It’s ten years since the creation, and rapid obliteration, of a now infamous mural off Brick Lane in East London. Titled “Freedom For Humanity — False Profits”, it was the work of US artist Kalen Ockerman, aka Mear One, and immediately provoked complaints about the alleged use of antisemitic imagery…

The controversy over Tariq Ali’s book Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes stirred renewed interest among the left in Churchill and his political record. That might explain why the above meme has been regularly shared on social media in recent months. It would appear to be the work of the…

According to a story doing the rounds on social media, Volodymyr Zelensky has sold 17 million hectares of his country’s farmland to the companies Monsanto, DuPont and Cargill. It’s fake news, as anyone who bothered to do a basic fact-check could easily find out. (For a start Monsanto no longer…

Every new year’s day far-right nationalists in Ukraine hold a torchlight march in Kiev to mark the birthday of their hero Stepan Bandera, the fascist leader notorious for his collaboration with the Nazis during World War 2, whose followers in the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists directly participated in the Holocaust…

This image, which depicts a Ukrainian stamp marking the 30 June birthday of notorious World War 2 Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych, recently went viral on social media. …

For all its dodgy Cold War origins, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty once had a good record of exposing the role of the far right in Ukraine, notably through the admirable journalism of Christopher Miller. (See for example here, here, here, here and here.) Following the outbreak of war, however, all…

With the Azov regiment having finally accepted defeat and surrendered the Avostal steel plant to Putin’s forces, abandoning the last remaining centre of resistance in Mariupol, we are thankfully spared the daily spectacle of a leading component of the Ukrainian extreme right being portrayed by the western media as heroic…

There was a time when the mainstream media were prepared to report accurately and in some detail on the disturbing far-right aspects of post-Maidan politics in Ukraine. These days, not so much. Such journalism would undermine the propaganda image of a small democratic country defying the might of a dictatorial…

After pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych was brought down in 2014 by the Maidan protest movement, in which a decisive part was played by the violent far-right paramilitary forces of Pravyi Sektor, the Russian-speaking minority of Ukrainians were subjected to a systematic campaign of discrimination and marginalisation by the victors. Treated…