At the mercy of Washington and the Nazis
Excerpt from an important Long-Read by Felix Abt on Conflict and Atrocities in Ukraine
With permission by author Felix Abt, who spent many years studying countries and people who are not living a “western lifestyle”, we reproduce an excerpt of his well-researched and sourced Long Read on the history of the war in Ukraine. #NeverAgainIsNowGlobal shares concerns documented by the author, but issued by Institutions and Activists from around the world, about the revival of Anti-Semitic and genocidal forces with a strong influence on the government and state of Ukraine - which without support from the West, particularly Neo-Cons in the U.S. would have been unable to get to where they are today.
After revisiting the political events in Ukraine before and around the 2014 coup, and describing the consequences for National Security Interests for the Russian Federation the author goes on to explain:
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.”
President Poroshenko’s interior minister incorporated the Azov Regiment into Ukraine’s National Guard. 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 Putin.
Although Azov has been recognized by the U.S. Congress as a terrorist and neo-Nazi organization, it 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 thoroughly researched 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.
Since the Euromaidan coup in 2014, more than 1,000 settlements and more than 50,000 streets have been renamed in Ukraine. It was a massive de-russification and re-Nazification campaign.
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 Zelenskyj 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.
The nationalists later prevailed, including against Zelenskyj, who in 2014 was still publicly speaking out against discrimination against the Russian-speaking minority: Article 10 of the new Constitution stipulates that Ukrainian is the official language of Ukraine. In addition, a new law came into force in Ukraine in January 2022 that mandates the use of Ukrainian in almost all areas of public life and de facto prohibits the use of Russian and other minority languages.
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.
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” (Jerusalem Post), 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.
On the Way to a Totalitarian Nationalist Regime?
Twelve opposition parties, including the political party that came in first behind Zelenskyj 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. The government published a blacklist listing all domestic and foreign critics as “pro-Russian propagandists” to be punished. The Ukrainian Myrotvorets NGO 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. Cases have come to light in which dissidents were persecuted, tortured, killed, or disappeared without ever being seen again.
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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.
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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 Russia. Zelenskyj was not to stand in their way.
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Let us not forget the vile basis of Nazi ideology, which 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 Zelenskyj 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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READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE: How Zelenskyj was prevented from making peace in the Donbass and avoiding war with Russia
You can find the profile of the author Felix Abt here