How Zelensky was prevented from making peace in the Donbass and avoiding war with Russia.
From peace advocate to warmonger, from anti-fascist comedian to figurehead of the banderite neo-Nazi regime: the untold tragic story of a Western hero.
Fact-based answers to the questions: ▪ How democratic and free or fascist is Ukraine? ▪ What is behind the (legal or illegal?) change of the (democratically elected or undemocratically appointed?) government in 2014, the subsequent secession (or annexation?) of Crimea, the (real or unreal?) civil war in the Donbass from 2014 and the (legal or illegal?) invasion of Russia in 2022 ? ▪ What is the role of Jewish President Zelensky, who was elected as a peacemaker and became president in wartime of a country where Jews, Poles and Russians were slaughtered by nationalists who are revered as heroes?
Ultimate victory (“Endsieg”) of the warmongering neo-Nazis over former Jewish peacemaker
Traffic came to a standstill, people in the squares and sidewalks knelt down, the bells of all churches rang, soldiers appeared in parade uniforms and a pompous state funeral began. It was an impressive event symbolizing the victory of neo-Nazis over a Jewish president: on March 10, 2023, liberal Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, representing the collective West, stood behind President Zelensky at the open coffin of Dmytro “Da Vinci” Kotsiubailo, commander of the “Da Vinci Wolves” of the fascist “Right Sector,” which advocated ethnic cleansing. The New York Times reported that “his soldiers wore Nazi-style patches, including the Totenkopf” (death skull). In the days that followed, the pro-government Ukrainian media (opposition media are banned) reported on his deeds with effusive praise, and numerous squares and streets in Ukrainian villages and towns were named after Kotsyubailo.
Kotsiubailo suffered heroic death in the Donbass in the fight against the Russian “subhumans” and for the salvation of the Ukrainian “master race.” The 27-year-old, an ardent admirer of Bandera, who murdered thousands of Jews, was one of the youngest military commanders. The neo-Nazi leader was already awarded the “Order of the Golden Star” and the title of “Hero of Ukraine” last year in the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, by a Jewish president, of all people.
Five months before Kotsiubailo’s state funeral, Zelensky had already called the fascist Azov leaders “our living heroes” and honored them with the nation’s highest award.
Today’s Ukraine builds its national identity on Nazi collaborators and war criminals.
Because its president and prime minister are Jews, supporters of the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine claim that their country is not Nazi.
This makes it sound as if there was no racism in the United States because America had a black president, or as if there were no Nazi crimes against Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto because there were also Jewish guards working for the Nazis.
The extraordinary memorial service in the presence of a head of state from the European Union marked the end of a transformation from the anti-fascist comedian, who campaigned against discrimination against minorities and for the end of the civil war against Russian speakers in the Donbass, to his capitulation to a regime dominated by neo-Nazis, whose figurehead he became. To understand this dramatic development, we should start at the beginning.
From Comedian to Elected Peace President
There are two Volodymyr Zelenskys: the one we have known since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, who has since been celebrated every day in the Western media as a hero with a spotless white (or green) vest, and the other, who was less well-known prior to this significant escalation of the war, which, according to NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, began already in 2014. (Here and here are details on the actual start of this war in 2014). After all, prominent British, German and other European media already referred to the “Panama” or “Pandora Papers” to describe the “former” Zelensky, who was not yet the illustrious governor of the American empire on its NATO eastern flank, as being highly corrupt. Ironically, comedian Zelensky made fun on TV at the time that Barack Obama was in fact “the real president of Ukraine” and that he had led Ukraine into NATO and made it a “henchman.”
However, his hero status could end abruptly if Washington decides he is no longer useful, for example, if war results do not meet expectations despite NATO’s active participation: after all, the war alliance has been heavily involved with all kinds of weapons deliveries, training, reconnaissance, military “advisors,” the guidance of troop movements, artillery, and missiles at Russian targets, and the preparation of offensives to be carried out by Ukrainian soldiers, but so far without any soldiers of its own directly on the front lines, resulting in massive expenditures that far exceed Russia’s entire defense budget. In this case, the media will again go in search of dirty details about him. Wanna bet?
What the same media bubble fails to mention, however, is that Zelensky was elected to office with a large majority of the electoral votes, including the votes of many Russian-speaking citizens, with massive financial support from the richest Ukrainian oligarch at the time (who had stolen huge sums of money and was therefore banned from entering the country by the United States) and with the promise of bringing peace to the Donbass. His pledge to end the civil war that nationalists and neo-fascists had been waging against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east of the country since 2014 was to prove a tough nut to crack. Nevertheless, he made efforts to implement it at the beginning of his presidency.
Zelensky’s original peace mission
The plan of Volodymyr (actual first name at birth: Vladimir) Zelensky probably also had to do with the fact that he, the president of Jewish faith and Russian mother tongue, himself belonged to the minority. He learned fluent Ukrainian only late, when it became politically unavoidable for him.
Long before he became president, he had campaigned as a comedian against discrimination against the Russian-speaking minority. For example, in a 2014 television appearance, he declared, “In the east and in Crimea, people want to speak Russian. Leave them alone, just leave them alone. Give them the right to speak Russian. Language should never divide our country…. We have the same skin color, the same blood, regardless of language.” When he took the highest office in the country, he tried to implement his election promise.
However, this was a Herculean task in view of the very strong ultranationalist forces and the “fascists who overran the country” (according to the “Jerusalem Post” and other media) who opposed his peace mission. The influence of these circles was (and is) so great that from schoolchildren to senior citizens, all Western Ukrainians were processed to hate Ukrainian citizens of Russian descent and to believe that it is good to slaughter them. Even in schools, students were goaded by their teachers to use slogans like these against Russian-speaking Ukrainians: “Hang the Muscovites,” “Put the Russians on the pyre,” “Drink the blood of Russian babies!”
Peaceful coexistence instead of final victory
Zelensky could only have achieved peaceful coexistence between western and eastern Ukraine if he had been permitted to negotiate as he originally desired with Russia and with representatives of the largely Russian-speaking Donbass. He needed the backing of his supporters in Washington to do so, as the Russophobic nationalists who have led the fighting in eastern Ukraine since 2014 threatened him and declared that they would only accept a “final victory” over the Donbass. But Washington did not want him to negotiate with Russia — and thus strengthened the position of the extremists. The nationalists, guided by the ideology of their idol Bandera, even told Zelensky that he would sign his own death warrant if he spoke to Russia and the Russian-speaking separatists in the Donbass.
It gradually became clear that the existential threat to the Russian-speaking population in the Donbass, and in particular the looming emergence of a highly armed and hostile NATO member Ukraine, could not be met through negotiations. The West, which did not take seriously the “red lines” Russia had proclaimed for years, was at no time interested in discussing Russia’s security needs, and Vladimir Putin’s growing critics in Moscow grew tired of giving enemies more time to prepare for war against Russia.
Nor did it heed the warnings of many prominent figures in the U.S. political establishment: Robert M. Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, warned against NATO expansion, as did Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, who wrote that NATO expansion was neither necessary nor desirable, and Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s Secretary of State, who predicted war in Ukraine. George Kennan, the intellectual father of U.S. containment policy during the Cold War, issued a stark warning against NATO enlargement in a May 1998 interview with The New York Times, calling it a “tragic mistake” and declaring that “there is no reason for it at all.” Nor were the voices of countless other prominent U.S. foreign policy leaders, including former senators, military officers, diplomats, and academics, who had warned against NATO expansion decades ago taken seriously.
President Biden could not, or would not, recall that as a senator and ranking member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he also assessed NATO expansion as a dangerous Western provocation of Russia and warned that it would provoke “a vigorous and hostile response from Russia.”
Matthew Hoh, deputy director of the Eisenhower Media Network, explains why NATO expansion went through anyway: “At the end of the Cold War, the military-industrial complex faced an existential crisis. Without an adversary like the Soviet Union, justifying massive arms spending by the United States would be difficult. NATO expansion allowed for new markets. Countries coming into NATO would be required to upgrade their armed forces, replacing their Soviet-era stocks with Western weapons, ammunition, machines, hardware and software compatible with NATO’s armies. Entire armies, navies and air forces had to be remade. NATO expansion was a cash bonanza for a weapons industry that originally saw destitution as the fruit of the Cold War’s end. From 1996–1998, US arms companies spent $51 million ($94 million today) lobbying Congress. Millions more were spent on campaign donations. Beating swords into plowshares would have to wait for another epoch once the weapons industry realized the promise of Eastern European markets.”
While Russia was accused by Western politicians and media of not wanting to honor the Minsk agreements to resolve the conflict in the Donbass, in reality it was the other side that did not want to abide by these agreements in the first place, as can be seen from the statements of the main players at the time, Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Petro Poroshenko; they only served to buy time so that the Ukrainian army could be rearmed by NATO and prepared for war with Russia. Geoffrey Roberts of Cork University argued in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies that Russia therefore felt compelled to wage what he called a “preemptative war against Ukraine.”
But instead of being provoked by American militarism and unilateralism, Russia could have taken a potentially far cheaper and more effective route than invading Ukraine: Had it formed a diplomatic “coalition of the willing” among countries in Europe and the Global South to pressure Washington to keep NATO out of Ukraine (and Georgia), it might well have achieved its goal much more easily, given the popularity of that goal and Russia’s backing in the Global South.
It should be recalled that since 2008, Russia has repeatedly warned that a Ukraine in NATO, which has been pushed especially since 2014, would pose an unacceptable threat to the country, an existential threat, because it would mean that the U.S., after Romania and Poland, could also station nuclear-capable missiles in Ukraine, which could reach Moscow within 3–5 minutes. This would deprive Moscow of second-strike capability, i.e., the deterrent balance of terror. Moscow has made it clear that it would have to intervene militarily if this existential threat were to materialize. All Russian diplomatic efforts to avert this threat have been shot down by the collective West. The Russian president’s last attempt was a letter to the U.S. president and the NATO secretary-general on December 17, 2021, urgently requesting security guarantees from NATO. The collective West was again unwilling to provide such guarantees.
To understand how this came about, we should start with the founding of NATO and its Eastern counterpart: Shortly after all the sacred oaths that Germany — like Japan — would refrain from any military buildup were made, guaranteeing that war would not come from Germany again after the civilizational catastrophe of World War II, the Federal Republic of Germany was led into the Western military alliance by its transatlantic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
Eight countries from the Eastern Bloc founded the Warsaw Pact in response to that, I repeat: in response to that. So the Eastern Defense Alliance was sparked by West Germany’s rearmament rather than the other way around.
The Warsaw Pact dissolved together with the USSR. And NATO carried out its so-called eastward expansion, growing to 28 members, contrary to the commitment to expand “Not One Inch Eastward.” As a result, Russia felt increasingly encircled — and betrayed.
To make matters worse, in 2001 — after the Sept. 11 attacks — NATO not only declared an alliance emergency, but German troops invaded Afghanistan, ostensibly to defend democracy in the Hindu Kush. Even more serious was the military intervention with German participation in the so-called Kosovo War, where NATO carried out terrorist air strikes on what was then Yugoslavia and on Belgrade, among other places. This was certainly illegal under international law, since there was no UN mandate for it; moreover, the bombing of Belgrade was very likely a war crime.
Let us also recall how the U.S. responds to the threat of being encircled by hostile forces armed with nuclear-capable missiles by using the example of the so-called Cuban missile crisis triggered by the U.S. Monroe Doctrine. This policy prohibits the deployment of missiles from adversaries in the neighborhood of the United States (i.e., in this case, Russian missiles in Cuba). Washington was determined at the time to risk World War III because of these missiles.
Two months after Vladimir Putin’s letter that achieved nothing, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. However, the goal was not to conquer all of Ukraine. There is no evidence that Moscow wants to create a Greater Russia, a kind of Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact 2.0, as is claimed in the West. Statements by Vladimir Putin, which are not mentioned by the Western media, even indicate the opposite. Nor does it make sense: the Russians know that the Soviet Union expended enormous resources to keep the Soviet republics under control, which contributed to the exhaustion and collapse of the USSR. Moreover, Moscow is aware that an occupation of all of Ukraine would end in an even greater defeat than the occupation of Afghanistan at that time in 1989. According to Moscow’s statements, Russia’s real concern is the security of the at-risk Russian-speaking community in the country’s east.
Russia invaded in February 2022 with 90,000 troops, while Ukraine had about 800,000 troops. To defeat the Ukrainian military would have required a force ratio of 1:3, meaning Russia would have needed over 2,000,000 troops on Ukrainian soil. For this, a general mobilization would have been necessary with the justification of a “war” instead of the “special military operation” for which fewer troops and mercenaries were used. Moreover, Russia limited its advances to the periphery. The reason: It expected the West to negotiate. By invading with a relatively small force, however, Russia showed that it was serious in its demand for a neutral Ukraine and an end to the oppression of the Russian-speaking population in the Donbass. But again, the West was unwilling to negotiate and preferred to escalate the war.
More than a year after invading with a mere vanguard (vastly outnumbered and outgunned by Ukrainian forces), Russia has not brought the bulk of its army with its overwhelming firepower into the conflict (but mainly the private Wagner Army), once again disproving the conspiracy theory of NATO and its supporters that supposedly imperialist Russia wants to annex all of Ukraine (and subsequently invade other European countries). And why would the largest country in the world, spanning 11 time zones, be interested in increasing its burden by incorporating a poor, corrupt and otherwise problematic country?
Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicaco provides a thorough analysis of the conflict situation in Ukraine today, the players and the prospects. Mearsheimer explains that Russia is not acting out of an alleged imperialist expansionism, but from a position of strategic defense.
Eliot Cohen is a good example of how not only the media but also the academic establishment in the West try to influence and shape the narrative of the Ukraine conflict instead of shedding independent and unbiased light on it. He is a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and holds the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Instead of a reasoned and factual article, he published another pamphlet in The Atlantic calling for the victory of Ukraine (with unlimited NATO support) and the push over the cliff of nuclear power Russia because, according to his conspiracy theory, Russia is “imperialist.” And, of course, Putin is an autocrat and Zelensky a democrat, if you believe him. The Ukrainian president is undoubtedly what Cohen and like-minded people believe him to be, a bulwark of freedom if one disregards the fact that under massive pressure from the Banderists, he has banned opposition parties and independent media, discriminated against minorities, and even had the Russian-speaking minority in the Donbass shot at (details later).
Of course, there is no tirade against the imperialist USA from Professor Cohen. He and his like-minded colleagues ignore the May 2023 Brown University study of how many lives the U.S. wars have cost since 9/11. According to the study, 4.5 to 4.6 million people have been victims of illegal U.S.-led or -supported wars of aggression, with about one million killed directly in combat operations and the rest victims of the consequences of war. In a 2020 study titled “Costs of war,” Brown University concluded that U.S. wars since Sept. 11, 2001, have also caused nearly 60 million refugees worldwide. Earlier wars such as the Vietnam War and the Korean War, which were not included in the study, have caused many more millions of deaths.
U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay, the head of the strategic air command during the Korean War, explained the Office of Air Force History in 1984 that “we went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea. (…) Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population.” If Cohen had looked at the numbers, he would have noticed that in the last 120 years, Nazi Germany and the United States were responsible for the most war deaths.
Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Nazi Germany’s High Commissioner in the Netherlands, was tried and hanged at the Nuremberg Tribunal at the instigation of the United States for his crimes, including his attempt to flood farmland in 1944. During the Korean War, the U.S. Air Force destroyed the Kusong and Toksan irrigation dams (it was not a mere attempt) that supplied water to 75% of North Korea’s food production, resulting in agricultural flooding and mass starvation. During the Vietnam War, which the Vietnamese refer to as the “American War,” the U.S. Air Force again bombed dikes, resulting in the flooding of farmland in several provinces. The U.S. military murdered countless innocent civilians in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The U.S. military has murdered countless innocent civilians in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
None of the American war criminals were ever prosecuted. No sanctions were imposed on the United States. No American president has been the subject of a criminal investigation by an international court. Even the “Gulag of our time” (Amnesty International’s term) at Guantanmo, where prisoners are held and brutally tortured by the United States without charge or trial, in some cases for more than 20 years, is not worth a word of criticism from the European Union. U.S. musicians have not been required to speak out publicly against the United States’ brutal wars of aggression or to distance themselves from the policies of U.S. presidents before performing in Europe, as Russian athletes do. And athletes from the U.S. have not been banned from international competitions like Russian athletes. Obviously, Cohen and like-minded “experts” have no problem with this double standard.
Cohen deliberately ignores the causes of the Ukraine conflict and Russia’s stated goals. He is a vivid example of how biased, irresponsible and unprofessional not only the media, but also a large part of the Western academic establishment calling themselves “scientists” have become.
In addition to the threat to his life, Zelensky faced direct obstacles to his peace mandate on several fronts.
When Zelensky traveled to the part of Donbass still under Ukrainian army control to campaign in October 2019, he was met by angry members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion protesting under the slogan “No to surrender.” Zelensky argued with a military commander from the Azov Battalion about the president’s demand for a troop withdrawal in a videotaped exchange. “I am the president of this country. I am 41 years old. I am not a loser. I came to you and told you: withdraw your weapons,” Zelensky demanded.
Despite his personal appearance on the ground, Zelensky encountered even further resistance: the same neo-Nazi forces set up an armed checkpoint to prevent or at least delay a withdrawal of the Ukrainian military. Thousands of nationalist demonstrators, cheered by the liberal intelligentsia and carrying flares, also marched in Kyiv.
Nationalists and U.S. government prevented peace agreement
Although Zelensky was reluctant to accept the Minsk agreements on resolving the minority issue, he continued talks on their implementation. The radical nationalists expressed their violent opposition at every opportunity — including in August 2021, when at least eight police officers were injured during armed protests in front of the presidential office. Their threats against Zelensky undoubtedly thwarted a peace agreement that could have prevented the Russian invasion.
Just two weeks before Russian troops invaded Ukraine, The New York Times noted that Zelensky “would take extreme political risks to even consider a peace agreement with Russia” because his government could be “shaken and possibly overthrown” by far-right groups if he agreed to “a peace deal that they believe gives too much to Moscow.”
Yuri Hudymenko, leader of the fascist Democratic Axe party, even threatened Zelensky with a coup d’état, according to the New York Times: “If anybody from the Ukrainian government tries to sign such a document, a million people will take to the streets and that government will cease being the government.” He also emphasized that “they [the Zelensky government, F.A.] fear the Ukrainian people [respectively his fascist followers, F.A.] more than they fear the Russian army.”
An example that these nationalists are serious about their hostility toward native Russian-speaking Ukrainians is the recent announcement by a Ukrainian soldier in the east of the country that he and his comrades will murder all Russian-born eastern Ukrainians in the Donbass as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
If you read this article to the end, you will find many more striking examples that reveal the true character of the regime.
If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proposes peace talks between Kjiv and Moscow, he will commit “political suicide.” This statement was made by the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) Oleksiy Danilov in an interview with Ukrinform. And as befits a convinced Banderist, he had already vehemently opposed the Minsk agreements, since they should have protected minorities, especially the Russian-speaking ones in the Donbass, from discrimination and violence.
Suffering in Donbass acknowledged by Zelensky, censored by Western media
Katharine Quinn-Judge of the “International Crisis Group” explained that Zelensky’s press secretary at the time, Yulia Mendel, acknowledged the suffering in the Donbass because “Zelensky had promised during the election campaign to treat the residents of the Russian-backed enclaves as full Ukrainians” — a misstep for the U.S.-favored nationalists, who oppose equal rights for all Ukrainians.
Yet journalists in European and other Western countries are intimidated and prevented from reporting on Ukrainian terror and suffering in the Donbass by being defamed, losing their jobs, and even threatened with imprisonment. And reporters who provide balanced news about Ukraine are suspended.
The fact that dissent is crushed and freedom of the press is repressed in Ukraine does not bother the political and media elites in the West. They feel all the more disturbed by the handful of free journalists who dare to report on the situation in the Donbass, where the majority Russian population has been under Ukrainian fire since 2014 (more, how it came to this, later). This explains why Europeans are generally unaware of the years of violence that the Ukrainian military and neo-fascist groups have inflicted on the population in the Donbass.
After German journalist Patrik Baab dared to report from the Donbass, German universities and media accused him of “legitimizing Putin’s war of aggression with his mere presence”. As a result, he lost his job as a lecturer at a university (which, a court later ruled, was illegal).
The French journalist and filmmaker Anne-Laure Bonnel had made two documentaries showing the situation of the Russian-born population in the regions attacked by Kyiv. As a result, she lost her job in Europe. Here you can see how she had to deal with biased editors in France while working in the Donbass. Incidentally, both Patrik Baab and Anne-Laure Bonnel had unequivocally condemned the Russian invasion.
“I saw the war, yet we cannot speak the truth,” says Sonja van den Ende, a Dutch investigative journalist who has covered the Donbass, adding, “We’re being censored in Europe.”
Italian photojournalist Giorgio Bianchi became the target of a defamation campaign waged by major Italian newspapers over his reporting from Ukraine. He was accused of being a pro-Russian propaganda stooge.
The media conjured up all sorts of wild suspicions against him, to which he responded: “All of these hypotheses are absolutely false and lack any support of evidence. It is a clumsy attempt to muzzle whoever disapproves of crazy policies by a government that is making the Italian people pay the cost of arbitrarily imposed sanctions against Russia.” He noted that most intellectuals and journalists are increasingly reluctant to come out and voice their concerns about the escalation of the conflict for fear of jeopardizing their reputations or suffering a career assassination because of the witch-hunt atmosphere.
Alina Lipp moved to Ukraine in 2021 — a year before Russia invaded — and out of sheer curiosity to Donetsk to spend some time there and find out for herself what was actually happening in the Donbass. The German freelancer journalist was little known at the time. Although Berlin loudly declared that it was protecting democracy and thus freedom of expression in Ukraine (nota bene: with heavy weapons, including tanks rolling against Russia again!), Germany wanted to punish her for this with three years in prison. Lipp saw her bank account frozen and relieved of 1,600 euros without further explanation. The German authorities also said that she would not be allowed to defend herself in court, as this could hinder the investigation.
▪ Here is one of Alina Lipp’s uncensored documentaries about her stay in Donbass. Just watch it and form your own opinion!
▪ For those for whom atrocities, regardless of whether they were “only” preached or perpetrated nationwide, against Russian-speaking Ukrainians by Ukrainian nationalists don’t turn their stomachs, I recommend this video.
▪ And discover even more about the history of the war and its background in Ukraine in this insightful documentary by Paul Moreira, a renowned French filmmaker who has made quite a few investigative documentaries in conflict zones. Are you ready to challenge your knowledge and beliefs?
Western politicians and media have strongly condemned Russian censorship. Russia has restricted access to state-affiliated Western media such as the BBC and Germany’s Deutsche Welle. But the West itself also practices a growing regime of censorship that has taken hold in the United States and Europe. For example, by suppressing all Russian media, including RT and Sputnik, to ensure that media consumers in the West receive only the Western perspective on the Ukraine conflict. The Western press even cheered this on. Western social media joined this censorship campaign and even expanded it. Differentiated views on the Ukraine conflict, often denigrated as pro-Russian propaganda, no longer find a place in Western social and mainstream media.
The war against freedom of expression is being waged across all borders and continues to escalate: for example, a Spanish journalist who reported on events in the Donbass much to the displeasure of the Ukrainian government was arrested while reporting on the arrival of Ukrainian refugees in Poland for the Spanish television station La Sexta, presumably at the behest of the Ukrainian government. He also worked for the Spanish daily Publico and the regional newspaper Diario de Gara, as well as for South American news outlets.
In Poland, he was charged with espionage on a blanket basis under Article 130.1 of the Polish Criminal Code, without charges being filed or a trial date set. Since then, he has been treated as a “dangerous prisoner” in a maximum-security prison in a small solitary cell (with no contact with other prisoners), where he spends 23 hours a day, plus one hour to walk with guards outside his cell. He is not allowed to talk on the phone with his wife and children or with anyone else, except his lawyer. His children have not spoken to their incarcerated father in a year. Letters addressed to him are handed to him two months late and are opened, translated and censored beforehand.
So is this the kind of democracy and freedom that the collective West pretends to defend with weapons and billions of taxpayer dollars in Ukraine and neighboring Poland?
On the other hand, Western journalists are much better off not reporting from Donbass and spreading with great benevolence any news, true or untrue, from the Kjiv government, such as the rape of Ukrainian babies by Russian soldiers (one of the many lies of a high-ranking Ukrainian official, so absurd that even the Ukrainian parliament felt forced to dismiss her). They are rewarded by the Ukrainian president with medals of honor for their good (partisan) work, and these “journalists” gladly accept them. With her lies, Ms. Denisova, the Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsperson, made it into the news on CNN, Washington Post, BBC and others. She has also been repeatedly quoted in German media (including here, here or here and the German news magazine SPIEGEL even interviewed her).
Ms. Denisova, has commented in an interview on why she invented these outrageous atrocities. She said, among other things: “For example, when I spoke in the Italian Parliament in the Committee on International Affairs, I heard and saw a weariness about Ukraine, you know? I spoke about these terrible things to somehow get them to make the decisions that Ukraine and the Ukrainian people need.” In plain English, she lied and made up “news” about the rape of babies by Russian soldiers and other horror stories to get the decisions she wanted in the West.
Whenever atrocities occur in Ukraine, Kjiv, NATO governments and their Western media partners almost reflexively blame Russia, as in the case of the Butcha massacre. But why does Ukraine refuse every time Russia calls for an independent investigation if it is not to blame, and why does the West support Kjiv in its refusal? And it is therefore not surprising that the U.S.-dominated majority of the U.N. Security Council also rejected an independent investigation of the Nordstream terrorist act requested by Russia.
In articles about U.S. military involvement in Ukraine, the U.S. mainstream media cite think tanks that receive funding from the arms industry 85% of the time. This also influences the mainstream media outside the U.S., which often leans on its narrative.
It is not unimportant, then, to be aware of the fact that the “reporting” of the U.S. and other, primarily Western, media depends to a large extent on think tanks whose funders profit from the war.
Academics are also being “canceled”: One instance is the dismissal of a renowned university professor for adopting a nuanced stance on Ukraine.
France had awarded Professor Ulrike Guérot the prestigious Order of Merit (“Ordre National du Mérite”). A German president took her along on a state visit in his delegation. Whenever an EU summit took place, television stations called to interview her about it. Her book “Why Europe Must Become a Republic!” became a bestseller and was translated into eight languages.
She lost her fame abruptly when she defied the official narrative of the Ukraine war and offered a more nuanced view instead of regurgitating the only accepted version, as she was expected to do, and blaming the Russian president exclusively and solely for the Ukraine war and leaving out the back story.
As a result, friends turned away from her, and the same media that had previously praised her began digging for dirt on her. German democracy, propped up by the pillars of speech and counter-speech, quickly began to crumble when the latter was abolished in the wake of Washington- and Brussels-directed war hysteria over the “Russian war of aggression in Ukraine” and when, ironically, it itself became more and more similar to the kind of “democracy” in Ukraine and Russia.
The German magazine EMMA writes: “As a celebrated Europe expert, she was a guest on all channels. Now she is persona non grata. Even her own university distanced itself from her. The reason: her position on the Ukraine war. Guérot asks: What is actually wrong with our discussion culture? And she wrote a book on Europe’s role in the war that is well worth reading.”
Illegal coup d’état triggered secession of Crimea and war in Donbass
Transatlantic politicians and the mainstream media portrayed the momentous “revolution” on the Maidan in 2014 as the work of liberal, pro-Western protesters motivated by a righteous resentment of an authoritarian, corrupt president.
In line with their narrative, they simply ignored the fact that according to the Ukrainian constitution in force at the time (Article 108), the presidential term could only be terminated early for four reasons: resignation, health reasons, impeachment proceedings or the death of the incumbent.
None of the four reasons applied to the dismissal of democratically elected President Yanukovych. He had neither resigned nor was he seriously ill, and opposition leaders Vitali Klitschko, Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Oleh Tyahnybok had not conducted impeachment proceedings either. Even a fact check by the German magazine Der Spiegel, known for its transatlantic and strongly anti-Russian bias, concluded that Yanukovych’s ouster was unconstitutional. Referring to a statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the magazine concludes its fact check with the sentence: “If you look at the change in the presidency in Ukraine from a ‘purely legal’ perspective, Putin is right.”
The Maidan protest movement was a marriage of convenience between government opponents, who at best represented one half of a polarized country, and the neo-Nazis. The fact that the uprising served primarily to strengthen the neo-Nazis, while only implementing the goals of the Western powers that opportunistically supported them, was conveniently ignored in the West.
Tryzub, one of the groups that came together to form the influential Neonazi “Right Sector,” had urged the Ukrainian opposition to shift “from a peaceful demonstration to a street-revolutionary plane” in March 2013. In the event that the pro-Russian forces came to power, their leader Dmytro Yarosh had already called on his compatriots in 2009 to “take up an armed struggle against the regime of internal occupation and the Moscow empire.” Yanukovych was hated by nationalists as part of the “pro-Russian forces.” However, the Brookings Institution characterized Yanukovych’s foreign policy as “more nuanced” than his pro-Russian leanings had initially suggested.
Looking outside of Kyiv, a thorough examination of more than 3,000 Maidan demonstrations revealed that the far-right Svoboda party, whose leader alleged that a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” controlled Ukraine, and which includes a leading politician who admires Joseph Goebbels, was the most active force behind the demonstrations. They were also more likely than any other group, with the exception of the “Right Sector,” a collection of neo-Nazi activists with ties to collaborators with the Nazis who had committed mass murder, to engage in violent acts.
For good reason, the Israeli embassy advised Jews to stay in their homes while a prominent rabbi urged them to leave the city and even the country.
A massacre perpetrated by snipers during the Maidan coup, which was strongly condemned in the collective West, was a false-flag operation attributed by Western politicians and media to the Yanukovych government to lend some moral legitimacy to its overthrow.
Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian professor at the School of Political Studies & Conflict Studies and Human Rights Program at the University of Ottawa, who conducted research on the matter, refuted the Western claim:
“All the evidence shows that this massacre was not perpetrated by government snipers or led by the police…. No one has been convicted of this mass murder…. They killed and wounded police officers and Maidan demonstrators in order to falsely blame government forces….”
Indeed, the post-Yanukovych interim government, in which leading far-right figures took prominent positions, swiftly passed a law giving Maidan participants immunity for any violence.
Adds Katchanovski: “He (President Yanukovych) was blamed for the massacre and the West, including the United States, no longer recognized him as president of Ukraine. In his memoirs, Biden writes that immediately after the massacre he called Yanukovych and told him that he had to leave Ukraine.”
Katchanovski points out that there is clear evidence of involvement of nationalists and neo-Nazis in the massacre.
Also rather unknown in the West is the fact that there were large protests against the Kjiv-Maidan protests in Crimea and the Donbass, as well as in other Russian-speaking areas, the so-called “anti-Maidan movement.” After the coup, protests grew stronger not only in Crimea, but also in the Donbass and southern Ukraine. Cities such as Odessa, Melitopol and Mariupol refused to obey the new Kjiv-Maidan government. However, all this took place peacefully, there was hardly any violence and, above all, no fatalities.
However, the character of the nonviolence of the anti-coup protests changed dramatically in April 2014 for the following reason: while CIA Director John Brennan was in Kyiv, the Security Council of Ukraine under its chairman Andriy Parubiy of the Nazi Svoboda party decided on April 13 to launch the so-called “anti-terrorist operation.” Just two days later, the violent campaign began in the opposition areas, where tanks and other war equipment were used against demonstrators in what was then eastern and southern Ukraine. This marked the beginning of a relentless war against Russian-speaking civilians in the Donbass, who were labeled “terrorists.” In the process, Ukrainian government forces made, for example, “Widespread Use of Cluster Munitions” in populated areas such as the city of Donetsk (Donbass), Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported. HRW added that “the use of cluster munitions in populated areas violates the laws of war due to the indiscriminate nature of the weapon and may amount to war crimes.” (More on the use of cluster bombs and current U.S. deliveries to Kjiv here).
As of 2014, Kyiv also disconnected the Donbass region’s water supply, power grid, banking system, and pension system. Moscow prioritized the Minks talks to find a peaceful solution despite calls for Russian intervention from the separatists in Lugansk and Donetsk to shield the population from economic strangulation and a bloodbath. (It wasn’t until years later that it became clear that the Minsk agreements were a sham and that neither the West nor Kjiv had negotiated them in good faith.)
4-Star General Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who has never made a secret of his Banderite convictions (portrait and bust of Bandera displayed in his office), sees the fight against the Russian invaders as a continuation of the fight against the Russian-speakers in the Donbass since 2014.
In a December 15, 2022 Economist interview, he stated: “All we did when the large-scale aggression started was to implement not only our knowledge, which we already had in 2014, but also the skills and the experience we have gained since then. And the most important experience we had and one which we have practiced almost like a religion is that Russians and any other enemies must be killed, just killed, and most importantly, we should not be afraid to do it. And this is what we are doing.”
El Pais, the Spanish flagship of PRISA, one of the largest media groups in Spain and Latin America, quotes Oleksiy Melnyk, co-director of the Razumkov Center for International and Security Policy Analysis in Kyiv, that Zaluzhny and other senior officers “studied NATO regulations and applied them, but the main factor that makes them military leaders is eight years of experience in Donbas.” Other Ukrainian experts are quoted as saying these military leaders were “schooled in the war in Donbas”, where they “had eight years of apprenticeship on the front lines, on a large scale.”
So by the time of the Russian invasion in 2022, the war had already lasted nearly eight years and claimed thousands of lives, but was largely ignored by the Western media. The civil war was fought not only by neo-Nazi brigades, but also by the Ukrainian military, which is riddled from top to bottom with banderists who hate everything Russian. These include, for example, the “SS Bears,” whose leader has an Adolf Hitler tattoo on his arm.
During the Maidan demonstrations, the West demanded that the Ukrainian government should not use force against the demonstrators, but should take their demands seriously and fulfill them. After the Maidan it was different and nobody demanded from the new government, which came to power by the coup, to negotiate with the demonstrators in the south and east of Ukraine. For two months, Kjiv refused any talks with the demonstrators and then in April — instead of a negotiating delegation — sent tanks and fighter jets against the then still unarmed demonstrators.
The fighting escalated further when Kyiv sent the “volunteer battalions” formed from the neo-Nazi “security forces” of the Maidan protests into the Donbass. These units bore names like “Azov” and “Svoboda” and quickly gained sad notoriety for their cruelty. Nazi brigades, of which there are dozens, were equipped with modern weapons, including heavy weapons of all kinds from 2014.
Moscow reacted to the declaration of the so-called anti-terrorist operation on the very day of its launch, and “Ria Novosti” reported: “Russia condemns the use of violence involving ‘Right Sector’ militants against protesters in southeastern Ukraine and calls on the West to convince Kjiv to distance itself from neo-Nazis, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement obtained by Ria Novosti on Sunday.”
The fact that Kjev explicitly wanted to use the army against the demonstrators was not mentioned in the Western media, only trivialized paraphrasing that “units of all security forces” were involved in a “special operation against pro-Russian separatists.” Moreover, governments in the West showered Moscow with recriminations.
According to Western media reports, units of the Ukrainian army defected to the protesters beginning April 16. It was a considerable number of soldiers who switched sides. Therefore, the rebels were quickly well armed, because whole barracks and military bases in the east of Ukraine supported the rebels. Earlier, Ukrainian government troops in Crimea also started turning their backs on the regime in Kyiv.
Protesters occupied squares and buildings and began to defend themselves with weapons against police forces still loyal to Kjiv, but this time the terms used in the Western media were suddenly different from those used during the Maidan demonstrations. Demonstrators were now defamed as “Russian agents,” “terrorists,” or “bandits.” It is irrelevant whether Russia controlled or influenced the events in the east or did nothing of the sort. The Maidan demonstrations were also clearly at least influenced, and even controlled, by the West. Anyone who wants to try to report neutrally should at least use comparable terms for comparable events, and not give them judgmental names according to their own sympathies.
Also on February 23, protests took place in Crimea. The Guardian reported on this under the headline “Ukraine crisis fuels secession calls in pro-Russian south” and wrote “The protest in the port city of Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula was attended by thousands, with the crowd voting for the establishment of a parallel administration and for civilian defense units. Protesters held up Russian flags — not a single Ukrainian flag was visible — and chanted “Russia, Russia” … Speakers said that at a similar demonstration the same day in the regional capital of Simferopol, some 5,000 people joined such units. The reaction is likely to be far greater in Sevastopol, where up to 200,000 people could be counted, said Dmitry Sinichkin, president of the local branch of the Night Wolves motorcycle club.”
Resistance came only from the minority of Tatars. That the relationship of the Crimean Tatars to Russia is problematic is undeniable. When President Putin spoke before both chambers of the Russian parliament about Crimea’s application for membership in the Russian Federation, he mentioned: “Yes, there was a period when the Crimean Tatars, as well as some other peoples of the USSR, suffered a brutal injustice”. Even President Putin’s full rehabilitation of the Crimean Tatars and Russia’s promotion of the Crimean Tatar language cannot close the gap in the short term. That some of them are stirred up against Russia is understandable. The Ukrainian “Glavred” wrote the same day under the headline “In Crimea, Tatars raised the Bandera flag and chanted ‘Hail Ukraine.’”
The majority of the population in Crimea opposed the new central government in Kyiv. They still considered the democratically elected but illegally ousted Yanukovych as their president.
The Crimean parliament deposed Crimea’s acting prime minister on February 27 and elected Sergey Aksyonov as the new premier. Aksyonov was one of three deputies from the pro-Russian Russian Unity party. The parliament, which consisted of a clear pro-Russian majority, also decided to hold a referendum on the status of Crimea on May 25, coinciding with the presidential election scheduled by Kyiv. Despite the presence of armed pro-Kyiv forces in the building to deter MPs, the majority of the 64 MPs present voted in favor of the referendum on Crimea’s status, according to the Unian news agency. A parliamentary spokeswoman justified the move, saying, “Due to the unconstitutional takeover of power in Ukraine by radical nationalists and with the support of armed gangs, peace and tranquility in Crimea are at risk.”
Western news coverage thereafter repeatedly invoked MP Sumulidi as a source for alleged electoral fraud, but was unable to find other MPs who could corroborate his version.
Tensions increased between Kyiv, which opposed the referendum, and Crimea. Crimean Prime Minister Aksyonov asked Russia for help on March 1: “Understanding the responsibility for people’s lives and security, I turn to President Putin with a request for help in securing calm and peace in Crimea.” The referendum, originally scheduled for May 25, was brought forward to March 16. The reasons given for bringing it forward were the tense situation and the potential danger of armed conflict over Crimea. Initially, the issue was the extension of autonomy, but later, in view of the threats made in Kyiv, the secession of Crimea was also brought up for discussion.
Russia justified the deployment of troops in Crimea with the “critical situation in Ukraine, which means danger to the lives of citizens of the Russian Federation and danger to our armed forces stationed on the territory of Ukraine (Crimea) on the basis of an international agreement.”
The fears were not groundless, because in the new government in Kyiv “Svoboda” had received the second largest share of ministerial posts, a party that only months before had been labeled by the EU, the German government and others as nationalistic, chauvinistic, hostile to Russians and Jews, etc.
The “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”, known for its transatlantic and strongly anti-Russian bias, reported from Crimea on this March 1 under the headline “Russia courts Sevastopol” and wrote: “New realities are probably to be created as quickly as possible. A strengthening of autonomy, closer ties with Russia are popular in Crimea. As the days before, pro-Russia rallies were again held in front of the city administration building over the weekend. As in all of Sevastopol, many wear the orange and black Saint George’s ribbon as a sign of attachment to Russia. They chant ‘Russia! Russia!’ Among them are many young, but also older people.”
During the referendum, Russian soldiers and their supporters took control of key positions in Crimea and besieged Ukrainian barracks and military bases. Although there were isolated critical situations, no fighting took place. Russia justified these actions as necessary to prevent the Ukrainian army from disrupting an orderly referendum process.
The vote was to decide between two alternatives: “1. Are you in favor of unification of Crimea with Russia as a subject of the Russian Federation? 2. are you in favor of the reinstatement of the 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Crimea and the status of Crimea as part of Ukraine?”
The 1992 Constitution provided that Crimea had all the rights of an independent administrative unit in the Ukrainian state, with many powers to determine its own destiny and to establish relations with any other country, including Russia.
Article 9 stated: “The Republic of Crimea belongs to the state of Ukraine and regulates its relations with it on the basis of treaties and agreements.” And Article 10: “The Republic of Crimea independently enters into relations with other states and organizations and regulates relations with them on the basis of treaties and agreements concerning cooperation in economic, cultural, health, educational, research and other spheres; it establishes its relations with them on the basis of equality, respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, non-interference in internal affairs, resolution of disputes exclusively by peaceful means and goodwill fulfillment of mutual obligations.”
The Crimean parliament invited the OSCE to observe the referendum. The organization did not act on it because Kiev refused to give it the invitation it needed to do so. Ironically, the West subsequently accused Russia and the Crimean government of not having OSCE observers on the ground.
Apart from ethnic, linguistic or national reasons, which were decisive for the high result for joining the Russian Federation, there were also other reasons for the inhabitants of Crimea to vote for it: economic. The standard of living in Russia was much higher than in Ukraine. At that time 3 million Ukrainians (or 6% of the Ukrainian population) had been living in Russia for a long time. After the accession of Crimea to the Russian Federation, there was also an immediate increase in the salaries of state employees and pensions to Russian levels. For many — not only ethnic Russians — the prospect of a tripling of salaries and pensions may also have been an incentive to vote for unification with Russia.
Kyiv called the referendum “illegal”. On the day of the referendum, Ukraine’s “Vesti” quoted Prime Minister Yatsenyuk under the headline “Yatsenyuk opens hunt for separatists across the country.” In the West, the event was condemned as a “sham referendum,” in part because of the absence of OSCE observers and the presence of Russian soldiers, and sanctions were levied against Russia. That Russia deployed soldiers in Crimea is undisputed. The extent to which Russia planned the events in Crimea or was itself surprised by the dynamics is speculative. Russia does not have as extensive a network of foundations as the U.S. and NATO, which have decades of experience in influencing states to the point of regime change.
For all the criticism voiced in the West and in Kyiv, however, not one expert could be found who would have claimed that Crimea would have made a different decision under different circumstances. The majority of the population was clearly pro-Russian, and there were economic reasons for the non-Russian segments of the population to unite with Russia as well.
In the absence of OSCE observers on the ground, Crimea invited observers from around the world, who reported no irregularities. Nevertheless, from today’s perspective, it would be easier to assess the referendum objectively if there were an OSCE election report.
From a purely legal point of view, the secession of Crimea is not a simple issue and will certainly keep state and international law experts busy for a long time to come. Nevertheless, the West has set a precedent in Kosovo. Kosovo, where unlike Crimea there was never a referendum, also declared itself independent without permission from the central government of Yugoslavia, and the West supported this and bombed Serbia, the legal successor to Yugoslavia, at the time — indisputably in violation of international law. The International Court of Justice issued a legal opinion on Kosovo on July 22, 2010, concluding that a unilateral declaration of independence would not violate international law. Thus, Crimea’s declaration of independence would be legal and its subsequent accession to the Russian Federation would also be legal, because after its secession — which was therefore legal under international law — Crimea was free to choose whether to be independent or to join another state.
Slovenia is a similar case to Crimea: On 25 June 1991, Slovenia unilaterally declared itself independent of Yugoslavia. After Slovenia adopted its own constitution in December 1991 (Crimea also had its own constitution), it was recognized by all states of the then European Community within less than a month. The term “Russian annexation” used in the West is therefore incorrect; it was a secession followed by an application for membership in the Russian Federation.
A later poll by the Gallup Institute, which is not suspected of spreading Russian propaganda, showed that the overwhelming majority of Crimean citizens consider the union of Crimea with Russia to be positive and that their situation and that of their families had improved as a result.
In 2022, referendums were held in Donbas, Kherson, and Zaporozhye, and like in Crimea, they were approved as expected by the area’s predominately Russian-speaking populace. Thus, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) were created and joined the Russian Federation. These referendums have once more been denounced as a sham by the collective West.
Kosovo, unlike Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, did not have a free expression of the populace’s will; instead, an independence declaration was adopted by a provisional self-governing body that exceeded its authority. This was sufficient at the time for the West to acknowledge Kosovo’s independence and assert that a declaration of independence was not prohibited by international law.
In the case of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who were discriminated against and fought against by Kjiv, the direct expression of the will of the people concerned was not recognized as legitimate by the same West.
The term “Nazi Ukraine” is not a creation of Vladimir Putin
Not surprisingly, the French-Israeli lawyer and anti-Semitism activist Arno Klarsfeld strongly opposes Ukraine’s accession to the European Union:
“Thirty years ago, Stepan Bandera, who called for the murder of Jews, was considered in Ukraine as a murderer, while today he is erected as a national hero”, the lawyer said about the Russophobic Ukrainian Nazi. “The country has issued postage stamps in his image, erected statues and established holidays in his honor. The largest avenue in Kyiv, five kilometers long and leading to the site of Babi Yar, bears his name. As for the extension of this avenue, it was named after Roman-Taras Yosypovych Shukhevych, who was even worse than Bandera.”
Incidentally, German citizen Heinrich Bücker condemned the German government for helping a regime that renamed the street to Babi Yar, where tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered after the person responsible, Stepan Bandera. The Kyiv regime literally renamed Babiy Yar Street “Bandera Boulevard.” For his criticism, a lawyer filed a criminal complaint against Bücker under Section 140 of the Criminal Code (StGB) “Reward and approval of criminal offenses”, which includes a prison sentence of up to three years or a fine.
The penalty order states that Bücker, in his public speech, approved “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in violation of international law, the illegality of which you knew.” To prove this, a longer paragraph from the speech is quoted, the entire wording of which is documented here (in German).
In the quoted paragraph, Bücker opposed cooperation with neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine:
“It is incomprehensible to me that German politicians are again supporting the same Russophobic ideologies on the basis of which the German [Nazi] Reich found willing helpers in 1941, with whom they closely cooperated and jointly carried out murder. All decent Germans should reject any cooperation with these forces in Ukraine against the background of German history, the history of millions of murdered Jews and millions and millions of murdered Soviet citizens in World War II. We must also vehemently reject the war rhetoric emanating from these forces in Ukraine. Never again must we as Germans be involved in any form of war against Russia. We must unite and oppose this madness together.”
Shukhevych, the man Klarsfeld mentions, is a Nazi and mass murderer of Jews and Poles who is hailed as another pre-eminent national hero in modern-day Ukraine.
While numerous monuments to Nazi criminals are being erected, at the same time monuments honoring such greats of world literature as Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky are being torn down: Alexander Pushkin, born in 1799, was a world-famous playwright and novelist; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, born in 1821, expressed religious, psychological and philosophical ideas in his widely acclaimed writings; and Leo Tolstoy, born in 1828, is considered one of the greatest writers of all time and has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Even the greats of science had to be extinguished, like Mikhail Lomonosov, born in 1711, who became world famous as a polymath, scientist and writer thanks to his significant contributions to literature, education and science. His discoveries included the atmosphere of Venus and the law of conservation of mass in chemical reactions.
Intellectuals from a time when parts of today’s Ukraine and today’s Russia were still one country with a common history are violently torn from their pedestals to make way for Nazi mass murderers like Bandera and Shukhevych, the new national saints.
The European Union and the United States have provided most of the funding for this demolition and renaming frenzy, including, for example, the many new memorial plaques throughout the country to Taras Bulba-Borovets, the Nazi-appointed leader of a militia that carried out numerous pogroms and murdered many Jews. Monuments were also erected in honor of Symon Petliura, who was at the head of the Ukrainian People’s Republic when 35,000 to 50,000 Jews were killed in a series of pogroms between 1918 and 1921.
80 years ago, in 1943, soldiers of General Nikolai Vatutin’s Red Army units liberated Kyiv from the Nazi reign of terror. Shortly after the liberation of Kyiv, he was ambushed and wounded by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) led by Stepan Bandera.
The general was rightly celebrated as a hero, and the people of Kyiv regularly decorated his monument with flowers. The Vatutin monument was recently demolished, in the year of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Kyiv, and the Kyiv authorities desecrated his grave.
The Ukrainian military unit Azov Regiment, whose emblem is the “Wolfsangel,” a Nazi symbol used in particular by units of Nazi Germany’s SS, was given the honor of renaming the street of the Ukrainian Marshal Malinovsky, one of the leaders of the Red Army in the war against Nazism, “Street of Heroes of Azov Regiment.”
Arsen Avakov, the Ukrainian Interior Minister (from 2014 to 2021), who is linked to the founding commander of the Azov battalion, Andriy Biletsky, by a personal friendship, integrated Azov into the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014. Thanks to this status, the neo-Nazi organization became a direct recipient of American aid. Established in 2014, the battalion has since evolved into a full-fledged brigade. After the coup in 2014 Ukraine became a Mecca for far-right extremists around the world, who came to learn and get training from Azov — including, ironically, Russian white supremacists who were hounded from their country by Vladimir Putin.
The best-known Russian neo-Nazi in Ukraine is Denis Kapustin, alias Denis Nikitin. He is of Jewish descent and moved to Germany as a teenager, where he became a leading figure in the neo-Nazi scene.
As Ukrainian magazine Zaborona reported, he returned to Russia and worked in various jobs alongside his political activities until he had enough money to found the clothing brand White Rex on August 14, 2008. The number “14” refers to the 14-word phrase known among neo-Nazis as “We must protect the existence of our people and the future for white children,” and the two eights are considered a coded greeting for “Heil Hitler!” The “eight” stands for the eighth letter (“H” as in Heil and Hitler) in the alphabet. These garments mainly carried Nazi symbols. The basis of the White Rex logo is the “Black Sun”, which was used in Nazi Germany as an alternative to the swastika and is also used in Ukraine by Azov and other neo-Nazi organizations. In his book “Hooligans: The World Between Football, Violence and Politics,” researcher Robert Klaus refers to Kapustin alias Nikitin as a “Nazi and a businessman.” He added: “Nikitin wants to be a kind of main supplier of Nazis.”
The brand “White Rex” became a major force in the international neo-Nazi scene, and was involved in organizing numerous large-scale neo-Nazi events in Europe. After being expelled from Germany with a Europe-wide ban, he moved to Ukraine. Together with neo-Nazi groups such as Asov, he helped overthrow the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014. In interviews in 2022, Kapustin boasted of having met half of Ukraine’s military leadership and claimed he had been recruited as a regular soldier in the Ukrainian army.
In August 2022, he founded the Russian Volunteer Corps (RFK) with the stated goal of creating an “ethnically pure” Russian nation-state, just as his like-minded Banderist friends seek an “ethnically pure” Ukrainian nation-state. The cultural diversity of Russia is considerable: an estimated 185 different ethnic groups live mainly in the urban areas of this vast country, the largest in the world. Kapustin thus wants a Russia without the tens of millions of Russian Muslims and members of other national, religious, and ethnic minorities who are citizens of the Russian Federation. He is fighting the Kremlin, which he sees as the guarantor of this multiethnic state, with force of arms from Ukraine. The RVC uses symbols of the Vlasov Army, which collaborated with the Nazis in their war of extermination against the Soviet Union during World War II, as well as various insignia of the international far right. Under Kapustin’s leadership, the RVC began attacking villages inside the Russian border in 2023 with NATO equipment, “encouraged by authorities” as he stated, killing civilians and taking hostages.
Another RVC fighter is Russian Alexei Liovkin (or Levkin), a member of the black metal group “m8181th,” which reportedly means “Hitler’s Hammer,” and a former member of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
The U.S. Congress banned funding for neo-Nazis like Azov in 2015 and lifted the ban six months later. Whether it backs neo-Nazi groups or not doesn’t really matter: the United States has a long history of supporting and using extreme and violent groups for its own ends: For example, it supported and sponsored Islamist groups such as the Taliban, terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State (ISIS) before turning against them when they were no longer useful — a fact better known than the CIA’s support for the Ukrainian Nazis (including the Asov precursors) and their recruitment as anti-Russian forces during World War II, which the CIA continues to use to the present, as CIA expert Douglas Valentine explains in his book.
The Tenth Mountain Infantry Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces was given the name Edelweiss around the same time that the monument to General Vatutin was demolished in Kyiv.
The name had been used by the First Mountain Infantry Division of the German Wehrmacht during World War II. This division was responsible for the deportation of Jews, the execution of prisoners of war and the use of punitive measures against partisans in Yugoslavia, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Greece. Many members of the Ukrainian armed forces, including the current commander-in-chief, openly wear “Totenkopf” insignia, which are almost identical to the emblems of the SS “Totenkopf” division and other Nazi units.
Referring to the following tweet by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, The New York Times wrote: “In April 2023, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted a photograph on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head. The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.”
In contrast to the mainstream media in Europe, which tend to leave the issue out entirely, the New York Times also dared to write, more than a year after the Russians invaded, about the Nazi symbols that “now appear with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line.”
Nevertheless, the New York Times repeated the claim, often made in the collective West, that Ukraine officially distanced itself from Nazi ideology and could not be Nazi because the country’s president was Jewish.
Those who make this argument do not know the basics of Nazi ideology. It was not specifically anti-Semitic, but rather the widespread belief that Germans were a “master race” or that they were superior to other races and peoples. The Nazis referred to a number of ethnic groups as “Untermenschen” (Subhumans), and the Jews were only one of them.
The Holocaust Encyclopedia states that Nazi Germany viewed “the war against the Soviet Union as a war of annihilation between German fascism and Soviet communism; a racial war between German ‘Aryans’ and subhuman Slavs and Jews.”
The New York Times has a long history of supporting and justifying illegal U.S. wars. For example, it fired its longtime, award-winning star reporter Chris Hedges for his criticism of America’s unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq.
The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is arguably the world’s leading organization conducting humanitarian operations in conflict and crisis regions, helping to alleviate the plight of thousands of people. More than 20,000 people work for the ICRC worldwide. Peter Maurer, who was president of the ICRC for 10 years and followed the war in Ukraine closely, came to a startling conclusion: since World War I, the proportion of civilian casualties in wars has risen steadily, even more so in the destructured, terrorist-driven conflicts of recent years, he says. “I once said, looking at Syria, ‘If you want to survive in this war, it’s best to put on a uniform.” The casualties, he says, have almost all been civilians.
The war in Ukraine marked a turnaround, Maurer said, although violations of international humanitarian law occurred there as well. Most of the participants in the war belonged to a regular army. They are trained in international humanitarian law and know the internationally recognized norms of warfare, he said. “We note that there are genuine efforts on both sides not to let this conflict escalate completely. There are precautions toward civilians.”
This is a huge progress that the New York Times and the rest of the Western mainstream media have not reported. They prefer to play up the alleged Russian war crimes without independent investigation or evidence and to prejudge the Russian president as a war criminal, instead of comparing the war in Ukraine with past war atrocities, such as the massive and indiscriminate bombing of German cities at the end of World War II when the German Wehrmacht was already down, or with the atomic bombings of Japanese cities when the Japanese army was also on the verge of annihilation, or with the brutal extermination of 20% of the North Korean population by the U. S. Air Force during the Korean War.
And as one would expect from a newspaper that has also clearly taken sides in the Ukraine conflict, a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia on Ukrainian soil, the New York Times used this excuse to try to downplay and trivialize the fact of a Ukrainian society steeped in Nazi ideology, expressed, among other things, in Nazi insignia: “Calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian propaganda”.
The symbolism of the spirit of the times can be seen not only on uniforms, but everywhere in the cities and villages of Ukraine: Since the 2014 Maidan coup, more than 1,000 settlements and more than 50,000 streets have been renamed in Ukraine, according to reports including Maxim Goldarb, chairman of the “Union of Left Forces” and, before the Maidan coup, chief auditor and financial controller of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. According to conservative estimates, it has cost more than a billion euros, in one of the poorest countries in Europe, and even more so in a country at war and in urgent need of foreign financial aid, and where this year about two-thirds of state budget revenues come from abroad: mainly from EU countries and the United States. This has been a massive de-Russification and re-Nazification campaign, apparently worth the money of American and European taxpayers.
On May 10, 1933, students across Germany burned more than 25,000 “un-German” books. Among them were the works of Jewish authors such as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, leftist and liberal authors, and blacklisted American authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller. More than 100,000 people took to the streets in New York and many other places in the United States to protest this fascist act.
Nobody in the West objected when millions of “un-Ukrainian,” i.e. Russian-language books, were recently banned throughout Ukraine and books for the Russian-speaking minority were publicly burned.
Because the media either failed to cover this fascist act and the true nature of the banderist Ukraine, or because they chose to ignore it this time, Americans and Europeans were unaware of the striking similarity between the disappearance of countless books in Nazi Germany and in contemporary Ukraine.
And why, if they could, would those who disappear millions of books from Ukraine not also exterminate in large numbers the writers and readers they so despise, as in their great 1930s role model?
“One language, one Ukraine. Long live Ukraine. Long live the nation. Ukraine above all. Bandera, Shukhevych are heroes of Ukraine. Out with Judaism. Death to the enemies. Death to Moskal [ethnic slur for Russian speakers, F.A.]. Impale the [Ukrainian] Russians with knives.”
Since 2014, nationalist mobs have been shouting the above slogans in the streets, stadiums and elsewhere in western Ukraine, from Kyiv to Odessa. Odessa already had a sad reputation for one of the worst massacres in Ukraine in 1941 and 1942, when more than 100,000 Jews were burned or shot. In 2014, Odessa saw another massacre, this time of Russian-speaking citizens, again perpetrated by fascists. This documentary depicts the new crime.
Prime Minister Yatsenuk visited the scene after the crime and showed his true colors. If he were the prime minister for all the people, he would have shown compassion for the victims, condemned the murderers and vowed to bring them to justice. Instead, he was apologetic of the crime by spreading an unfounded conspiracy theory against Russia and taking a bellicose stance, talking about a war against Russia (documentary video sequence from 1:08:05–1:08:16).
The nationalists that have become a mighty force after the overthrow in 2014 are not only targeting Russian speakers but also other minorities, a fact that seems to be purposefully ignored or downplayed in the West. Peter Szijjarto, the foreign minister of Hungary, recently lamented on his Facebook page that the Kyiv regime had severely restricted the minority rights — including language rights — of the more than 150,000 ethnic Hungarian Ukrainians. For instance, schoolchildren who speak Hungarian are no longer allowed to receive instruction in their native tongue.
The Romanian President also complained about the discrimination against Romanian-speaking Ukrainians.
The discrimination against Polish speakers by today’s Ukrainian nationalists is perhaps not surprising, since their predecessors, led by the Ukrainian national hero Bandera, hated Poles so much that between 1943 and 1945 they slaughtered over 100,000 Poles in Volhynia and eastern Galicia “with axes, pitchforks, scythes and knives,” in what the Polish president calls a genocide.
A first attempt after the coup d’état to repeal the 2012 “Language Law” took place on February 23, 2014, when the Rada (parliament) decided to repeal it. This law stipulated that in regions of Ukraine with a national minority of at least 10%, the language of the minority should also be the official language. The abolition of the law was a demand from the party program of “Svoboda” and other nationalist and fascist organizations such as “Right Sector”, whose leader was Dmytro Yarosh (who, by the way, on November 2, 2022 was appointed by President Zelensky as an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi). Although interim President Turchynov vetoed the new law, this momentous step by the Rada led to great fears of further discrimination in the Russian-speaking parts of the country and gave a strong boost to autonomy efforts in Crimea and the Donbass.
Later, the nationalists prevailed, even against Zelensky, who had repeatedly spoken out loudly against discrimination against the Russian-speaking minority: Article 10 of the new Constitution stipulates that Ukrainian is the only official language of Ukraine. In addition, a new law came into force in Ukraine in January 2022 that requires citizens to use the Ukrainian language in all areas of public life, including public administration, medicine, science and education, the media, and the Internet, and de facto bans the use of Russian and other minority languages.
The fact that the member of the Russian-speaking minority had to sign discriminatory laws of the nationalists as president was a bad omen for his mission to end the violence of the nationalists against the Russian-speaking population in the Donbass, which was a much more difficult undertaking. The lack of a power base relentlessly revealed Zelensky’s impotence and his true character as a mere figurehead of a Russophobic nationalist regime in the tradition of its national hero Stepan Bandera.
Zelensky’s powerlessness was also made unmistakably clear when, as commander-in-chief, he was not privy to his military’s planning and execution of a terrorist attack on the Nordstream gas pipelines. The Nation stated that “some reporting in the mainstream press even suggests Zelensky might not be in full control of these Ukrainian operations, which would imply that rogue military actors in Ukraine are driving policy.” I must qualify here by adding that the claim that Ukraine is the culprit in the Nordstream attacks may be a red herring on the part of the United States, which is suspected, for good reason, to be behind the attacks.
The refusal of Verkhovna Rada deputy from Zelenky’s “Servants of the People” party, Maksim Buzhansky, to switch to Ukrainian on TV triggered a political and media scandal in Kjiv. Even worse, he refused to give the appropriate obligatory greeting response to the greeting “Glory to the (fascist, F.A.) heroes!” of the TV presenter.
To this, the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC), Alexei Danilov, responded by stressing that such people had no place in the country and promised a “purge.” He stated: “The not-yet-discharged <…> who think they have the right to speak Russian on Ukrainian television have no place not only on television but also in politics and in Ukraine,” and he expressed his determination to have such people “purged to the root and kicked out of everything.”
According to a nationwide survey conducted in 2021, 22 percent of Ukrainians speak Russian as their native language (although in reality the number may be higher). The percentage is identical to that of French speakers in Switzerland. Unlike Ukraine, however, not only German, the language of the majority, is an official language in Switzerland, but French and Italian (the language of an even smaller minority) are also official languages with equal rights. Official documents such as law books and passports are issued in these three languages, schools teach in these languages, and Swiss citizens can use their mother tongue without restriction.
Which raises the question: Why does Ukraine systematically discriminate against its minorities, while other countries do not, as the example of Switzerland shows, and treat minorities equally? And why don’t Western politicians and media ask this question to the Ukrainian government?
And the Roma, another minority, have become the target of the worst fascist crimes.
Even though Ukrainian nationalists now deny it, Russians and Ukrainians — both categorized as Eastern Slavs — have historically and geographically been one people with fewer differences than similarities for a long time. More than a thousand years ago, Kyiv, the present-day capital of Ukraine, served as the administrative hub of Kyivan Rus, the first Slavic state and the forerunner of both Ukraine and Russia. At that time, the two countries’ shared history began. And no one in the collective West is bothered by the fact that Lenin and Stalin didn’t give a damn about international law and the will of the citizens concerned and arbitrarily cobbled together different territories to form the Soviet Republic of Ukraine, or by the gift that Soviet General Secretary Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, gave to Ukrainians by bartering away Crimea, a time-honored part of Russian territory, to Ukraine in violation of Soviet law. The present borders of Ukraine were drawn in August 1991 by three more Soviet apparatchiks, including Boris Yeltsin, in a Belarusian forest, again without a mandate from the people and without due process of law. It is not known whether it was a sober event in the presence of the notorious alcoholic Yeltsin, one of the few Russian heroes celebrated by the West.
Without the involvement of external forces, it is unlikely that the civil war that broke out after the fall of the legitimate government in Kjiv in 2014 and was later followed by the war between (Western) Ukraine and Russia would have occurred.
Despite the genocide caused by years of bombardment of Russian-speaking civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk by the Ukrainian Army, irregular volunteer units, and the “fascists who overran the country,” the Western-dominated UN Security Council has not intervened — even though it was obligated to do so under the following paragraph 6 of the International Criminal Code a.k.a “Völkerstrafgesetzbuch”:
“Whoever, with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group as such, kills a member of the group, inflicts serious bodily or mental harm on a member of the group, particularly of the kind specified in section 226 of the Criminal Code, places the group in conditions of life likely to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part … shall be punished by life imprisonment.”
In his book “Ausnahme Zustand: Geopolitische Einsichten und Analysen unter Berücksichtigung des Ukraine-Konflikts” (State of Emergency: Geopolitical Insights and Analyses Taking the Ukraine Conflict into Account), German lawyer Wolfgang Bittner explains that Russia can invoke its Responsibility to Protect (“R2P”) vis-à-vis the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine — a generally recognized requirement under international law to prevent serious human rights violations. R2P, however, is a problematic doctrine that was originally introduced into international law by the United States and NATO — primarily to justify the war of aggression against Yugoslavia.
The serious threat of the biggest pogrom ever to take place on Ukrainian soil is looming on the horizon. Although the genocide is publicly announced by the neo-Nazi protagonists of the Kjiv regime, the collective West prefers to ignore it. In an interview with Ukrainian blogger Sergei Ivanov, Kirill Budanov, the director of the Main Intelligence Department of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, said:
“After the victory I will go to Sevastopol (the largest city in Crimea, F.A.), which is my hometown. There will be a lot of work there. We have three million people who lived under Russian propaganda. These are changed people who are waiting to be physically destroyed.”
The complete annihilation of the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine is not enough. One of Ukrainian President Zelensky’s key advisors, Mikhail Podolyak, recently said he would have every Russian in the world killed if he could be caught. Previously, he had made several statements along these lines. Among other things, he stated in an interview that it would be difficult, but still possible, to “physically destroy” every “pro-Russian” person in Ukraine.
On the Way to a Totalitarian Dictatorship
Twelve opposition parties, including the political party that came in first behind Zelensky in the presidential election, were banned. Trade unions were largely suppressed. Also, all critical media, especially those close to minorities, were banned or put on a state leash. Some Russian-speaking Ukrainians, including a democratically elected former president, were stripped of their Ukrainian citizenship, and others had their property taken away without due process.
The government published a blacklist listing all domestic and foreign critics as “pro-Russian propagandists” to be punished.
Cases have come to light in which dissidents were persecuted, tortured, killed, or disappeared without ever being seen again. The torture and killing techniques used by the SBU (the Ukrainian CIA) are reminiscent of the USA’s brutal “Operation Phoenix” in Vietnam.
Ukraine has also an “assassination program” against dissenters, The Economist candidly reports. According to the report, Ukraine’s intelligence service has been running a “murder program” to eliminate government critics inside and outside Ukraine since at least 2015. The program was started by Nalivaychenko, quoted in the article, an avowed neo-Nazi. He was a long-time friend of the founder of the neo-Nazi “Right Sector” and a member of the right-wing radical “order” “Trisub”, which was allied with the Right Sector.
There was no outcry in the Western media, showing once again what “Western values” are worth.
The Ukrainian Myrotvorets NGO operates a fatwa-type murder call portal which publishes a kill list that bears similarities to corresponding hit lists of death squads, e.g. in South America, targeting Ukrainians and foreigners. The list even includes several hundred children whose “crime” is to have made positive comments about Russia on social media. It gained notoriety when several of the people named there were murdered, including Ukrainian writer Oles Busyna, former Ukrainian parliamentarian Oleg Kalashnikov, and Italian freelance photojournalist Andrea Rocchelli.
Major General Kyrylo Budanov, the commander of Ukrainian military intelligence, also publicly claimed responsibility for the murders of civilians and promised more attacks in the future. It is remarkable that these murderers can practice their bloody craft unhindered thanks to Western politicians who shower them with taxpayers’ money.
The high-reach Ukrainian news portal Unian launches polls on Telegram asking readers, for example, to vote on which Russian journalist should be the next victim of a terrorist attack. Over 300,000 readers took part in that survey. Unian is part of the 1+1 media group, owned by the controversial and corrupt Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomojskyj, who also financed Zelenskyj’s presidential campaign. Unian names as its partner media German magazine Der Spiegel, Associated Press, Reuters, and U.S. state-affiliated media Voice of America, British state-affiliated media BBC and German state-affiliated media Deutsche Welle. The fact that such polls call for the next civilian murder victim shows that Ukraine sees terrorism as a legitimate tool (as well as the complicity of its Western allies, on whom it depends and who do not oppose it). This is underscored by statements by Ukrainian politicians who openly call for the murder of Russian speakers and Russian citizens.
The canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) is the largest religious organization in Ukraine. It has three million Ukrainian citizens, 12,000 parishes (communities), nearly 300 monasteries and three so-called lavras — which are considered sanctuaries of all Orthodoxy. It became the latest target of the attempt to force all opinions to the line of the ruling nationalists.
Historically, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, while formally affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church, the Moscow Patriarchate, enjoys extensive autonomy. For example, the highest governing bodies, including the appointment of bishops and the election of the Metropolitan, fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Ukrainian Orthodox clergy. The Church is recognized by all major ecclesiastical denominations of the world. Despite Article 35 of the Ukrainian Constitution, which states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression and religion,” authorities have launched a coordinated attack on the Church with the goal of banning it. On December 21, 2022, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Malyuk, bluntly stated, “We are now actively working against the UOC, and our commander-in-chief is setting the main pace.” Here, too, it is evident that the nationalists are using Zelensky (who supposedly “sets the pace”) as a figurehead to enforce their policy of systematic discrimination and forced assimilation.
For several months, the SBU, police, and National Guard conducted mass searches of UOC churches and monasteries. Members of the clergy were subjected to criminal prosecution, the (illegal) revocation of their citizenship, and the extrajudicial confiscation of their property.
For example, on April 21, 2023, Dmitry Zhyvitskyj, the head of the Sumy Regional Military Administration, stated unequivocally what is behind this campaign: “I will do everything to ensure that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the Sumy region no longer exists.”
The above list of arbitrary and coercive measures against the Russian-speaking minority is not complete, as the Kjiv regime is in the process of eliminating as much “Russian influence” as possible. It seems to want to fulfill the wish of its national hero Nazi Bandera, who is buried in Germany, to achieve a “purified” Ukraine.
Western politicians, media and self-proclaimed supporters of Ukraine are making a mockery of the democracy and freedom they claim to defend. This is all the more true as they prop up with billions of taxpayer dollars a government that is, in the words of Bill Gates, “corrupt, one of the worst in the world, controlled by a few rich people!”
In this context, it is also interesting to note that a damning September 2021 report by the European Court of Auditors, an agency of the European Union, which exposed “Grand Corruption” in Ukraine, i.e. the large-scale corruption that dominates all aspects of the country’s political and economic life, was carefully hidden from the eyes of EU citizens by the mainstream media and promptly stuffed down the memory hole. They know that citizens at home, who need to save money, might ask uncomfortable questions about what is happening to the tens of billions of euros that their politicians are smugly sending to Ukraine in the vain hope that this now exhausted country can defeat its overpowering neighbor after all.
The collective West has strongly condemned the Russian invasion as an illegal war. The Russians instead call it a “special military operation” to de-nazify Ukraine, motivated by their horrific experience of the murder of tens of millions of Russians by the German Nazis in the 1940s and by their fear of NATO’s nuclear-tipped missiles stationed along their 2,300 km shared border with Ukraine, which can reach Moscow within minutes.
Imagine if the Russians were defeated and the nationalists in Kjiv were left unchecked to slaughter the deeply hated Russian-speaking people in the Donbass, Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine, and in an effort to cleanse all of Ukraine, murder other minorities and create another Baby Jar. In such a case, would Israel not have the legal and moral right to send troops to save the Jews, or would the collective West also call this an illegal war of aggression against Ukraine?
It was a matter of political and physical survival
Zelensky clearly got the message. Instead of pursuing the peace program for which he was elected, he has forged alliances with the Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis, which violently oppose the program. It was not until late January 2022, in the midst of final talks to salvage the Minsk Agreement (which was supposed to give Russian and other minorities the same rights as the majority), that Zelensky-appointed Ukrainian security chief Oleksiy Danilov instead declared that “fulfillment of the Minsk Agreement means the destruction of the country.”
At the last round of Minsk talks in February 2022, just two weeks before the Russian invasion, a “major obstacle,” as the Washington Post reported, was “Kyiv’s resistance to negotiations with the pro-Russian separatists.” Only through this opportunistic closing of ranks with the nationalists who sought his life could Zelensky ensure his political and physical survival.
At the mercy of Washington and the neo-Nazis
Zelensky’s peace efforts were undone once and for all when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled specially to Kjiv as Washington’s representative in April 2022 and instructed him not to sign the peace treaty negotiated with Russia in Turkey. Johnson made his demand with the illusory promise that NATO would give him money and weapons until Russia was defeated.
Kjiv had agreed to the peace deal negotiated in Turkey, two months after the Russian invasion. The agreement stipulated that Ukraine would remain neutral, that eastern Ukraine (occupied by Russia) would retain an autonomous status but remain with Ukraine, and that the status of Crimea and Sevastopol would be resolved in negotiations between the two countries over the next 15 years. Under pressure from the West, Kjiv rejected the agreement and instead escalated the war. The price Kjiv will have to pay for this dramatic change of heart will be high, because these relatively favorable terms will no longer be accepted by Moscow, and the territories won in the war are unlikely to be returned to Kjiv.
In addition, as a result of this peace agreement, Kiev had asked Russia to withdraw its troops from the vicinity of Kjiv, which the Russian government did and was heavily criticized in Russia for doing so. Western media portrayed this as a forced withdrawal (which it was not). After this troop withdrawal, Kjiv no longer adhered to the agreement and claimed to have won a victory. As in the case of the Minsk agreements, Kjiv behaved in bad faith.
The fascist currents are so strong that even the Russophobic nationalist and first post-coup prime minister, Yatsenyuk, became a target of anti-Semitism, even though he is not even Jewish. For example, Serhiy Ratushnyak, mayor of Uzhhorod and a former presidential candidate, called Yatsenyuk a “nasty Jewish mason” and an “impudent little Jew” who was “successfully serving the thieves who are in power in Ukraine and is using criminal money to plough ahead towards Ukraine’s presidency”.
With his back to the wall and in the face of an overwhelming phalanx of Banderites and NATO, Zelensky apparently had no choice but to transform himself from a peace-seeking mediator into an obdurate hardliner and a Russophobic warmonger who, for example, had his own people bombed in Donetsk, a city that was not on the front lines. He had no choice; the Nazi-dominated regime expected this from its figurehead.
To hold him solely responsible would be unfair. First and foremost, Washington is to blame for letting him hang, based on its primary strategic goals — the uncompromising weakening of Russia and, in its wake, Europe.
In his tweet, Robert F. Kennedy, lawyer, and U.S. presidential candidate, stated: “Let’s face it, the Neocons wanted this war with Russia, just as they wanted war with Iraq. Listen here to NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark describe how White House Neocons justified the Iraq invasion.”
In his interview, General Clark talked about the secret strategies for regime change in a whole series of countries shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when the U.S. Department of Defense adopted a plan to overthrow the governments of seven countries by force (war) : Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
And again, the neocons hope that their war in Ukraine would also trigger regime change in Moscow and the dissolution of the Russian Federation in Washington’s favor. Zelensky was not to stand in their way.
The Trap of the Neoconservative War Hawks
Russia allowed Germany to reunite peacefully after the West had promised diplomatically not to move NATO an inch to the east. Moreover, in 1999, Western countries had agreed to the principle in the Charter for European Security that “the obligation of each State not to strengthen its security at the expense of the security of other States.”
Not only did the West fail to keep its promises, the U.S. even provoked Russia by trampling on its security interests until Moscow fell into a Washington-set trap à la Afghanistan (It also provoked Russia by massively arming the Kjiv nationalists after the 2014 coup and enabling them to instigate a civil war against Russian speakers in the Donbass).
The invasion of Ukraine may be illegal under international law, but the Russians see it differently. They say they were passively and actively threatened and that it was a kind of war of self-defense as well as a war of liberation for the oppressed Russian-speaking minorities threatened by a regime infiltrated by neo-Nazis, again dismissed as “propaganda” in the West. What they called a violation of international law gave the U.S. and its European and other supporters a reason to implement Washington’s plan to isolate Russia economically from much of the world and intensify a proxy war that began not in February 2022 but after the U.S.-initiated regime change in Kyiv in 2014 — a crucial fact that I repeat here because Western politicians and media deliberately omit it.
A significant benefit of the Ukrainians’ war against Russia, fought under NATO training, arming, and guidance, is that no NATO troops had to be deployed on the ground, preventing the dreaded body bags that would have been returned from Ukraine. In his 1993 piece titled “Toward a New World Order: The Future of NATO,” the billionaire oligarch and financier George Soros, who was frequently portrayed as a humanist, advocated for a hard-nosed geopolitical strategy for the “new world order.” He acknowledged that NATO countries had no desire for “body bags,” suggesting instead that Eastern Europeans could take on that role. And that is exactly what the Ukrainians are doing now.
The U.S.-fueled conflict between Ukraine and Russia has indeed weakened Russia, though much less than Washington had hoped, and de facto pushed Ukraine into NATO, at least for now, and Europe away from Russia; it has also improved relations with Europe, which has become more strategically dependent on the United States. Even during the Cold War, the Soviet Union did not use energy and other natural resources it supplied to Western Europe as leverage against the West, unlike the United States, which has long weaponized its currency, products, and services against enemies and friends alike to submit them to its imperial geopolitics.
In reality, the United States has been the biggest beneficiary of Russian-Ukrainian tensions: They were able to sell huge quantities of weapons worth countless billions of dollars to Ukraine and European countries, as well as large quantities of energy at many times the price (instead of cheap Russian energy), which drastically increased manufacturing costs, and they thus contributed to the deindustrialization of Europe in favor of reindustrialization in the United States.
There are also other tangible interests behind the conflict: BlackRock, for example, the world’s largest asset manager, is in the process of acquiring large parts of Ukraine, and Russia would be an even more valuable asset. As an inexhaustible and cheap source of raw materials, Russia is a particularly lucrative target for the West. President Putin stands in their way and has long been a thorn in the West’s side and a target for regime change because he is independent and has a genuine “Russia first” policy. In addition to coercive economic measures, information warfare and psychological operations are being waged against him. Anyone who consumes the Western mainstream media can see this.
It is the most amazing project of recent times to “make America great again” at the expense of Russia and Europe, and Zelensky, a bishop on America’s great chessboard, has played only a negligible role in it.
Finally, it is worth remembering once again that the vile basis of Nazi ideology was not primarily anti-Semitism and the cult of the Führer. It was the racist belief that one or more ethnic groups (then called “races”) were inferior, evil, or otherwise bad that formed the basis of Nazi doctrine, and that it was therefore acceptable to discriminate against and kill them.
The worst agitators against an ethnic group (Russians) at present are mainly those in the West who call themselves “anti-fascist.” They are blatantly hypocritical, as shown by their support for the Kyiv regime, which is peppered with supporters of the Nazi Führer Bandera.
“What else is there to say?”…
…asks German author Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, daughter of Heinz Galinski, a former president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany who had been incarcerated by Nazi Germany from 1943 to the end of World War II in concentration camps in Auschwitz, Buchenwald und Bergen-Belsen. Stunned, she continues:
“When the Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin together with Volodomyr Zelensky honors Dmytro Kotsiubailo (nickname: Da Vinci), a Ukrainian fallen neo-Nazi, a man of the “Right Sector”, what else can one say? The “Right Sector”: what an organization! It traces its roots to 20th century nationalist movements and counts Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhovych among its heroes. It played a crucial role in the 2014 transition of power in Kyiv, with its members staging violent clashes and seizing administrative buildings. They subsequently suppressed protests in eastern Ukraine, triggering the armed conflict in the region.”
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P.S.
Another must watch:
The documentary «Ukraine on Fire» (1 hour 33 min. 2016 video) shows War history, Stepan Bandera and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Svoboda party, Rights Sector, 2004 Orange Revolution, Viktor Yushchenko becomes president; gets poisoned, 2010 Viktor Yanukovych is elected president, 2013–14 Maydan uprisings, the overthrow and coup against president Viktor Yanukovych and his government, Yatsenyuk unlawfully elected prime minister of Ukraine (2014–16), the art of color revolution, Victoria Nuland, John McCain, George Soros, NED’s Carl Gersman. In parts of the video filmmaker Oliver Stone interviews in Moscow the Ukrainian de jure president Viktor Yanukovych
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You may also watch Jimmy Dore’s video on the subject.
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Read my new piece: “Book your fondest memories here: Enjoy your next vacation in amazing Ukraine!”
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You can find the profile of the author Felix Abt here