A Russian Plan for the Genocide of the Ukrainian People
Revised and annotated by Susan Smith-Peter, Ph.D., from the earlier translation by Mariia Kravchenko.
The following article contains a Russian plan for the genocide of Ukraine. It was published by the state-run news agency RIA Novosti, whose works are often picked up by various media outlets. The author, Timofei Sergeitsev, has been a columnist at RIA Novosti since 2014 and worked as a political consultant for Leonid Kuchma, the former Ukrainian president, during the 1999 presidential elections, as well as for former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych during the 2004 elections that led to the Orange Revolution. The publication and the source show that this is not a fringe statement but an expression of a widely-held view.
In the article, Sergeitsev lays out a plan to commit genocide in Ukraine. Echoing Putin, he denies that the Ukrainian people have a separate existence. He brands any expression of Ukrainian politics, history, culture, language or thought as Nazi. All those who took part in the Ukrainian military or government should be liquidated and those that cannot be, will be sentenced to forced labor to rebuild the infrastructure Russia destroyed. The territory will no longer be called Ukraine and the use of the Ukrainian language, it is strongly implied, will be forbidden, as only Russian-approved materials will be allowed in schools and in public. Western Ukraine may exist as a rump, neutral state, but it will not be allowed to be Ukrainian or to use Ukrainian symbols and will be under constant threat of invasion from the former eastern Ukraine, which will be divided up into provinces and directly annexed to the Russian Federation. For the bulk of the Ukrainian population, “a just punishment … can only be possible through bearing the inevitable hardships of a just war against the Nazi system,” he writes. He expects this process will take a generation.
Sergeitsev also wrote the scenario for the 2012 Russian film “Match” (sometimes named “The Death Match”), which provided a Russian propaganda view of the 1942 soccer match between the Nazi Wehrmacht team and the Soviets held in Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The Nazi collaborators in the movie speak Ukrainian, while those who resist speak Russian. The Ukrainian government blocked its release for several months, as it ignored the historical record.
Sergeitsev’s views of politics have resonances with neo-Nazi themes glorifying violence and the control of the masses. In an interview given to polit.ru on June 18, 2006, he said that politics, as “an activity with a mass character,” meant that “nothing but the lash is required.” He continued by saying that “the violence might be very subtle, humanitarian, and organized in a complex social manner. It is not required that violence take the form of social repression — prisons, the army, genocide.” But it is not forbidden, either, as we see in his own blueprint for genocide, which here is annotated by Susan Smith-Peter, professor of Russian history and director of the History MA and Public History programs at the College of Staten Island/ City University of New York. It is a revised version of an earlier translation published by Mariia Kravchenko on Medium on April 4.
“What should Russia do with Ukraine?”
Timofei Sergeitsev
Published in RIA Novosti, April 4, 2022
“We wrote about the inevitability of Ukraine’s denazification last April already. We do not need a Nazi, Banderite[1] Ukraine, the enemy of Russia and a tool of the West used to destroy Russia. Today, the denazification issue has taken a practical turn.
Denazification is necessary when a considerable number of a population — very likely, most of it — has been subjected to a Nazi regime and pulled into its politics. That is, when the “good people — bad government” hypothesis does not apply. Recognizing this fact forms the foundation of the politics of denazification, in all of its measures, and the very fact itself constitutes the object of that foundation.
This is the situation Ukraine has found itself in. The fact that the Ukrainian voter chose between the “Poroshenko peace” and the “Zelensky peace” must not deceive you[2]: Ukrainians were quite happy with the shortest way to peace via a blitzkrieg, which was strongly alluded to by the last two Ukrainian presidents when they were elected.[3] This was the method — the method of total terror — used to “pacify” domestic antifascists in Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipro [editor’s note: the Russian original uses the city’s former name “Dnipropetrovsk”], Mariupol, and other Russian cities.[4] And ordinary Ukrainians were fine with it. Denazification is a set of actions aimed at the nazified bulk of the population, who technically cannot be exposed to direct punishment as war criminals.
Those Nazis who took up arms must be destroyed on the battlefield, as many of them as possible. No significant distinction should be made between the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the so-called “nationalist battalions,” as well as the Territorial Defense, who have joined the two other types of military units. They are all equally complicit in the limitless violence towards civilians, equally complicit in the genocide of the Russian people[5], and they do not comply with the laws and customs of war. War criminals and active Nazis must be punished in such a way as to provide an example and a demonstration. A total lustration must be conducted.[6] All organizations involved in Nazi actions must be eliminated and prohibited. However, besides the highest ranks, a significant number of common people are also guilty of being passive Nazis and accomplices to Nazism. They supported the Nazi authorities and indulged them. A just punishment for this part of the population can only be possible through bearing the inevitable hardships of a just war against the Nazi system, waged as carefully and sparingly as possible as it relates to civilians. The further denazification of this bulk of the population will take the form of re-education through ideological repressions (suppression) of Nazi paradigms and a harsh censorship not only in the political sphere but also in the spheres of culture and education. It was through culture and education that the pervasive large-scale Nazification of the population was conducted, ensured by the guarantees of dividends from the Nazi regime’s victory over Russia, by means of Nazi propaganda, internal violence and terror, and the 8-year-long war against the people of Donbas, who have rebelled against Ukrainian Nazism.[7]
Denazification can only be conducted by the winner, which means 1) their unconditional control over the denazification process and 2) the power that can secure such control. For this purpose, a country that is being denazified cannot possess sovereignty. The denazifier state, Russia, cannot approach denazification through liberal means. The denazifier ideology cannot be challenged by the guilty party that is being denazified. When Russia admits that Ukraine needs to be denazified, it essentially admits that the Crimea scenario cannot be applied to all of Ukraine.[8] In all fairness, this scenario was also not possible in the insurgent Donbas in 2014. Only the 8-year-long rebellion against the Nazi violence and terror managed to result in an internal unification and deliberate, explicit, broad-based refusal to retain any unity with or links to Ukraine, which has identified itself as a Nazi community.
The period of denazification can take no less than one generation that has to be born, raised, and attained adulthood under the conditions of denazification. The nazification of Ukraine has been going on for more than 30 years — starting from as early as 1989, when Ukrainian nationalism was given legal and legitimate forms of political self-expression and led the movement for “independence,” setting a course for Nazism.[9]
The current nazified Ukraine is characterized by its formlessness and ambivalence, which allow it to disguise Nazism as the aspiration to “independence” and the “European” (Western, pro-American) path of “development” (in reality, to degradation) and claim that, in Ukraine, “there is no Nazism, only few sporadic incidents.” Indeed, there is no main Nazi party, no Führer, no full-fledged racial laws (only a cutdown version in the form of repressions against the Russian language).[10] As a result there is no opposition or resistance against the regime.
However, all that is listed above doesn’t make Ukrainian Nazism a “light version” of the German Nazism of the first half of the 20th century. Quite the opposite: since Ukrainian Nazism is free from such “genre” norms and limitations (which are essentially a product of political technologies), it can spread freely just like a basis for any Nazism — both European and, in its most developed form, American racism.[11] That’s why there can be no compromise during denazification, as in the case of formulas such as “no to NATO, yes to the EU.” The collective West is in itself the architect, source, and sponsor of Ukrainian Nazism, while the Banderite supporters from Western Ukraine and their “historical memory” serve as just one of the tools of the nazification of Ukraine.[12] Ukronazism poses not less, but more of a threat to the world and Russia than the Hitler version of German Nazism.
Apparently, the name “Ukraine” cannot be kept as a title of any fully denazified state entity on the territory liberated from the Nazi regime. The people’s republics, newly created on the territories free from Nazism, must and will develop on the basis of practices of economic self-government and social security, with the restoration and modernization of systems of essential services for the population.[13]
Their political direction cannot be neutral in practice: the redemption of their guilt before Russia for treating it like an enemy can be manifested only by relying on Russia in the processes of restoration, revival, and development. No “Marshall Plans” can be allowed to happen on these territories.[14] No “neutrality” in the ideological and practical sense that is compatible with denazification can be possible.[15] Cadres and organizations who are to become tools of denazification in the new denazified republics cannot but rely on direct power and organizational support from Russia.
Denazification will inevitably include de-ukrainization — the rejection of the large-scale artificial inflation of the ethnic component in the self-identification of the population of the historical Little Russia and New Russia (Novorossiya) territories, which was started by the Soviet authorities.[16] Being a tool of the Communist superpower, this artificial ethnocentrism did not remain without an owner after communism’s fall. It was transferred in its subservient role to a different superpower (the power that stands above states) — the superpower of the West. It needs to be brought back within its natural boundaries and stripped of political functionality.
Unlike, for example, Georgia or the Baltic States, history has proved it impossible for Ukraine to exist as a nation-state, and any attempts to “build” such a nation-state naturally lead to Nazism.[17] Ukrainism is an artificial anti-Russian construct that has no civilizational substance of its own, a subordinate element of an extraneous and alien civilization. Debanderization alone will not be enough for denazification: the Banderite element is only a performer and a screen, a disguise for the European project of Nazi Ukraine, which is why the denazification of Ukraine means its inevitable de-europeanization.
The Banderite elites must be liquidated; their re-education is impossible. The social “swamp,” which has actively and passively supported them through action and inaction, must go through the hardships of war and internalize the lived experience as a historical lesson and the atonement of its guilt. Those who did not support the Nazi regime and suffered from it and the war it started in Donbas must be consolidated and organized, must become the foundation of the new authorities, their vertical and horizontal framework. History has shown that the tragedies and dramas of wartime benefit the peoples who were tempted and carried away by their role as the enemy of Russia.
Denazification as a goal of the special military operation within the limits of the operation itself means a military victory over the Kyiv regime, the liberation of the territories from the armed supporters of nazification, the liquidation of hard-line Nazis, the taking prisoner of war criminals, and the creating of systemic conditions for further denazification in peacetime.
The latter, in its turn, must begin with the establishment of local governments, militia, and defense institutions, cleansed of Nazi elements, the launching on their basis of constituent processes to create a new republican statehood, the integration of this statehood in close cooperation with the Russian agencies overseeing the denazification of Ukraine (newly established or reorganized on the basis of, for example, Rossotrudnichestvo,[18]) the adoption, under Russian control, of the republican regulatory framework (legislation) for denazification, the definition of boundaries and frameworks for the direct application of Russian law and Russian jurisdiction in the liberated territory in regard to denazification, the establishment of a tribunal for crimes against humanity in the former Ukraine. In this regard, Russia should act as the guardian of the Nuremberg Trials.
All of the above means that, in order to achieve the denazification goals, the support of the population is necessary, as well as its transition to the Russian side after its liberation from the terror, violence, and ideological pressure of the Kyiv regime, and after their withdrawal from informational isolation. Of course, it will take some time for people to recover from the shock of military hostilities, to be convinced of Russia’s long-term intentions and that “they will not be abandoned.” It’s impossible to foresee exactly in which territories such a mass of the population will constitute a critically needed majority. The “Catholic province” (Western Ukraine, made up of five oblasts) is unlikely to become part of the pro-Russian territories.[19] The exclusion line, however, will be found through the path of experience. Behind the line, a Ukraine hostile to Russia will remain, but it will be forced to be neutral and demilitarized and the formal signs of Nazism will be banned. This is where the haters of Russia will go. The guarantee of the preservation of this obsolete Ukraine in a neutral state must be the threat of an immediate continuation of the military operation in case of non-compliance with the listed requirements. Perhaps this will require a permanent Russian military presence on its territory. From the exclusion line to the Russian border, there will be a territory with potential integration into Russian civilization, which is inherently anti-fascist.
The operation to denazify Ukraine, which began with a military phase, will follow the same logic of stages in peacetime as during the military operation. At each stage, it will be necessary to achieve irreversible changes, which will become the results of the corresponding stage. In this case, the necessary initial steps of denazification can be defined as follows:
— The liquidation of armed Nazi formations (which means any armed formations of Ukraine, including the Armed Forces of Ukraine), as well as the military, informational, and educational infrastructure that ensures their activity;[20]
— The establishment of people’s self-government institutions and militia (defense and law enforcement) of the liberated territories to protect the population from the terror of underground Nazi groups;
— The installation of the Russian information space;[21]
— The seizure of educational materials and the prohibition of educational programs at all levels that contain Nazi ideological guidelines;
— Mass investigations aimed to establish personal responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity, the spread of Nazi ideology, and support for the Nazi regime;
— Lustration, making the names of accomplices of the Nazi regime public, involving them in forced labor to restore the destroyed infrastructure as punishment for Nazi activities (from among those who have not become subject to the death penalty or imprisonment);
— The adoption at the local level, under the supervision of Russia, of local legislative acts of denazification “from below,” a ban on all types and forms of the revival of Nazi ideology;
— The establishment of memorials, commemorative signs, monuments to the victims of Ukrainian Nazism, perpetuating the memory of the heroes of the struggle against it;
— The inclusion of a set of anti-fascist and denazification norms in the constitutions of the new people’s republics;
— The establishment of permanent denazification institutions for a period of 25 years.
Russia will have no allies in the denazification of Ukraine. Because this is exclusively a Russian affair. And because it is not only the Bandera version of Nazi Ukraine that will be eradicated, but also, and primarily so, all Western totalitarianism, its imposed programs of civilizational degradation and disintegration, mechanisms of subjugation by the superpower of the West and the United States.
In order to put the Ukraine denazification plan into practice, Russia itself will have to finally part with pro-European and pro-Western illusions, acknowledge itself as the last authority in protecting and preserving those values of historical Europe (the Old World) that deserve to be retained and that the West ultimately abandoned, losing the fight for itself.[22] This struggle continued throughout the 20th century and found its expression in the World War and the Russian revolution, which were inextricably linked with each other.
Russia did everything possible to save the West in the 20th century. It implemented the main Western project that constituted an alternative to capitalism, which defeated the nation-states — the Socialist red project. It crushed German Nazism, a monstrous offspring of the crisis of Western civilization. The last act of Russian altruism was its outstretched hand of friendship, for which it received a monstrous blow in the 1990s.
Everything that Russia has done for the West, it has done at its own expense, by making the greatest sacrifices. The West ultimately rejected all these sacrifices, devalued Russia’s contribution to resolving the Western crisis, and decided to take revenge on Russia for the help that it had selflessly provided. From now on, Russia will follow its own way, not worrying about the fate of the West, relying on another part of its heritage — the leadership in the global process of decolonization.[23]
As part of this process, Russia has a high potential for partnerships and alliances with countries that the West has oppressed for centuries and which are not going to put on its yoke again. Without Russian sacrifice and struggle, these countries would not have been liberated. The denazification of Ukraine is at the same time its decolonization, which the population of Ukraine will have to understand as it begins to free itself from the intoxication, temptation, and dependence on the so-called European choice.”
[1] From World War Two on, Russians have called Ukrainian nationalists “Banderists” after Stepan Bandera (1909–1959), a Ukrainian nationalist who briefly collaborated with the Nazis but who spent most of his time during World War Two in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He led a faction within the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which, in February 1941, agreed with the German military intelligence to form Ukrainian units supporting the Nazis. However, once Bandera and his faction declared Ukrainian independence on June 30, 1941, the day after the Nazis, together with the OUN, entered Lviv, the Germans arrested him and sent him to Sachsenhausen. The more moderate faction of OUN continued to collaborate with the Nazis until early 1942, by which time both factions were at war with the Nazis. While OUN was largely anti-Semitic, Russian attempts to blame the Holocaust in Ukraine on them, such as we see in the Oliver Stone produced movie, Ukraine on Fire, means that the Nazis are, quite wrongly, absolved of significant responsibility.
[2] A reference to the election of 2019, when former president Petro Poroshenko and current President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky put forward different plans about how to seek peace with Russia.
[3] This refers to the Russian-produced fake news, together with fake documents, that Ukraine was planning to invade the breakaway territories in the Donbas. As Zelensky noted in his long interview with Russian journalists given on March 27, the false documents included a large number of spelling and other errors, not least giving Zelensky’s signature as V.A. Zelensky, whereas in Ukrainian it is V.O. Zelensky.
[4] This false statement claims that these cities are Russian-speaking and therefore are anti-Ukrainian. As news reports have shown, the Russian government was willing to pay the largely Russian-speaking municipal authorities of these and other areas a large amount of money to become collaborators and support the Russian invasion, but they refused, although it seems that in Kherson they did find such collaborators.
[5] A false claim that forms one of Putin’s main justifications for the war.
[6] In this context, lustration means that no members of the democratically-elected government of Ukraine would be allowed to continue to serve under Russian rule.
[7] While this follows the Russian propaganda line that the breakaway republics were led by Russian-speaking Ukrainians, real scholarship shows that many of the leaders and rank-and-file of the republics were from Russia and many of them were themselves Russian fascists. The book by the leading Russian fascist, Alexander Dugin, tellingly titled Ukraine: My War (Moscow, 2015), approvingly notes the fascist-inspired actions of many of the leaders of the breakaway republics as well as details the actions of the fascist youth movement he created and that has been active there. For more on the fascist origins of these leaders and their connections to the European New Right, see Anton Shekhovtsov, “Aleksandr Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism and the Russian-Ukrainian War,” in The Politics of Eurasianism: Identity, Popular Culture and Russia’s Foreign Policy, ed. Mark Bassin and Gonzolo Polo (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 181–200.
[8] This likely means that Russia cannot expect to hold a referendum and then govern without carrying out a war.
[9] Note that for the author, any desire for Ukrainian independence is evidence of Nazism, regardless of its form. Ukraine’s desire to join the West and to be democratic are thus branded as fascist.
[10] False claims that Ukraine has suppressed the Russian language would seem to be difficult to support, as Ukraine’s president himself is a native Russian speaker and a multitude of videos of Ukrainians heroically defying Russian invaders show the Ukrainians speaking Russian among themselves. However, Russian propaganda is about creating an alternate reality, not engaging with what exists.
[11] This combines the emphasis that Soviet propaganda put on American racism with the current Russian obsession with naming everything that opposes it as Nazi. Yale historian Timothy Snyder, in his The Road to Unfreedom (New York: Penguin, 2018), usefully calls this “schizofascism” and notes that the Russian state under Putin is deeply influenced by fascism and also obsessively accuses others of being fascist.
[12] Bandera and the OUN were largely from Galicia, the western part of Ukraine that had been under Habsburg rule and thus a center for the development of the Ukrainian national movement already in the nineteenth century. Europe as a whole is thus seen as fascist.
[13] This echoes the work of Russian fascist Alexander Dugin, whose textbook, The Foundations of Geopolitics, has been widely used by the Russian General Staff and military academies as a textbook since its publication in 1997. He argues that Ukraine must be divided and that its existence itself is a threat to Russia.
[14] This refers to the discussion in the US and elsewhere in the West to create a Marshall Plan for Ukraine, which was widely reported during the month of March.
[15] In his March 27 interview with Russian journalists, President Zelensky noted that Ukraine was willing to discuss the neutrality of the country as part of a peace process.
[16] This echoes Putin’s false claim that V.I. Lenin created Ukraine and Ukrainian national identity, when really a modern national movement, equivalent to any other in Europe in its use of folklore, language, poetry and so on, started from the early nineteenth century.
[17] This echoes Putin’s statements before the war, both in his wildly inaccurate “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” issued July 12, 2021, and in his two major speeches before the invasion. By denying Ukrainian statehood, he also laid the foundation to deny the very existence of Ukrainians — a step that Sergeytsev’s article takes. This is properly called genocide.
[18] The Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation (Rossotrudnichestvo) was founded in 2008 under the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to deal with Russians living abroad.
[19] This refers to Galicia and territories once part of the Habsburg Empire, where the Uniate Church plays an important role.
[20] This helps to explain why educational institutions, from kindergartens to universities, have been deliberately destroyed by Russian forces.
[21] Here is meant the organs of Russian propaganda.
[22] This echoes neo-Nazi views.
[23] Decolonization is not the proper name of an imperial project that seeks the retaking of a former colony by force.
