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FTR#1318 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
FTR#1319 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Continuing our analysis of the Ukraine War, these programs further chronicle how the conflict is normalizing Nazis.
Points of Analysis and Discussion Include: A full page ad in The New York Times of a film by Bernard Henri-Levy titled from the WWII and contemporary Ukrainian military and police salutes; An article in that same paper lionizing a member of the Azov Battalion; Review of Roman Zvarych’s role in generating the Azov Battalion; A Veterans Day celebration at the White House by Ukrainian Nazis; The Canadian Parliament’s standing ovation for an officer of the 14th Waffen SS Division; Canada’s long history of importing Nazi and SS veterans; The refusal of Canada’s top general to condemn the ovation given to Jarowlav Hunka; Review of the continuity of clandestine warfare from the Third Reich to the Cold War CIA; The media revisionism that
Lviv, Ukaine, Summer of 2018. Celebration of the 75th anniversary of the 14th Waffen SS Division (Galician). Note the Ukrainian honor guard in the background.
characterized the coverage of “Hunkagate”; Britain’s charging of blogger Warren Thornton with spreading “malinformation” after breaking the Hunkagate story; Review of key information from FTR#300 about the Nazi tract Serpent’s Walk.
1. The New York Times, 11/26/2023; p. 7.–Glory to the Heroes
. . . . On March 14, he enlisted in the Azov regiment, a former far-right militia group. . . .
. . . . The co-founder of the CUN and formerly Yaroslav Stetsko’s private secretary, the U.S.-born Roman Zvarych (1953), represents a younger generation of the Ukrainian émigré community active during the Cold War and a direct link from the ABN to the Azov Battalion. . . . Zvarych participated in the activities of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations in the 1980s. . . . In February 2005, after Viktor Yushchenko’s election, Zvarych was appointed Minister of Justice. . . . According to Andriy Biletsky, the first commander of the Azov battalion, a civil paramilitary unit created in the wake of the Euromaidan, Zvarych was head of the headquarters of the Azov Central Committee in 2015 and supported the Azov battalion with ‘volunteers’ and political advice through his Zvarych Foundation. . . .
A recent rally in front of the White House featuring Nazi iconography has been wholly ignored by the same mainstream media outlets pushing the narrative of rising antisemitism. The two DC-based organizations behind the events collaborated with the Biden administration on a similar event last February.
This Veterans Day, on November 11, passersby outside the White House gates were met with the sight of protest signs bearing Nazi-inspired Wolfsangels and protesters performing fascist salutes.
While the rally may have fallen under the radar of the mainstream press – or was deliberately ignored – the US-government owned Voice of America (VOA) provided extensive coverage through their Ukraine branch. One photograph embedded in the story features Ukraine war veteran Roman Kashpur flanked by the White House and performing a fascist salute. Astonishingly, the second shot of the outlet’s video report features a Wolfsangel. Rally goers chanted “bring our heroes home!” and “Make Russia pay!”
VOA interviewed the rally’s organizer, Nadiya Shaporynska, whose talking points sounded as though they could have come from the Ukrainian embassy itself: “Our main message today is a call for the release of prisoners-defenders of Azovstal. We are now asking the United States for help to free them as soon as possible.”
Shaporynska has collaborated directly with the Biden Administration during past initiatives. As revealed in The Grayzone, she and a coterie of activists with longstanding ties to neo-Nazi militias managed to arrange for high-level Biden Administration officials to speak at a rally this past February.
The two DC-based groups which organized the efforts, United Help Ukraine and US Ukrainian Activists, enjoy close ties to the Ukrainian embassy. US Ukrainian Activists is led by Nadiya Shaporynska, who also co-founded United Help Ukraine. The latter is led by Tanya Aldave. In February, The Grayzone reported that Aldave listed her employer as the US Securities and Exchange Commission on LinkedIn — an account which she has since deleted.
This August, Shaporynska was awarded the Ukrainian Order of Merit by President Vlodomyr Zelensky. When the president visited the United States the following month, he personally presented her with the award.
This past February, US Ukrainian Activists and another group co-founded by Shaporynska called United Help Ukraine held a rally commemorating the start of the war in Ukraine which featured United States Agency for International Development (USAID) director Samantha Power as its keynote speaker. The Biden Administration’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Karen Donfried and other local and federal officials also joined the rally.
Since the Maidan coup in 2014, Aldave and Shaporynska have fundraised and advocated for Ukrainian fascist groups ranging from the Azov Battalion, the Aidar Battalion, Right Sektor, and the Georgian National Legion, as The Grayzone has reported. Aldave, who appears to work for the US government, has been described by her organization United Help Ukraine as a “true Banderite” – or a follower of the World War Two-era Nazi collaborator and mass murderer of Jews and Poles, Stepan Bandera.
In a 2015 Facebook post featuring a photo of herself, Shaporynska, and a representative of the fascist Right Sektor organization, Aldave wrote “we support Dmytro Yarosh,” referring to the group’s ultranationalist leader who once vowed to “de-Russify” Ukraine. Aldave described herself and the other local activists in the group as “Right Sektor’s DC Branch.”
For her part, Shaporynska once hosted a charity concert featuring Georgian warlord Mamuka Mamulashvili as its guest of honor. The Grayzone has documented numerous allegations of war crimes committed by Mamulashvili’s mercenary group, the Georgian National Legion; the warlord has personally implied that executing Russian prisoners of war is Georgian Legion policy.
Just months prior to the Georgian Legion event, Shaporynska and company held another charity concert for the Azov Battalion. At the time, Azov was led by Andriy Biletsky, an overtly fascist militant who was recently filmed receiving a medal of commendation from Zelensky. Biletsky has vowed to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen,” and described the enemy of his movement as Jews, and the political forces led by the “real masters,” who also happen to be Jews.
As the global focus shifts from Ukraine to Israel-Palestine, the Biden Administration has taken what it describes as a “landmark step to counter antisemitism,” framing criticism of the genocide in Gaza as anti-Jewish hatred. Meanwhile, the administration continues to ignore the flamboyant fascism of the Ukrainian operatives in its orbit, even as it sends top foreign policy officials to appear at their rallies.
By celebrating a Waffen-SS volunteer as a “hero,” Canada’s Liberal Party highlighted a longstanding policy that has seen Ottawa train fascist militants in Ukraine while welcoming in thousands of post-war Nazi SS veterans.
Canada’s second most powerful official, Chrystia Freeland, is the granddaughter of one of Nazi Germany’s top Ukrainian propagandists.
In the Spring of 1943, Yaroslav Hunka was a fresh-faced soldier in the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia when his division received a visit from the architect of Nazi Germany’s genocidal policies, Heinrich Himmler. Having presided over the battalion’s formation, Himmler was visibly proud of the Ukrainians who had volunteered to support the Third Reich’s efforts.
80 years later, the Speaker of Canada’s parliament, Anthony Rota, also beamed with pride after inviting Hunka to a reception for Volodymyr Zelensky, where the Ukrainian president lobbied for more arms and financial assistance for his country’s war against Russia.
“We have in the chamber today Ukrainian war veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today even at his age of 98,” Rota declared during the September 22 parliamentary event in Ottawa.
“His name is Yaroslav Hunka but I am very proud to say he is from North Bay and from my riding of Nipissing-Timiskaming. He is a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service,” Rota continued.
Gales of applause erupted through the crowd, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Zelensky, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Canadian Chief of Defense Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre and leaders of all Canadian parties rose from their seats to applaud Hunka’s wartime service.
Since the exposure of Hunka’s record as a Nazi collaborator – which should have been obvious as soon as the Speaker announced him – Canadian leaders (with the notable exception of Eyre) have rushed to issue superficial, face-saving apologies as withering condemnations poured in from Canadian Jewish organizations.
The incident is now a major national scandal, occupying space on the cover of Canadian papers like the Toronto Sun, which quipped, “Did Nazi that coming.” Meanwhile, Poland’s Education Minister has announced plans to seek Hunka’s criminal extradition.
The Liberal Party has attempted to downplay the affair as an accidental blunder, with one Liberal MP urging her colleagues to “avoid politicizing this incident.” Melanie Joly, Canada’s Foreign Minister, has forced Rota’s resignation, seeking to turn the the Speaker into a scapegoat for her party’s collective actions.
Trudeau, meanwhile, pointed to the “deeply embarrassing” event as a reason to “push back against Russian propaganda,” as though the Kremlin somehow smuggled an nonagenarian Nazi collaborator into parliament, then hypnotized the Prime Minister and his colleagues, Manchurian Candidate-style, into celebrating him as a hero.
To be sure, the incident was no gaffe. Before Canada’s government and military brass celebrated Hunka in parliament, they had provided diplomatic support to fascist hooligans fighting to install a nationalist government in Kiev, and oversaw the training of contemporary Ukrainian military formations openly committed to the furtherance of Nazi ideology.
Ottawa’s celebration of Hunka has also lifted the cover on the country’s post-World War Two policy of naturalizing known Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and weaponizing them as domestic anti-communist shock troops. The post-war immigration wave included the grandfather of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who functioned as one of Hitler’s top Ukrainain propagandists inside Nazi-occupied Poland.
Though Canadian officialdom has worked to suppress this sordid record, it has resurfaced in dramatic fashion through Hunka’s appearance in parliament and the unsettling contents of his online diaries.
Yaroslav Hunka, front and center, as a member of the Waffen-SS Galicia division
“We welcomed the German soldiers with joy”
The March 2011 edition of the journal of the Association of Ukrainian Ex-Combatants in the US contains an unsettling diary entry which had gone unnoticed until recently.
Authored by Yaroslav Hunka, the journal consisted of proud reflections on volunteering for the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia. Hunka decribed the Nazi Wehrmacht as “mystical German knights” when they first arrived in his hometown of Berezhany, and recalled his own service in the Waffen-SS as the happiest time in his life.
“In my sixth grade,” he wrote, “out of forty students, there were six Ukrainians, two Poles, and the rest were Jewish children of refugees from Poland. We wondered why they were running away from such a civilized Western nation as the Germans.”
The Jewish Virtual Library details the extermination of Berezhany’s Jewish population at the hands of the “civilized” Germans: “In 1941 at the end of Soviet occupation 12,000 Jews were living in Berezhany, most of them refugees fleeing the horrors of the Nazi war machine in Europe. During the Holocaust, on Oct. 1, 1941, 500–700 Jews were executed by the Germans in the nearby quarries. On Dec. 18, another 1,200, listed as poor by the Judenrat, were shot in the forest. On Yom Kippur 1942 (Sept. 21), 1,000–1,500 were deported to Belzec and hundreds murdered in the streets and in their homes. On Hanukkah (Dec. 4–5) hundreds more were sent to Belzec and on June 12, 1943, the last 1,700 Jews of the ghetto and labor camp were liquidated, with only a few individuals escaping. Less than 100 Berezhany Jews survived the war.”
When Soviet forces held control of Berezhany, Hunka said he and his neighbors longed for the arrival of Nazi Germany. “Every day,” he recalled, “we looked impatiently in the direction of the Pomoryany (Lvov) with the hope that those mystical German knights, who give bullets to the hated Lyakhs are about to appear.” (Lyakh is a derogatory Ukrainian term for Poles).
In July 1941, when the Nazi German army entered Berezhany, Hunka breathed a sigh of relief. “We welcomed the German soldiers with joy,” he wrote. “People felt a thaw, knowing that there would no longer be that dreaded knocking on the door in the middle of the night, and at least it would be possible to sleep peacefully now.”
Two years later, Hunka joined the First Division of the Galician SS 14th Grenadier Brigade – a unit formed under the personal orders of Heinrich Himmler. When Himmler inspected the Ukrainian volunteers in May 1943 (below), he was accompanied by Otto Von Wachter, the Nazi-appointed governor of Galicia who established the Jewish ghetto in Krakow.
“Your homeland has become so much more beautiful since you have lost – on our initiative, I must say – those residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicia’s good name, namely the Jews…” Himmler reportedly told the Ukrainian troops. “I know that if I ordered you to liquidate the Poles … I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway.”
“Hitler’s elite torturers and murderers have been passed on RCMP orders”
Following the war, Canada’s Liberal government classified thousands of Jewish refugees as “enemy aliens” and held them alongside former Nazis in a network of internment camps enclosed with barbed wire, fearing that they would infect their new country with communism. At the same time, Ottawa placed thousands of Ukrainian veterans of Hitler’s army on the fast-track to citizenship.
The Ukrainian Canadian newsletter lamented on April 1, 1948, “some [of the new citizens] are outright Nazis who served in the German army and police. It is reported that individuals tattoooed with the dread[ed] SS, Hitler’s elite torturers and murderers have been passed on RCMP orders and after being turned down by screening agencies in Europe.”
The journal described the unreformed Nazis as anticommunist shock troops whose “‘ideological leaders’ are already busy fomenting WWIII, propagating a new world holocaust in which Canada will perish.”
In 1997, the Canadian branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center charged the Canadian government with having admitted over 2000 veterans of the 14th Volunteer Waffen-SS Grenadier Division.
That same year, 60 Minutes released a special, “Canada’s Dark Secret,” revealing that some 1000 Nazi SS veterans from Baltic states had been granted citizenship by Canada after the war. Irving Abella, a Canadian historian, told 60 Minutes that the easiest way to get into the country “was by showing the SS tattoo. This proved that you were an anti-Communist.”
Abella also alleged that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (Justin’s father) explained to him that his government kept silent about the Nazi immigrants “because they were afraid of exacerbating relationships between Jews and Eastern European ethnic communities.”
Yaroslav Hunka was among the post-war wave of Ukrainian Nazi veterans welcomed by Canada. According to the city council website of Berezhany, he arrived in Ontario in 1954 and promptly “became a member of the fraternity of soldiers of the 1st Division of the UNA, affiliated to the World Congress of Free Ukrainians.”
Also among the new generation of Ukrainian Canadians was Michael Chomiak, the grandfather of Canada’s second-most-powerful official, Chrystia Freeland. Throughout her career as a journalist and Canadian diplomat, Freeland has advanced her grandfather’s legacy of anti-Russian agitation, while repeatedly exalting wartime Nazi collaborators during public events.
During a March 2, 2020 rally, Canadian Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland proudly displayed a banner of the Ukrainian Partisan Organzation which fought alongside Nazi Germany during WWII.
Canada welcomes Hitler’s top Ukrainian propagandists
Throughout the Nazi German occupation of Poland, the Ukrainian journalist Michael Chomiak served as one of Hitler’s top propagandists. Based in Krakow, Chomiak edited an antisemitic publication called Krakivs’ki visti (Krakow News), which cheerled the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – “The German Army is bringing us our cherished freedom,” the paper proclaimed in 1941 – and glorified Hitler while rallying Ukrainian support for the Waffen-SS Galicia volunteers.
Chomiak spent much of the war living in two spacious Krakow apartments that had been seized from their Jewish owners by the Nazi occupiers. He wrote that he moved numerous pieces of furniture belonging to a certain “Dr. Finkelstein” to another aryanized apartment placed under his control.
Michael Chomiak at a party with Emile Gassner, the Nazi media chief for Occupied Poland
In Canada, Chomiak participated in the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC), which incubated hardcore nationalist sentiment among diaspora members while lobbying Ottawa for hardline anti-Soviet policies. On its website, the UCC boasted of receiving direct Canadian government assistance during World War Two: “The final and conclusive impetus for [establishing the UCC] came from the National War Services of Canada which was anxious that young Ukrainians enlist in military services.”
The UCC’s first president Volodymyr Kubijovych, had served as Chomiak’s boss back in Krakow. He also played a part in the establishment of the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia, announcing upon its formation, “This historic day was made possible by the conditions to create a worthy opportunity for the Ukrainians of Galicia, to fight arm in arm with the heroic German soldiers of the army and the Waffen-SS against Bolshevism, your and our deadly enemy.”
Freeland nurtures media career as undercover regime change agent in Soviet-era Ukraine
Following his death in 1984, Chomiak’s granddaughter, Chrystia Freeland, followed in his footsteps as a reporter for various Ukrainian nationalist publications. She was an early contributor to Kubijovych’s Encyclopedia of Ukraine, which whitewashed the record of Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera, referring to him as a “revolutionary.” Next, she took a staff position at the Edmonton-based Ukrainian News, where her grandfather had served as editor.
A 1988 edition of Ukrainian News (below) featured an article co-authored by Freeland, followed by an ad for a book called “Fighting for Freedom” which glorified the Ukrainian Waffen-SS Galician division.
During Freeland’s time as an exchange student in Lviv, Ukraine, she laid the foundations for her meteoric rise to journalistic success. From behind cover as a Russian literature major at Harvard University, Freeland collaborated with local regime change activists while feeding anti-Soviet narratives to international media bigwigs.
“Countless ‘tendentious’ news stories about life in the Soviet Union, especially for its non-Russian citizens, had her fingerprints as Ms. Freeland set about making a name for herself in journalistic circles with an eye to her future career prospects,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported.
Citing KGB files, the CBC described Freeland as a de facto intelligence agent: “The student causing so many headaches clearly loathed the Soviet Union, but she knew its laws inside and out – and how to use them to her advantage. She skillfully hid her actions, avoided surveillance (and shared that knowledge with her Ukrainian contacts) and expertly trafficked in ‘misinformation.’”
In 1989, Soviet security agents rescinded Freeland’s visa when they caught her smuggling “a veritable how-to guide for running an election” into the country for Ukrainain nationalist candidates.
She quickly transitioned back to journalism, landing gigs in post-Soviet Moscow for the Financial Times and Economist, and eventually rising to global editor-at-large of Reuters – the UK-based media giant which today functions as a cutout for British intelligence operations against Russia.
Canada trains, protects Nazis in post-Maidan Ukraine
When Freeland won a seat as a Liberal member of Canada’s parliament in 2013, she established her most powerful platform yet to agitate for regime change in Russia. Milking her journalistic connections, she published op-eds in top legacy papers like the New York Times urging militant support from Western capitals for Ukraine’s so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” which saw the violent removal of a democratically elected president and his replacement with a nationalist, pro-NATO government in 2014.
In the midst of the coup attempt, a group of neo-Nazi thugs belonging to the C14 organization occupied Kiev’s city council and vandalized the building with Ukrainian nationalist insignia and white supremacist symbols, including a Confederate flag. When riot police chased the fascist hooligans away on February 18, 2014, they took shelter in the Canadian embassy with the apparent consent of the Conservative administration in Ottawa. “Canada was sympathizing with the protesters, at the time, more than the [Ukrainian] government,” a Ukrainian interior ministry official recalled to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Official Canadian support for neo-Nazi militants in Ukraine intensified after the 2015 election of the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau. In November 2017, the Canadian military and US Department of Defense dispatched several officers to Kiev for a multinational training session with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion. (Azov has since deleted the record of the session from its website).
Azov was controlled at the time by Adriy Biletsky, the self-proclaimed “White Leader” who declared, “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.”
As Nazi family history surfaces, Freeland lies to the public
Back in Canada, Freeland’s troubling family history was surfacing for the first time in the media. Weeks after she was appointed in January 2017 as Foreign Minister – a post she predictably exploited to thunder for sanctions on Russia and arms shipments to Ukraine – her grandfather’s role as a Nazi propagandist in occupied Poland became the subject of a raft of reports in the alternative press.
The Trudeau government responded to the factual reports by accusing Russia of waging a campaign of cyber-warfare. “The situation is obviously one where we need to be alert. And that is why the Prime Minister has, among other things, encouraged a complete re-examination of our cyber security systems,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale declared.
Yet few, if any, of the outlets responsible for excavating Chomiak’s history had any connection to Russia’s government. Among the first to expose his collaborationism was Consortium News, an independent, US-based media organization.
For her part, Freeland deployed a spokesperson to lie to the public, flatly denying that “the minister’s grandfather was a Nazi collaborator.”
When Canadian media quoted several Russian diplomats about the allegations, Freeland promptly ordered their deportation, accusing them of exploiting their diplomatic status “to interfere in our democracy.”
By this time, however, her family secrets had tumbled out of the attic and onto the pages of mainstream Canadian media. On March 7, 2017, the Globe and Mail reported on a 1996 article in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies confirming that Freeland’s grandfather had indeed been a Nazi propagandist, and that his writing helped fuel the Jewish genocide. The article was authored by Freeland’s uncle, John-Paul Himka, who thanked his niece in its preface for helping him with “problems and clarifications.”
“Freeland knew for more than two decades that her maternal Ukrainian grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland that vilified Jews during the Second World War,” the Globe and Mail noted.
After being caught on camera this September clapping with unrestrained zeal alongside hundreds of peers for a Ukrainian veteran of Hitler’s SS death squads, Freeland once again invoked her authority to scrub the incident from the record.
Three days after the embarrassing scene, Freeland was back on the floor of parliament, nodding in approval as Liberal House leader Karina Gould introduced a resolution to strike “from the appendix of the House of Commons debates” and from “any House multimedia recording” the recognition made by Speaker Anthony Rota of Yaroslav Hunka.
Thanks to decades of officially supported Holocaust education, the mantra that demands citizens “never forget” has become a guiding light of liberal democracy. In present day Ottawa, however, this simple piece of moral guidance is now treated as a menace which threatens to unravel careers and undermine the war effort in Ukraine.
As Canada’s top officials express embarrassment for honoring a WWII Nazi collaborator in parliament, the leader of the country’s military, Gen. Wayne Eyre, refuses to apologize for his standing ovation. The Canadian military has trained Ukraine’s notorious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion for years.
Canadian politicians have been in frantic damage control mode since feting a former member of the Waffen-SS during a parliamentary reception for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on September 22. The Speaker of Canada’s House of Commons, Anthony Rota, resigned following the incident, while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lamented it as “extremely upsetting,” and opposition leader Pierre Poilievre branded the affair the “biggest single diplomatic embarrassment” in Canada’s history.
But amid the gratuitous public rites of contrition, one influential official has been conspicuously absent: Canada’s highest-ranking general. According to the Ottawa Citizen, Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre has “declined to apologize for his standing ovation” for Yaroslav Hunka, the now-notorious 98-year-old former member of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, whose members gained international infamy for hunting down anti-Nazi partisans, massacring thousands of civilians, and burning hundreds of Polish villagers alive.
The notion that the Nazi proclivities of figures like Hunka could have escaped Eyre’s notice now appears increasingly remote. In 2017, Ukraine’s Azov Battalion published photos on their website publicizing their meeting with high-level Canadian military officials, who had arrived in Ukraine to help train the notoriously neo-Nazi infested unit, which was officially incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard.
A year later, Azov posted photos on its official social media channels showing Canadian military attaché Col. Brian Irwin meeting with its personnel. Responding to a query from journalist Asa Winstanley, a Canadian military spokesman justified training the fascist military on the grounds that the session “includes ongoing dialogue on the development of a diverse, and inclusive Ukraine.”
Just four months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies sent a letter to then-Acting Chief of the Defense Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre and Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan demanding an investigation into the decision to train Ukrainian neo-Nazis. The Jewish group urged them to ensure that such instruction did not continue.
“If Canada is going to be providing military training to foreign forces, then it is our responsibility to know we are not training neo-Nazis,” said Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, policy director of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. “It is our obligation to our Canadian veterans who sacrificed so much defeating fascism in Europe.”
But such warnings apparently went unheeded. The Canadian military not only declined to discontinue its Nazi-training policies, it escalated its program of coaching avowed fascists. Since Russian military operations in Ukraine kicked off in Feb. 2022, Canada has invested a further $1.6 billion USD in the arming and instructing of Kiev’s military.
On the sidelines of Zelensky’s now-infamous address to the Canadian Parliament, Ottawa authorized the further disbursement of another $483 million USD in aid and training on F‑16 fighter jets.
Canada’s scheme of funneling weapons to Kiev and coaching Ukrainian forces officially began in 2014, just months after anti-Russian forces toppled the democratically-elected government of Viktor Yanukovych in a brutal US government-backed coup d’etat. Under the auspices of “Operation UNIFIER,” more than 33,000 Ukrainian troops received “advanced combat instruction by Canadian soldiers,” Canada’s state-affiliated CBC reported in 2022.
Ukraine’s ambassador in Ottawa, Yulia Kovaliv, heralded the training initiative as a “very important initiative.”
“It is also important to further provide Ukraine with heavy weapons,” she added.
In the UK, where Canadian forces frequently travel in order to school Zelensky’s army in the art of killing Russians, the program received a similarly warm welcome. An ebullient British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said in a statement at the time that he was “delighted” that “the Canadian Armed Forces will be joining the growing international effort to support the training of Ukrainian soldiers in the UK.”
“Canada’s expertise will provide a further boost to the programme and ensure that the Ukrainian men and women, coming to the UK to train to defend their country, will get a wide pool of experience and skills from both UK forces and our international partners,” Wallace crowed.
Just what exactly the nationalist-leaning members of Ukrainian armed forces did with the training and tacit blessing of Canada has yet to be ascertained. But Azov members have been implicated in a number of war crimes. Despite the unit’s recent push to whitewash its Nazi tendencies, Azov — which has since expanded to a full-fledged brigade under Kiev’s official command — retains as its leader Andrey Biletsky, who once described Ukraine’s role on the global stage as helping to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen.”
Biletsky has taken pains to distance himself from the comment, but the unit has not undertaken similar efforts to distance itself from Biletsky. In September 2023, Biletsky was photographed proudly shaking hands with Zelensky during an intimate meeting with the Ukrainian President on the outskirts of Bakhmut. And Zelensky himself appears to have few problems with publicly associating with the group.
In a post commemorating the encounter with Ukraine’s most celebrated Nazi formation, Zelensky declared: “I am grateful to everyone who defends our country and people, who brings our victory closer.”
It was an embarrassing event in the Canadian Parliament in late September as Ukrainian Nazi-linked veteran Yaroslav Hunka was honored as a World War II “hero.” Upon finding this out, Canadian officials scrambled to save face. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed that this was “deeply embarrassing.” House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota, after getting more information about Hunka (after the fact), regretted his decision to invite him. Democracy Now interviewed Ukrainian journalist Lev Golinkin about this revelation.
It is rather irresponsible that there was no relevant research done on Hunka’s history before anything occurred. Perhaps Canadian officials rushed to prop up Hunka as it relates to the Russia-Ukraine War, of which Canada is a supporter. What is also irresponsible is the standing ovation Hunka got in the parliament, although at the time the audience was unaware of Hunka’s history.
According to the BBC, Hunka served in the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division during World War II. The soldiers in the Division were mainly Ukrainian, and under Nazi command. Heinrich Himmler, who systematized the Nazi policy of genocide against Jews and other “undesirables,” paid a visit to the Division and was very proud of its support for the cause of the Third Reich.
Hunka kept a journal of his time in the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division. In it, Hunka described the Nazis as “mystical German knights” and was in awe of them. Hunka wrote that his service to the Division was the happiest time of his life.
Meanwhile, Nazi Germany was carrying out its genocidal policies. In Berezhany, where Hunka was born, 12,000 Jews were living there and were attempting to flee so they would not be eventually targeted by the Nazis. Many could not escape. Max Blumenthal, Editor-in-Chief of The Gray Zone, gave detailed examples of the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis:
“During the Holocaust, on Oct. 1941, 500–700 Jews were executed by the Germans in the nearby quarries. On Dec. 18, another 1,200 were shot in the forest. On Yom Kippur in Sept.1942, 1,000–1,500 were deported to Belzec and hundreds murdered in the streets and in their homes. On Hanukkah (Dec. 4–5) hundreds more were sent to Belzec concentration camp and on June 12, 1043, the last 1,700 Jews of the ghetto and labor camp were liquidated, with only a few individuals escaping. Less than 100 Berezhany Jews survived the war.”
The Soviets had control of Berezhany, and Hunka and other ultra-nationalist Ukrainians were hoping Nazi Germany would come to their rescue. Hunka wrote in his journal that “Every day we looked impatiently in the direction of the Pomoryany (Lvov) with the hope that those mystical German knights [would] appear.” Hunka got his wish when the Nazi Germany army entered Berezhany. Hunka: “We welcomed the German soldiers with joy.” This was in 1941after the Soviet Union left, ending its occupation of Berezhany.
Hunka eventually joined the First Division of the Galician SS 14th Grenadier Brigade, which was created by Heinrich Himmler. He inspected the brigade, and later commented, according to Blumenthal, “Your homeland has become much more beautiful since you have lost – on our initiative, I must say – those residents were so often a dirty blemish, namely the Jews…I know that if I ordered you to liquidate the Poles I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway.”
After World War II, Ukrainian Nazi veterans allied with Nazi Germany acquired Canadian citizenship and established their own communities, along with other Ukrainian immigrants.
The main reason why Canada allowed Ukrainian Nazis into the country was because of their rabid anticommunism. The Cold War produced many instances of Canada giving citizenship to several Ukrainian Nazis. For example, 1,000 Nazi SS veterans from the Baltic states became Canadian citizens after the war ended. If one had an SS tattoo then it was all the more, easier to become a citizen of Canada, besides being an anticommunist. Thousands more Ukrainian Nazis, for example, were given citizenship in Ottawa, Canada.
The wave of Ukrainian Nazi veterans going to Canada included Yaroslav Hunka, arriving in 1954 and going to Ontario. He had become a member of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians. Ukrainian Nazis were now on the side of the “Free World.”
No doubt, Hunka and other Ukrainian Nazi veterans have been celebrated in Ukraine, in particular, after the 2014 U.S.-backed coup. Before that, when the Soviet Union existed, the right-wing in Ukraine was not in the mainstream, but on the outer fringes of politics. (In the USSR, it wasn’t a case of Russia and Ukraine being at each other’s throats, like they are now.) The coup caused the right to reemerge and is now practically in the political mainstream. Neo-Nazis, fascists, etc. have been marching in the streets, making a spectacle of themselves. These “stormtroopers” carry the Ukrainian flag and also flags depicting Nazi symbols on them.
If there is any Ukrainian that is enthusiastically followed in the country more than the others, it is Stepan Bandera, who was a Nazi collaborator during World War II. Writing for Jacobin, Daniel Lazare gives examples of Bandera’s personality traits:
“Bandera was indeed noxious as any personality thrown up by the hellish 1930s and ‘40s. The son of a nationalist-minded Greek Catholic priest, Bandera was the sort of self-punishing fanatic who sticks pins under his fingernails to prepare him for torture at the hands of his enemies. As a university student at Lviv, he is said to have moved on to burning himself with an oil lamp, slamming a door on his fingers, and whipping himself with a belt. “”Admit, Stepan!’” he would cry out. ‘No, I don’t admit!’”
Bandera sounded like he was a masochist. And he would do anything for the cause of Ukrainian independence. But the independence Bandera wanted was characterized by right-wing motives. One could dare say this is not independence at all, but an elitist caricature of it. With the right being in power, it’s as though they think they have the right to violate the rights of others. More directly put, imposing Nazism, fascism, etc.
Having a violent streak, Bandera joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and proceeded to influence a tendency in the organization that was already violent. Lazare wrote, “In 1933, he organized an attack on the Soviet council in Lviv. A year later, he directed the assassination of the Polish minister of the interior. He ordered the execution of alleged informers and was responsible for other deaths as well as the OUN took to robbing banks, post offices, police stations, and private households in search of funds.”
There was a series of events which caused Bandera to move further rightward. Poland was in control of Western Ukraine, and when Ukrainians like Bandera struck back with arson attacks, the Poles cracked down. Poland responded with repression and cultural warfare. Polish farmers were brought to Ukraine to make use of the land changing the demographics, Ukrainian schools were closed down, And there was even an attempt to ban the word “Ukrainian.”
In 1930, the OUN used arson and sabotage to resist Polish control. Poland again cracked down. There were about 30,000 Ukrainians thrown into prison. If that wasn’t enough, Polish politicians were considering to embark on an extermination campaign. Lazare wrote, “…a German journalist who traveled through eastern Galicia in early 1939 reported that local Ukrainians were calling for ‘Uncle Fuhrer’ to step in and impose a solution of his own on the Poles.”
Ethnic tensions continued in Eastern Europe, in particular Western Ukraine. Combined with that, World War II was approaching. Lazare: “Conceivably, Bandera might have responded to the growing disorder by moving to the political left. Previously, liberal Bolshevik cultural policies in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic had caused a surge in pro-communist sentiment in the neighboring Polish province of Volhynia.”
But Bandera moved even further to the right. His membership in the OUN practically indoctrinated Bandera into being antisemitic. Ukrainian ultra-nationalists’ feelings devolved into a hatred for the Jews. Further, what the ultra-nationalists ideally wanted was a pure Ukraine with no Jews, Poles, Russians, etc. And that obviously included no Bolsheviks, communists, socialists; anything that contradicted Ukrainian purity.
The OUN embarked on a pogrom against Jews. Its members, for example, smashed the windows of Jewish homes in 1935. The next year was worse. OUN members burned about 100 Jewish homes, thus making the families who were living in those houses homeless.
Bandera, meanwhile, was arrested and put on trial for murder. Rather than expressing any guilt, Bandera taunted the court, giving the fascist salute and saying, “Glory to Ukraine.” Bandera was to serve a life sentence and began doing so.
Nazi Germany, however, took over Western Poland in 1939. This gave Bandera an opportunity to escape. And he did, going to Lviv, the capital of Eastern Galicia. But the Soviet Union eventually made an incursion into the territory, and Bandera fled again, toward the side of the Nazis. Lazare wrote, “Eventually, he and the OUN leadership settled in German controlled Cracow, where they set about preparing the organization for further battles yet to come.”
Then, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The OUN knew this ahead of time, and this was an opportunity to attack in an effort to establish a Greater Ukraine. The OUN drew up a document entitled “The Struggle and Activities of the OUN in Wartime.” Lazare gave details as to the contents of this document:
“It called on members to take advantage of the ‘favorable situation’ posed by a ‘war between Moscow and other states’ to create a national revolution that would draw up all Ukraine in its vortex. It conceived of revolution as a great purification process in which ‘Muscovites, Poles, and Jews’ would be ‘destroyed…in particular those who protect the [Soviet] regime.”’
Lazare quoted more of the document: “We treat the coming German army as the army of allies. We inform them that the Ukrainian authority is already established. It is under the control of the OUN under the leadership of Stepan Bandera…”
Bandera and his followers saw the relationship with Nazi Germany as “tactical.” But it was deeply ideological. There was the scenario of setting up a one-party state with Bandera as the “Fuhrer.” And Ukraine would be under the wing of Nazi Germany.
Hitler, however, saw the Ukrainians as inferior Slavs. Lazy, disorganized, and nihilistic as the Russians.
Ukraine was important to Hitler because of its grain supplies. Nazi Germany proceeded to expropriate grain out of Ukraine on a such scale that would it threaten to cause starvation for about 25 million people. The Nazis had a plan called the Generalplan Ost. The objective was to kill or expel 80% of the Slavic population and replace them with German settlers. Bandera, however, wanted to desperately to maintain an alliance with Nazi Germany, despite being put under house arrest. Lazare wrote, “Bandera and his followers continued to long for an axis victory.” Quoting Bandera, “German and Ukrainian interests in Eastern Europe are identical.” He added that Ukrainian nationalism had taken shape “in a spirit similar to the National Socialist ideas.”
But Hitler wasn’t impressed. That prompted OUN members to form the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). And the goal for the UPA was ethnic cleansing, notably against Poles, driving them out of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Between 1943 and 1945, the UPA killed about 100,000 Poles. And the campaign against the Jews continued.
In the last phases of World War II, Bandera and his followers still continued to fight alongside Nazi Germany, as the latter was retreating and on to eventual defeat. The Soviet Union had the momentum as its Red Army came closer.
Even in the post-war era, Bandera and the OUN carried out oppression against “undesirables.” Lazar provided details:
“OUN fighters killed not only informers, collaborators, and eastern Ukrainians transferred to Galicia and Volhynia to work as teachers, or administrators, but their families as well. ‘Soon the Bolsheviks will conduct the grain levy,’” they warned on one occasion. ‘Anyone among you who brings grain to the collection points will be killed like a dog, and your entire family butchered.’”
The OUN killed 30,000 people before the Soviet Union wiped out the resistance in 1950. Eventually, in 1959, Lazar wrote, “a Soviet agent managed to slip through Bandera’s security ring in Munich and kill him with a blast from a cyanide spray gun.” Today, Bandera is honored in Ukraine to the point of it being a cult.
That forced the Ukrainian ultra-nationalists to retreat to the fringes of society. But in 1991 after the dissolving of the USSR, the OUN, along with other right-wing entities, reemerged in Ukraine. They have names like Svoboda, Right Sector, the Azov brigade, etc. And they still want a pure Ukraine.
Canada has been dealing with worldwide criticism of the Hunka scandal. In making assumptions that Hunka was a “hero,” Canada has soiled its reputation; and all for a proxy war.
Media coverage of the Canadian Parliament’s standing ovation in September for Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Ukrainian Canadian who fought for the Nazis in World War II, has included egregious Holocaust revisionism.
On September 22, following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address to the Canadian parliament, Canada’s then–Speaker of the House Anthony Rota introduced Hunka:
We have here in the chamber today a Ukrainian-Canadian veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today.
Rota went on to call Hunka “a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service” (Politico, 9/24/23). Parliamentarians of all political parties gave Hunka two standing ovations, and Zelenskyy raised his fist to salute the man (Sky News, 9/26/23).
Then the New York–based Forward (9/24/23) pointed out that Hunka had fought for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, also known as the Galicia Division, of the SS. (The SS, short for Schutzstaffel, “Protection Squadron,” was the military wing of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.)
‘A complicated past’
“You have to tread softly on these issues,” said the main expert used by the CBC (9/28/23) to discuss the topic of Ukraine and Nazism.
Covering the subsequent controversy, the CBC (9/28/23) ran the headline, “Speaker’s Honoring of Former Nazi Soldier Reveals a Complicated Past, Say Historians.” In the context of the Holocaust, “complicated” functions as a hand-waving euphemism that gets in the way of holding perpetrators accountable: If a decision is “complicated,” it’s understandable, even if it’s wrong.
Digital reporter/editor Jonathan Migneault, who wrote the piece, soft-pedaled the Galicia Division in other ways too. He said that some of the Ukrainians who joined it did so “for ideological reasons, in opposition to the Soviet Union, in hopes of creating an independent Ukrainian state.”
That’s quite a whitewashing of the ideological package that goes with signing up for the SS, leaving out that this vision for an “independent Ukrainian state” included the extermination of Jewish, LGBTQ, Roma and Polish minorities. As far as the “hopes of creating an independent Ukrainian state” alibi, the Per Anders Rudling (Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 2012) documents that “there is no overt indication that the unit [of Ukrainian Waffen-SS recruits] in any way was dedicated to Ukrainian statehood, let alone independence.”
‘Caught between Hitler and Stalin’
Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick (9/26/23) mocked Poland for wanting to extradite Hunka, whose unit massacred Poles during World War II, because “Poland has a notorious history of antisemitism.”
Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick (9/26/23) also used the word “complicated” to diminish Nazi atrocities, and mock the Polish government’s interest in having Hunka extradited for war crimes:
Funny, they’ve had 73 years to ask Canada for him. It’s almost as if Poland has a notorious history of antisemitism but that’s crazy talk….
Rota should have understood how complicated history is, how, post-Holodomor, a Ukrainian caught between Hitler and Stalin made a fatal choice.
We can hate Hunka for that now. I do.
But would every Canadian MP have made immaculate choices inside Stalin’s “Bloodlands” in 1943? Of course you and I would have been heroic, joined the White Rose movement, been executed for our troubles. But everyone?
Mallick refers to Ukraine as “Stalin’s ‘Bloodlands,’” citing the Holodomor, the 1930s famine in the Soviet Union that killed an estimated 3.5 million Ukrainians, as well as millions in other parts of the USSR. Yet her link takes readers to a review of the book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which—its own flaws notwithstanding (Jacobin, 9/9/14)—discusses the killings in Ukraine and elsewhere by Stalin and, on a significantly more egregious scale, Hitler. Acknowledging that the phrase she’s borrowing refers to both Soviet crimes and the Nazis’ genocides would have made the choice of joining the Nazis seem rather less sympathetic.
Meanwhile, Mallick’s baffling comments about Poland erase the Nazis’ systematic killing of Polish people. Polish history has indeed been marred by horrific antisemitism, with many Polish people complicit in the Holocaust, as she glibly references; this does not erase the fact that the Nazis also murdered 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, or negate Poland’s desire to see their killers brought to justice. As Lev Golinkin (Forward, 9/24/23) pointed out, the Galicia Division that Hunka belonged to was visited by SS head Heinrich Himmler, who spoke of the soldiers’ “willingness to slaughter Poles.” Three months earlier, SS Galichina subunits perpetrated what is known as the Huta Pieniacka massacre, burning 500 to 1,000 Polish villagers alive.
The non-Nazi SS
Keir Giles (Politico, 10/2/23) advances the argument that joining the SS and swearing “absolute obedience to the commander in chief of the German Armed Forces Adolf Hitler” doesn’t make you a Nazi.
An old cliché uses the analogy of gradually boiling a frog to explain how fascism takes hold in societies, but readers of Keir Giles’ intervention (Politico, 10/2/23) will feel like they are eyes-deep in a bubbling cauldron.
Giles, who said the relevant history is “complicated” four times and “complex” twice, wrote an article entitled “Fighting Against the USSR Didn’t Necessarily Make You a Nazi.” That’s a dubious claim in a piece focused on World War II, when the Soviet Union was the main force fighting Nazi Germany, and thus fighting the Soviets made you at least an ally of Nazis.
More to the point, the unit Hunka belonged to was a formal division of the SS, trained and armed by Nazi Germany (Forward, 9/27/23), which “fought exclusively to serve Nazi aims” (National Post, 9/25/23).
Giles, however, opened by writing:
Everybody knows that a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has even got its boots on.
And the ongoing turmoil over Canada’s parliament recognizing former SS trooper Yaroslav Hunka highlights one of the most important reasons why.
Something that’s untrue but simple is far more persuasive than a complicated, nuanced truth….
In the case of Hunka, the mass outrage stems from his enlistment with one of the foreign legions of the Waffen-SS, fighting Soviet forces on Germany’s eastern front.
Setting aside that Giles omits “and butchering innocent people” when he describes Waffen-SS activities as “fighting Soviet forces,” his suggestion that calling Hunka a Nazi is a “lie” does not withstand even minimal scrutiny. For instance, Rudling (Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 2012) documents that, from August 29, 1943, onward, Ukrainian Waffen-SS recruits were sworn in with the following oath:
I swear before God this holy oath, that in the battle against Bolshevism, I will give absolute obedience to the commander in chief of the German Armed Forces Adolf Hitler, and as a brave soldier I will always be prepared to lay down my life for this oath.
Vowing “absolute obedience” to Hitler, and swearing that you’re willing to die for him, makes you as root and branch a Nazi as Rudolf Hess or Hermann Göring.
‘Simple narratives’
After drawing these bogus distinctions between the Nazis and their units, Giles moved on to genocide denial:
The idea that foreign volunteers and conscripts were being allocated to the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht on administrative rather than ideological grounds is a hard sell for audiences conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide….
Repeated exhaustive investigations—including by not only the Nuremberg trials but also the British, Canadian and even Soviet authorities—led to the conclusion that no war crimes or atrocities had been committed by this particular unit.
Giles doesn’t name any investigations by British or Soviet officials, so it’s unclear what he’s talking about on those points, but he’s lying about Nuremberg. The Nuremberg Tribunals did not specifically address the Galicia Division (Guardian, 9/25/23), but found that the combat branch of which they were a part, the Waffen-SS, “was a criminal organization”:
In dealing with the SS, the Tribunal includes all persons who had been officially accepted as members of the SS, including the members of the Allgemeine SS, members of the Waffen-SS, members of the SS Totenkopfverbaende, and the members of any of the different police forces who were members of the SS.
Giles asserted that “simple narratives like ‘everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes’ are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp”—but everybody in the SS was, quite literally, guilty of war crimes.
Heavily censored report
The Ottawa Citizen (9/27/23), citing B’nai Brith, reported that “the Canadian government’s approach to Nazi war criminals had been marked with ‘intentional harboring of known Nazi war criminals.’”
The Canadian investigation Giles refers to is a 1986 Canadian government report that claims that membership in the Galicia Division did not in and of itself constitute a war crime. This conclusion is highly suspect when read against the Nuremberg tribunal’s judgment, and the report also has to be understood in the broader context of Canadian state investigations into Nazis in the country. As the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese (9/27/23) explained:
The federal government has withheld a second part of a 1986 government commission report about Nazis who settled in Canada. In addition, it has heavily censored another 1986 report examining how Nazis were able to get into Canada. More than 600 pages of that document, obtained by this newspaper and other organizations through the Access to Information law, have been censored.
Neither Giles nor any other member of the public knows what the Canadian government is hiding about its investigation, or why it’s concealing this information, so it’s disingenuous for him to present the fraction of the government’s conclusions to which he has access as if it is the final word on the Galicia Division or anything else.
As to Giles’ jaw-dropping complaint that people are “conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide,” the Nuremberg Trial concluded that the SS carried out persecution and extermination of the Jews, brutalities and killings in concentration camps, excesses in the administration of occupied territories, the administration of the slave labor program, and the mistreatment and murder of prisoners.
Perhaps the public is “conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide” because the SS carried out genocide.
As disconcerting as it is that authors like Giles are writing fascist propaganda—and that Mallick veers perilously close to the same—it’s even more alarming that editors at outlets like the Star, CBC and Politico deem such intellectually and morally bankrupt material worthy of publication.
7. “Hunkagate, or How ‘Inglourious Basterds’ Eat Crow” by C.B. Forde; The Postil; 10/01/2023.
Note to self: The Nazis are no longer the bad guys, the Russians are.
So, why is it so surprising that Justin Trudeau honored a former Waffen SS veteran (Yaroslav Hunka), in parliament, on September 22, 2023? There is no point in insulting our own intelligence by even considering that it was solely the fault of one man (Anthony Rota), and no one else even knew what Rota was up to. . . .
. . . . Enter Warren Thornton, in Britain. It was he who first noticed as to what had happened in the Canadian Parliament. He just pointed out the obvious: in World War Two, the only ones fighting the Russians were the Nazis and their ilk, because the Russians (or Soviets at that time) were “our” allies. Ergo, Hunka could not be anything other than a Nazi. . . .
. . . . Back in Britain, Mr. Thornton was rewarded for all his hard work by being promptly arrested for spreading “malinformation.” This is information that is true but which the government feels can cause “harm.” So, British authorities were busy protecting Hunka, since we can’t have anyone maligning the Nazis, can we? Thankfully, Mr. Thornton was released because he hung tough. . . .
8. FTR#300 “If Music Be The Food of Love, Munch On, Part 3”
Fascism and the Dangers of Economic Concentration
Is a peaceful settlement to the conflict in Ukraine at all plausible? Well, if we listen to the reports we’ve been repeatedly hearing in the Western press, yes, such a settlement is not only possible but something the Kremlin has been quietly sending feeling out about for months now. But that’s assuming we aren’t also listening to the explicit denials of such reports by the Kremlin. It’s a weird media mystery, but a potentially important one.
The latest examples of these reports came in the form of a Bloomberg report from a few days ago based on two anonymous sources claiming that Vladimir Putin has indicated that he would not oppose Ukraine’s “neutral status” and eventual NATO membership, as long as Kyiv recognizes Russia’s claims to the occupied territories. It was a remarkable claim. On the one hand, it’s not hard to imagine Putin is open to peace negotiations. That’s how this conflict will ultimately end. But it’s exceedingly difficult to imagine that a conflict that was started in large part of fears of Ukraine’s NATO membership will end up getting resolved with that NATO membership. And yet that’s the narrative we keep hearing.
In fact, few a days after that Bloomberg report, former NATO Supreme Commander James Stavridis gave an interview where he also speculated that peace negotiations could feasibly get underway near the end of the year, in particular after the US presidential election. And according to Stavridis, the eventual peace plan could resemble “the Korean scenario”, with Russian regaining control over Crimea and parts of the land bridge but also with Ukraine moving towards NATO membership.
So we have to ask, are these real reports about actual behind-the-scenes peace feelers being sent out by the Kremlin and that, amazingly, could include NATO membership for Ukraine? Or are we just looking at the kind of ‘think pieces’ designed to start getting Western audiences used to the idea of an end to the conflict that doesn’t involve a complete expulsion of Russia?
Either way, it’s important to keep in mind that Western audiences aren’t the only audiences hearing these reports. Which raises one of the other major questions looming over any possible peace deal that could end this conflict: what will Azov and the rest of the Ukrainian far right do in response to these proposals? NATO membership isn’t exactly a tempting consolation prize for these groups, after all. Don’t forget how Svoboda, Right Sector, and National Corps (Azov’s political wing) jointly issue a manifesto back in 2017 calling for moving Ukraine away from the West and the creation of “a new European Union with the Baltic States,” along with nuclear weapons for Ukraine.
But it’s not just the far right’s stated goals that should be a source of concern here. It’s their demonstrated ability to block peace negotiations and get away with it. Recall how, back in 2019, after President Volodymyr Zelensky was overwhelmingly election on a platform of negotiating some sort of settlement for what was then still a civil war, Zelensky traveled to the town of Zolote on the eastern front to meet with the public and soldiers as he was trying to reach some sort of ceasefire agreement, he was confronted by a number of members of Azov angry about any such negotiations. After video of confrontation went viral, Azov founder Andriy Biletsky vowed to bring thousands of soldiers to confront Zelensky next. And Zelensky wasn’t just subjected to multiple death threats by far right leaders over the ceasefire negotiations. He was also thwarted in his demands that the Azov members in relinquish what were then illegally possessed weapons in the town. Weapons that could be used to block the temporary peace he was trying to establish in the area. And it was none other than Vadym Troyan — the former deputy commander of the Azov Battalion who was elevated to the position of the Chief of Police for the Kyiv Oblast back in 2014 — who insisted that, no, Azov possessed those weapons legally, despite the Ukrainian military stating the opposite.
And that episode in Zolote in 2019 was over a temporary local ceasefire. And episode that didn’t involve any real punishment for effectively blackmailing the country’s president with threats of violence. What can we expect from Ukraine’s Nazis today should some sort of serious peace negotiation really start to get underway? How long before we see some sort of coup attempt? And what will the West’s response be if Ukraine suddenly finds itself with an far right militant government intent on continuing to wage war at any cost? These are the kinds of questions looming over this whole process that serve as a reminder that, despite the Kremlin’s denials over these reports, the Kremlin probably isn’t going to be hardest party get to the negotiation table:
“As the invasion nears its second anniversary, U.S. media outlets have in recent months reported that Putin may have been signaling an openness to a ceasefire deal since at least September.”
Murmurings of peace overtures from Putin aren’t new at this point. US media has been issue such reports for months now. The latest being the recent Bloomberg report suggesting not only that Putin might be open to a peace arrangement that results in Ukraine’s “neutral status”, but that Putin could even be open to eventual NATO membership for Ukraine as long as Kyiv recognizes Russia’s control of the eastern provinces. The Kremlin is formally denying such reports. But with this just being the latest in a steady string of reports hinting at the Kremlin’s willingness to negotiate — at the same time the Ukrainian counter-offensive has largely failed to gain any ground — we have to wonder how much these reports are a reflection of real quiet negotiations taking place in the background:
Or are these reports based on nothing but instead purely intended to psychologically prepare Western populations for inevitable negotiations that concede territory to Russia? That remains very unclear. It’s not hard to imagine negotiations are quietly happening, but it’s also not hard to imagine that Russia may not be in a rush to arrive at a negotiated settlement at this point given how the war is going for Russian forces.
And that brings us to the following article published in the Kyiv Post, a few days after the Bloomberg piece, about the predictions by former NATO Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis. According to Stavridis, the period following the 2024 US elections could be a moment for negotiations on Ukraine. Stavridis went on to speculated that some sort of settlement might involve Russia retaining control over areas like Crimea and the land bridge, while Ukraine moves towards NATO membership. So for whatever reason, we keep getting reports in the Western press suggesting the conflict in Ukraine might end sooner rather than later with a settlement that concedes territory to Russia but also ends up with Ukraine joining NATO:
““I think toward the end of this year, probably after the US elections, we’ve got a moment for potential negotiation,” Stavridis said in an interview on “The Cats Roundtable” on WABC 770 AM on Sunday.”
Might there be a period of negotiations closer to the end of 2024? Time will tell, but the other implied part of Stavridis’s prediction is the political reality that there is unlikely to be any sort of formal push on these kinds of negotiations from the US until the US presidential election has been resolved one way or another.
But it’s also hard not to notice how these frequent predictions are setting up expectations inside Ukraine that NATO membership is going to be the consolation prize for not winning back that lost territory. Expectations that are going to ultimately be up to Russia to agree to which may not happen. Preventing Ukraine’s membership into NATO is one of the overarching stated objectives for Russians “special military operation” in the first place, after all:
So with the West seemingly dangling some sort of outline for a peace settlement that involves a swap of land for NATO membership, we have to not just ask how the Ukrainian public at large might accept such a deal put in particular how Ukraine’s powerful Nazi organizations might respond to such prospects. How will groups like Azov or C14 — both of which have already been deeply incorporated into Ukraine’s official national security infrastructure by this point — react to such plans should they appear to have any hope of coming to fruition? NATO membership and much closer ties to the West isn’t exactly something groups like Azov want to see either. Recall how Svoboda, Right Sector, and National Corps (Azov’s political wing) jointly issue a manifesto back in 2017 calling for moving Ukraine away from the West and the creation of “a new European Union with the Baltic States,” along with nuclear weapons for Ukraine. How will Ukraine’s powerful far right react to news about serious peace settlements?
We already know the answer on some level. After all, we already saw how the far right will respond to peace negotiations back in 2019 after President Volodymyr Zelensky was overwhelmingly election on a platform of negotiating some sort of settlement for what was then still a civil war. As we saw, when Zelensky traveled to the town of Zolote on the eastern front to meet with the public and soldiers as he was trying to reach some sort of ceasefire agreement, he was confronted by a number of members of Azov angry about any such negotiations. After video of confrontation went viral, Azov founder Andriy Biletsky vowed to bring thousands of soldiers to confront Zelensky next. Zelensky was facing open threats of violence if he didn’t change his stance. Threats that went unpunished.
So with the prospect of a replay of that 2019 threat to end Zelensky should he pursue peace now underway, it’s worth taking another look back at that 2019 confrontation in Zolote. Zelensky wasn’t just subjected to multiple death threats by far right leaders, but he was also thwarted in his demands that the Azov members in relinquish what were then illegally possessed weapons. Weapons that could be used to block the temporary peace he was trying to establish in the area. And as we’re going to see, it was none other than Vadym Troyan — the former deputy commander of the Azov Battalion who was elevated to the position of the Chief of Police for the Kyiv Oblast back in 2014 — who intervened and declared that Azov’s weapons were all possessed legally even though military officials had previously stated the opposite. It was a chilling example of just how powerful the far right had already become by the time Zelensky was elected. Powerful enough to thwart a president who had just been overwhelmingly been election a platform to seek a peaceful settlement:
“The president was pushing a mutual disengagement of troops and armaments at the front line flashpoint. The veterans opposed this plan.”
The elected president of Ukraine has a mutual disengagement plan for the front line, but Ukraine’s Nazis had different plans. Guess who won:
But the opposition to the ceasefire proposal wasn’t the main point of contention between Zelensky and the far right that day. Their possession of illegal weapons was the primary source of conflict. Weapons that could be unilaterally used to disrupt any negotiated ceasefire. Zelensky issued direct orders to National Corp head Denys Yantar to remove the weapons from the town. And Andriy Biletsky responded with a video threatening to send thousands of troops to confront Zelensky:
But those threats from Biletsky weren’t the most disturbing part of this story. That prize goes to the the fact that we found former Azov deputy commander Vadym Troyan — then serving as the head of the police for the Kyiv Oblast — running cover for Azov over these illegal weapons. Cover that defied the Ukrainian military:
So we had a showdown in Zolote in 2019 with Zelensky and the Ukrainian military on one side and Ukraine’s Nazis on the other side, with the Nazis coming out on top. And this was a showdown over a peace proposal that was far less substantive than the kind of we is being bandied about in the Western press. It was just a temporary ceasefire around one area on the front line. If that was how Azov respond in 2019, what kind of reaction can we expect to peace negotiations that include land concessions in exchange for membership in NATO? What kind of far right insurrection can expect at that point? And what kind of access to weapons — legal or not — will those far right forces have now that they’ve been formerly incorporated into the Ukrainian military? These are just some of the questions looming over the Ukrainian peace process. Questions that, generally speaking, wouldn’t have to be asked at all had there not been such an open embrace of these kinds of extremists in the first place by so many of groups long claiming to ‘support Ukraine’.
@Pterrafractyl–
Remember that the “Moscow Times” is a right-wing paper named to fool readers into thinking this represents what Russians are thinking and/or saying.
Keep up the great work!
Prime Minister invited Waffen-SS veteran Hunka to his official reception for Zelensky
The Speaker took the fall for Trudeau’s actions. Canada is crawling with Nazis, eh?
High-level shakeups are underway inside Ukraine’s military. The kind of potentially destabilizing high-level shakeups that should raise serious questions about whether or nor the shakeups are going to be limited to military. Might we see a “march of Kiev”-style shakeup of the presidency by the time the dust settles? It’s increasingly looking possible given the recent turn of events.
For starters, we got confirmation last week of something that’s been hinting at for a while now: Volodymyr Zelensky has replaced general Valery Zaluzhny with General Oleksandr Syrsky as the head of Ukraine’s armed forces. It’s a move that came at the same time polls have shown a precipitous drop in Zelenksy’s public support at the same time Zaluzhny’s political star has been rising. In fact, recent polls have for the presidency have support for Zaluzhny at 40% compared to to Zelensky’s 42%. The fact that Zelensky suspended the election scheduled for this Spring back in November doesn’t help.
Beyond Zaluzhny’s rising poll numbers is another significant growing risk as a result of this move: the Ukrainian armed forces are reportedly livid with Zelensky over the move, in part because it’s seen as a sign that little will change regarding how Ukraine approaches the fight. Notably, Zaluzhny has been advocating for a mass mobilization of adults into the military, something Zelensky has so far resisted.
But there’s another disturbing angle to this story: it appears Zaluzhny has already identified his core base of support. At least that’s what we might infer from his recent decisions to be photographed with 67th Mechanized Brigade commander Andriy Stempitsky. That’s a Right Sector brigade that’s been formerly incorporated into the military and Stempitsky is one of Right Sector’s leaders. The photo shows Zalushny and Stempitsky smiling and being presented with an award from his brigade in front a photo of Stepan Bandera. The photo was posted on Facebook by Stempitsky on February 2, the same day the Washington Post reported on Zelensky planning on firing Zaluzhny. So at the same time Zelensky appears to have enraged the Ukrainian armed forces with this move, Zaluzhny is openly cuddling up to the far right.
But let’s not forget that far right militias now incorporated into Ukraine’s military aren’t the only source of potential instability for the country. There’s also all the ‘foreign volunteers’ who have been flooding into the country. Volunteers who were generally ideologically motivated. At least at first. But ideology isn’t necessarily the primary motivation at this point. At least that doesn’t appear to be the case for the growing number of former Colombian soldiers who have been heading to Ukraine. Instead, it’s about the money. It turns out Ukraine pays much better than the Colombian military. And thanks to Ukraine having now set up the infrastructure for Spanish-speaking troops, more and more soldiers from the Spanish-speaking world can travel to Ukraine in search of a small fortune.
How will the growing number of financially-motivated foreign soldiers inside Ukraine play out should we end up seeing a showdown between Ukraine’s civilian government and the military? These are the kinds of questions we have to start asking. Sooner rather than later. After all, the elections may have been suspended. But a ‘march on Kiev’ doesn’t need a schedule. Just a lot of really pissed off troops and someone to lead them:
“The decision to name Syrsky as commander in chief, however, is expected to cause backlash among troops in the field. Among rank-and-file soldiers, Syrsky is especially disliked, considered by many to be a Soviet-style commander who kept forces under fire far too long in the eastern city of Bakhmut, which eventually fell to Russian control. Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers were killed and many more were wounded defending the city, which had limited strategic value.”
Expectations of a backlash inside the military. That’s more than a little ominous. But those are the warnings we are getting in the wake of Zelensky’s decision to replace General Zaluzhny with the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces Oleksandr Syrsky. Warnings pointing to a deep sense of betrayal along with an expectation that Ukraine’s military will be expected to engage in more politically symbolic but militarily questionable commitments like the catastrophic attempt to hold onto Bakhmut.
But it’s not just a difference on military strategy that divides Zaluhzny and Syrsky. There’s also Zaluhzny’s call for the mass mobilization of nearly 500,000 new troops, something Zelensky has resisted. So at the same time this move is already causing a drop in Ukraine’s military morale, in part over concerns that the infantry will be asked by Syrsky to engage in more suicidal missions, it’s also a sign that a mass mobilization isn’t going to happen. It points to a range of crises that could turn Zelensky into a very unpopular figure inside Ukraine’s military. Will all the consequences that could follow:
Also note how this high-level shakeup isn’t limited to Zaluzhny. Other generals are expected to be replaced. How loyal is Ukraine’s military going to be to Zelensky’s office by the time this shakeup is over?
So with growing discontent over this decision and more high-level replacements on the way, at the same time Ukraine’s military looks unlikely to carry out the mass mobilization Zaluzhny was calling for, how long before we see a crisis of morale erupt? Time will tell, but as the following article warns, when that crisis happens, don’t be surprised if Zaluzhny is seen as the solution to that crisis. And also don’t be surprised if it’s groups like Right Sector offering him up as the solution:
“According to to a report in the Financial Times in December, Zaluzhny and Zelensky have had a strained relationship for over a year. Zaluzhny is seen as a potential rival for the presidency when elections are held next, polling at 40% to Zelensky’s 42%, as well as being viewed as more trustworthy by Ukrainians compared to Zelensky.”
It’s never a great sign for a country at war when the elected leader dismisses a general who has more public support. But that appears to be exactly what happened. Zaluzhny poses an obvious political threat to Zelensky? But as the photos with 67th Mechanized Brigade commander Andriy Stempitsky implicitly warn, Zaluzhny doesn’t just pose a potential political threat to Zelensky. He’s actively loved by and openly cuddling up to the Ukrainian far right. When you combine those Right Sector ties with Zaluzhny’s general popularity and Zelenksy’s collapsing supporting inside the military, we’re looking at the perfect set up for a ‘politics through other means’ domestic situation. The kind of situation that would be eerily similar to what we saw in 2014 with the Maidan revolution in terms of the role Right Sector and similar groups could play in providing street muscle. But also potentially much bigger than 2014 since Zaluzhny can potentially win the loyalty of the Ukrainian military over Zelensky. Especially now that groups like Right Sector and Azov have been so thoroughly incorporated into the military and valorized. In other words, we could see are repeat of the street-level showdown we saw in 2014. But we also might just see a simple Zaluzhny-led putsch:
It’s not hard to see where this situation is heading. The more demands Zelensky imposes on the Ukrainian military, the greater the temptation for groups like Right Sector to enact a “March of Kiev”. And, sure, Zaluzhny would need to agree to lead such a march. How unlikely is that scenario when we see him openly embracing Right Sector like this?
And as the following AP piece reminds us, when we’re talking about Ukraine’s armed forces, we aren’t just talking about Ukrainians. This is a military comprised of volunteers from around the globe, after all. Far right volunteers in many cases. But not all cases. For example, as Ukraine has expanded its infrastructure for Spanish-speaking troops, hundreds of Colombian former soldiers have joined the effort. But as the article makes clear, they aren’t traveling to Ukraine out of ideology. It’s raw economics. Corporals in Colombia get a salary of roughly $400/month. In Ukraine, any member of the armed forces gets a monthly salary of up to $3,300, regarding of citizenship, along with up to $28,660 if they are injured. The families of those killed in action are due $400k in compensation. it’s not to see appeal. At least the monetary appeal. So at the same time the overall social cohesion of Ukraine’s armed forces appears to be more strained and at risk of a far right “march on Kiev” than ever, we’re seeing growing numbers of financially-motivated foreign volunteers joining the fray:
“As the two-year mark in the war approaches, Ukraine’s forces are in a stalemate with Russia’s. Ukraine is now expanding its system allowing people from around the world to join the army, said Oleksandr Shahuri, an officer of the Department of Coordination of Foreigners in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”
An expanded foreign recruitment system that promises to allow people from around the world to join the Ukrainian military. That’s the message from
the Department of Coordination of Foreigners in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. And as we can see with the growing number of Colombian soldiers making their way to Ukraine, this expansion has included the development of the infrastructure needed to incorporate Spanish-speakers:
So what’s motivated the hundreds of Colombian former soldiers to commitment to Ukraine’s fight? Economic need and the promise of much better pay:
So how many of these Spanish-speaking soldiers has Ukraine incorporated into its forces? And, perhaps more importantly, how many have already died or wounded? We have no idea. And neither do their families, apparently. Which obviously is going to created some complications on these families receiving that $400k:
It’s going to be grimly interesting to find out how many of families of these foreign volunteers ultimately end up getting that $400k. Because right now it’s sounding like Ukraine has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it comes to the fate of these volunteers. Which, in turn, should raise questions about what the overall morale is for all these foreign fighters. Do they share the same growing antipathy towards Zelensky? Are they feeling cheated and abused? And who will they back in the event of a power struggle showdown? Again, time will tell. We don’t know for sure. But in situations like this, when things are only getting worse and show no signs of improving, it’s not hard to guess what time is going to eventually tell us. Fascist downward spirals tend to have a lot of inertia.
The TrackANaziMerc channel on telegram is rife with profiles of soldiers of fortune coming from South America, particularly Colombia and Brazil. Most have left girlfriends or wives and children to ‘play trench games and pose for tik tok vids’ as the channel often remarks. The propaganda and promised riches that would compel these guys to risk dying in a random field outside a town halfway around the world that they cannot spell, pronounce, or find on a map must be compelling.
On a similar vein, there is at least one vid going around of a mass grave of soldiers being filled in with bodies and covered with soil by a tractor. The loved ones of these dead are likely never to be compensated with any of those promised riches, let alone notified of their losses.
The New York Times recently published a giant piece of reporting on the US’s decade-long secret intelligence relationship with Ukraine. The report was apparently based on over 200 interviews. It was a limited hangout, as we should expect. But it could have been a lot more limited and is filled with one stunning admission after another. A doozy of a limited hangout.
The piece covers the relationship between Ukrainian intelligence from 2014 to today. A relationship describe as a closely guarded secret. A closely guarded secret that is for some reason now being publicly disclosed in a report filled with the kind of details that appear to confirm one of the central tenets of Russia’s declared motivations for its intervention in Ukraine: that Ukraine was being turned into the West’s front line for anti-Russian operations, well before the 2022 invasion. The report actually cites an unnamed senior European official who describes how, towards the end of 2021, as Putin was weighing whether to launch a full-scale invasion, one of his top spy chiefs told him the CIA and MI6 were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Russia. Which is a pretty remarkable detail to include in a report seemingly celebrating how Ukraine has been turned into an intelligence beachhead for operations against Russia.
As the article describes, Ukraine has been transformed into a Russian intelligence-gather hub, delivering the US unprecedented access to Russian communications. Some of intelligence now available to the US was already in the possession of the Ukrainians and simply handed over to the CIA, often as part of an effort to woo US intelligence into a deeper relationship, according to the report. But it sounds like the big prize comes in the form of over a dozen secret spy bases that have been constructed along the Russian border.
The narrative starts with the days following the collapse of Viktor Yanukovych’s government in February of 2014 and conveniently leaves out any Western intelligence role in those events. Ukraine’s new spy chief immediately after the fall of the Yanukovych government, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, is described as the figure who first reached out to the CIA. As the article notes, Nalyvaichenko conveniently happened to have played a similar role in starting a partnership with the CIA while serving as spy chief under Viktor Yuschenko. So the CIA/Ukrainian relationship that ‘started in February 2014’ was started by a spy chief who already started a relationship with the CIA under the Yuschenko administration. There’s also obviously no mention of how Nalyvaichenko is tied to the neo-Nazi Right Sector/Pravy Sektor. Instead, according to this narrative, Nalyvaichenko met with the CIA station chief and the local head of MI6 and asked for help in rebuilding the SBU from the ground up, and proposed a three-way partnership. “That’s how it all started,” according to Nalyvaichenko.
Early on, we are told, the Obama White House was deeply concerned about this relationship crossing a line provoking the Russians. Nalyvaichenko then tapped General Valeriy Kondratiuk to server as head of counterintelligence and the two created a new paramilitary unit, the Fifth Directorate, that could be deployed behind enemy lines and gather intelligence that the CIA or MI6 refused to provide them. So it sounds like the CIA and MI6 helped rebuild Ukraine’s intelligence from the ground up at the same time Ukraine was setting up special “independent” units that could operate in a manner that gave the CIA and MI6 plausible deniability when it came to culpability over ‘crossing lines’ with Russia.
Interestingly, we are also told the Fifth Directorate, played a key role in the investigation of the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. Apparently that was the unit that, within hours, produced telephone intercepts and other intelligence that pinned the blame for the downing of the airline on the Russian-backed separatists. This is a good time to recall how the officer in charge of that investigation for Ukraine, Vasily Vovk, called for the destruction of “the Jews” in 2017. We are also told that the CIA was apparently so impressed with this intelligence that it responded by provided the unit secure communications gear and specialized training.
The relationship between Ukrainian intelligence and the CIA continued to deepen significantly heading into the summer of 2015, when Petro Poroshenko fired of Nalyvaichenko and General Kondratiuk was appointed to the head of the Ukrainian military intelligence agency, the HUR. Crucially, the HUR had the authority to collect intelligence outside of the country, including Russia. Interestingly, it appears that Kondratiuk initially reached out to his American counterpart at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), but DIA officials were suspicious and discouraged building closer ties. Why were they suspicious? We aren’t told. But it turns out Kondratiuk had already been establishing deeper ties with the CIA and by January of 2016, the CIA agreed to modernize the HUR in exchange for the the raw intelligence it was gathering.
But the CIA wasn’t just training Ukraine’s spies. It was also training Unit 2245, an elite Ukrainian commando force. Interestingly, when the Ukrainians wanted to engage in actions that the US saw as too provocative to directly assist in — like planting explosives on an airfield in Crimea — it was Unit 2245 that the Ukrainians turned to. So, much like the Fifth Directorate, the CIA trained the commando unit the Ukrainians use for actions that are deemed too provocative for the CIA to have its fingerprints on it.
There’s also mentions of what sounds like Gladio-style preparations: starting in 2016, the CIA oversaw some sort of spy training program called Operation Goldfish. Ukraine’s CIA-trained spies were then deployed to 12 newly-built forward operating bases building along the Russian border for the purpose of gathering intelligence inside Russia. But they weren’t just trained for operations inside Russia. They were also trained to act as sleeper agents on Ukrainian territory for the purpose of launching guerilla operations in case of occupation. It also sounds like these units were activated in the Kherson region, assassinating local collaborators and helping Ukrainian forces target Russian positions. While it would be interesting to learn more about the nature of the figures drafted into these partisan stay-behind networks — like whether or not they are predominantly far right extremists as we should expect — no information on that is provided in the report.
When the report gets to the Trump administration, not only do we find that the Trump administration was fully in support of maintaining this relationship with Ukrainian intelligence but the administration substantially deepened that relationship as the ‘RussiaGate’ story gripped Washington DC. Intriguingly, we are told that the HUR played a role in the US intelligence community’s conclusion that the ‘Fancy Bear’ hacking group was indeed working for the Russian government. Ukrainian and American intelligence officers reportedly joined forces to probe the computer systems of Russia’s intelligence agencies to identify operatives trying to manipulate voters. And as part of some sort of joint CIA-HUR operation, the HUR tricked a Russian intelligence officer into providing information that allowed the CIA to connect “Fancy Bear” to the Russian government. Keep in mind that the Russian government for the hack of the DNC right out of the gate in the summer of 2016, presumably many months before this HUR trickery apparently took place under the Trump administration. So this narrative about a joint CIA-Ukrainian operation started under the Trump administration providing the evidence that connected Fancy Bear to the Russian government makes no sense in terms of the available timeline of events. But that’s the narrative we’re getting.
Finally, we get to one of those revelations that hints at a much bigger story yet to be told: The report mentions a secret meeting at the Hague hints at a secret anti-Russian coalition that was formed long before February of 2022 between the HUR, CIA, MI6, Dutch intelligence and other unnamed spy agencies.
But this isn’t just a story about the relationship between the CIA and Ukrainian intelligence. The CIA was apparently so pleased with the kind of relationship it created with Ukraine that it decided to expand it. A secret meeting was held at the Hague, where representatives of the HUR, CIA, MI6, Dutch intelligence, and other unnamed agencies agreed to pool more of their intelligence on Russia. A secret anti-Russian intelligence coalition was born, with the Ukrainians serving as vital partners. This is well before the invasion of February 2022.
So who knows why exactly it was deemed desirable to share this level of detail about the Ukraine’s special role as the West’s anti-Russian secret weapon. Presumably the motives had something to do the struggles in DC over Ukraine funding and a perceived need to better sell the war in Ukraine to the Western public. But for whatever reason the US intelligence community now wants the world to view Ukraine as not just a beleaguered victim of Russian aggression but a vital ally for secret operations inside Russia. The script hasn’t exactly been flipped, but this is a major alteration:
“In more than 200 interviews, current and former officials in Ukraine, the United States and Europe described a partnership that nearly foundered from mutual distrust before it steadily expanded, turning Ukraine into an intelligence-gathering hub that intercepted more Russian communications than the C.I.A. station in Kyiv could initially handle. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence and matters of sensitive diplomacy.”
Ukraine has been turned a US intelligence-gathering hub, delivering an unprecedented level of access to Russian communications. That’s the message being delivered in this New York Times piece based on hundreds of interviews with current and former intelligence officials. A message the US intelligence community clearly wants delivered to the public that portrays Ukraine as a vital asset in the US’s new Cold War with Russia. Remarkably, the article even points out how, according to a senior European official, Putin factored Ukraine’s status as a beachhead for operations against Russia back in 2021 when weighing whether or not to launch the invasion. But the report goes on to quibble with the Kremlin’s assessment by pointing to the various tensions between the US and Ukraine that have played out over the last decade. Tensions that have been largely resolved and never really threatened Ukraine’s status as a growing US beachhead. That’s part of what makes this report so remarkable. It’s filled with stunning admissions about a dramatically deepening relationship that preceded the 2022 invasion and more or less confirm the Kremlin’s fears about Ukraine being transformed into Western anti-Russian beachhead. It’s a surprisingly revealing self-serving narrative:
And according to this narrative, the CIA’s relationship with Ukraine started immediately in the wake of the Maidan revolution in February of 2014. A narrative that conveniently leaves out any Western intelligence role in those events. And as we can see, the new spy chief immediately after the fall of the Yanukovych government, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, conveniently happened to have played a similar role in starting a partnership with the CIA while serving as spy chief under Viktor Yuschenko. So the CIA/Ukrainian relationship that ‘started in February 2014’ was started by a spy chief who already started a relationship with the CIA under the Yuschenko administration. Also, note the lack of any mention of how Nalyvaichenko is tied to the neo-Nazi Right Sector/Pravy Sektor, because of course that was left out:
Then we get to this remarkable admission regarding the investigation into the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July of 2014: we are told the Obama White House was deeply concerned about providing intelligence support that would cross a line and provoke Russia. So in response, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko tapped General Valeriy Kondratiuk to server as head of counterintelligence and the two proceeded to create a new paramilitary unit that could be deployed behind enemy lines and gather intelligence that the CIA or MI6 refused to provide them. That paramilitary unit, the Fifth Directorate, was apparently the unit that, within hours, produced telephone intercepts and other intelligence that pinned the blame for the downing of the airline on the separatists. This is a good time to recall how the officer in charge of that investigation for Ukraine, Vasily Vovk, called for the destruction of “the Jews” in 2017. Somehow all mention of the extremist nature of the figures playing leading roles in this investigation got left out of this narrative. But it is still interesting to learn that the unit that ostensibly provided the key evidence in that investigation is the Fifth Directorate, and the CIA was apparently so impressed with this intelligence that it responded by provided the unit secure communications gear and specialized training:
By the the summer of 2015, the relationship between Ukrainian intelligence and the CIA appears to deepen significantly. First, following the firing of Nalyvaichenko, General Kondratiuk was appointed to the head of the Ukrainian military intelligence agency, the HUR, which had the authority to collect intelligence outside of the country, including Russia. Interestingly, it appears that Kondratiuk initially reached out to his American counterpart at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), but DIA officials were suspicious and discouraged building closer ties. Why were they suspicious? We aren’t told. But it turns out Kondratiuk had already been establishing deeper ties with the CIA and by January of 2016, the CIA agreed to modernize the HUR in exchange for the sharing of the raw intelligence it was gathering:
And then we get to what sound like Gladio-style preparations: starting in 2016, the CIA oversaw some sort of spy training program called Operation Goldfish. Ukraine’s CIA-trained spies were then deployed to 12 newly-built forward operating bases building along the Russian border for the purpose of gathering intelligence inside Russia. But they weren’t just trained for operations inside Russia. They were also trained to act as sleeper agents on Ukrainian territory for the purpose of launching guerilla operations in case of occupation:
But the CIA wasn’t just training Ukraine’s spies. It was also training Unit 2245, an elite Ukrainian commando force. And as we can see, when the Ukrainians wanted to engage in actions that the US saw as too provocative to directly assists — like planting explosives on an airfield in Crimea — it was Unit 2245 that the Ukrainians turned to. So the CIA trained the commando unit the Ukrainians use for actions that are deemed too provocative for the CIA to have its fingerprints on it:
Jumping forward to the incoming Trump administration, and we find not just full support for the Ukrainians but a dramatic expansion of that support as the ‘RussiaGate’ story about Russian interference in 2016 election roiled Washington DC. And what do we find but claims that, as part of a joint CIA-HUR operation, the HUR tricked a Russian intelligence officer into providing information that allowed the CIA to connect “Fancy Bear” to the Russian government. Think about that for a moment: the evidence that Fancy Bear was a Russia government operation apparently came from the HUR. Keep in mind that the US was blaming the Russian government for the hack of the DNC right out of the gate in the summer of 2016, presumably many months before this HUR trickery apparently took place under the Trump administration:
But this isn’t just a story about the relationship between the CIA and Ukrainian intelligence. A secret coalition against Russia emerged following a secret meeting at the Hague, where representatives of the HUR, CIA, MI6, Dutch intelligence, and other unnamed agencies agreed to pool more of their intelligence on Russia. This is well before the invasion of February 2022:
A secret anti-Russian intelligence coalition that is secret no more. Well, ok, it’s partially secret. We still don’t know who all the members are of this secret coalition. Perhaps we’ll get more details on during the next major narrative update.
But, for now, it’s clear from this report that Ukraine is no longer just to be seen as a victim of Russian aggression. It’s also a vital member of the New Cold War and will remain vital for years, or decades, to come. That’s the message delivered to the public in this report. Which also serves as a reminder that the Hot War inside Ukraine right now might be the end of what we think of as modern Ukraine, but it’s also just the start of the long Cold War to follow, assuming the conflict can be ended without some sort of Russian-NATO conflagration. Extended conflict. That’s the plan. It’s not a good plan, but it’s the plan, with narratives to be updated accordingly.
Wow, they really don’t want to just let this gross scandal quietly skulk away: It turns out there’s an update to Canada’s Yaroslav Hunka scandal. He got another award. This time it was the “honorary award of the Ternopil Regional Council for services to the Ternopil Region,” presented to Hunka’s great-niece, Olga Vitkovska, on March 19, Hunka’s 99th birthday. The person presenting the award happened to be Oleh Syrotyuk, the local leader of Svoboda. And it turns out this award is also known as the “Yaroslav Stetsko medal.” So the local leader of Svoboda, the party that is basically the contemporary version of the OUN‑B, awarded Hunka — a member of the 14th Waffen SS division — with a medal named after one of the most influential OUN‑B leaders. As the following article reminds us, Stetsko was not only an enthusiastic backer of the Holocaust but he went on to lead the “Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations” for decades in the post-war era and was even received by the Reagan White House in 1983.
So if you wanted to identify a leading Nazi collaborator who never really had to face the consequences for his horrific legacy, you almost couldn’t find a better example than Yaroslav Stetsko. In that sense, awarding Hunka with the Stetsko medal is weirdly appropriate, if given with a sense of grim irony. But, of course, that’s not the spirit this medal was given in. This was intended to be a great honor. Just as Hunka was honored by the government of Canada.
As the following article also notes, the uproar of Hunka is far from the first time Canada has had to deal with these kinds of controversies. Notably, there was Deschênes Commission formed back in 1985 after it was discovered that Albert Helmut Rauca, a known Nazi war criminal the West German government had been searching for for decades, had been living openly in Canada under his real name for over three decades. That commission predictably ended in a farce, concluding not only that Canada had no such problem with Nazi war criminal living in its midst but that it was inappropriate to assume that someone was a Nazi war criminal just because they were a member of a group like Hunka’s 14th Waffen SS division.
But as we’re going to see, the commission had a very notable dissenter: Alti Rodal, the lone historian assigned to the commission and given the nearly impossible task of reviewing Canada’s post-war history with war criminals. Rodal found extensive evidence of the Canadian government turning a blind eye to blatant war criminals. But she also explored the crucial issue at the center of whole Hunka affair about whether or not we can conclude that the individuals who signed up for groups like the 14th Waffen SS division knew what they were signing up for. As Rodal saw it, there was no way someone signing up for the 14th Waffen SS division in 1943 — the year Hunka joined — didn’t realize that they were signing up to slaughter Jews. It’s just not possible given what had been transpiring.
It turns out the Deschênes Commission, predictably and seemingly by design, ran out of time to complete its work and asked for a six month extension in December of 1985. That extension was granted, and yet Rodal’s contract was not extended. Despite that, she continued her research without pay and presented the commission with a report in May of 1986. The report was accepted by the commission, and all indications are that Judge Deschênes read the report. And yet none of its conclusions made it into the final commission report.
So that’s the grim and gross update on the Hunka story. Thanks to Svoboda, Hunka has a new award and the rest of the West has a new Ukrainian Nazi scandal to systematically ignore:
“The Yaroslav Stetsko medal, whose official title can be translated to the “honorary award of the Ternopil Regional Council for services to the Ternopil Region,” was presented by Oleh Syrotyuk to Hunka’s great-niece, Olga Vitkovska, on March 19, Hunka’s 99th birthday.”
The Yaroslav Stetsko medal. It’s quite an honor. If you’re a Nazi. But that’s the honor bestowed upon Yaroslav Hunka by the Ternopil Regional Council, months after the uproar in Canada over a similar honor. And it wasn’t just that this Western Ukrainian town decided to bestow the Stetsko medal honor upon Hunka, but also the fact that the local leader of Svoboda is the person who did the bestowing. This wasn’t subtle. It was an embrace of Hunka by the contemporary manifestation of OUN‑B network:
But, of course, the stench associated with these groups isn’t limited to their enthusiastic role as executioners of the Nazi’s Holocaust in Ukraine. There’s also the fact that Stetsko was never punished for his role as a leading Ukrainian Nazi functionary but instead went on to serve as the leader the “Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.” He was even warmly received at the Reagan White House in 1983:
But it wasn’t just the Reagan White House seemingly suffering from historical amnesia about Stesko and the movements he lead back in the 1980s. Canada’s Deschênes Commission, formed in 1985, operated as a de facto coverup of Canada’s extensive embrace of Nazi war criminals:
So to get a better idea of just how gross of a coverup the Deschênes Commission was, almost 40 years ago, here’s a recent look back at the commission and the heroic efforts of Alti Rodal, the lone historian assigned to the commission and given an impossible timeline for investigating the Canadian government’s post-war relationship with WWII war criminals. As we’re going to see, Rodal not only uncovered extensive evidence that the Canadian government had been systematically allowing known war criminals — some who was actively being sought be West Germany over their war crimes — into the country but also, crucially, investigated the often made claims in defense of the members of these units that one cannot conclude someone was a Nazi collaborator just because they were a member of group like Hunka’s 14th Waffen SS. As Rodal concluded, there was simply no way to plausibly suggest the people signing up for these units didn’t know they were signing up to slaughter the Jews and other targeted groups, especially in 1943, the year Hunka volunteered.
These were the findings of Rodal’s report, which were all ignored and never made it into the final Commission report. In fact, as evidence of how little interest the commission had in Rodal’s research, they actually submitted for a six month extension in December of 1985 after it became clear the commission wasn’t going to have enough time to complete its goals (which was obvious from the beginning because not nearly enough time was given), but did NOT extend Rodal’s appointment. Yep. And yet, Rodal continued her research and submitted a report to the commission in May of 1986. Again, none of her findings made it into the commission’s official findings. Because, again, this was a Canadian government coverup that was never intended to arrive at anything other than the conclusion that there were no Nazi collaborators in Canada and if any were found they were unfairly accused:
“The Deschênes Commission was appointed by Order-in-Council on February 7, 1985, because the government could no longer keep up the pretence that there were no war criminals in Canada. Or, as External Affairs and Justice Department officials used to insist, “If there are any, they must be small fry, minor offenders hardly worth bothering with.””
The Canadian government could no longer ignore the growing maelstrom around the ‘discovery’ that Albert Helmut Rauca, a notorious Nazi war criminal, had been living in Canada for decades. Living under his own name. He even received a pension. Somehow, it took the RCMP 20 years to find him despite the West German government’s worldwide search and their certainty that Rauca was hiding somewhere in Canada. Or barely hiding, as the case may be:
And as we can see, the commission was fixed from its inception. It wasn’t intended to explore the topic. It was designed to be a coverup, hence the nearly impossible task assigned to Alti Rodal, the lone historian working for the commission. Rodal wasn’t given enough time to do her work because that was the point. And yet, she persisted:
Then, when the commission predictably falls behind its impossible schedule, the deadline was extended in December of 1985 for six months but Rodal was dropped. Despite this, Rodal continued working, unpaid, and submitted her report in May of 1986. The report was read and clearly completely ignored. Because, again, this wasn’t a real investigation. It was a coverup:
Rodal’s report was basically a complete refutation of the commission’s conclusions, filled with details including the fact that Rauca’s relocation to Canada was assisted by the Canadian Christian Council despite his name appearing on at least two war criminal lists. The guy even has an SS tattoo under his arm. No questions were asked and citizenship was offered when requested:
But the value of Rodal’s work isn’t just the evidence of the Canadian government’s embrace of Nazi war criminals. She also investigated the routinely heard claims from the defenders of Nazi collaborators that they weren’t all Nazis but merely anti-Communists who had no role in the Holocaust. As Rodal concluded, these claims were convenient nonsense. It wasn’t a mystery what they were enthusiastically volunteering to do. Mass murder of Jews and other targeted groups was unambiguously the task at hand and the people who staffed these units embraced that task. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have signed up in the first place. They weren’t just enthusiastic for the Nazi’s Holocaust but vital for its operations:
Crucially, when it comes to the case of Yaroslav Hunka and the assertion — backed by the Deschênes Commission — that we can’t jump to any conclusions based on someone’s participation in a group like the 14th Waffen-SS Galician Division, Rodal found extensive evidence of the unit’s direct participation in the slaughter of Ukrainian Jews. So much so that Rodal concluded that there was no way someone could have signed up to the unit without knowing what they were signing up for. Despite that, Canada allowed some 2,000 veterans from the Galician division into Canada in 1950 as part of a special dispensation of the Canadian government, based largely on these unsupported claims about the members of these units just being innocent victims of communist smears:
Finally, one last piece of evidence of the gross coverup at work with this commission, when the Simon Wiesenthal Centre twice offered to provide evidence of the Galician divison’s crimes, it was turned down both times:
The Commission had a conclusion it intended to arrive at and no amount of facts or evidence was going to get in its way. And yet, it’s not like the Rodal Report doesn’t exist. It’s there, sitting in the Public Archives of Canada. Waiting for a public that recognizes the vital importance of understanding its own past. In other words, waiting until it crumbles to dust, largely unread.
Rodal’s courageous efforts, though ignored at the time, have since been released on the government of Canada website. One can find it easily by googling: Rodal Report. It’s long, but crucial to understanding the longtime coverup and amnesia that helped produce the Hunka affair in the first place.
Denis Kapustin — leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC/RDK) known for carrying out attacks inside Russian on behalf of Ukraine — has no problem admitting that he likes being seen as ‘the bad guy’. It was a childhood dream, in fact, as he admitted in the following Politico article. Nor does he seem shy about sharing with the reporter an anecdote about a trip to South Africa that left him with the impression that life was much better there under Apartheid. Kapustin was also happy to share how he didn’t actually speak with any black South Africans and wouldn’t allow a black person (or a gay or transgendered person) to serve in his unit. And sure, he runs a far right apparel line of T‑shirts and caps with nationalist and xenophobic images and Nazi symbols like “88”.
And sure, he co-hosted a 2021 podcast with Robert Rundo, of the California-based Rise Above Movement (RAM). Recall how Azov leader Sergey Korotkikh reportedly hosted RAM members in Kyiv in 2018 and how RAM members were also reportedly networking with Azov spokesperson Olena Semenyaka. And yes, German authorities have labeled him one of the leading neo-Nazis in Europe.
Sure, he’s done all that. But don’t call him a Nazi. He doesn’t like that label. No, Kapustin would prefer to describe himself as “definitely conservative, definitely traditionalist, definitely right wing-ish,” but he’s not a Nazi.
That’s the trollish nature of the following Politico interview of Kapustin. But the trolling doesn’t end there. Because at the same time Kapustin was adamant about his non-Nazi status, he appeared to be absolutely reveling in how conflicted Western journalism is when it comes to covering Nazis like himself during a time when the West has come to rely on them to fight the war in Ukraine. As the article puts it, Kapustin “relishes sparring with Western journalists, seeing how awkward many of them feel interviewing him, torn between disapproval of his far-right ideology and hooligan history and their sympathy for Ukraine, not wanting to put the county in a bad light for Western liberal audiences.”
Or as Kapustin himself put it, “It is a very funny position for you and your colleagues because you all have been trying hard to put us in a bad light for years. Neo-Nazis, racist, white supremacists, terrible guys, blah, blah, blah. And then the darkest hour in Ukraine’s modern day history arrives. And all of a sudden the eternal bad guys turn out to be brave, courageous, determined, stubborn and heroes. And they’re like, ‘damn, how should I write about them?’”
We don’t usually see this degree of frankness in how the Western press has handled Ukraine’s Nazi phenomena. But here it is, thanks largely to Kapustin’s eager trolling about the West’s kid glove treatment:
“But there are hazards in holding him too close. German authorities say Kapustin — sometimes known as Denis Nikitin — is “one of the most influential neo-Nazi activists” on the European continent, and that’s a godsend to Russian propagandists, who are seeking to whitewash their murderous invasion of Ukraine as an attempt to “de-Nazify” Kyiv.”
Yes indeed, there are hazard in holding notorious neo-Nazis “too close”. There’s no shortage of obvious hazards associated with elevated and militarily arming a leading neo-Nazi. And not hazards to Europe. As we can see, Denis Kapustin co-hosted a 2021 podcast with Robert Rundo, of the California-based Rise Above Movement (RAM). Recall how Azov leader Sergey Korotkikh reportedly hosted RAM members in Kyiv in 2018. RAM members were also reportedly networking with Azov spokesperson Olena Semenyaka. So when we find Kapustin co-hosting a podcast with American neo-Nazi Robert Rundo , keep in mind that this is just one facet of a much larger international neo-Nazi movement with deep roots in Ukraine. It’s hazardous. But, as we should expect, the primary hazard the Western media and governments seem to focus on is the propaganda opportunities these groups provide to Russia:
Kapustin wasn’t exactly hiding his extremism during the interview, as his anecdote about his trip to South Africa makes clear. It also gives us a taste of the kind of Russia he would try to create given the opportunity. And whether or not he ever succeeds in overthrowing the Russian government, he’s undoubtedly radicalizing the members of his unit with ideology lectures. It’s like a Russian version of Azov operating out of Ukraine:
And that brings us to open gaslighting Kapustin is engaging in during this interview, where he seemingly relishes in insisting to Western journalists that he’s not a neo-Nazi, knowing full well that these journalists are going to be very torn about whether or not they can honestly and accurately acknowledge his neo-Nazi status without handing Russia a propaganda victory. Kapustin openly mocks Western journalists in this interview over the “funny position” they find themselves in while interviewing someone like him:
And, of course, the report had to include some sort of seemignly obligatory attempt at ‘bothsidesism’ with neo-Nazis, taking pains to emphasize that neo-Nazis can be found in Russian militias while dismissing Ukraine’s far right as having “near negligible support in national representative politics”, a gross whitewashing of the immense influence these groups have wielded in Ukraine over the last decade despite a lack of electoral success. Influence like how Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky had to face off with angry members of Azov demanding “No to Capitulation” in October of 2019 in response to Zelensky possibly pursuing negotiations to end Ukraine’s civil war. Sure, both sides have neo-Nazis fighting on their behalf, but only one side has spent the last decade embracing these units as nationalist heroes while incorporating their leaders into official positions of power and influence. Only one side is facing the perpetual and growing threat of far right coup if the Nazis get too unhappy:
Then there’s the question of what role did Kapustin’s unit, and the other two Russian units based in Ukraine, play in the Moscow concert hall attacks. As we’ve seen, all three of the Russian units operating out of Ukraine were engaged in cross border operations starting on March 12 and lasting more than two week, which means they were operating in Russian territory during the March 22 concert hall ISIS‑K attacks that involved an attempted escape route into Ukraine. As we’ve also seen, the Ukrainian government seems to have an alarmingly cozy relationship with jihadist groups like ISIS as long as they are focused on attacking Russia. So when we see Alexei Baranovsky of the Freedom of Russia Legion assert that these units are only under the Ukrainian chain of command while in Ukraine, and operate independently while inside Russia, we have to ask if there was any ‘independent’ action involving those ISIS‑K attacks:
And those claims of ‘independent action’ once these units are operating inside Russia brings us to the interesting admission by Kapustin that the militias have freedom of action once across the border but the raids are closely coordinated with the HUR, which provides logistical assistance, vets their operational plans and arms and pays them. So they are ‘independently’ carrying out plans vetted and assisted by the HUR:
Finally, in case it’s not clear that a Russia under the influence of neo-Nazis like Kapustin would be a nightmare for the world, note his big complaint about the Putin government: Putin isn’t nationalistic enough. That’s the spin he deploys while trying to pass himself off as just a ‘traditionalist conservative nationalist’:
Is a hyper-nationalistic Russia ruled by neo-Nazis seen as preferable to Vladimir Putin? Apparently. This is a good time to recall the nationalist roots of the West’s previously go-to Russian regime change agent: Alexei Navalny. Also recall how one of the other Russian groups operating in Ukraine, Freedom for Russia, has a ‘decolonization’ vision of breaking Russia up into dozens of ethnic statelets, which is the kind of end game scenario that could potentially appeal to neo-Nazis like Kapustin who would prefer the creation of ethnically ‘pure’ states.
Has the West arrived at the conclusion that hyper-nationalism is the most effective means of taming Russia as a geopolitical entity? It’s not like we should be shocked if that’s the underlying strategy, but is it? A strategy of neutralizing Russia by Nazifying it and hoping that blows it apart? Let’s hope that’s not the strategy, but Denis Kapustin appears to feel that’s the case. And he’s clearly loving it.
Oooof. This is a rough story for anyone sympathetic to US librarians and the increasingly politicized environment they’ve been forced to operate in over the last decade: The American Library Association (ALA) has a new scandal to deal with. And unlike most of these ‘scandals’ in recent years — which have largely been focused on right-wing hysteria over LGBTQ content in libraries — this is a real scandal involving a genuinely toxic book.
In January of this year, the ALA published its list of Best Historical Materials for 2023, which included Enemy Archives: Soviet Counterinsurgency Operations and the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement—Selections from the Secret Police Archives, a compendium of Soviet era documents. And the co-editors of this book just happen to be Lubomyr Luciuk — professor at the Royal Military College of Canada — and Volodymyr Viatrovych. Yep, the same and Volodymyr Viatrovych who was the head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory and notorious for extensive whitewashing of the WWII legacy of Nazi collaboration by Ukrainian nationalist groups like the OUN‑B. That’s the guy who co-edited a book on Soviet Archives about Ukrainian nationalism. A book that was chosen by the ALA for an award earlier this year.
The book’s co-editor, Lubomyr Luciuk, is a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, the Canadian equivalent of West Point. He actually published an excerpt of the book in the National Post in February of 2023, prompting a complaint by the Simon Wiesenthal Center over the way the piece was promoting Holocaust denialism. As we’re going to see, the National Post’s editor in chief actually admitted to the Simon Wiesenthal Center that the article “included a paragraph disputing the view that the Second World War era Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists were Nazi collaborators. However, we recognize that this collaboration has been established by prior scholarship.” So an excerpt from this book prompted a Holocaust denialism complaint almost a year before it was selected for ALA’s ‘Best Historical Materials for 2023’ list.
Oh, and it turns out Luciuk was extremely upset about the public outrage over the Canadian parliament’s honoring of Jarowlav Hunka. Luciuk was adamant that any associations to the Nazis was completely inappropriate and that Hunka deserved an apology. Again, Luciuk is a professor at a Canadian military academy. This is a good time to recall how the Canadian government engaged in a massive coverup of thousands of imported WWII war criminals in the post-war period which remains underappreciated to this day. Also, Hunka has subsequently been awarded the “Yaroslav Stetsko medal” by a local Svoboda leader in the Ternopil Region.
But the whitewashing of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in this story isn’t limited to the co-editors of this book. When the ALA published its list, a brief review was written for each book, with Southern Mississippi professor Jennifer Brannock writing the Enemy Archives review. And according to Brannock, the documents in the book “cover topics such as the Soviet claim that the Ukrainian underground promoted fascism and collaborated with the Nazis.” So everyone reading this ALA list of the top historical works in 2023 got a little dose of Nazi collaborationist whitewashing in the process.
That’s all part of the context of the ALA’s unfortunate decision. But there is one positive turn in this otherwise sad episode: The publication of the following piece in The Nation by Lev Golinkin laying out the alarming facts in this story prompted the ALA to remove the book from its awards list. This actually happened! It’s kind of amazing when you think about it. So while the whitewashing of Ukrainian WWII history is quite extensive at this point, it’s not yet complete. Just almost complete. Hooray?:
“This compendium of Soviet documents was edited by Volodymyr Viatrovych and Lubomyr Luciuk. Viatrovych, who is currently a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament, is notorious for drafting laws glorifying Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators. He’s been condemned by Jewish organizations as well as the governments of Poland and Israel. Luciuk, a professor in Canada’s elite military college, has defended a Third Reich division accused of war crimes.”
That’s quite a book to make it onto the ALA a list of Best Historical Materials for 2023: A compendium of Soviet documents co-edited by the one-time head of the Ukrainian Institute of National memory, Volodymyr Viatrovych, the man who was basically Ukraine’s official historical revisionist for years.
But it’s not like this decision came out of nowhere. The ALA had to apology over musings that took place during a 2022 panel when two literary experts suggested that opposition to book bans — which has become a politically charged topic in recent years due to the GOP’s fixation on LBGTQ book content — would require the acceptance of all books including books that deny the Holocaust. So the ALA managed to followup its 2022 incident Holocaust denialism incident with the selection of book that engages in WWII ‘both-sides-ing’ and outright whitewashing. Even the ALA’s brief review of the book included whitewashing statements like the statement that the book will “cover topics such as the Soviet claim that the Ukrainian underground promoted fascism and collaborated with the Nazis.” The OUN-B’s collaboration with the Nazis never happened. It was just a Nazi claim. That’s the message everyone got in this brief review found in a list of the ‘Best Historical Materials for 2023’:
And when we see Viatrovych accusing Eduard Dolinsky — head of Ukrainian Jewish Committee — of making up incidents of antisemitism in order to profit, this is a good time to recall how Facebook once banned Dolinsky in 2018 for posting images of antisemitic graffiti in Odessa under the pretense that he was promoting antisemitism. This is the kind of demented ‘up is down, left is right’ environment figures like Dolinsky have been forced to deal with both inside and outside Ukraine:
And then there’s Viatrovych’s co-editor, Lubomyr Luciuk, a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada. He actually published an excerpt of the book in the National Post in February of 2023, prompting a complaint by the Simon Wiesenthal Center over the way the piece was promoting Holocaust denialism. This was last year, long before the ALA selected this same book to appear on its ‘best historical works’ list:
Finally, we find Luciuk angrily reacting to the public uproar over the Canadian parliament’s honoring of Jarowlav Hunka, insisting that any association of Hunka with the Nazis was completely inappropriate. At least he’s consistent:
It sure would be interesting to know what Professor Luciuk has to say about the stunning findings of the 1985 Rodal Report on the extensive Canadian government coverup of thousands of WWII Nazi collaborators in the post-war period. Not that we should expect the question to be posed to Luciuk or anyone else.
Just as we shouldn’t really expect the ALA’s withdrawal of this award to prompt any sort of broader recognition of the gross historical whitewashing now entrenched in Western narratives about this chapter of WWII history. That’s also part of the context of this story: it’s great news to see the ALA withdraw that award. And awful news that it’s basically non-news that this successful fight against the whitewashing of history happened at all.
Following up on that remarkable story of the “Best Historical Materials for 2023” award given — but later rescinded — by the American Library Association (ALA) to a book that grossly whitewashed WWII Ukraine nationalist groups like the Galician Division, here’s a pair of article excerpts that underscore the increasingly brazen nature of this historical whitewashing.
As we saw, the book in question, Enemy Archives: Soviet Counterinsurgency Operations and the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement—Selections from the Secret Police Archives was co-edited by Lubomyr Luciuk — a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada — and Volodymyr Viatrovych, former head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. It was only after Lev Golinkin published a piece in The Nation about the questionable nature of this award that the ALA removed the book from its “Best Historical Materials for 2023” list.
So given that the co-editor of this book is a Canadian professor at an elite military institution, the question is raised as to what Professor Luciuk has to say about the extensive evidence found in the Rodal Report of the systematic whitewashing of the war criminal pasts of thousands of ‘ex’ Nazis and fellow travelers in the postwar period of the 1940s and 50s. Whitewashing that continued with the Deschênes Commission set up in 1985 for which the Rodal Report was initially created only to be ignored. A commission that was ostensibly set up to investigate Canada’s handling of war criminals but, in reality, only served as as further whitewashing of the whole affair. After all, if you’re a Canadian professor of Ukrainian history, the Rodal Report should weigh heavily in your analysis of this history. And yet, as we saw, Luciuk was adamant that the public outcry of the fetting of Galician Divion veteran Yaroslav Hunka by the Canadian parliament was wrongly directed and that Hunka deserved an apology.
And that brings us to to another recent update to the Rodal Report affair that is hard to ignore in the context of the Hunka affair and Professor Luciuk’s vociferous insistence that it is outrageous to associate Hunka with the Nazis just because he was a member of 14th Waffen SS Galician Division. It turns out the Canadian government released a newly less-redacted version of the Rodal Report back in February.
There’s still 14 pages that remain redacted, but we did get to learn some new details. For example, in 1967, then-justice minister Pierre Trudeau — father of current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — was faced with a choice on how to handle a politically delicate case of “Subject F” a Canadian citizen who had been tried and convicted in absentia of the murder of over 5,000 Jews by a court in Riga, Latvia. Trudeau needed to decide whether or not to strip Subject F of their Canadian citizenship granted to them in the postwar period. And as we’re going to see, Trudeau determined Canada couldn’t risk creating the precedent, writing in a now-unredacted memo, “If we did so, I think we would be forced to concede that similar steps might be taken against any person who had obtained a certificate of citizenship if it were found that he had not disclosed occurrences in his past which we, the government now decide to be of sufficient gravity as to constitute concealment of circumstances material to his grant of citizenship.” So Subject F couldn’t be deported to face justice for his war crimes because the precedent would be set for all the other war criminals granted Canadian citizenship. That’s what we got to learn in February of this year.
Interestingly, this content remained redacted when the Canadian government released a version of the Rodal Report in June of last year. So it would appear the Hunka affair has forced the Canadian government into releasing more on this matter than it would prefer. But, again, 14 pages remain redacted. There’s more under this rock.
So given this new set of Rodal Report revelations, we have to ask what Professor Luciuk’s response would be in like of his assertion that evidence of Hunka’s Nazi associations are slim to none. Well, while we didn’t get a direct response from Luciuk, we did sort of get an indirect response in the form of the following opinion piece published last month in the Kyiv Post, seven weeks after the last Rodal Report release. As Luciuk argues, any assertion that membership in groups like the Galician Division are indicative of Nazi sympathies are absurd. Why? Because that was the finding of the Deschênes Commission. Yep, the same Commission that has now been thoroughly discredited by the Rodal Report. Luciuk makes no mention of the Rodal Report in his piece.
Beyond that, Luciuk argues in the piece that a ‘Ukrainian Nazi’ is a logical impossibility because true Nazis viewed Ukrainians as just another group of sub-human Untermenschen. And while he acknowledges that members of groups like the Galician Division swore and oath to Adolf Hitler, Luciuk points out that members of the German armed forces also swore an oath to Hitler and we obviously wouldn’t consider them to all be Nazis. Yep. Ao not only were none of Nazi’s eastern European collaborators Nazis but the members of the German armed forces shouldn’t get that label either.
So that’s sort of our answer to the question of what Professor Luciuk would have to say about the remarkable findings of the Rodal Report. Findings that keep getting more and more remarkable, and scandalous, with each less-redacted release. Luciuk has nothing to say about the Rodal Report’s findings at all, it seems. Which says a lot:
“Deplorably, some Canadians have bought into Soviet-era propaganda about the Galicia Division, as regurgitated by operatives of the Russian Federation and their fellow travelers in the West. That has only furthered the goals of a KGB campaign, known as Operation Payback, orchestrated to provoke tensions between the Jewish, Baltic and Ukrainian diasporas over what happened in eastern Europe during the Second World War.”
The aspersions cast at the Galicia Division are all just deplorable regurgitated Soviet-era propaganda, according to Professor Luciuk. And as evidence of the the Galicia Division’s innocent nature, Luciuk directly cites the findings of the Deschênes Commission and the fact that he was among those who were there when the Commission’s findings were revealed to Baltic, Jewish, and Ukrainian Canadian communities. And, of course, no mention of the Rodal Report that revealed the Deschênes Commission to be a gross exercise in whitewashing. Luciuk, to this day, uncritically cites the Deschênes Commission as a quality source and specifically points to the Commission’s findings, or non-findings, on the Galicia Division in his defense of Jaroslav Hunka:
But Luciuk doesn’t exclusively cite the Deschênes Commission in his whitewashing of the Galicia Division’s members. He also cites the 1950 report by the High Commissioner for Canada in the UK, L. Dana Wilgress, who dismissed all allegations of the Galicia Division’s war crimes “Communist propaganda”. Which, again, explains the lack of any acknowledgement by Luciuk of the Rodal Report and its disturbing findings about the systematic whitewashing of Nazis and Nazi collaborators by the government of Canada in the post-war years. A 1950 Canadian government report on the wartime record of the members of these groups is the last thing anyone should be citing at this point, but here it is in Luciuk’s piece, relayed as an “astute assessment” about the nature of the group:
Also note this important detail about the whole Hunka affair: he served in the Canadian military from 1963–65. How many other members of the Waffen SS units were there serving in Canada’s military during this period? It’s one of the many questions the Canadian government would prefer not to have to answer at this point:
And when we see Luciuk point to Hunka’s own writings on the atrocities he witnessed, we shouldn’t be surprised to find no reference to how Hunka called the years of 1941–43 as the happiest years of his life and wondered, as a 16-year-old student why Jewish classmates were “running away from such a civilized western people” as the Germans. Hunka professed hatred of the Soviets doesn’t mean he wasn’t an ideological Nazi:
And that brings us to the incredible assertion made by Luciuk that no Ukrainian could ever be a “Nazi” because the Nazis view Ukrainians as just another type of “Untermenschen”. Beyond that, even the members of the German army who swore an oath to Hitler weren’t Nazis either. Based on this ‘logic’, there were just a handful of ‘real’ Nazis, with everyone else falling into the category of Nazi victims:
And, again, let’s not forget how Professor Luciuk published a book just last year with none other than Volodymyr Viatrovych that is basically a gross whitewashing of the WWII history of Ukrainian nationalism. A book that received the ALA award for being one of the “Best Historical Materials for 2023” just back in January. So, on one level, it’s not surprising to see, just two months after receiving that award, Luciuk authoring a piece that basically argues there couldn’t be any Ukrainian Nazis. But on another level, it is kind of surprising from a brazenness standpoint.
And that brings us to the following report from early February, about 7 weeks before Luciuk penned the above Kyiv Post piece. As we’re going to see, Canada and the world got an update to the whole Deschênes Commission affair with the release of a less-redacted version of the Rodal Report. And as we got to learn from the newly unredacted material, it was none other than Justin Trudeau’s father, then-justice minister Pierre Trudeau, we made the decision in 1967 to not strip an ‘ex’ Nazi of their Canadian citizenship after this individual, Subject F, was tried and convicted for directing the slaughter of over 5,000 Jews in absentia in Latvia two years earlier. Why did Trudeau make this decision? Well, while ‘privacy concerns’ were generally cited, it appears the fears over setting a precedent were a primary concern. As Trudeau warned, in explaining his reasoning, “If we did so, I think we would be forced to concede that similar steps might be taken against any person who had obtained a certificate of citizenship if it were found that he had not disclosed occurrences in his past which we, the government now decide to be of sufficient gravity as to constitute concealment of circumstances material to his grant of citizenship.” In other words, Trudeau was concerned that there were A LOT more war criminals that would have to be dealt with too. So many others that the only prudent thing to do was nothing:
“The document, now largely unredacted, was released by Library and Archives on Thursday. It was originally prepared for the Deschênes Commission, which in the mid-1980s investigated Nazi immigration into Canada.”
As we can see, it was early February — seven weeks before Professor Luciuk wrote his column that relied heavily on the Deschênes Commission to excuse virtually all members of the Galician Division — when the Canadian government released a less-redacted version of the Rodal Report. And as we got to learn in the freshly unredacted content, it was 1967 when then-justice minister Pierre Trudeau decided to block the stripping of an accused Nazi war criminal for what appear to be primarily political reasons. This information was redacted in the version of the Rodal Report released just back in June of 2023. It appears the Hunka affair basically forced the Canadian government into making this very belated admission:
And as we can see in a November 1967 memo by Trudeau, it wasn’t the fate of Subject F that was Trudeau’s primary concern. It was all the other war criminals living in Canada that had Trudeau worried about setting a precedent
And then there’s a newly unredacted part of the Rodal report that revealed how, in 1954, the RCMP was aware of how the United States was trying to resettle Nazis and their fellow travelers in Canada, which is a reminder that Canada wasn’t just protecting its own international reputation by covering this up:
And note how there’s still at least 14 pages that remain redacted. You have to wonder what’s under that rock? Presumably more evidence of the whitewashing of war criminals. The worst, most embarrassing evidence:
And that brings us to the revealing statements we got from both Immigration Minister Marc Miller and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when directly asked about the prospect of further releases of more of this redacted information. Both Miller and Trudeau made references to concerns around privacy, with Trudeau also warning about the implications to “community cohesion, around the kind of country we are”. And then Miller’s spokesperson, Aïssa Diop, listed some of the reasons this information hasn’t been released already. Reasons that include some of the information being “injurious to international affairs, injurious to the enforcement of any law in Canada.” These sure sound like admissions that the full release of this information would create both national and international scandals the government would prefer to not deal with:
And, again, this scandalous set of revelations was publicly released by the government of Canada seven weeks before Professor Luciuk wrote that piece in the Kyiv Post citing the Deschênes Commission as the final word on the historical assessment of the Galician Division. So as we can see, while the Rodal Report may indeed be a damning indictment on this chapter of history and the ongoing whitewashing of that history, it’s an optional indictment. You can ignore it if you want and, for the most part, no one is really going to point it out. It’s how whitewashing works.
Following up on the story about Canada’s ongoing struggling in publicly acknowledging its extensive history of coddling WWII war criminals, we got an update back in February on another Canadian project for the investigation and public disclosure of the government’s handling of war criminals trying to get into Canada. The War Crimes Project was set up in 1998, with a mission of not just exploring Canada’s handling of WWII war criminals but also “modern” war criminals. The project was given an annual budget of $15.6 million and released annual reports from 1998–2008. Then, from 2009–2015, only two reports were released. Since then, zero reports. Same budget, zero reports, and no explanation. Well, we sort of get an explanation about the Project planning on updating its website, but no real explanations have been given.
Why the silence for the past 9 years? We have no idea. But it’s hard not to notice that this period of zero reporting just happens to overlap with the Ukrainian civil war and all of the military assistance provided to a number of units that are very likely filled with modern day war criminals. Recall how the Ukrainian far right Centuria group bragged on social media back in 2021 about being trained by the Canadian military in Canada. We were then told after the Centuria incident that Canada doesn’t do the vetting on its own of the foreign soldiers it trains. And not long after the reports on the Centuria group’s Canadian adventures, we got to learn about a pair of 2018 training events in Ukraine where Canadian officers ended up meeting and having pictures taken with the Azov Battalion. And this meeting happened a year after Canada’s Joint Task Force Ukraine produced a briefing on the Azov Battalion, acknowledging its links to Nazi ideology. “Multiple members of Azov have described themselves as Nazis,” the Canadian officers warned in their 2017 briefing. Records show the primary concerns following the 2018 meeting were related to whether or not the pictures would be publicly released.
So when we are learning about how the War Crimes Project just went silent for close to a decade now, it’s not just the extreme sensitivities over the all the WWII criminals allowed into Canada and the ongoing quasi-coverup of Deschênes Commission and the still-partially redacted Rodal Report. There’s also the fact that Canada has an ongoing military relationship with the organizational descendants of those same Nazi collaborators. It’s why the Hunka affair was such a political fiasco. Because all indications are of a much larger scandal hiding under that fiasco involving the ongoing military support of modern day Nazis. It’s not great optics. Hence, presumably, the War Crimes Project’s complete lack of optics since 2015:
“The program had two different streams, including one dealing with Second World War cases and one for what it deemed “modern day” cases, or events that occurred later.”
Canada’s War Crimes Program isn’t just about identifying war criminals from WWII. Modern day war crimes cases are part of its mandate too. That’s part of what makes the lack of any reporting since 2015 extra puzzling. Are there modern day war criminals that Canada really doesn’t want to talk about?
Again, we have to recall how the Ukrainian far right Centuria group bragged on social media back in 2021 about being trained by the Canadian military in Canada. We were then told after the Centuria incident that Canada doesn’t do the vetting on its own of the foreign soldiers it trains. And not long after the reports on the Centuria group’s Canadian adventures, we got to learn about a pair of 2018 training events where Canadian officers ended up meeting and having pictures taken with the Azov Battalion. And this meeting happened a year after Canada’s Joint Task Force Ukraine produced a briefing on the Azov Battalion, acknowledging its links to Nazi ideology. “Multiple members of Azov have described themselves as Nazis,” the Canadian officers warned in their 2017 briefing. Records show the primary concerns following the 2018 meeting were related to whether or not the pictures would be publicly released. So when we are reading about how Canada’s War Crimes Project stopped reporting after 2015 for seemingly inexplicable reasons, it’s important to keep in mind that the Canadian military began training self-declared Ukrainian Nazis in the following years. From 1998 to 2008, the War Crimes project was producing reports annually. Then just two between 2009 and 2015. And then nothing since, despite the ongoing $15.6 million annual budget. Nothing beyond a hapless explanation about plans for ‘updating the website’:
And note how the War Crimes Project is a direct outgrowth of Deschênes Commission and all of the fall out from the commissions findings. Findings that, as we’ve seen, were systematically covered up by the Commission and only belatedly released in the still-partially redacted Rodal Report. That ongoing quasi-cover-up of the Rodal Report’s findings is a big part of the context of the War Crimes Projects mysterious silence for the past 9 years:
So we’ll see if the War Crimes Project’s website ever gets its update. But don’t count on that update including any actual updates on the status of Canada’s Nazi coddling. Especially the ongoing coddling.
Are NATO troops heading to Ukraine? It appears so, with France reportedly planning on sending a few dozen instructors to Ukraine, further blurring the lines between this being a conflict between Russia and Ukraine vs Russia and NATO. But as we’re going to see in the following set of article, there’s another line-blurring taking place that could prove to be even more provocative: The US has approved Ukrainian strikes inside Russia using US-supplied weapons.
So far, the new policy only allows for strikes along Russia’s border with Ukraine near Kharkiv, where Russian forces have been carrying out attacks from inside Russian territory. Forces inside Russia preparing to attack Kharkiv can now be struck with US-supplied weapons.
While that policy shift is being presented as only a minor modification to the existing US ban on strikes inside Russia, it’s also acknowledged that this is likely just a first step, with Ukraine and members of Biden administration already lobbying for the permission for deeper strikes inside Russia. In other words, it’s just a matter of time before a further ‘loosening’ of those restrictions. This is a first step.
We’re also told that the US’s decision to make this policy shift was only arrived at a few weeks ago in mid-May. And yet, as we’re going to see in the second article excerpt below, the US secretly approved of the shipment of longer-range ATACMS to Ukraine back in February. Previously, the ATACMS provided by the US had a range of 100 miles. The newer version have a 190 mile range. So several months before the US officially made this policy shift, longer-range ATACMS were secretly shipped to Ukraine. That sounds like a plan that’s been playing out for several months now. With more plans presumably underway.
Finally, as we’re also going to see in a recent New Republic piece, while all these weapons shipments are only exacerbating the US’s depleted stockpiles of all sorts of military hardware and especially missiles, there’s another issue growing more and more acute as the war in Ukraine (and the war in Gaza, for that matter) drags on: war profiteering.
The explosion of war profiteering is obviously due, in part, to the supply and demand imbalance created by the war. But there’s also the reality that the US military industrial complex has been allowed to consolidate itself into an oligopoly. As a result, only a handful of defense contracting giants supply many of the key weapons systems used by the US military and exploding profits are reflecting this consolidation. For example, in 1991, a sincle Stinger missile cost $25,000 to produce. Today, Raytheon is making $400,000 per Stinger. Keep in mind that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sat on Raytheon’s board before becoming Defense Secretary. Last year, the Defense Department released its first review of contract financing since 1985. Cash paid to shareholders in dividends and stock buybacks was up 73 percent compared to the previous decade, according to the review. Which is pretty incredible when you consider the volumes US military spending of that prior ‘War on Terror’ decade.
And that’s all why we should probably expect a lot more ‘loosening’ of the US’s restrictions on strikes insider Russia, along with a lot more reports about deepening shortages of weapons stockpiles. And, of course, the ever-deepening pockets of the military industrial complex. We’ve been warned. Over and over:
“U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking on Friday in Prague, declined to say whether the Biden administration could expand its policy to allow strikes elsewhere in Russia. But he did not rule it out.”
It’s just a first step, but presumably the first of many to come. That’s the conclusion experts arrived at in part thanks to Antony Blinken’s refusal to rule out a further ‘loosening’ of restrictions on the use of US weapons to strike inside Russia. It’s currently just Russian forces amassed on the Ukrainian border, but that’s going to change by all appearances. It’s just a matter of time:
Also note how experts don’t actually expect this new policy allowing for the striking of Russian forces on the immediate border to actually change the strategic situation. Which is all the more reason to assume a further loosening of those restrictions is just a matter of time:
And while we are told the Biden administration made this decision over just the last few weeks, it also turns out the US started secretly shipping longer-range ATACMS to Ukraine back in February. Unlike the previously supplied ATACMS that had a range of around 100 miles, these newer missiles can go around 190 miles. So while this policy shift is being presented as a recent reaction to desperate Ukrainian appeals, the secret shipping of longer-range ATACMS capable of striking much deeper inside Russia would suggest plans for this policy shift have been in the works for a while. Which, again, also suggests plans for a further loosening of this policy are already in the works:
“In a major policy shift, President Biden secretly approved the decision to send more than 100 of the longer-range missiles in mid-February, the senior U.S. official said, as well as more of the cluster munition variant. They were part of a $300 million shipment of weapons to Ukraine in March, the first new aid package for the country since funding ran out in late December.”
It was a major policy shift. A secret major policy shift that we only learned about a couple of months after the fact. As a result, almost all of the weapon systems the Ukrainians have been clamoring for that the US didn’t initially want to hand over have ultimately been handed over. Almost all of them. There’s still more to go:
But it’s not like the US has an endless supply of missiles. ATACMS haven’t been manufactured since the 1980s with Lockheed Martin as the sole supplier. They aren’t going to be cheap to replace. And yet, we are told the $300 million arms package that included these missiles was paid for thanks to Pentagon contracts that came in under bid. Take a moment to think about that claim. So many Pentagon contracts came in under bid that the money was found for a $300 million arms package. Because Pentagon contracts often come in under bid, right? It’s not exactly a compelling narrative. But that’s the narrative what they went with for some reason:
And that absurdist narrative about the $300 million the Pentagon just happened to find from under bid contracts brings us to the following piece about a trend that appears poised to only grow as the West gives Ukraine more and more high end weapons systems and risks provoking a much larger conflict: war profiteering is out of control and getting worse as the war in Ukraine drags on and US’s depleted stockpiles get more and more depleted:
“Within the first 48 hours of Russia’s invasion, the missile became “the star of the show,” according to one executive at Raytheon. These missiles had been out of production for two decades, yet the United States has sent roughly 2,000 anti-aircraft Stingers from its stockpiles to Ukraine over the last two years. While one missile cost $25,000 in 1991, it costs taxpayers $400,000 to build today. Raytheon, now RTX Corporation, is its sole producer and stands to gain hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue as it ramps up Stinger production.”
Yes, missiles have been ‘the star of the show’ in the war in Ukraine from the very beginning. The kind of stars that only a handful of defense contractors supply and only at exorbitantly marked up prices. There’s effectively an unchecked missile manufacturing oligopoly:
And note how not only was Lloyd Austin a Raytheon board member, but his predecessor Mark Esper also worked as a Raytheon lobbyist. The system is a highly lucrative giant conflict of interest:
But while we’re seeing monopoly-like prices coming from this handful of missile suppliers, it’s worth keeping in mind that this is kind of a monopoly/monopsony situation. The US government is the only buyer too. One might hope such a dynamic could lead to some sort of negotiating price sanity. But that’s obviously not what has happened, with the Pentagon failing one audit after another. It’s not a new problem. Quite the opposite. And with overwhelming majorities of US electorate in favor of cracking down on military price gouging and congressional insider trading, it’s turning into quite a political opportunity for any party willing to take on the Military Industrial Complex:
Of course, if popular politics alone were what dictated the actions of members of congress, the military industrial complex wouldn’t exist. Instead, it’s arguably bigger and more powerful than ever. Systemic festering corruption that only deepens, now festering at an accelerated pace thanks in large part to a war that is also only allowed to fester and deepen.
They used to be Nazis, but not anymore. Let’s give them weapons!
That’s more or less the decision just made by the US State Department over the arming of the Azov Battalion. A longstanding ban based on the “Leahy Law” — which bans US military assistance from going to foreign units credibly found to have committed major human rights violations — has been lifted following a “thorough review” that concluded the unit has not been responsible for any such violations. Azov can now receive any of the weapons systems getting sent to Ukraine. It sounds like the decision was made following the visit to Kyiv by Secretary of State Antony Blinken last month.
As the following article notes, this “Leahy Law” State Department ban is actually separate from the ban that was successfully passed by the US Congress in 2018. Recall how Congressman Ro Khanna managed to get the ban pushed through congress in 2018, only to get slammed in the US press for being a Russian dupe. And as we also saw, that ban was set to expire in 2025. But as predicted by Giorgi Kuparashvili — an Azov co-founder who led an Azov delegation tour of the US that included meeting with at least 50 members of Congress September 2022 — that ban was going to be lifted even sooner. It turns out Kuparashvili was correct. Sort of. Because it sounds like this State Department decision has effectively lifted that congressional ban too.
This is a good time to recall the Pentagon’s decision to invite an Azov-led team of Ukrainian military athletes to the Warrior Games held at Disney World in August of 2022. An event where the Azov member of the team with a large Nazi tattoo on his elbow won the “spirit of the team” award. It was just one of the many examples of a whole scale normalization of Ukraine’s Nazis in the West in recent years.
And regarding the delivery of western weapons directly to Azov, also recall that report from May of 2023 describing how Azov units have been one of the main recipients of NLAW anti-tank missiles from the UK. The decision was predicated on the conclusion that Azov was no longer a neo-Nazi unit. And yet, as we also saw, Azov founder Andriy Biletsky claimed at that time to be in command of an Azov special forces group, the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, and all of the commanders on the unit are either veterans of the Azov movement or other far right groups like Right Sector and Centuria. Just weeks ago, Boris Johnson led a UK delegation of MPs that welcomed Azov members as heroes. The lifting of this US weapons ban has long seemed inevitable. The writing has been on the wall for a while. And here we are:
“Now the brigade, a onetime volunteer militia absorbed into the Ukrainian National Guard in 2015, will have access to the same U.S. military assistance as any other unit. The policy shift was disclosed as Kyiv starts the summer fighting season and faces down a Russian military that has intensified its pressure on objectives in eastern Ukraine and the country’s energy infrastructure.”
It has long seemed pretty inevitable that we would reach this point and here we are. The mainstreaming and normalization of Azov is complete, at least officially. There’s “no evidence” of any violation of the “Leahy Law” banning weapons going to groups credibly accused of human rights violations. Which, notably, doesn’t really appear to be a statement about the ideology of the group. Also note how it sounds like this decision was arrived at by the US State Department following lobbying by Ukraine during Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit last month:
And note how the ban lifted is just the State Department’s ban. It’s NOT the congressional ban passed in 2018. Recall how Congressman Ro Khanna managed to get the ban pushed through congress in 2018, only to get slammed in the US press for being a Russian dupe. And as we also saw, that ban was set to expire in 2025. But as predicted by Giorgi Kuparashvili — an Azov co-founder who led an Azov delegation tour of the US that included meeting with at least 50 members of Congress September 2022 — that ban was going to be lifted even sooner. It turns out Kuparashvili was sort of correct. Because it sounds like this move by the State Department is effectively lifting that congressional ban too:
Now, regarding the assurances that the group’s leadership has long ago abandoned its Nazi roots, recall that report from May of 2023 describing how Azov units have been one of the main recipients of NLAW anti-tank missiles from the UK. The decision was predicated on the conclusion that Azov was no longer a neo-Nazi unit. And yet, as we also saw, Azov founder Andriy Biletsky claimed at that time to be in command of an Azov special forces group, the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, and all of the commanders on the unit are either veterans of the Azov movement or other far right groups like Right Sector and Centuria. Also recall that March 2022 puff piece in the Financial Times that included an interview of Biletsky and claims that Nazi symbols used by the unit’s members were really just pagan symbols, one of many western media puff pieces on Azov in recent years seemingly designed to whitewash the group’s ideology. So when we see further assertions in this article about how Azov shed its Nazi ideology long ago, it’s the same song and dance:
Finally, keep in mind that this is only going to help Azov recruit even more volunteers at the same time Ukraine is increasingly dependent on ‘press gang’ forced conscriptions. In other words, expect Azov’s influence inside Ukraine’s military to only grow:
Finally, keep in mind that this is all happening at the same time the US is loosening the overall restrictions on what types of weapons can be sent to Ukraine, with Ukraine now receiving longer-range missiles and other platforms that can strike deep inside Russia. So with the Azov battalion now slated to receive the same weapons as the rest of Ukrainian military, we have to ask: are any of those weapons systems capable of striking deep inside Russia going to be handed over to into Azov? Because at this point it’s hard to imagine a better guarantee of this conflict morphing into a formal Russia vs NATO conflict than handing Azov the ability to strike sensitive sites inside Russia. A nightmare outcome that has also seemed inevitable for a while now. And again, here we are, one big step closer to that seemingly inevitable nightmare.
Are we witnessing the beginning of the end for Russia’s occupation of Crimea? Yes, according to the hyped up reports touting some apparently stunning successes in the use of the recently delivered US-provided long-range ATACMS against air defense systems in Crimea. According to these reports, Ukraine crippled multiple S‑400 air defense systems in Crimea without having a single missile shot down. While the reports haven’t been confirmed, it’s already being giddily cited by Western military analysts as a sign of things to come. With the S‑400, Russia’s top of the line air defense system, seemingly unable to stop ATACMS, the plans appears to be to first take out the air defenses, then the rest of the over 100 military targets will get hit and, eventually, Crimea will be made militarily unusable for Russia. That’s the plan.
We’re also getting a better sense of how readily this situation can escalate. Because while the has US secretly already sent 100 of these longer-range ATACMS to Ukraine in recent months, it sounds like there’s still around 1,140 “expired” ATACMS in the US’s stockpiles. It’s unclear how many of those “expired” missiles are still usable, but it’s still an indication that this missile-based strategy could rapidly escalate significantly.
And let’s not forget that the US isn’t the only government with missiles to spare. The UK is already pledging to send more Stormshadow missiles. And while Germany has so far refused to send Taurus missiles, we are told in a recent Radio Free Europe that the Taurus would be even more appropriate than the ATACMS at taking out the Kerch Bridge and the hope is that the US’s decision to deliver these ATACMS will persuade the German government. Recall how the UK government reportedly devised a plan for blowing up the Kerch Bridge, although it wasn’t the plan Ukraine ultimately used. So it would appear that plans for missile attacks on that bridge are underway.
Now, it’s important to keep in mind that we’ve heard this “game changer” narrative before, whether it’s tanks or jets. And yet it’s hard to ignore the realities that large deliveries of longer-range high precision missiles capable of striking any target in Crimea really could change the situation. Of course, it’s highly unlikely to change the situation in a manner that somehow results in a Ukrainian ‘victory’. But it could escalate the situation significantly.
And let’s also not forget that, when it comes to escalatory changes to the current war dynamic, we’re not just talking about large scale missile attacks on Crimea. With the US loosening its restrictions on attacks inside Russia, it’s just a matter of time before these missiles start hitting sensitive sites inside the rest of Russia. So while it’s hard to take seriously the preemptive celebration over the routing of Russia from Crimea, it’s not hard to take seriously the prospects for a much more intense conflict involving more and more powerful weapon systems on both sides. It’s hard to see why a dramatic escalation will be great for Ukraine, but it should be an incredible payday for Western defense contractors in the missile-building business:
“The S‑400 is Russia’s most advanced air defense system. It first became operational in 2007, more than two decades after the ATACMS, which have been in service since 1986.”
Russia’s most advanced air defense systems are apparently quite vulnerable to decades-old ATACMS. While experts acknowledge that the S‑400 is indeed highly capable, it’s also highly vulnerable to these old US-provided missiles. That’s the story we’re getting:
And it’s not just these recent successful attacks that experts are citing. There have been claims of successful ATACMS attacks on Crimean installations for months now:
And that report touting this allegedly stunningly successful ATACMS attack, with none of the missiles intercepted, brings us to the following Radio Free Europe report from a couple of weeks ago describing the plans on using these attacks to make Crimea militarily unusable. And as the article notes, while 100 ATACMS have been sent so far, there’s still another 1,140 “expired” ATACMS sitting in US stockpiles potentially available:
“Now fortress Crimea faces a significant new threat that could neutralize its crucial role in the 26-month-old war: U.S. long-range ATACMS, or Army Tactical Missile Systems. After nearly two years of hesitation, the United States earlier this month delivered versions of the powerful ballistic missiles that can travel 300 kilometers — essentially reaching any of the more than 100 military targets on the peninsula.”
All of the military targets of Crimea are now in reach of US-supplied ATACMS, according to this analysis. As one analyst puts it, “The delivery of ATACMS is a big breakthrough. It could basically make Crimea militarily worthless.” And while it’s preposterous to imagine Russia will allow itself to be ‘pushed out’ of Crimea, it’s not hard to imagine this really does represent a significant escalation in this conflict:
And with those roughly 100 military targets in mind, note the readily available pool of ATACMS that could still be sent to Ukraine: on top of the 100 missiles already sent, there are still 1,140 “expired” ATACMS still in the US’s stock. And that’s on top of the missiles sent by the UK and potentially Germany. The missile-intensive phase of this war could get a lot more intense as the western restrictions on what can be sent to Ukraine continues to ‘loosen’. For example, note how the German Taurus missile is cited as being more appropriate than the ATACMS for attacking the Kerch Bridge. Also recall how the UK government reportedly devised a plan for blowing up the Kerch Bridge. Crippling that bridge is a longstanding goal of the West and it sounds like it will be a lot easier to accomplish with all these new missiles:
Also note that when we see references to the earlier shorter-range ATACMS deliveries that spray bomblets, recall how cluster munitions have been used in Ukraine since 2014, with civilians as one of the primary victims. Which is a reminder that the more this conflict escalates, the more civilian deaths we should expect. Including civilians in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine that, in theory, are to be reincorporated back into Ukrainian society after some sort of nebulous ‘Russian defeat’ has been achieved:
How many more cluster munition missiles is the US planning on sending? We’ll see, but more missiles is clearly the plan. Especially if it turns out all the hype over the S‑400’s troubles is accurate. We’ve reached the escalatory missile phase of this conflict.
And in related news, the US just announced plans to send another battery of Patriot missiles to Ukraine. Which is a reminder that Russia has missiles too. As well as a reminder that it’s the Ukrainian people, and not their Western ‘allies’, who are going to be on the receiving end of those missiles as this conflict continues to fester and escalate without any realistic end in sight.
Are the Russians about to neutralize the new threat posed by the US’s delivery of powerful longer-range ATACMS to Ukraine and the loosening of rules against the targeting of sites in Russian territory? Maybe, according to a recent Russian media where Russia claims to have downed an intact ATACMS guidance system. That’s all we know. It was a valuable find, but time will tell if it pans out into enhanced countermeasures, possibly in the form of far fewer stories about successful Ukrainian strikes.
But that recent report came roughly a week after another very disturbing report regarding Ukraine’s use of these new longer-range ATACMS: four civilians — including two children — were killed and an other 151 were injured after an ATACMS struck a civilian beach in Crimea. The US claims the Ukrainians were targeting a missile launcher and the ATACMS happened to be shot down by the Russians and shrapnel just happened to strike the civilians on the beach. Russia makes no mention of shooting down the missile and not only claims that the civilians were intentionally targeted by Ukraine but that the US provided the targeting information. Russia’s Foreign Ministry reportedly summoned US Ambassador Lynne Tracy and told her the US was “waging a hybrid war against Russia and has actually become a party to the conflict” and went on to warn that “retaliatory measures will definitely follow.” Russia did not give details about the nature of those retaliatory measures.
So we’ve hit a point where Russia has now formally accused the US of not just directly participating in the war in Ukraine but targeting civilians in Crimea. It’s a recipe for escalation. Which brings us to a fascinating opinion piece published weeks ago by Jeffrey Sachs where Sachs makes the case that the US has been engaged in a decades-long covert neocon plan to not just contain but break up Russia. Dick Cheney was even opining about the breakup of Russia back in 1992 when he was Secretary of Defense. And as Sachs describes, the deepening conflict in Ukraine is very much a part of that plan. Sachs goes on to give a remarkable account of his own experiences in Ukraine in 2014 in the wake of the Maidan revolt. As Sachs describes, “I happened to see the U.S. complicity up close, as the post-coup government invited me for urgent economic discussions. When I arrived in Kiev, I was taken to the Maidan, where I was told directly about U.S. funding of the Maidan protest...In my view, this was a standard CIA-led covert regime change operation.”
And as Sachs goes on to describe, while Russian has repeatedly offered peace proposals designed to end what was first Ukraine’s civil war and eventually the Russian invasion, the US and its allies have been adamantly opposed to any sort of negotiated settlement the entire time. As Sachs puts it, “Guided by the neocon game plan, the U.S. has refused to negotiate on every occasion, while trying to pin the blame on Russia for the lack of negotiations.”
Worse, guess which candidate in the US presidential election is reportedly proposing plans to force the Ukrainians to the negotiation table under the threat of cutting off aid if they don’t: Donald Trump. Yep. The plan — devised by two Trump national security advisors — hasn’t been formally embraced by the Trump campaign, we are told Trump was shown the plan and responded favorably. But it did appear on the website of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), one of the many new Trump-oriented think tanks to pop up in recent years. Recall how the AFPI is run Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director Brooke Rollins and is filled with former Trump staffers. Also recall how Rollins is herself quite close to Texas Christian Nationalist billionaire Tim Dunn.
It’s unclear how Russia might respond to the plan, which appears to put off the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO “for an extended period of time”, but doesn’t necessarily rule it out. Beyond that, the security guarantees for Ukraine would likely include “arming Ukraine to the teeth” under the plan. There’s a lot Russia could view as a non-starter. Still, it’s a reflection of how utterly demented the US foreign policy establishment’s position on Ukraine (and Russia) has become by this point that mad man Trump is probably advocating a more realistic foreign policy position on Ukraine. And while that establishment may loathe the idea of the US forcing Ukraine to the negotiation table, it’s not hard to imagine the US public will be more than happy to see peace negotiations end that war. In other words, the longstanding bipartisan US commitment to this neocon project has more or less handed a future President Trump an incredible diplomatic ‘win’ just sitting there for the taking. This is where we are.
But let’s also not forget one of the incredibly disturbing things we’ve learned about how the Trump handled its foreign policy: despite all of his claims about opposition to the ‘deep state’, Trump actually dramatically increased the powers of the CIA during his term. So while we have candidate Trump running on a platform of forcing peace negotiations, what can we actually expect given his track record? Keep in mind his planned war with the ‘Deep State’ isn’t a plan to ‘deconstruct’ the national security state. It’s plan to fill it with people willing to pledge loyalty to Trump, which is not remotely the same thing as a plan to fill the CIA with peaceniks. Quite the opposite. This is going to be a fascist CIA unleashed.
And what happens if those negotiations fail because the Russians don’t find the terms acceptable? What’s a spurned President Trump going to do in that situation? It’s not hard to imagine ‘Trump the peacemaker’ morphing into ‘Trump the warlord’ on this front given his delicate psychological makeup. But again, this is where we are. A situation decades in the making in many respects.
Ok, first, here’s that recent report on the Russian acquisition of an intact ATACMS guidance system. Time will tell if this really does result in enhanced ATACMS interception capabilities. But keep in mind that if Russia does manage to start shooting down these missiles in large numbers, that will probably just be seen as an excuse to escalate further according to this ongoing covet neocon strategy:
“Viktor Litovkin, a retired Russian colonel, told the online Lenta.ru news portal that Moscow would try to identify any weak spots and use the information it gleaned to improve its ability to shoot down ATACMS missiles.”
Will Russia managed to counter the existing threat posed by the longer-ranged ATACMS delivered by the US earlier this year with the help of this intact guidance system? We’ll see, possibly in the form of far fewer reports about successful Ukrainian attacks with them.
But as the following report from roughly a week earlier reminds us, even when these missiles are shot down, there’s still a chance they inflict damage. At least that was the explanation US officials gave for the loss of civilian life in Crimea after a Ukrainian-launch ATACM struck a civilian area of a beach resulting in the death of at least four civilians — two of whom were children — and another 151 injuries in Crimea. According to US officials, the Ukrainians weren’t targeting civilians but instead the Russians successfully shot down the missile and it just happened to hit those civilians.
Russia, on the other hand, is treating this as an attack on civilians not just enabled by the US providing the ATACMS but also providing the targeting information. Russia’s Foreign Ministry reportedly summoned US Ambassador Lynne Tracy and told her Washington was “waging a hybrid war against Russia and has actually become a party to the conflict”. Russia went on to warn that “retaliatory measures will definitely follow,” without being specific about what those measures may be.
So either the Russians managed to shoot down an ATACM — something that, just weeks ago, Russia was apparently struggling with given all the predictions about how the new longer ranger ATACMS would eventually drive Russia’s military out of Crimea — and the missile just happened to hit a number of civilians on a beach. Or the Ukrainians targeted civilians on a beach using these newly delivered US-supplied ATACMS:
“But directly blaming the United States for an attack on Crimea — which Russia unilaterally annexed in 2014 although most of the world considers it part of Ukraine — is a step further.”
It’s an escalation. An escalation in rhetoric at a minimum. But if it really is the case that Ukraine targeted civilians on a Crimean beach, it’s going to be a lot more than just a rhetorical escalation. And while the US is assuring us that this was just an accident as a result of Russia shooting down the missile, keep in mind the Russians are going to know if that’s actually the case. The world may not know, but the Russians know whether or not they really did shoot down that missile:
And while we don’t know what exactly those promised retaliatory measures will be, note the disturbing echos of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the threat to station conventional missiles within striking distance of the US and its allies:
And that threat of a renewed escalation of direct military tensions between the US and Russia as the war in Ukraine plays out brings us to the following opinion piece by Jeffrey Sachs that puts the deepening conflict in Ukraine and deepening risk of escalation in the context of a much broader longstanding US neoconservative project focused on weakening and ultimately breaking up Russia that has been in place since the end of the Cold War. As Sachs reminds us, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney was opining about the breakup of Russia all the way back in 1992. Steady NATO enlargement that violated pledges made to Russia was part of the plan, including US proposals for NATO membership for Ukraine AND Georgia at the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit.
Then came the 2014 Maidan revolt in Ukraine. As Sachs describes, “I happened to see the U.S. complicity up close, as the post-coup government invited me for urgent economic discussions. When I arrived in Kiev, I was taken to the Maidan, where I was told directly about U.S. funding of the Maidan protest...In my view, this was a standard CIA-led covert regime change operation.” And as Sachs goes on to describe, while Russian has repeatedly offered peace proposals designed to end what was first Ukraine’s civil war and eventually the Russian invasion, the US and its allies have been adamantly opposed to any sort of negotiated settlement the entire time. As Sachs puts it, “Guided by the neocon game plan, the U.S. has refused to negotiate on every occasion, while trying to pin the blame on Russia for the lack of negotiations.” It’s important, but ominous, context to keep in mind as we’re waiting to see how the threats of direct retaliation against the US by Russia for that attack in Crimea ultimately manifests. Because it’s hard not to see an escalation of direct military tensions between the US and Russia as being very consistent with that decades-old neocon plan:
“It is against this grim backdrop that Russian leaders have repeatedly proposed to negotiate security arrangements with Europe and the U.S. that would provide security for all countries concerned, not just the NATO bloc. Guided by the neocon game plan, the U.S. has refused to negotiate on every occasion, while trying to pin the blame on Russia for the lack of negotiations.”
Sachs isn’t mincing words. He views the ongoing escalation of tensions between the US and Russia and the deepening, albeit increasingly hopeless looking, war in Ukraine as being entirely consistent with this decades-long neocon agenda to contain and ultimately break up Russia. A plan going all the way back to the end of the Cold War. In other words, the Cold War didn’t really ever end. Unilaterally:
But then we get to what Sachs personally witnessed as someone invited to partake in urgent post-Maidan economic discussions. According to Sachs, the US’s fingerprints were all over the Maidan events. It was a standard CIA-led covert regime change operation:
Sachs goes on to describe how it was the West that has been systematically blocking any real peace negotiations in this conflict from the beginning. Even the Minsk II agreement was apparently made in bad faith and was just intended to give Ukraine time to build up its military, as Angela Merkel later admitted:
Then we get to the December 2021 Russian proposal that had at its core a Russian demand for an end to the expansion of NATO. Sachs managed to speak with US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and urge him to enter into negotiations. Advice that was obviously ignored, reflecting an ongoing US plan for further NATO expansion. The long-standing neocon project continues:
Then there’s the March 2022 proposed negotiations, weeks into the war. Russia and Ukraine nearly closed a peace deal. Until UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv to warn the Ukrainians against it. The deal died:
Finally, there’s the current peace negotiation offer made weeks ago that is currently getting ignored. Again, the neocon plan continues:
And that highly disturbing opinion piece by Sachs imploring the US foreign policy establishment to allow Ukraine to even enter into peace negotiations brings us to the recently revealed Trump peace plan. A plan predicated on forcing Ukraine to the negotiation table:
“They have presented their strategy to Trump, and the Republican presidential candidate responded favorably, Fleitz added. “I’m not claiming he agreed with it or agreed with every word of it, but we were pleased to get the feedback we did,” he said.”
Trump seemed on board with the plan. At least that’s what we were told. Which isn’t particularly surprising given it was the America First Policy Institute — filled with Trump staffers — that published it. And yet, while it’s very conceivable Russia would be willing to enter these negotiations, it’s not clear the plan actually meets Russia’s terms, with the possibility of NATO membership only put on hold and plans of “arming Ukraine to the teeth”:
Are the core elements of this peace plan going to be acceptable to Russia? Maybe, or maybe not. But that’s what negotiations are for. And while it would be an utter catastrophe for the US and world if Trump returns to office, that doesn’t negate the readily apparent catastrophe of this decades-old longstanding US covert neocon policy. A policy designed to culminate in some sort of grand conflagration that ends Russia as an intact state once and for all. We realistically shouldn’t expect the situation to actually get better under Trump. He’s far too unstable and deranged to expect a real solution. But nor should we expect the situation in Ukraine to improve if he loses. US foreign policy is stuck between a longstanding lunatic policy and the promises of a madman. It’s an existential problem, decades in the making and, in large part, by design.
What can Ukraine possibly do to end the slaughter? It’s a question that only grows grimmer with each passing month as the news on the front lines steadily gets worse at the same time the resolve to refuse any sort of peaceful negotiated settlement remains firm. But while answers remain elusive, we’re getting an idea of how Ukraine is planning on respond to situation. A classic response: high-level firings. We saw that back in February with the firing of Gen. Valery Zaluzhny. As we also saw, Zaluzhny’s firing was followed up with Zaluzhny flirting with far right figures and OUN‑B symbols. Flash forward to last week, and we got a new high level firing: Lt. Gen. Yuriy Sodol was replaced as Ukraine’s Joint Forces’ commander.
By all accounts, Sodol was widely disliked by the troops and for understandable reasons. He has a reputation for giving orders to hold ground that couldn’t be held and resulted in high casualty rates. What’s disturbing about this story, however, is the impetus behind Sodol’s firing. Maj. Bohdan Krotevych, chief of staff of the Azov Brigade, filed a request to Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation concerning “a military general who in my opinion has killed more Ukrainian soldiers than any Russian general,” and posted about it on Telegram. President Volodymyr Zelensky announced Sodol’s firing hours later. It was a remarkable display of the growing influence of an increasingly mainstreamed Azov movement that recently got the green light from the US military for US training and weapons.
But Krotevych wasn’t the only influential far right figure to openly call for Sodol’s firing. Serhii Sternenko — described as a “Ukrainian activist” with millions of YouTube followers in the article below — was cited as an example of the other influential figures calling for Sodol’s removal. Recall how Sternenko isn’t just some ‘Ukrainian activist’ on YouTube. As we saw, not only is Sternenko a former leader of Right Sector but he was also one of the ‘Ukrainian Activist’ who showed up during the Hong Kong protests of 2019. Protests that managed to incorporate far right symbols like ‘Pepe the frog’ into its symbolic repertoire. And as we also saw, one of Sternenko’s chief patrons happens to be Ulana Suprun, a key leader of various OUN‑B front groups in recent decades along with her husband Marko. In other words, Sternenko is like a Ukrainian Nazi influencer at this point. A rather influential influencer, it would appear.
And then there’s Mariana Bezuhla, an MP and member of the parliament’s defense committee. Bezuhla referred to Sodol as “a criminal” in a Facebook post and has also called on General Syrsky — who replaced Zaluzhny earlier this year — to resign. Bezuhla also happens to be the lawmaker who introduced a bill back in November of last year that would have expanded the conscription laws to include women. It’s an example of how Ukraine simply has no realistic military options. Sure, it can start conscripting women, and maybe even all adults as young as 18, but what then? They’re still going to be outmatched on the battlefield. The political demand that Ukraine must win back all its former territory — a demand that ignores the ethno-sectarian civil war reality that started this conflict — is running up against battlefield realities. And while the firing of Sodol is a reflection of those contradictions, it’s not a solution.
What can Ukraine’s military leaders possibly do to ‘win’ when that’s not realistically possible? Well, there’s one option that was actually floated by Major Krotevych back in April of last year: capturing entire Russian villages hostage as leverage in negotiations with Russia. Yep. Krotevych cited the use of such tactics by Chechen fighters in Russian-Chechen civil war. A tactic that, months after Krotevych suggest it, appears to have been at the core of Hamas’s October 7 attacks against Israel. Attacks that have had apocalyptic consequences for the people of Gaza but, on the other hand, have undoubtedly been a massive global public relations victory for Hamas as a result of Israel’s horrific response. Might we see October 7‑inspired ‘asymmetric warfare’ strategies deployed by Ukraine as traditional military victories appear more and more remote? We’ll see, but that otherwise hopeless reality on the battlefield isn’t really leaving Ukraine many traditional military options. That’s all part of the grim context of this latest Ukrainian shake up. It’s not clear what realistically can change the reality on the ground, but that doesn’t mean more and more desperate measures won’t be deployed. With the far right gaining more and more influence and prestige the entire time:
“Maj. Bohdan Krotevych, the chief of staff of the influential Azov Brigade, filed a request to Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation concerning “a military general who in my opinion has killed more Ukrainian soldiers than any Russian general,” he wrote Monday in a post on Telegram.”
Maj. Bohdan Krotevych, the chief of staff of the Azov Brigade, publicly calls for Sodol’s removal and, within hours, Sodol is gone. After just four months in this position:
And as we can see, Krotevych isn’t just accusing Sodol of poor leadership in his current position that he only assumed months ago. Krotevych’s complaints go back to siege of Azovstal plant in Mariupol. Of course, while Sodol may be gone, there’s still the overarching question of whether or not Ukraine’s extraordinarily high rate of casualties is really primarily due to the poor decision-making of higher-level commander like Sodol, or if this is more an inevitable outcome of a conflict that Ukraine is simply not realistically able to win? What can be changed in terms of tactics? This is good time to recall how Maj. Bohdan Krotevych has called for taking entire Russian villages hostage as leverage in negotiations with Russia. Might that be the approach taken? Hamas-style mass civilian hostage-taking?
But it wasn’t just Azov chief of staff Maj. Bohdan Krotevych leveling these charges against Sodol. We find “Ukrainian activist” Serhii Sternenko cited as an example of the other influential figures who have been harshly critical of Sodol. Recall how Sternenko isn’t just some ‘Ukrainian activist’ on YouTube. As we saw, not only is Sternenko a former leader of Right Sector but he was also one of the ‘Ukrainian Activist’ who showed up during the Hong Kong protests of 2019. Protests that managed to incorporate far right symbols like ‘Pepe the frog’ into its symbolic repertoire. And as we also saw, one of Sternenko’s chief patrons happens to be Ulana Suprun, a key leader of various OUN‑B front groups in recent decades along with her husband Marko. In other words, Sternenko isn’t just a Ukrainian Nazi. He’s a particularly influential Ukrainian Nazi:
Finally, when we lawmaker Mariana Bezuhla also joining the chorus for Sodol’s removal, it’s worth keeping in mind that she was the lawmaker who introduced a bill back in November of last year that would have expanded the conscription laws to include women. Which is a reminder that Ukraine doesn’t really have many options beyond continuing to throw more and more of its population into this meat grinder or negotiating some sort of peaceful settlement. Those are the only realistic options remaining:
This is a good time to note that Ukraine’s population, estimated at around 36 million, is currently project to fall by around 10 million over the next three decades, according to official Ukrainian government estimates. And that’s without the mass mobilization of Ukraine’s women. And, presumably, also without a negotiated peaceful settlement.
Here’s one of those stories that not just troubling on its own but hints at a much larger and more troubling pervasive situation: The New York Times published a story about the systematic execution of surrendering Russian soldiers by one of the international legions fighting in Ukraine. That’s according to the accounts of Caspar Grosse, a German medic who served in the unit, and Benjamin Reed, a former member from Massachusetts. The report describes three episodes of surrendering Russians being killed in violation of the Geneva Conventions, some captured on video.
The unit, called the Chosen Company, is comprised of about 60 members from around a dozen countries. While technically operating under the Ukraine’s 59th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade, it sounds like the Ukrainian officers in charge merely perform administrative duties. The de facto leader is Ryan O’Leary, a former U.S. Army National Guardsman from Iowa. O’Leary strongly denies all the allegations and insists there were no “dirty kills”, although the available evidence strongly suggests a cover up.
So is the Ukrainian military now investigating these allegations? It doesn’t sound like. As the article notes, The Wilson Center issued a report in February that observed how “Reports of human rights violations within the military have become a toxic issue for the Ukrainian government and highlighted the issue.” And yet, it doesn’t sound like Ukraine is the only country in a position to investigation these war crimes. According to Rachel E. VanLandingham, a professor at Southwestern Law School and a former U.S. Air Force lawyer, the fact that Mr. O’Leary and other Chosen members are American means the US DOJ could investigate too. It’s an important reminder that the international nature of the forces fighting for Ukraine has potentially turns the war crimes conducted on behalf of Ukraine’s fight into an international justice issue. It’s not just Ukraine not investigating these allegations.
As VanLandingham adds, “Failure to investigate is more troubling than the incident itself...Lack of accountability starts with lack of investigation.” Which is also a reminder that there’s probably A LOT more war crimes of this nature taking place, in part, because soldiers are going to know they won’t be punished. This is a good time to recall the video of the execution of Russian POWs by soldiers who appear to be members of the Georgian Legion in the opening weeks of war. Were those videos investigated? If not, well, we can’t be shocked if other units were doing the same.
But also keep in mind that, while we are told these are ‘Russian soldiers’ being killed while surrendering, there’s a good chance a number of these were former Ukrainians from the separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Or maybe from Crimea. All territories that Ukraine has pledged to recapture. In other words, the killing of surrendering Russian soldiers probably also includes the killing of people who, ostensibly, are supposed to be reintegrated back into some sort of whole Ukraine someday. At least that’s the stated goal. Which underscores the reality that there’s never been any real discussion about what exactly the plan is for the millions of former Ukrainians from those separatist areas who clearly do not want to be part of the rest of Ukraine at this point. What’s the plan for them? Reeducation camps? Ethnic cleansing and expulsion to Russia? It’s never discussed. At least not in public. And odds are the systemic killing of surrendering prisoners, and all the other war crimes encouraged through a lack of investigations, isn’t going to help with that allegedly planned future social reunification of the country.
And yes, obviously, there is no shortage of allegations of Russia abusing Ukrainian POWs, including a UN report released back in March. But with the conflict being framed in the West as a fight for ‘democracy and human rights vs authoritarianism,’ systematic unaddressed war crimes by units fighting for Ukraine present a pretty massive problem, especially when it comes to convincing Ukrainians living in the separatist regions (now Russia) that actually they should be rejecting Russia and embracing the West.
Also keep in mind that we’re only learning about this thanks to a pair of whistleblowers from the unit. International whistleblowers who have the option of leaving the battlefield and returning to their home countries where they can safely tell their stories. That’s not going to be an option for Ukrainian soldiers. So while we’re hearing about these tolerated war crimes in one of the international units, we shouldn’t assumed the all-Ukrainian units aren’t doing this too. That’s all part of why the following report, which is primarily focused on just three episodes of killing surrendering soldiers in just one of the international units operating in Ukraine, is really just a peek at a much larger story:
“The shooting of the unarmed, wounded Russian soldier is one of several killings that have unsettled the Chosen Company, one of the best-known units of international troops fighting on behalf of Ukraine.”
This isn’t just a story about the execution of a single surrendering soldier. It’s a pattern of conduct in violation of the Geneva Convention by a unit of international fighters led by Ryan O’Leary, a former U.S. Army National Guardsman. A pattern of conduct that the Ukraine military doesn’t appear interested in investigating. But as the article notes, this isn’t just up to the Ukrainian military. The US Justice Department also can investigate because Mr. O’Leary and other Chosen members are American. Which is presumably also an option for the governments of the other international members of The Chosen. It’s a reminder that the world really does have a range of options for addressing the war crimes committed by these units of foreign fighters. Which also makes the lack of any action by governments around the world all the more disappointing:
And note now As Rachel E. VanLandingham, a professor at Southwestern Law School and a former U.S. Air Force lawyer, puts it, “Failure to investigate is more troubling than the incident itself...Lack of accountability starts with lack of investigation.” It’s a reminder that, when we see a lack of investigation into incidents like this where there’s video evidence of a war crime, that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg:
And then there’s the detail that this Chosen unit of around 60 people from a dozen or so countries was technical operating under the command of the Ukraine’s 59th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade. And yet, it sounds like the Ukrainian officers were only technically in charge but not actually in charge. And this is the norm for these international units. Which is another reminder that this is probably a far more pervasive problem:
It’s going to be grimly interesting to see how these public reports about the systematic killing of surrender Russian soldiers impacts their decision to either surrender or fight to the death. And don’t forget: the large number of surrendering ‘Russians’ are probably separatist Ukrainians from Donetsk, Luhansk, or Crimea and who, in theory, are to be ‘liberated’ after Ukraine militarily reclaims all of its lost territory. Having a ‘surrendering soldiers will probably be shot’ unofficial policy probably isn’t the best long term plan to help ease the resistance to an eventual recapture of that lost territory. But that’s the unofficial policy and will presumably remain the unofficial policy until it’s clear such incidents will trigger investigations. Investigations highly unlikely to happen. At least not until there too many war crimes to ignore. How many is too many to ignore? It would be nice to know, but let’s hope we don’t have to find out.
It’s a stunning success that’s turning the tide of the conflict. It’s the kind of narrative we should expect from Western military analysts at this point when it comes to assessing the impact of Ukraine’s big Kursk offensive in recent weeks. A high profile offensive that hasn’t really achieved any obvious battlefield strategic objectives for Ukraine but has at least managed to achieve what could be considered the highest of priorities in this conflict: embarrassing Putin. At least that’s what we can infer from the waves of excited coverage we’ve seen about the invasion and its impact inside Russia.
And that brings us to the following pair of reports on the Kursk invasion. The first, a Business Insider piece, quotes a number of ‘war analysts’ from Western think tanks who all had roughly the same message: the Kursk invasion was wonderful but not enough. The West’s restrictions on the use of longer-range Western-provided missiles inside Russia needs to be lifted entirely so Ukraine can start strike targets deep inside Russia.
That’s the consensus from the three analysts in the following piece: Rajan Menon, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And George Barros, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. All three seemed to agree the Kurks invasion was a wonderful initiative that succeeded in ’embarrassing Putin’ but more needs to be done, with the lifting of restrictions on missile strikes inside Russia but the next necessary step. Ukraine itself seems to be suggesting that the Kursk invasion wouldn’t have been necessary at all had the restrictions already been lifted. So we have this new ‘expert’ consensus emerging that the Kursk invasion has been a huge win and further escalations are the next needed step.
Keep in mind that this is far from the first time we heard calls for a loosening of restrictions on the use of Western-provided missiles. Back in May, we learned about how the US quietly modified its restrictions by allowing for strikes on Russian units inside Russia preparing for strikes on Kharkiv. Then, in June, we learned that the US approved the US of longer-range ATACMS against targets in Crimea. This is an established trend. Dropping those restrictions entirely is kind of the next logical step. And, of course, also the next logical step towards making this a direct Russia-NATO conflict.
Then we get to the second article below. A Forbes piece published on the same day as the Business Insider piece. And as the author argues, if the Kursk invasion was intended to be a diversion that would force Russia to pull away from the eastern front in Ukraine, it’s already failed. Instead, Russia hasn’t pulled back at all but is instead gaining momentum and is on the verge of capturing Pokrovsk, a city located at a crossroads of multiple railroad lines. As the article describes, the fall of Pokrovsk could weaken Ukrainian defenses all along the eastern front line. If that happens, Russia could be in control of the entire Donetsk Oblast, a key objective of this war.
It’s those two narratives — the former rooted in what appears to be wishful thinking and a zeal for escalation and the latter grounded in the realities on the battlefield — that point towards just how precarious the situation has gotten in terms of keeping this conflict from spiraling into something much more like a direct conflict between Russia and NATO. Because at the same time the West is ‘learning the lesson’ that bold initiatives like the Kursk invasion are paying huge dividends, Ukraine is on the verge of losing the entire Donetsk Oblast. What sort of additional escalations will these Western ‘analysts’ call for should Pokrovsk fall, along with the rest of the eastern front? Will we finally be in a place where both sides are open to peace talks? Or will it be more calls for long-range missiles that can strike deep inside Russia and escalate the conflict even more? Is the Kursk invasion part of some sort of preemptive land grab in anticipation of the fall of Donetsk and ensuing peace negotiations? Or a preemptive escalation?
Time will tell. But the more this Kursk invasion plays out, the more it looks like the net effect from the surprise invasion is going to be an accelerated collapse of Ukraine’s eastern front and, in turn, an acceleration to the next phase of this conflict. Whether that next phase involves the start of real peace negotiations, or the next level of in increasingly direct Russia-NATO conflict:
“They also say that Ukraine would be even more successful if the restrictions that many of its major allies, including the US, imposed on it were dropped.”
Calls for a dropping of restrictions on the use of Western missiles inside targets in Russia. It’s not a surprise, but it’s still alarming. Three experts with thoroughly ‘establishment’ credentials — a senior researcher as Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War — all delivering the same message to the public in this piece: Ukraine needs permission to start hitting sites deep inside Russia with weapons like US ATACMS or British Storm Shadows. This is, of course, following reports from back in May about how the US quietly modified its restrictions by allowing for strikes on Russian units inside Russia preparing for strikes on Kharkiv. Then, in June, we learned that the US approved the US of longer-range ATACMS against targets in Crimea. That’s part of the context of these ongoing calls for a further loosening of these restrictions. There’s already been a steady loosening for months now, much to the glee of Western war analysts. And now they want to see the rest of the restrictions dropped:
Also note how there appeared to be a general agreement among these analysts that the invasion of the Kurks region had been an unmitigated success. Taken together, we can see how the ‘establishment war analysts’ consensus appears to be for both deeper military campaigns inside Russia and many more missile strikes deep inside Russia using advanced Western-provided missiles. In other words, a massive escalation:
And those high hopes brings us to the following Forbes piece that has a very different take on the successes of the Kursk offensive. The message of the piece: If it was intended to be a diversion, it has failed and risks far bigger failures the longer it goes:
“The result, three weeks into Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk, is that the Russian offensive in the east is not only continuing—it’s gaining momentum. “Although we anticipated that the town of Novohrodivka would be captured in the coming days,” CIT noted, “the pace of the Russian forces’ advance has exceeded our expectations, not only failing to slow down as it approached the town but even accelerating.””
Not only was Russia not diverted, but it’s been gaining momentum on the Ukrainian Eastern Front. Pokrovsk is now on the verge of falling. And if Pokrovsk falls, Ukrainian defenses all along the eastern front line could be compromised and the whole Donetsk Oblast could fall under Russian control. That appears to be the direct consequence of pulling so many veteran units away from the eastern front to engage in a high profile Kursk invasion. Russia didn’t pull its own units away in response. Instead, it just kept advancing:
Finally, note the options available to Ukraine: deploy newly formed brigades — which presumably won’t perform well — or reposition forces from Kursk and Kharkiv. Will pulling units from Kursk be a politically tenable move given how much Western fanfare there’s been over the whole invasion?
But also keep in mind there’s one more option available to Ukraine: somehow getting the West to drop those remaining restrictions on missile strikes deep inside Russia. Who knows how that might change the situation on the ground for Ukraine. Of course, we know how such a move would change the overall situation: it would be a giant escalation of tensions between Russia and the West. The kind of escalation that is very much in Ukraine’s favor. After all, the only plausible way for Ukraine to really ‘win’ the war at this point is to blow it up into a full blown Russia-vs-NATO conflict. In other words, Ukraine can only ‘win’ under a WWIII scenario.
So yes, it does appear the Kursk offensive has failed as a diversion. But how about as an escalation?
Have we hit the ‘escalate to deescalate’ phase of the conflict in Ukraine? Let’s hope so, because otherwise it’s looking like we’ve hit an ‘escalate to escalate’ phase:
Calls from Ukraine for a loosening of US restrictions on the use of US-provided missiles like ATACMS continue to grow louder, with the US’s NATO allies joining the chorus. And while it remains unclear if the Biden administration will eventually provide those permissions, it’s important to keep in mind that we’ve sort of seen this movie before. Recall how the ATACMS originally provided by the US had a range of 100 miles. But after lobbying by Ukraine, the US secretly shipped ATACMS with ranges up to 190 miles back in February, allowing Ukraine to strike targets inside Russia. Those ATACMS were, in turn, used for strikes on Crimea that, at the time, were touted as ‘game changers’, but also resulted in civilian deaths and Russian pledges of retaliation against the US. Later, after Ukraine launched its surprise invasion of the Kursk region, we saw a kind of consensus emerge from ‘experts’ suggesting that the lifting of restrictions on deep strikes as the next logical step in the war.
That’s all why a lifting of those remaining restrictions should be seen as very plausible. All the more plausible given the calls from NATO members like the UK and France. Interestingly, as we’re going to see, while the UK has provided Ukraine with its own Stormshadow missiles, the US still has a say in how those missiles are used since some components are built in the US. France, on the other hand, doesn’t have these problems. So while all of the focus right now is on the US, it’s possible France — or any other NATO member — could unilaterally grant those permissions, resulting in a potentially significant escalation of the conflict.
And yet, despite all these calls for dropping those restrictions, the Pentagon reportedly remains convince of the limited strategic value in allow deep strikes inside Russia, largely because almost all of the military hardware the Ukrainians might want to hit — especially bombers — has already been relocated to bases outside even the longer-ranges of these missiles. As a result, Ukraine really only has unmovable targets like fuel or weapons depots available. Beyond that, the Pentagon warns that all of this focus on directly attacking Russia is serving as a distraction from the increasingly perilous situation for Ukraine on the eastern front, with the strategically important city of Pokrovsk about to fall to advancing Russian forces. Yes, Ukraine is currently careening towards the kind of major strategic battlefield loss that could force it into negotiations at the same time it’s seeking permission to escalated its attacks inside Russia in order to ‘motivate Russia to seek peace’.
As we should expect, Russia is now openly threatening direct war with NATO if these restrictions are lifted and the country starts facing a barrage of NATO-provided missile strikes. Still, Ukraine insists that it needs to engage in these long-term range strikes to ‘motivate Russia to seek peace’. In other words, Ukraine seems to be advocating a sort of non-nuclear version of ‘escalate to deescalate’ strategy, hoping to somehow force Russia to back down by getting extra aggressive. Recall how ‘escalate to deescalate’ is part of Russian military doctrine, with the idea being that tactical nukes could be used in response to an overwhelming conventional military defeat. Now, in the case of Ukraine, it’s unclear how even a barrage of deep strikes could somehow force Russia to withdraw its forces. And yet, as we’ve seen, the argument that deeper strikes inside Russia could be used as leverage during peace negotiations has an argument we’ve heard from US officials for a while now. And while it might seem like stretch to assume that deeper strikes in Russia are going to result in anything more than an intensification of Russia’s resolve to finish the conflict with a decisive defeat for Ukraine, there’s is one obviously scenario where ‘escalate to deescalate’ could sort of make sense from Ukraine’s perspective: if those strikes somehow turned this war between Ukraine and Russia into a war between NATO and Russia. A kind of ‘escalate to escalate to deescalate’ strategy:
“Administration officials are concerned that loosening restrictions on the use of the weapons would have limited impact and come with great risk. Russian President Vladimir Putin last week warned that Russia would be “at war” with the United States and its NATO allies if they allow Ukraine to use the long-range weapons.”
It’s quite the conundrum, apparently: should the US give Ukraine permission to use US missiles for strike deep inside Russia despite the conclusion by the US that such strikes would have a limited impact and Russia is threatening open war with the US in response?
From a tactical standpoint, giving Ukraine such permissions wouldn’t seem to make much sense. But then we get to Ukraine’s strategic rationale: somehow motivating Russia to seek peace. In other words, even Ukraine seems to be acknowledging that there isn’t an immediate tactical benefit to deep strikes:
But it’s not just Ukraine making these requests for a loosening of restrictions. Other NATO members are clamoring for the US to loosen those restrictions too, in particular the UK, which has provided Ukraine Storm Shadow missiles but still needs US permission due to the fact that some Storm Shadow components are built in the US:
But as we’re going to see in the following Reuters report, while the UK may need to ask the US for permission to loosen the restrictions of Storm Shadow missiles, that’s not the case for France. A unilateral French loosening of restrictions is a real possibility. And yet, as US officials warn, the tactical value of such strikes are limited due to the fact that the targets Ukraine needs to hit the most — like bombers — have already been relocated to airbases deeper inside Russia.
But there’s another major reason US officials appear wary of fostering more Ukrainian strikes inside Russia: all of this focus on strikes inside Russia is distracting from the reality that Ukraine’s forces are at risk of collapsing along the eastern front, with the strategic city of Pokrovsk on the cusp of being lost to advancing Russian forces. In other words, Ukraine is begging for the right to ‘motivate Russian to seek peace’ at the same time it’s on the verge of the kind of massive battlefield defeat that could effectively force Ukraine into negotiations:
“Although Britain is expected to seek U.S. approval before lifting its restrictions on Storm Shadow missiles, a French diplomatic source said Paris did not need authorization from Washington for Ukraine to use French missiles.”
While the UK may need US permission for Ukraine to use Storm Shadows for deep strikes, that’s not the case for France’s missiles. Are we going to see a unilateral loosening of restrictions by France? If so, how much longer before the US follows suit?
And as we can see, the Pentagon simply doesn’t see any real military value in these deeper strikes because the targets they would want to hit have already been relocated out of range of missiles like ATACMS. Sure, unmovable targets like fuel depots can still be struck, but it doesn’t appear the Pentagon sees a broader strategic advantage:
And will strikes deep in Russia actually motivate Russia to ‘seek pace’ as Zelenksy puts it? Because if not, all that’s accomplished will have been an escalation in a conflict Ukraine is already losing:
Finally, note the other major concern expressed by US officials: all of this focus on attacking Russia directly is leading to a collapse of Ukrainian forces along the eastern front, with the strategic city of Pokrovsk on the verge of being lost:
As we can see, Ukraine is seemingly trying to force Russia into negotiations on favorable terms by dramatically increasing its aggression inside Russia at the same time the country is facing the kind of strategic defeat that could force Ukraine to seek peace on Russia’s terms. It seems like an insane strategy. Unless, of course, the real strategy is to spark a directly NATO vs Russia conflict as part of some last ditch gambit to expand in war into something much bigger. Which is obviously still insane, but strategically insane. At least strategically insane for Ukraine. And completely insane for everyone else.
With just weeks left in the US presidential race, the time for last minute appeals is now. And as we’re going to see in the following Washington Post report, there’s a perhaps surprising constituency that could play a key role in the Keystone state: Ukrainian Americans in Pennsylvania are very split between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
As the following Washington Post report on the divide in Ukrainian American community reminds us, this is a demographic that has long leaned towards the GOP. This is a good time to recall how the GOP has long courted Ukrainian Americans via its “Heritage Councils” going back decades. Heritage Councils led by WWII Ukrainian fascist embraced as anti-Communists in the post-war period. But with war raging in Ukraine, and Donald Trump taking a decided less aggressive stance on the conflict than his Democratic counterparts, many were expecting this demographic to be strongly leaning towards the Democrats. But that isn’t so. Yes, by all accounts, the Ukrainian American community hold the conflict in Ukraine as a paramount concern. And yet, it appears that a large percentage of this demographic have yet to determine which candidate will be the best for Ukraine.
And with an emerging consensus that Ukraine is stalling in the battlefield and sense that Ukraine needs to ‘take the fight to Putin’, one particular area of frustration with the Biden administration has been the ongoing refusal of the US to give Ukraine long-range missiles that can be used for deep strikes inside Russia. Now, as we’ve seen, it’s already looking like it’s just a matter of time before the US lifts those restrictions and provides those long-range ATACMS, although the US hasn’t yet officially committed to the policy, citing limitation on the strategic utility of such strikes. And as we’re also going to see below, US official have indeed anonymously told reporters that, yes, long-range ATACMS are going to be provided to Ukraine but it just hasn’t been officially announced yet. In fact, there’s a prediction that the official announcement will come in the form of a loud ‘bang’.
That’s all part of a grimly fascinating political dynamic emerging with less than three weeks to go before election day. Ukrainian Americans appear to be a shockingly large ‘undecided’ component of the electorate in one of the most closely contested states that could determine who wins the White House. And one of the things they are most frustrated about is something the Biden administration has already unofficially announced it’s going to be doing. Are we going to be hearing about some loud ‘bangs’ inside Russia in the next couple of weeks? Time will tell.
But it’s also worth noting that it doesn’t sound like the US even has that many long-range ATACMS to spare, meaning Ukraine is going to have to choose very carefully how it uses them. After all, for Ukraine, those missiles don’t just have military value. They are also ideal for escalating the conflict into a direct conflict between NATO and Russia. Which is really the only realistic path to a Ukrainian ‘victory’ at this point. What are those long-range ATACMS going to be used to strike?
At the same time, there’s another conflict shading how Ukrainians view the levels of support they’re getting from the West: the overwhelming military aid being provided to Israel while Ukraine still deals with restrictions. Especially when it comes to the US Air Force flying directly over Israeli airspace and shooting down Iranian-fired missiles and drones. Ukraine wants NATO jets protecting its airspace too. Analysts point to the reality that Ukraine is simply much larger and that Russians nuclear stockpile vs Iran’s lack of a nuclear stockpile is alone a reason for the US’s difference in behavior. But then there’s the counterarguments, like what we’re hearing from Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the Ukrainian National Institute for Strategic Studies, who argues that the US’s willingness to treat Russia with kid gloves due to its nuclear stockpile is serving as an incentive for countries like Iran to pursue nuclear weapons. And while that might sound like a completely insane argument, Shelby Magid, a deputy directors of the Atlantic Council, appears to agree. According to Magid, “There is a nearly crippling fear of not wanting to strike Russian-fired weapons directly as the administration sees it as directly fighting Russia.”
So at the same time the Biden administration has quietly approved last month the delivery of long-range ATACMS to Ukraine, we’re seeing growing pressure for direct US air patrols of Ukrainian skies. We’ll see if any reports about loud ‘bangs’ deep inside Russia end up shaking up the race in Pennsylvania over the next couple of weeks. But as we can see with the ‘War with nuclear powers needs to be courted in order to dissuade countries from pursuing nuclear weapons’ logic, we shouldn’t be surprised if the ‘bangs’ end up getting a lot louder by the time this is all over.:
“There are between 100,000 and 200,000 U.S. citizens of Ukrainian descent in Pennsylvania, a key swing state that Joe Biden won in 2020 by about 81,000 votes. They are clustered mostly in the southeast corner of the Keystone State, many in the purple Philadelphia suburbs of Bucks and Montgomery counties. Ukrainians are an organized and politically active community in the region, where the Ukrainian church network is strong and Ukrainian culture thrives. But as of yet, perhaps surprisingly, neither presidential campaign has succeeded in winning their outright support.”
It’s a toss up. The kind of toss us that might come as a shock to many Democrats who presumed the Ukrainian voting bloc would, by now, have a deep anti-Trump sentiment. Sure, some Ukrainian Americans are staunchly opposed to Trump, but if these reports are accurate, it sounds like there’s a significant percentage of this demographic planning on voting for Trump. Or at least considering it. And that’s despite JD Vance openly telling audiences he doesn’t really care what happens in Ukraine. The simple reality is this has been a traditionally Republican demographic and old habits die hard:
So what is it about the Biden/Harris policy towards Ukraine that has so many Ukrainian Americans leaning towards Trump? Well, there’s apparently widespread frustration that the Biden administration hasn’t relaxed US restrictions on deep strikes inside Russia using US missile technology:
And that apparent frustration among Ukrainian Americans with the US’s refusal to allow deep strikes inside Russia with US missile technology brings us to the rather interesting updates we got on that front last month. Updates that effectively said the US was indeed going to be approving these deep strikes but the public announcement simply hasn’t been made yet. Instead, the public acknowledgement of this new policy will likely come with a loud ‘bang’:
“There will be no press conference after Biden and Starmer meet today, and no announcement of any change to how Storm Shadow missiles can be used. “It’s being billed as a broad strategic discussion,” Dan Sabbagh said, shortly before joining a flight to Washington with Starmer and foreign secretary David Lammy. “It’s likely that the first explicit sign we’ll have of any change is a loud ‘bang’.””
A loud ‘bang’ is the likely first explicit sign of a change in US policy. That’s the prediction from Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian’s defense and security editor, about how the public is going to learn about a US policy shift on long-range missiles strikes with US missiles. In other words, it’s going to be a loud ‘bang’ coming from a large explosion deep inside Russia from a US provided missile:
But what about all of the arguments that, thus far, the US has been using in opposition to allowing these deep strikes? Arguments like that this would be a highly escalatory move that invites a direct conflict between Russia and NATO? Or the arguments that Russia can move most of military assets, like bombers, outside the range of these missiles? Well, as we can see, part of the reasoning appears to be that the goal of the deep strikes isn’t simply to hit military targets. Impacting the lives of average Russians with an aim of eroding support for Putin is the ultimate goal here. The kind of goal that suggests inflicting civilian casualties will be one of Ukraine’s objectives, albeit perhaps an unstated objective. But then there’s the other rationale we’re seeing: that the crossing of Putin’s ‘red lines’ hasn’t resulted in a direct Russian-NATO conflict yet, so therefore, the reasoning goes, there’s no real risk of crossing more of those lines. It’s like the perfect recipe for a massive escalation:
So can we expect as loud ‘bang’ in coming weeks or months, followed by a flurry of reports about the US’s new policy? It’s certainly looking that way. Because as we learned just a week after the above report, the Biden administration has indeed decided to send Ukraine long-range ATACMS. What hasn’t yet been decided is when the US will officially make it public:
“The officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly, did not say when the missiles would be delivered or when a public announcement would be made.”
Missile strikes deep inside Russia with US missiles is just a matter of time, according to this report. Although it doesn’t sound like very many long-range ATACMS will be sent since there simply aren’t that many in the US stockpile. In other words, the missiles will be of very limited tactical value from a military perspective. There aren’t enough to make a significant different. On the other hand, it’s potentially enough missiles to escalate the conflict, especially if civilian casualties are a consequence:
So that was the update we got nearly a month ago. A kind of unofficial confirmation that, yes, the US was going to allow deep strikes inside Russia worth US missile technology even if an official declaration hasn’t been made yet. And as we can see from the ongoing frustration of Ukrainian American voters, those voters haven’t received that unofficial message. On the contrary, we’re still seeing reports like the following, describing how Ukraine is frustrated over the overwhelming military support the US has provided Israel, along with further calls to allow deep strikes inside Russia:
“The reason why the U.S. acts boldly in Israel and cautiously in Ukraine is clear: Russia is armed with nuclear weapons and Iran isn’t.”
The asymmetric treatment of Ukraine and Israel isn’t a mystery. If Iran had nuclear weapons capable of striking the United States, the US would be acting very differently in the Middle East too. And yet, as we can see from the commentary from figures like Shelby Magid, a deputy director at the Atlantic Council, or Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the Ukrainian National Institute for Strategic Studies, the idea that Russia’s nuclear stockpile is serving as a check on West’s ability to get directly involved in a conflict is portrayed as some sort of existential risk by sending the message that nuclear powers will be treated with deference and make the acquisition of nuclear weapons all the more tempting for countries like Iran. In other words, the West needs to court nuclear war in order to send the message that acquiring nukes won’t serve as a deterrence. Think about the madness of that logic:
Will the US overcome its “nearly crippling fear” of not wanting to engage in a directly conflict with a nuclear power capable of nuking the planet? Let’s hope not. Mutually Assured Destruction may not be the best paradigm to live by, but there are worse options. And while many Ukrainian Americans undoubtedly back the idea of turning this into a US/Russia showdown, it’s also worth keeping in mind that the country most likely to get nuked first in any sort of nuclear escalation between the US and Russia is, of course, Ukraine.
At the same time, it’s hard to imagine a greater risk of nuclear war in general at this point than the election of Donald Trump to a second term. A vengeful, increasingly demented figure who appears poised to stack the US military with loyalist sycophants ready to follow his every whim. Whims that reportedly included nuking North Korea and trying to pin the blame on someone else. Yes, Trump reportedly actually considered that exact scenario. A vote for Trump is effectively a vote for mutually assured destruction in some form or another. So let’s hope we don’t learn about any massive new escalatory actions between now and Election Day. Or end up learning about a shocking Trump victory thanks to Ukrainian Americans ‘coming home’ to the GOP. The prevailing MADness is bad enough.
It’s been inevitable for months now, and it finally happened: The Biden administration officially granted Ukraine the right to use in longer-range missiles provided by the US to conduct strikes deep inside Russia. And just days after that announcement, we’re already getting reports that such strikes are underway, along with the reports that the UK-built Storm Shadows are also being used by Ukraine for deep strikes. Russia has responded by issuing a new nuclear doctrine stating that an attack by a non-nuclear power backed by a nuclear power will be treated as a joint assault on Russia. It’s an unambiguous escalation.
And yet, as we’re going to see, it’s an escalation that Western analysts for the most part don’t seem to really be taking very seriously, largely because there’s now widespread expectations that Donald Trump will immediately pursue some sort of peace negotiations with Russia upon returning to office, along with all sorts of assurances that Russia’s threats are just rhetorical bluster not to be taken seriously. Instead, they seem to be portraying this escalation as something that won’t actually impact Ukraine’s overall military situation but instead will improve Ukraine’s negotiating position during the upcoming peace talks. Yes, this highly escalatory situation is being dismissed as merely a negotiations tactic for negotiations that have yet to begin and will have to be conducted successfully by a lunatic like Donald Trump.
So if the West isn’t expecting a nuclear response, what are they predicting? Hybrid warfare. In particular, hybrid warfare using proxies like China or the Houthis in Yemen. In fact, a recent incident involving the severing of an undersea communications cable connecting Sweden and Finland and suspected of being caused by a Chinese shipping vessel is already being openly suspected by European officials as being a Russian hybrid proxy attack. As we’re going to see, while Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said that “nobody believes that these cables were accidentally severed.”, two unnamed US officials told CNN they suspect it was likely an accident caused by a dragging anchor as has happened before.
Russia’s nuclear threats are all a bluff, but anything bad that happens is a form of Russian hybrid-warfare. That’s the destabilizing narrative developing in the final months of the Biden administration, seemingly predicated on the assumption that Donald Trump is going to ultimately re-stabilize the crisis by somehow negotiating a peace treaty:
“Russian foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin said in an interview published on Wednesday that Moscow would retaliate against NATO countries that facilitate long-range Ukrainian missile strikes against Russian territory.”
It’s an unambiguous intensification of the conflict, with promises of retaliation have already been issued by the Russian government. And yet, as we can see, these longer-range missile strikes aren’t even seen as really changing Ukraine’s prospects in this conflict. Instead, the strikes appear to be part of some sort of wrangling over negotiating positions for presumed peace talks under Donald Trump. In other words, this is an escalation that seems to presume meaningful peace talks are just around to the corner. A highly questionable presumption that assumes Donald Trump isn’t going to be an agent of chaos:
And that highly escalatory situation now includes a loosening of the Russian nuclear doctrine. A loosening that appears to be interpreted as nothing more than a meaningless bluff by Western analysts:
keep in mind: there’s just two months left for the Biden administration to escalate further. And it’s hard to imagine this is going to be the last escalatory move if Russia’s shifting nuclear posture is seen as unserious. How many more escalations are we going to see in coming months?
It’s that ominous questions brings us to the following piece in the Guardian describing the various scenarios Western analysts see as plausible responses from Moscow. While a nuclear response is seen as highly unlikely, some sort of hybrid warfare response appears to be what they are predicting. Hybrid warfare that is heavily reliant on proxies like China or the Houthis in Yemen. In other words, all of the West’s rivals are soon to be redefined as ‘Russian proxies’, with Russian secretly behind all of the world’s conflicts. It’s the next phase of this last minute escalation:
“Most experts think use of nuclear weapons by Russia is unlikely for now, but have cautioned against complacency. Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, said he did not believe that dropping a bomb in Ukraine was on Moscow’s list of options “primarily because it would not help achieve any military goals, and Russia is advancing at the moment”.”
Russia isn’t going to use nukes any time soon, especially given its military advances at the moment. That’s the view of Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research. Which is consistent with the views we saw above that the longer-range missile strikes aren’t really going to fundamentally change the military situation on the ground. It’s purely an escalation, supposedly in anticipation of looming peace talks that everyone seems to assume will go swimmingly. And yet, Podvig isn’t ruling out a tactical nuclear strike by Moscow. And don’t forget, if Russia does decide to use tactical nuclear weapons, the target will almost certainly be in Ukraine. In other words, if the strategic reasoning behind this decision to escalate doesn’t pan out and nukes do get used, it’ll be Ukraine that bears the brunt of it:
And with a nuclear response seen as unlikely, note how the suspected ‘hybrid’ response from Russia is basically the assumption that Russia will wage secret proxy wars across the world. Everything bad that happens in the world is a secret Russian plot. Are Houthi rebels targeting western shipping in the Red Sea? Russian plot. Did a package catch fire on a European plane? It was actually a bomb plot from Russia and dry run for more civilian terror attacks to come. That’s the kind of dynamic emerging in this ‘loosened nuclear’ posture new reality: At the same time the West largely laughs off the possibility that Russia would use nuclear weapons despite the threats, a global secret hybrid war that encompasses all of the West’s other enemies will be secretly waged by Moscow, including civilian terror attacks targeting western airlines. Which is a great recipe for much further escalations after the anticipated Trump/Putin peace talks break down:
And as we can see with the accusations over the cutting of an undersea cable in the Baltic Sea by a Chinese shipping vessel, the ‘Russian hybrid warfare’ narrative now apparently includes using China as a proxy:
So what evidence are these European governments using to making their allegations? That remains unclear, although Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius is assertion that “nobody believes that these cables were accidentally severed.” At the same time, two unnamed US officials are telling reporters they believe the severed cable was simply an accident caused by a dragged anchor, as had happened in the past. So we have European governments openly declaring how “nobody believes that these cables were accidentally severed,” at the same time two unnamed US officials are more quietly acknowledging that, yeah, it was probably an accident:
“European leaders were quick to voice their suspicions. Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said that “nobody believes that these cables were accidentally severed.””
It was definitely sabotage. that’s the immediately response from both Germany and Finland. But they didn’t stop with sabotage suspicions. The two governments issued a joint statement suggesting it may have bee “hybrid warfare” conducted by Russia. And notice how past accusations that Russian is conducting a secret hybrid warfare campaign against Europe is cited as evidence of how these accusations weren’t ‘plucked out of thin air’. It’s almost like citing hearsay. And yet, Sweden and Finland are already opening criminal investigations. This is a good time to recall how Sweden refused to publicly release the findings of its investigation into the Nord Stream bombing. So don’t hold your breath on finding out the results of this investigation, depending on what they find:
Those forceful assurances by European government officials that this was definitely sabotage comes as the same time unnamed US officials are downplaying the speculation, telling CNN they suspect it was just another anchor-dragging accident as has happened before:
And there’s at least two more months of what is probably going to be even more wild escalations before Donald Trump returns to office, when the big peace treaty is supposed to all be worked out. Until that doesn’t happen, at which point we’re just much closer to that nuclear exchange we’ve been assured is just bluster.
The kids are not ok. Too many communist sympathies. That’s apparently the bipartisan assessment of the US House of Representatives following the overwhelmingly bipartisan passage of The Crucial Communism Teaching Act (H.R. 5349), a bill that grants a kind of congressional stamp of approval for anti-communism educational curriculum for American k‑12 schools. And yes, the anti-communism curriculum starts in kindergarten. It really is K‑12.
But the curriculum isn’t developed by the Department of Education. Instead, its the product of an entity we’ve seen pop up in a number of disturbing previous stories: the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), a group dedicated to promoting the idea that the Cold War never ended and a global war on communism must continue. As we saw, the VOC’s founder, Lee Edwards, wasn’t just a high-ranking member of the Heritage Foundation. A co-founder of Barry Goldwater’s Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), Edwards went on to found the American branch of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), the American Council for World Freedom (ACWF). In 1974, the ACWF hosted WACL’s conference in DC, which included OUN‑B leader Yaroslav Stetsko as a special guest. Edwards was made the Secretary General of WACL that year. Flash forward to 1994, and we find Edwards and key Stetsko operative Lev Dobrianksy forming the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC). Edwards sat at the head of the VOC board until 2022, at which point his daughter Elizabeth replaced him. In other words, the VOC is an extension of the fascism-infused Cold War influence network. And here it is, in 2024, getting a congressional stamp of approval for its curriculum for children. And while the passage of a bill in the House isn’t, alone, enough to make this a law, it’s hard to imagine the bill isn’t going to be revived under the second Trump administration. Revived and probably made worse somehow.
And this isn’t just a national ‘educational’ initiative. The VOC has already been promoting its curriculum at the state level, with Arizona and Florida already adopting its curriculum for public schools, with new legislation in Florida calling for it to begin as early as kindergarten. This is also a good time to recall how Lee Edwards’s son-in-law, Matthew Spalding — a professor of constitutional government at Hillsdale College and the dean of Hillsdale’s graduate school of government in DC — who was tapped by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to lead the ‘anti-woke’ purge of New College, a public Florida university known for its progressive student body and curriculum. Which is a reminder that the ‘anti-communist’ curriculum developed by the VOC is likely to be extremely ‘anti-woke’ too. Wokeness is Cultural Marxist communism in the eyes of this movement, after all.
As we should expect, while Democrats attempted to ‘balance’ the bill by amending it to include the promotion of curriculum that would also add lessons about the dangers of fascism, the amendment was unanimously rejected by the Republicans on the committee. Which makes this a good time to recall that disturbing story about the “Best Historical Materials for 2023” award given — but later rescinded — by the American Library Association (ALA) to a book that grossly whitewashed WWII Ukraine nationalist groups like the Galician Division. WWII pro-fascist revisionism is having a moment in America.
And not just America. As we’re also going to see, the government of Canada appears to be on the verge of finally unveiling a ‘Victims of Communism’ memorial, despite a string of controversies that have delayed the memorial for over a year now. For example, the memorial was initially supposed to be opened to the public in November of 2023. Until the Jaroslav Hunka scandal erupted and shined an international light on the Canadian government’s sordid WWII history of coddling fascist war criminals.
Of course, the Hunka affair is far from the only embarrassing episode of cuddling up to fascists by the Canadian government in recent years. Recall the extensive evidence found in the Rodal Report of the systematic whitewashing of the war criminal pasts of thousands of ‘ex’ Nazis and fellow travelers in the postwar period of the 1940s and 50s. Whitewashing that continued with the Deschênes Commission set up in 1985 for which the Rodal Report was initially created only to be ignored. A commission that was ostensibly set up to investigate Canada’s handling of war criminals but, in reality, only served as as further whitewashing of the whole affair. As we saw, the quasi-coverup of Deschênes Commission and the still-partially redacted Rodal Report continues to this day despite some of the report having been released to the public. Also recall how the Ukrainian far right Centuria group bragged on social media back in 2021 about being trained by the Canadian military in Canada. We were then told after the Centuria incident that Canada doesn’t do the vetting on its own of the foreign soldiers it trains. And not long after the reports on the Centuria group’s Canadian adventures, we got to learn about a pair of 2018 training events in Ukraine where Canadian officers ended up meeting and having pictures taken with the Azov Battalion. And this meeting happened a year after Canada’s Joint Task Force Ukraine produced a briefing on the Azov Battalion, acknowledging its links to Nazi ideology. “Multiple members of Azov have described themselves as Nazis,” the Canadian officers warned in their 2017 briefing. Records show the primary concerns following the 2018 meeting were related to whether or not the pictures would be publicly released. That string of ongoing national scandal over Canada’s history of Nazi coddling is the gross context of this long-delayed public unveiling of the monument.
But let’s also not assume that it was just these tangentially-related fascist coddling scandals that has been stalling the Canadian government’s unveiling of the monument. There’s also the fact that, of the 553 names to be commemorated on the memorial, over half were flagged by the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center as having fascist or Nazi connections. Beyond that, some of the names didn’t even have any direct ties to Canada. Yep.
How did the names of fascists with no ties to Canada end up on the monument? That’s unclear, although the nature of the funding for the monument probably had something to do with it. Because while the monument received $6 million in public funds, there was still private donations, including donations made in the name of Roman Shukhevych and Ante Pavelic. Both of their names were originally slated for the memorial.
So how did the Canadian government address these concerns? By deciding to remove ALL the names from the memorial. Which is quite a response. If the fascists can’t be honored, no one can be, apparently. Although also note that we are told they haven’t ruled out adding names later. In other words, we should probably expect this story to get worse. Just give it time. Because the times are a‑changin’. Specifically, our memories of who the ‘bad guys’ were in WWII. That’s a‑changin’ big time. With the government’s endorsement:
“In the latest front in the culture war over school curricula, the House of Representatives is set to vote Friday on a bill that would give a congressional stamp of approval to the lesson plans of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a group closely linked to fervently hawkish corners of the foreign policy blob. ”
A congressional stamp of approval on special anti-communism curriculum for kids, developed by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), a group dedicated to promoting the idea that the Cold War never ended and a global war on communism must continue. The VOC has long served as an extension of the fascism-infused Cold War influence network. And here it is, in 2024, getting a congressional stamp of approval for its curriculum for children:
To underscore the fascist nature of this VOC’s own history, note how an attempt by Democrats to amend the bill to include lessons on the dangers of fascism was unanimously rejected by the GOP committee members. And yet, the bill passed in the House with the overwhelming support of both Democrats and Republicans. It’s a demonstration of potency of this kind anti-communist fervor even today. A bill to promote the curriculum designed by a group with fascist Cold War roots got overwhelming bipartisan support:
And when we see how the VOC’s curriculum is already being promoted at the state level in states like Arizona and Florida, recall how it was Lee Edwards’s son-in-law, Matthew Spalding — a professor of constitutional government at Hillsdale College and the dean of Hillsdale’s graduate school of government in DC — who was tapped by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to lead the ‘anti-woke’ purge of New College, a public Florida university known for its progressive student body and curriculum. Which is a reminder that wokeness is an easy ‘Cultural Marxist’ target of this movement:
And as we should expect, while the VOC’s curriculum covers the events of WWII extensively, there’s almost no mention of the Holocaust. Imagine that, from a group with roots in the OUN-0B and Cold War fascist propaganda networks:
And that whole story about the US House granting its bipartisan stamp of approval on this curriculum brings us to another story just across the border: Canada’s publicly funded Memorial to Victims of Communism is about to finally be unveiled. Despite the fact that the memorial has been dedicated to major Holocaust figures like Ante Pavelic and Roman Shukhevych. The memorial isn’t being organized by the VOC, but it’s unambiguously the same movement. A movement dedicated to a dramatic retelling of WWII, where the Communists were the main bad guys who committed all the unspeakable atrocities. A movement with profound levels of government support, demonstrably:
Yes, the publicly funded Memorial to Victims of Communism is about to finally be opened to the public. Albeit, with all the names stripped off after it was determined by over half of the names were of Nazis and their fellow travelers
. Names that, as it turns out, didn’t even necessarily have any links to Canada at all. How did the names of fascists with no links to Canada make it onto a publicly funded Canadian memorial? That’s unclear, but the fact that the memorial was also financed by private donations, including donations from groups that gave in the name of figures like Roman Shukhevych and Ante Pavelic presumably had a lot to do with it:
“The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center has pointed to a report prepared for the Department of Canadian Heritage which recommended more than half of the 550 names planned to go on the memorial be removed.”
More than half of the 553 names planned for the memorial should probably be removed, according to a report prepared by the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. Which suggests that was intended to be a memorial of WWII fascists under the guise of a ‘victims of communism’ theme. Financed by the government of Canada.
So what has the government of Canada done in response to these concerns? All of the names are to be removed instead. In other words, if the fascists can’t be named, no one gets a named. That’s the compromise the government went with, although it’s possible names could still be added in the future:
Also note how the Canadian government itself had already determined that around 50–60 of the names or organizations planned for the memorial had direct links to the Nazis. It’s not like the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center had to highlight these concerns. And yet, 50–60 is a lot less than the 275+ names the Wiesenthal Center cited. It would be interesting to learn about the nature of this discrepancy. But also note how a number of these names apparently had nothing to do with Canada! There’s also the private funds, like donations made in the name of Roman Shukhevych or Ante Pavelic, which is presumably part of the explanation for the fascists with no direct link to Canada. It’s a memorial to international fascism. Paid for by the Canadian government and private fascists:
Finally, note how the federal officials in Canada have been warning the Canadian Heritage department since at least 2021. And yet, this memorial was already supposed to have been unveiled in November of 2023 and has been in its final stages before the whole Yaroslav Hunka scandal hit the Canadian government. In other words, if that Hunka scandal has never happened, there’s a good chance the memorial would already be open to the public. Dedicated to hundreds of fascists. Despite the warnings going back to 2021 from federal officials about all the fascists slated to be celebrated with its unveiling:
So with the Victims of Communism memorial finally opening to the public, the countdown begins to stories about fascist eulogies, torchlight parades, and other gross displays of fascist fealty surrounding the site. Although keep in mind that it’s not like this is Canada’s only fascist monument. There’s a monument to Roman Shukhevych in Edmonton, after all. Canadian fascists have options when choosing a site for their celebrations. With one more option on the way.
Along with American students who happen to be on a Canadian field trip. A new ‘historical monument’ is available for some sort of ‘educational experience’ for them too. The times are a‑changin’.
@Pterrafractyl–
Stunning!
Dave Emory