesque sense of ethnically and linguistically pure Ukrainism. They much prefer the Russia-model state to that.
Now those anti-racist values, including the revering of the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance that brought down Hitler, and the disdain of societies founded on models of racist purity, are in fact also American values. But that affinity between Western values and the easterners would never even be guessed at in the avalanche of Cold War II newsfeed coming our way.
Incidentally, some Western reports that caricature the Putinist press’s use of the word “fascists” for Ukrainian nationalists don’t appreciate the colloquial Russian usage where it refers not necessarily to swastika-wielding thugs but even to high society that holds in esteem the likes of Bandera and other World War II-era Nazist fascists as supposed mythical “freedom fighters” to be revered today by the state, in street names, statues, museums, and more.
That is not to say that America’s allies among the western Ukrainian nationalists are all pro-fascist. They are not. But there are two salient issues that go beyond Ukraine and cover all of “anti-Russian” Eastern Europe, particularly the new member states of NATO and the EU.
The first is casual acceptance of neo-Nazi elements, symbolism and ideology as part of any kind of supposedly centrist mainstream. In Latvia [NATO member–D.E.] and Estonia [NATO member–D.E.], this is exemplified by tacit (or not so tacit) state support for honors for those countries’ Waffen SS divisions. In Lithuania [NATO member–D.E.], it can be manifest in state-sponsored shrines to the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) killers who unleashed the Holocaust on Jewish neighbors before the first German soldiers had quite arrived.
But there is a second issue that is much deeper, and has nothing to do with these more ostentatious kinds of Nazi worship. That issue is history.
‘History’ Alive
While World War II is indeed “history” for the West, it is very much part of Now in Eastern Europe. State-sponsored institutions in the three Baltic countries, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, especially, and also at times in Croatia [NATO member–D.E.], Romania [NATO member–D.E.] and elsewhere have invested a fortune in a kind of Holocaust revisionism that would whitewash their own nationalists’ collaboration with Hitler and turn the Soviet Union into the real Hitler.
Known as “Double Genocide,” it posits the absolute theoretical equality of Nazi and Soviet crimes. Its constitution is the 2008 “Prague Declaration [the Czech Republic is a NATO member–D.E.],” which most Americans have never heard of, that sports the word “same” five times in reference to Nazi and Soviet crimes. Even fewer Americans know that one of its demands, that the world accept a unitary mix-and-match day of remembrance for Nazi and Soviet victims, was snuck under the radar into last June’s congressional military appropriations bill.
The issue across the board is the choice made by nationalist elites in Eastern Europe to construct national myths not on the merits of a country’s great artists, poets, thinkers and genuine freedom fighters, but all too often, on the basis of Nazi collaborators whose claim to fame is that they were also “anti-Soviet patriots.”
The fact of the matter is that virtually all of Hitler’s collaborators in Eastern Europe were “anti-Soviet.” In fact, the Soviet Union was the only power putting up resistance to Hitler in Eastern Europe. If the Soviets had not pushed the Nazi armies back by the spring of 1944, at huge sacrifice to all the Soviet peoples, there would have been no D‑Day or opening of a Western front.
Whether it is hero-worship of Hungary’s Miklós Horthy [Hungary is a NATO member–D.E.], leaders of Croatia’s Hitlerist Ustasha [Croatia is a NATO member–D.E.], the Nazis’ Waffen SS divisions in Latvia and Estonia, or the likes of Ukraine’s Bandera and his OUN and UPA, and the Waffen SS, it is an offense to Western values that a NATO or EU state, or NATO/EU-aspiring state, would disburse state funds on the distortion of history, obfuscation of the Holocaust and construction of societies that admire the worst of history’s racists.
To do so quite simply implies that all the minority citizens they butchered, or whose butchering they supported, were quite unworthy of continued existence. Incidentally, all these countries have real heroes from that darkest moment in their history: those (often the simplest of people) who just did the right thing and risked all to rescue a neighbor from the Nazist establishment collaborationist leadership of their own nationalists.
...
Any viable solution needs to take into account that it is a deeply divided country even in the absence of (ever-present) Putinist mischief. It therefore needs to also take into account the many millions of Russian speakers who oppose the racial chauvinism of some of the nationalist elite now in or close to the government, and who have very different ideas about Twentieth Century history.
That is the way forward, not the Cold War II nonsense of spreading the word that the westerners are pure angels and the easterners pure demons, not the neocon nonsense that America’s greatness depends on endless foreign military misadventures in regime change that lead to long , unpredictable, and uncontrollable cycles of violence.
That America shares with Russia the magnificent legacy of having in tandem brought down Hitler’s empire is a heritage worth invoking for building better understanding, not a fact to be buried in deference to the far-right revision of Holocaust history with which much of nationalist Eastern Europe is so obsessed.
3b. The program reviews the role of the OUN/B in the Republican Ethnic Outreach organization, the Crusade for Freedom, the Free Congress Foundation and the destabilization of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
“The Free Congress Foundation Goes East” by Russ Bellant and Louis Wolf; Covert Action Information Bulletin #35; Fall/1990.
With the rapid pace of political change sweeping Eastern Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, many opportunities have emerged for western interests to intervene in the politics of that region. In some cases, such a vacuum has been created that virtual strangers to the area several years ago are now able to actively participate in changing those societies from within.
These interventions are not only being practiced by mainstream organizations. The involvement of the United States Far Right brings with it the potential revival of fascist organizations in the East. One U.S. group, the Free Congress Foundation, has been plahying a role in Eastern European and Soviet politics and has ties to Boris Yeltsin and the Inter-Regional Deputies Group (IRG) in the U.S.S.R.
The Free Congress Foundation (FCF) was founded in 1974 by Paul Weyrich as the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. Weyrich, who had started the Heritage Foundation the year before, was heavily funded by the Coors family for both organizations.
Weyrich has kept one foot in the right wing of the Republican Party while dallying with the racist Right and the extreme Christian Right. In 1976, for instance, he and a handful of other New Rights (William Rusher, Morton Blackwell, Richard Viguerie) attempted to take over the segregationist American Independent Party (AIP), formed by George Wallace in 1968. The AIP was an amalgam of Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Society elements. . . .
. . . . The IRG was established by Andrei Sakharov, Boris Yeltsin and others in the summer of 1989. By the end of that year, a training school had been established for candidates to put forward the IRG program. Their electoral success this year propelled Yeltsin to the leadership of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. He immediately began forging collaborative relationships with the deeply reactionary leaders of the Lithuanian Sajudis party. The IRG has also served as a source of right-wing pressure on Gorbachev to dismantle socialism and the Soviet Union itself.
One of the key dangers in this agenda is the political vacuum it creates, allowing ultra-nationalist forces in a number of republics to take power. Such nationalist and fascist elements are already evident in Lithuania and the Ukraine. In the latter republic, the pro-Nazi Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) has gained influence in several parties and has mobilized large demonstrations that honor OUN leaders who abetted Hitler’s war on the Eastern Front. Similarly, several deputies Sajudis deputies served in German military units in 1944, and Sajudis has made declarations against ethnic Russians living in Lithuania. According to some reports, Poles have also been denigrated.
It should also be noted that the “radical reformer” Boris Yeltsin has dallied with Pamyat, the foremost Russian fascist group to emerge in the last several years. Pamyat’s virulent anti-Semitism compares to the crude propaganda of the early German Nazi Party in the 1920’s.
The FCF is not entirely disconnected from the history of the OUN. The Treasurer of the FCF board is Georgetown University Professor Charles Moser. Moser is also serves on the editorial advisory board of the Ukrainian Quarterly, published by the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, a group dominated by the OUN. The Ukrainian Quarterly has praised military units of the German SS and otherwise justified the OUN alliance with the Third Reich which reflects the fact that the OUN was politically and militarily allied with Hitler and the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine.
The OUN, an international semi-secret cadre organization headquartered in Bavaria, has received financial assistance from the late Franz Joseph Strauss, the rightist head of the Bavarian state. Strauss also had a working relationship with Weyrich. . . .
. . . . Finally, FCF’s insinuation into the politics of the East must be judged by their selection of Laszlo Pasztor to head their Liberation Support Alliance, “which seeks to liberate peoples in Central and Eastern European Nations.”
Pasztor’s involvement in East European politics began in World War II when he joined the youth organization of the Arrow Cross, the Nazi party of Hungary.
When the Arrow Cross was installed in power by a German commando operation, Pasztor was sent to Berlin to help facilitate the liaison between the Arrow Cross and Hitler.
Pasztor was tried and served two years in jail for his Arrow Cross activities after an anticommunist government was elected in 1945. He eventually came to the U.S. and established the ethnic arm of the Republican National Committee for Richard Nixon. He brought other Nazi collaborators from the Eastern front into the GOP. Some were later found to have participated in mass murder during the war.
The dormant Arrow Cross has surfaced again in Hungary, where there have been attempts to lift the ban on the organization. Pasztor spent several months in Hungary. When Weyrich later conducted training there, he was provided a list of Pasztor’s contacts inside the country. Weyrich reports that he conducted training for the recently formed and now governing New Democratic Forum.
Pasztor claims to have assisted some of his friends in Hungary in getting NED funds through his advisory position with NED. In 1989 he spoke at the Heritage Foundation under the sponsorship of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a multinational umbrella organization of emigre fascists and Nazis founded in alliance with Hitler in 1943. It is led by the OUN. Pasztor spoke for the “Hungarian Organization” of ABN, which is the Arrow Cross. . . . .
3c. Note how many of the Eastern European countries manifesting World War II fascist heritage are NATO members. Note, also, where the reports of Russian artillery inside Ukraine firing n Ukrainian forces come from:
NATO officials said that the Russian military had moved artillery units inside Ukrainian territory in recent days and was using them to fire at Ukrainian forces. . . .
. . . . The NATO allegations are based on intelligence reports from several alliance members, Western officials said, and the allegation generally echoed Ukrainian claims in recent days of an expanding Russian military involvement in support of pro-Russian rebels who are battling to hold off a Ukrainian offensive.
A NATO spokeswoman, Oana Lungescu, also said that the alliance had receive multiple reports of the direct involvement of Russian airborne, air defense and special operations forces in Eastern Ukraine. . . .
Serpent’s Walk: Forecasts a Nazi takeover of U.S. in mid-twenty-first century, after WMD terrorist attacks.
3d. The dependence on unreconstructed Nazi sympathizers referencing World War II-era fascist ideological constructs is as dangerous as it is relativistic. Note, again, our reliance for “intelligence” on the very fascist elements we nurtured in the political womb of CIA/State Department/BND/GOP and then recast in Eastern Europe and the former U.S.S.R. after the Cold war.
For governments in the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania, Russia has invaded Ukraine and the two countries are now at war. Head further west, and they’re less sure what to call it.
While all agree that a line has been crossed, U.S and NATO officials prefer to speak of an “incursion.” French and German leaders have warned President Vladimir Putin of further sanctions without defining what Russian forces have done.
“In the past 48 hours, we have tipped into a formal invasion,” Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, said in a Bloomberg television interview. “Russia and Ukraine as sovereign countries are now at war and it’s going to be very difficult for the United States and Europe to deny that reality.”
Calling it war or an invasion would force the U.S. and European Union to consider steps they’d never be willing to take, such as committing military forces, Bremmer said. While sanctions have been imposed on some sectors of the Russian economy, Europe continues to rely on Russia for natural-gas imports and Russian trade with the EU was worth about $390 billion last year.
“The EU appears to have exhausted its politically feasible options in the previous round” of sanctions, Ievgen Vorobiov, an analyst at the Polish Institute of International Affairs in Warsaw, said in a telephone interview.
Troop Buildup
Pro-Russian insurgents widened their attacks yesterday on Ukraine government forces, taking several towns outside their strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk, including near the Sea of Azov. There are currently 20,000 Russian troops in the border region, with 1,000 operating inside Ukraine, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization military officer estimated today.
Latvia’s Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said on Twitter that Russia’s actions amount to a “war” that should be taken up by the United Nations Security Council. The Foreign Ministry in Lithuania, another former Soviet satellite state that’s now one of the EU’s 28 members, said it “strongly condemns the invasion of Ukrainian territory by Russian Federation military forces, which has obviously begun.” . . . .
3e. The satellite imagery purporting to show Russian armor and self-propelled artillery inside of Ukraine comes from a private company–DigitalGlobe. That company was founded by key personnel from Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.
“DigitalGlobe”; Wikipedia.com.
. . . . . Origins[edit]
WorldView Imaging Corporation was founded in January 1992 in Oakland, California in anticipation of the 1992 Land Remote Sensing Policy Act (enacted in October 1992) which permitted private companies to enter the satellite imaging business.[3] Its founder was Dr Walter Scott, who was joined by co-founder and CEO Doug Gerull in late 1992. In 1993, the company received the first high resolution commercial remote sensing satellite license issued under the 1992 Act.[4] The company was initially funded with private financing from Silicon Valley sources and interested corporations in N. America, Europe, and Japan. Dr. Scott was head of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories “Brilliant Pebbles” and “Brilliant Eyes” projects which were part of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Doug Gerull was the executive in charge of the Mapping Sciences division at the Intergraph Corporation.[5] The company’s first remote sensing license from the United States Department of Commerce allowed it to build a commercial remote sensing satellite capable of collecting images with 3 m (9.8 ft) resolution.[3]
In 1995, the company became EarthWatch Incorporated, merging WorldView with Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.‘s commercial remote sensing operations.[6] In September 2001, EarthWatch became DigitalGlobe.[7] . . . . .
3f. DigitalGlobe co-founder Doug Gerull had previously worked for the Zeiss firm, discussed in FTR #272 as one of the German/Underground Reich/Bormann firms that were moving into satellite imagery technology in the U.S.
. . . . . Carl Zeiss
Privately Held; 10,001+ employees; Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing industry
January 1980 – 1985 (5 years) Toronto / White Plains, NY
3g. An article published after this program was recorded notes the dubious nature of the claims of a “Russian Invasion’ of Ukraine.
“Who’s Telling the ‘Big Lie’ On Ukraine?” by Robert Parry; Consortium News; 9/2/2014.
. . . . And now there’s the curious case of Russia’s alleged “invasion” of Ukraine, another alarmist claim trumpeted by the Kiev regime and echoed by NATO hardliners and the MSM.
While I’m told that Russia did provide some light weapons to the rebels early in the struggle so they could defend themselves and their territory – and a number of Russian nationalists have crossed the border to join the fight – the claims of an overt “invasion” with tanks, artillery and truck convoys have been backed up by scant intelligence.
One former U.S. intelligence official who has examined the evidence said the intelligence to support the claims of a significant Russian invasion amounted to “virtually nothing.” Instead, it appears that the ethnic Russian rebels may have evolved into a more effective fighting force than many in the West thought. They are, after all, fighting on their home turf for their futures.
Concerned about the latest rush to judgment about the “invasion,” the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of former U.S. intelligence officials and analysts, took the unusual step of sending a memo to German Chancellor Angela Merkel warning her of a possible replay of the false claims that led to the Iraq War.
“You need to know,” the group wrote, “that accusations of a major Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence. Rather, the ‘intelligence’ seems to be of the same dubious, politically ‘fixed’ kind used 12 years ago to ‘justify’ the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.”
But these doubts and concerns are not reflected in the Post’s editorial or other MSM accounts of the dangerous Ukraine crisis. Indeed, Americans who rely on these powerful news outlets for their information are as sheltered from reality as anyone living in a totalitarian society.
4a. Illustrating the direct line of institutional evolution from the OUN/B to the present, Pravy Sektor is the political arm of the UNA-UNSO. It elected Yuriy Shukheyvch as its head. Shukheyvch is the son of OUN/B commander Roman Shukhevych, declared a “Hero of Ukraine” by the Yuschenko government. Roman also headed the Nachtigall Battalion in their liquidation of the Lvov Ghetto in 1941.
Note that the UNA/UNSO organization–the political parent of Pravy Sektor–has apparently been active in Chechnya as well.
“The Durability of Ukrainian Fascism” by Peter Lee; Strategic Culture; 6/9/2014.
. . . . One of Bandera’s lieutenants was Roman Shukhevych. In February 1945, Shukhevych issued an order stating, “In view of the success of the Soviet forces it is necessary to speed up the liquidation of the Poles, they must be totally wiped out, their villages burned … only the Polish population must be destroyed.”
As a matter of additional embarrassment, Shukhevych was also a commander in the Nachtigall (Nightingale) battalion organized by the Wehrmacht.
Today, a major preoccupation of Ukrainian nationalist historical scholarship is beating back rather convincing allegations by Russian, Polish, and Jewish historians that Nachtigall was an important and active participant in the massacre of Lviv Jews orchestrated by the German army upon its arrival in June 1941. . . .
. . . . Yuriy Shukhevych’s role in modern Ukrainian fascism is not simply that of an inspirational figurehead and reminder of his father’s anti-Soviet heroics for proud Ukrainian nationalists. He is a core figure in the emergence of the key Ukrainian fascist formation, Pravy Sektor and its paramilitary.
And Pravy Sektor’s paramilitary, the UNA-UNSO, is not an “unruly” collection of weekend-warrior-wannabes, as Mr. Higgins might believe.
UNA-UNSO was formed during the turmoil of the early 1990s, largely by ethnic Ukrainian veterans of the Soviet Union’s bitter war in Afghanistan. From the first, the UNA-UNSO has shown a taste for foreign adventures, sending detachments to Moscow in 1990 to oppose the Communist coup against Yeltsin, and to Lithuania in 1991. With apparently very good reason, the Russians have also accused UNA-UNSO fighters of participating on the anti-Russian side in Georgia and Chechnya.
After formal Ukrainian independence, the militia elected Yuriy Shukhevych—the son of OUN‑B commander Roman Shukhevych– as its leader and set up a political arm, which later became Pravy Sektor. . . .
5. Some of the best scholarship on the perpetuation of the OUN/B milieu has been done by Professor Per Anders Rudling of Lund University in Sweden. Discussing Roman Shukhevych (as with other Ukrainian names, orignally from the Cyrillic alphabet, the transliterated names vary, somewhat.)
Rudling notes the enthusiasm of Jaroslav Stetsko, Shukhevych and Stephan Bandera for Nazi ethnic cleansing methods, which they rigorously implemented in Ukraine during World War II.
“Schooling in Murder: Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 and Hauptmann Roman Shukhevych in Belarus, 1942” by Per Anders Rudling; academia.edu.
. . . . . Roman Shukhevych, its ommander, had distinguished himself in German service. Serving in German uniform since 1938, Shukhevych combined his political activism as a Ukrainian nationalist with a distinguished military record. In 1941, he was a commander of the Nachtigall battalion, a Wehrmacht formation consisting of Ukrainian nationalists. . . . .
[Footnote 90] . . . .
90 The OUN(b) blueprint for its wartime activities, “Borot’ba i diial’nist’ OUN pid chas viiny” from May, 1941, authored by Shukhevych, Stets’ko, Lenkavs’kyi and [ Stephan] Bandera, outlined the creation of an OUN “People’s militia,” the establishment of “internment camps, set up for Jews, asocial elements and captives.” [“Tabir internovanykh, pryznachenyi dlia zhydiv, asotsial’nykh elementiv ta polonenykh”] It demanded “Ukraine for the Ukrainians!...Death to the Muscovite-Jewish commune! Beat the commune, save Ukraine!”[“Ukraina dlia Ukraintsiv!...Smert’ moskovs’ko-zhydivs’kyi komuni! Byi komunu, spasai Ukrainu!”], demanding a “dog’s death” for the Muscovite-Jewish outsiders [“moskovs’ko-zhydivs’kykh zaid”]. TsDAVO Ukrainy, f. 3833, op. 2, spr. 1, ark. 57–76. Kopiia. Mashynopys and TsDAVO Ukrainy, f. 3855, op. 1, spr. 2, ark. 1–2. Kopiia. Mashynopys. Both published in Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi et al (eds.), OUN v 1941 roki. Dokumenty, Chastyna 1. (Kyiv: Natsional’na akademiia nauk Ukrainy, Instytut istorii Ukrainy, 2006), 143, 159, 165.
6. The program next summarizes the institutional evolution of the OUN/B through the Cold War years and its perpetuation through CIA and its subsidiary organization the Office of Policy Coordination, the Crusade for Freedom, the GOP’s Ethnic Heritage organization, the Free Congress Foundation and the Yuschenko government in Ukraine.
7. The program concludes with an article noting the military prowess and sophistication of ISIS. Critical to this analysis is the apparent role of the Chechens in the tactical development of the group. In FTR #381. we noted the role of the Al-Taqwa milieu in the funding of the Chechen seperatists, which appears to have continued, as we saw in our analysis of the Boston Marathon Bombing.
In the context of U.S. and Western support for the OUN/B milieu in Ukraine, including the UNA-UNSO fighters who fought with the Chechens and elsewhere in the Caucasus, we may well be seeing “blowback” from our policies vis a vis Ukraine in the development of ISIS’ sophistication. As discussed in paragraph 4a, the UNA-UNSO fighters were initially composed largely of Ukrainian veterans of the Afghan war. The organization gave rise directly to Pravy Sektor.
With the Obama White House left reeling from the “savage” slaughter of an American journalist held hostage by ISIS terrorists, military options are being considered against an adversary who officials say is growing in strength and is much more capable than the one faced when the group was called “al Qaeda-Iraq” during the U.S. war from 2003–2011.
ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, has been making a “tactical withdrawal” in recent days in the face of withering U.S. airstrikes from areas around Erbil in northern Iraq and from the major dam just north of Mosul it controlled for two nail-biting weeks, according to military officials monitoring their movements.
“These guys aren’t just bugging out, they’re tactically withdrawing. Very professional, well trained, motivated and equipped. They operate like a state with a military,” said one official who tracks ISIS closely. “These aren’t the same guys we fought in OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) who would just scatter when you dropped a bomb near them.”
ISIS appeared to have a sophisticated and well thought-out plan for establishing its “Islamic Caliphate” from northern Syria across the western and northern deserts of Iraq, many experts and officials have said, and support from hostage-taking, robbery and sympathetic donations to fund it. They use drones to gather overhead intel on targets and effectively commandeer captured military vehicles – including American Humvees — and munitions.
“They tried to push out as far as they thought they could and were fully prepared to pull back a little bit when we beat them back with airstrikes around Erbil. And they were fine with that, and ready to hold all of the ground they have now,” a second official told ABC News.
ISIS didn’t necessarily count on holding Mosul Dam, officials said, but scored a major propaganda victory on social media when they hoisted the black flag of the group over the facility that provides electricity and water to a large swath of Iraq, or could drown millions if breached.
U.S. special operations forces under the Joint Special Operations Command and U.S. Special Operations Command keep close tabs on the military evolution of ISIS and both its combat and terrorism — called “asymmetric” — capabilities, officials told ABC News. A primary reason is in anticipation of possibly fighting them, which a full squadron of special mission unit operators did in the Independence Day raid on an ISIS camp in Raqqah, Syria.
“They’re incredible fighters. ISIS teams in many places use special operations TTPs,” said the second official, who has considerable combat experience, using the military term for “tactics, techniques and procedures.”
In sobering press conference Friday, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said ISIS has shown that it is “as sophisticated and well-funded as any group that we have seen.”
“They’re beyond just a terrorist group. They marry ideology, a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess. They are tremendously well-funded,” he said. “This is beyond anything that we’ve seen.”
Prior ISIS’s recent public successes, the former chairman of the 9/11 Commission, which just released a tenth anniversary report on the threat of terrorism currently facing the homeland, said he was shocked at how little seems to be known inside the U.S. intelligence community about the Islamist army brutalizing Iraq as it has Syria.
“I was appalled at the ignorance,” former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, who led the 9/11 Commission, told ABC News last week.
Kean, a Republican, who with vice chairman Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, recently met with about 20 top intelligence officials in preparation of the commission’s latest threat report, said many officials seemed both blind-sided and alarmed by the group’s rise, growth and competency.
“One official told me ‘I am more scared than at any time since 9/11,’” Kean recounted in a recent interview.
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence defended the intelligence community’s tracking of ISIS, saying officials had “expressed concern” about the threat as far back as last year.
“The will to fight is inherently difficult to assess. Analysts must make assessments based on perceptions of command and control, leadership abilities, quality of experience, and discipline under fire — none of which can be understood with certainty until the first shots are fired,” ODNI spokesperson Brian Hale said.
Where did ISIS learn such sophisticated military methods, shown clearly after the first shots were fired?
“Probably the Chechens,” the one of the U.S. officials said.
A Chechen commander named Abu Omar al-Shishani — who officials say may have been killed in fighting near Mosul — is well known for commanding an international brigade within ISIS. Other Chechens have appeared within propaganda videos including one commander who was killed on video by an artillery burst near his SUV in Syria.
Earlier this year, ABC News reported on the secret history of U.S. special operations forces’ experiences battling highly capable Chechen fighters along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border since 2001. In addition, for decades Chechen separatists have waged asymmetric warfare against Russian forces for control of the Northern Caucasus.
The Secret Battles Between US Forces and Chechen Terrorists
In the battle against ISIS, many within American “SOF,” a term that comprises operators from all branches of the military and intelligence, are frustrated at being relegated by the President only to enabling U.S. airstrikes in Iraq. They are eager to fight ISIS more directly in combat operations — even if untethered, meaning unofficially and with little if any U.S. government support, according to some with close ties to the community.
“ISIS and their kind must be destroyed,” said a senior counterterrorism official after journalist James Foley was beheaded on high-definition ISIS video, echoing strong-worded statements of high-level U.S. officials including Secretary of State John Kerry.
Uncle Sam and The Swastika
Anne Applebaum has a horrifying thought or two in Washington Post about Ukraine that she wanted to share with the world: If the West doesn’t prepare for war with Russia, get ready for preemptive nuclear strikes:
So there we have it: Unless the west attempts to flood Ukraine with enough military hardware to turn the conflict in the east into a bloody enough stalemate to turns the Russian opinion against any assistance for the rebels, the ultranationalist fascists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Alexander Dugin will convince Putin to unilaterally nuke various cities in the Baltics just to demonstrate the hollowness of the West.
Putting aside the hysterics of predicting that Putin will launch preemptive nuclear strikes on NATO cities just “to prove that NATO is a hollow, meaningless entity that won’t dare strike back for fear of a greater catastrophe”, the column does indirectly raise a valid question: what types of scenarios are going to increase or decrease the odds of a far right ultranationalist challenge from Putin’s right actually succeeded and taking control of the Kremlin and then possibly engaging in the same type of ethnic cleansing that groups like Svoboda and Right Sektor have been pining for? Will prioritizing a ceasefire and peaceful end to the current conflict actually empower the Dugin/Zhirinovsky wing of Russian politics? How about the West trying to turn this into the bloodiest conflict possible while warning that Putin is considering a Hitlerian-style Russian blitzkrieg across eastern Europe with limited nuclear strikes along the way just to show the world who’s the boss. Might that increase the odds of a Dugin/Zhirinovsky faction eventually taking over?
Also, when can we finally transition to the Rollerball era of conflict resolution? Yes, there would certainly be issues with that kind of alternative approach to war, but it’ll surely be an improvement.
Yasha Levine has been reporting form the Russian/Ukraine border, turning his twitter feed into a must-read source for on the ground perspectives on the conflict. Take this recent tweet...
So, at least from Levine’s observations, the Ukrainian populace is split at this point over whether to continuing the war or not. And it’s a split that appears to include members of the Ukrainian military. This divide could be quite significant right now, because the rebels just made a big shift in their demands for peace: The rebels are calling for autonomy and not full independence:
Could we be seeing the beginning of the end for this conflict? That has to be an amazingly tempting offer for the Ukrainian populace, although it’s unclear if the oligarchs will be open to such an offer, especially those with empires concentrated in the east. The conflict could end the destruction of their physical assets in the east but with costs to their power and influence over the region yet to be determined. So let’s hope the oligarchs are at least entertaining the offer, for everyone’s sake (including their own).
Well, it doesn’t sound like Kiev is going to be receptive towards the rebels’ ceasefire/autonomy proposal. Kiev’s Defense Minister just doubled down on the WWII analogies
On the 75th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Germany breaks a taboo and pledges to arm the Kurds:
Is this the beginning of a new era of Germany getting directly involved in conflicts around the globe? Perhaps, but keep in mind that recent polls indicate 2/3 of Germans oppose arming the Kurds right now, so that new era might meet resistance:
Given the public opposition to arming the Kurds you have to wonder how those polls might shift if arming Kiev becomes a top priority. Maybe it won’t matter.
And the cease-fire is finally here. Whether or not it’s a permanent cease-fire remains to be seen, but this is huge progress:
Putting aside the threat of a cease-fire break down, one of the big questions now is what on earth can avoid turning this into another “frozen conflict”. A frozen conflict is certainly better than a hot conflict, but it’s also transnational cancer. On the surface, at least, it looks like there’s a chance for some sort of consensus to emerge: Prime minister Yatsenyuk is calling for “a long-term cease-fire, the withdrawal of the Russian Army and a wall along the border”. Well, a long-term cease-fire is basically what everyone wants at some point so that should be achievable. The withdrawal of the Russian Army should also be pretty straightforward since Russia asserts that it’s troops aren’t in the first place. And that just leaves the giant wall, which is such an insane and pointless waste of an idea that it shouldn’t be too hard to get Kiev to back off of that plan. The assertion by the prime minister of Luhansk that the region will continue to push for secession could be more or an sticking point for any long-term resolution, but that assumes some sort of decentralization plan can’t be developed that is just so appetizing that the people of Luhansk and Donetsk overwhelmingly choose to just accept the decentralization deal and go forward from there. So western Ukraine appears to desire security assurances more than anything else (ideally by joining NATO), while the regions on the east appear to be much more concerned with not being ruled by Kiev. The West seems to want Ukraine into the EU as soon as possible, with NATO membership maybe coming in the future, while Russia wants to avoid another NATO member on its border at all costs. Everyone wants a security guarantee of some sort, with the EU also strongly desiring that Ukraine join the EU (and Russia presumably not very happy about the idea).
Aside from expanding NATO into NATO-R‑U (which could be awesome for everyone), one of the big questions going forward is whether the people of eastern Ukraine, either as “decentralized” regions or a fully independent state(s), would possibly want to join the EU at this point because if they adamantly don’t want a future in the EU is there way to allow just half of a country join the EU while the other half stays out? Could just Kiev become an EU vassal state? That sounds impossible. And if a decentralized Ukraine can’t join the EU that seems like something the EU leaders are going to rather miffed about while negotiating a long-term peace deal that involves keeping Ukraine intact in a decentralized manner. And EU leaders are going to be needed here for any long-term peace. So if it turns out that the east wants out of the EU, will the EU’s leaders and Kiev be willing to put that goal aside for the foreseeable future in order to keep Ukraine intact? And will Russia agree to put of expansion of the Commonwealth Union too for now? Could there be a joint EU/Russian trade deal with Ukraine that guarantees natural gas flows to Europe while both sides shower Ukraine with the resources (and export markets) needed to rebuild its country after decades of corruption and a civil war? Of the many open questions going forward these seems like a big ones.
Here’s a reminder that the sooner a permanent peace can be agreed upon in Ukrainethe sooner the ‘volunteer batallions’ can be disbanded, which is something nearly everyone should be rooting for:
And here’s a reminder that a durable peace in Ukraine probably isn’t going to happen before more war:
Unless some new “game changer” weapons get introduced to the conflict (which doesn’t seem likely since they would probably kill a lot of civilians), it’s looking more and more like the plan on both sides is for a battle of attrition. And with winter approaching, life potentially about to get much much worse for East Ukrainians. So the question is raised of how the public sentiment can be expected to change as the conflict drags on. Is support for the rebels expected to grow or shrink amongst the East Ukrainians if the conflict ends in a bloody stalemate that never really gets resolved and doesn’t allow for any semblance of normalcy? It seems like sentiment is only going to grow against the side that does the most shelling of civilian areas, and right now that’s Kiev. Isn’t a Pyrrhic victor the best Kiev can hope for if this conflict drags on past the the winter or will most people just be happy for any end to the fighting at that point and ready to move on?
I’m enjoying this show, but you really ought to do some better fact checking of the various claims you are making. In this show listeners are told to “never lose sight of” the fact that Ukraine has 25% of the worlds proven natural gas reserves, and I have seen this claim being made in earlier shows too.
However, a quick search on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_gas_proven_reserves) would have told you that the proven gas reserves of Ukraine are actually estimated to be 0.5% of the world total, not 25%.
@GM–
Here’s the source for my statement:
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/talking-numbers/this-oil-giant-could-get-crush-by-ukraine-200317976.html;_ylt=A0SO8wmkeB5TWxEAKjpXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTB0c3FzZHNsBHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA2dxMQR2dGlkA1ZJUDI2NF8x
EXCERPT: ” . . . .Ukraine sits on 39 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves. That’s about one-quarter of the world’s entire proven reserves. One company that has bet big on Ukraine’s natural gas is US-based Chevron. . . .”
I source all of my material. Personally, I can neither confirm nor disprove CNBC/Yahoo News’ statement.
CNBC–though not beyond reproach, certainly–is somewhat more credible than Wikipedia.
En Garde!
Dave Emory
The casual embrace of double-edge swords doesn’t always end well:
A peek into the future of Ukraine’s parliament: “There might be no opposition at all in this parliament. But there might be competition to see who can be the best nationalist and the biggest enemy of Russia”:
Keep in mind that Oleh Lyashko is one of the figure popularizing the “trashing” of opposition politicians, so with opposition elected officials about to become a thing of the past the question arises of which group Lyashko and his fellow far right nut jobs will target next. So who’s going to be the new official scapegoat once everyone associated with the old Yanukovich government is removed from power? It’s possible they could start targeting the oligarchs living in mansions, but given Lyashko’s mansion-living lifestyle, maybe not. So who’s next?