NewsGuard, the media rating agency, alleges that Consortium News has published “false content” by reporting that there was a U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 and that ne0-Nazis have significant influence in the country. NewsGuard took issue with a:

“February 2022 article ‘Ukraine: Guides to Reflection,’ [which] asserted, ‘Hence, the inflation of Russian behavior in Ukraine (where Washington organized a coup against a democratically elected government because we disliked its political complexion) … .’

It then wrote:

“The U.S. supported the Maidan revolution that ousted then-Ukraine President Viktor Yanikovych (sic) in 2014 — including a December 2013 visit by John McCain to Kyiv in support of protesters — but there is no evidence that the U.S. ‘organized’ a ‘coup.’ Instead, it has the markings of a popular uprising, precipitated by widely covered protests against Yanukovych’s decision to suspend preparations for the signing of an association and free-trade agreement with the European Union.”

Viktor Yanukovych was democratically elected as president of Ukraine in 2010 in an election certified by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a fact not mentioned in NewsGuard’s writings on the change of government in Ukraine. Even though Yanukovych agreed to an EU political settlement and early elections, violence forced him to flee from the capital on Feb. 21, 2014. Reporting that the neo-Nazi Right Sector was at the forefront of the violent overthrow, The New York Times (NewsGuard green check) wrote earlier that day:

“Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of Right Sector, a coalition of hard-line nationalist groups, reacted defiantly to news of the settlement, drawing more cheers from the crowd.

‘The agreements that were reached do not correspond to our aspirations,’ he said. ‘Right Sector will not lay down arms. Right Sector will not lift the blockade of a single administrative building until our main demand is met — the resignation of Yanukovych.’ He added that he and his supporters were ‘ready to take responsibility for the further development of the revolution.’ The crowd shouted: ‘Good! Good!’

A study on the violence used to overthrow the government, by Prof. Serhiy Kudelia, a political scientist at Baylor University, says the overthrow succeeded because of “the embeddedness of violent groups” in a non-violent protest. The violence began on Dec. 1, 2013 when these violent groups attacked police with “iron chains, flares, stones and petrol bombs” and tried to ram a bulldozer through police lines. The police viciously fought back that day.

As the International Business Times (IBT) (green check) wrote about these groups at the time:

“According to a member of anti-fascist Union Ukraine, a group that monitors and fights fascism in Ukraine, ‘There are lots of nationalists here [EuroMaidan] including Nazis. They came from all over Ukraine, and they make up about 30% of protesters.

Different groups [of anarchists] came together for a meeting on the Maidan. While they were meeting, a group of Nazis came in a larger group, they had axes and baseball bats and sticks, helmets, they said it was their territory. They called the anarchists things like Jews, blacks, communists. There weren’t even any communists, that was just an insult. The anarchists weren’t expecting this and they left. People with other political views can’t stay in certain places, they aren’t tolerated,’ a member of the group continued.”

The violence by far-right groups was evidently condoned by Sen. John McCain who expressed his support for the uprising by addressing the Maidan crowd later that month. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and then U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt visited the square after the violence had broken out.

NewsGuard’s account of the events of Feb. 21, 2014 says that even though Yanukovych agreed to the early elections, “angry protestors demanded Yanukovych’s immediate resignation,” and he fled on that day after “hundreds of police guarding government buildings abandoned their posts.” NewsGuard then says “protestors took control of several government buildings the next day.”

Government Buildings Seized

Protestors occupied Kiev’s City Hall, replete with Confederate flag. (YouTube)

But protestors had already seized government buildings as early as December 2013. On Jan. 24 protestors broke into the Agriculture Ministry building in Kiev and occupied it. On the same day barricades were set up near the presidential headquarters. Government buildings in the west of the country had also been occupied. The Guardian (green check) reported on Jan. 24:

“There were dramatic developments in the west of the country on Thursday as hundreds of people forced their way into the office of the regional governor in the city of Lviv, and forced him to sign a resignation letter. Oleh Salo, a Yanukovych appointee in a city where support for the president is in the low single digits, later said he signed the letter under duress and was rescinding his resignation.

Thousands also stormed regional administration headquarters in Rivne on Thursday, breaking down doors and demanding the release of people detained in the unrest there, Unian news agency reported. In the town of Cherkasy, 125 miles south of Kiev, about 1,000 protesters took over the first two floors of the main administration building and lit fires outside the building.

Similar action took place in Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Khmelnytsky in western and central Ukraine, as well as parts of the north-east, the Party of the Regions said.”

Protestors had begun occupying Kiev City Hall in December, with a portrait of Ukraine’s World War II fascist leader Stepan Bandera hanging from the rafters. On the night of Feb. 21, the leader of the Neo-fascist Right Sector, Andriy Parubiy, announced that the Verkhovna Rada (parliament), the Presidential Administration, the Cabinet of Ministers and the Ministry of Internal Affairs had all come under control of the protestors.

Therefore NewsGuard has published “false content” by reporting that government buildings were occupied the day after Yanukovych fled the capital. It should print a correction.

On the day after Yanukovych fled, the Rada voted without the presence of Yanukovych’s party — the largest in the country — to impeach him after the fact of his violent overthrow. NewsGuard omitted the key fact that the impeachment vote was tainted by the absence of Yanukovych’s party and that the impeachment became largely irrelevant after violence forced him to flee the capital.

Democratically-elected leaders are removed by electoral defeat, impeachment or votes of no confidence, not by violence. NewsGuard writes that “hundreds of police guarding government buildings abandoned their posts” on the day Yanukovych was forced out, but doesn’t say why. As Jacobin (NewsGuard green check) magazine reports:

“Whatever one thinks of the Maidan protests, the increasing violence of those involved was key to their ultimate victory. In response to a brutal police crackdown, protesters began fighting with chains, sticks, stones, petrol bombs, even a bulldozer — and, eventually, firearms, all culminating in what was effectively an armed battle in February, which left thirteen police officers and nearly fifty protesters dead. The police ‘could no longer defend themselves’ from protesters’ attacks,’ writes political scientist Sergiy Kudelia, causing them to retreat, and precipitating Yanukovych’s exit.”

NewsGuard calls the events a “revolution,” yet revolutions in history have typically been against monarchs or dictators, not against democratically-elected leaders. For instance, the 1776 American Revolution, the 1789 French Revolution, the 1917 Russian Revolution, the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and countless others were against monarchs. Coups have been against both elected and non-elected leaders. Revolutions change political systems, usually from monarchies to republics. Ukraine’s political system was not changed, only its leader.

As a reader, Adrian E.. commented below on this article:

“When a movement that is supported by about half the population and opposed by about half the population violently overthrows a democratically elected government, this may be given different names (e.g. coup), but it is certainly not a “popular revolution”.

The Maydan movement was never supported by more than about half the Ukrainian population. It was supported by a vast majority in Western Ukraine, by very few people in the East and South of the country, with people more evenly split in the center/North. This clearly was not a case of a government that had lost public support to such a degree that there was a general consensus that it should resign. It was the case of one political camp representing about half the country that had lost the last elections imposing its will with brutal deadly violence.”

By any measure, Yanukovych’s ouster was an unconstitutional change in government. His “impeachment” without his party present for the vote came after government buildings had been seized and after violence drove him from the capital.

Circumstantial Evidence

McCain addressing crowd in Kiev, Dec. 15, 2013. (U.S. Senate/Office of Chris Murphy/Wikimedia Commons)

In its version of these events, NewsGuard only refers to circumstantial evidence of the coup, interpreting it as U.S. “support” for a “revolution” against a democratically-elected president.

NewsGuard fails to point out that McCain, Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-CT) as well as Nuland appeared on stage in the Maidan with Oleh Tyahnybok, leader of the Neo-fascist Svoboda Party, formerly known as the Social National Party.

NewsGuard does not consider how such events would be seen in the United States if a senior Russian foreign ministry official, two leading Russian lawmakers and Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. appeared on stage with a far-right American leader to address a crowd on the Washington Mall seeking to oust an elected U.S. president. If that president were overthrown violently, would Americans think it was a Russian-backed coup?

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NewsGuard discusses Nuland’s 2013 speech in which she revealed that since 1991 the U.S. had spent $5 billion to help bring about Ukraine’s “aspirations.” What it fails to point out is that U.S. aspirations were to turn Ukraine towards the West and away from Russia. And the U.S. had work to do.

In a 2008 poll, 17 years after this U.S. effort began, and the year in which the U.S. said Ukraine would one day join NATO, 50 percent of Ukrainians actually opposed NATO membership against just 24.3 percent who favored it. A 2010 Gallup poll showed that 40 percent of Ukrainians viewed NATO as more threat than protector. Just 17 percent had the opposite view. So building up civil society through U.S.-funded NGOs to favor the West was the U.S. challenge.

NewsGuard does not mention that part of the $5 billion the U.S. spent was to help organize protests. There was genuine popular dissatisfaction with Yanukovych that the NED nurtured and trained. Jacobin reported of the 2014 events:

“US officials, unhappy with the scuttled EU deal, saw a similar chance in the Maidan protests. Just two months before they broke out, the NED’s then president, pointing to Yanukovych’s European outreach, wrote that ‘the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help.’

In practice, this meant funding groups like New Citizen, which the Financial Times reported ‘played a big role in getting the protest up and running,’ led by a pro-EU opposition figure. Journalist Mark Ames discovered the organization had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from US democracy promotion initiatives.”

Writing in Consortium News six days after Yanukovych’s ouster, Parry reported that over the previous year, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which funds NGOs in countries the U.S. targets for regime change, had bankrolled 65 projects in Ukraine totaling more than $20 million. Parry called it “a shadow political structure of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir up unrest when the Ukrainian government didn’t act as desired.”

The NED, on Feb. 25, the day after the Russian invasion, deleted all projects in Ukraine it funded, which are archived here. The NED meddled in Ukrainian politics in 2004 in the so-called Orange Revolution. The Washington Post (green check) wrote in 1991 that what the C.I.A. once did in secret — destabilizing and overthrowing regimes — the NED was now doing openly.

C.I.A. or NED-led coups are never made up out of whole cloth. The U.S. works with genuine opposition movements within a country, sometimes popular uprisings, to finance, train and direct them. The U.S. has a long history of overthrowing foreign governments, the most infamous examples being Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973.

In September 2013, before the Maidan uprising began, long-time NED head Carl Gerhsman called Ukraine “the biggest prize” in a Washington Post op-ed piece, and warned that “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

In 2016 he said the NED has been involved in Ukraine since the 1980s and he praised the “overthrow of Yanukovych.”

Nuland-Pyatt Tape Omitted

Most significantly, NewsGuard’s attempt to refute U.S. involvement in the coup omits the 2014 intercepted and leaked telephone call between Nuland and Pyatt, the then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, in which the two discuss who will make up the new government weeks before Yanukovych was overthrown.

On the leaked tape, Nuland and Pyatt talk about “midwifing” a new government; Vice President Joe Biden’s role, and setting up meetings with Ukrainian politicians to make it happen. Nuland says the prime minister should be Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and indeed he became prime minister after the coup.

At the time, the BBC (green check) wrote of the leak: “The US says that it is working with all sides in the crisis to reach a peaceful solution, noting that ‘ultimately it is up to the Ukrainian people to decide their future’. However this transcript suggests that the US has very clear ideas about what the outcome should be and is striving to achieve these goals.”

The U.S. State Department never denied the authenticity of the video, and even issued an apology to the European Union after Nuland is heard on the tape saying, “Fuck the EU.” Mainstream media at the time focused almost exclusively on that off-color remark as a distraction from the greater significance of U.S. interference in Ukraine’s internal affairs.

Why did Nuland say, “Fuck the EU”? At the time she said it, France, Germany and Poland were working for the EU on a political settlement with Russia to the Maidan crisis that would leave Yanukovych in power.

Indeed the E.U. brokered a deal with Yanukovych, who agreed to early elections by December 2014, a restoration of the 2004 Constitution and an amnesty for all protestors, clearing the way for no one to be held responsible for the violent ouster. Yanukovych announced the agreement, with E.U. officials at his side in Kiev, on Feb. 21, 2014. Later that day he was violently driven from power.

Leaving the historic role of the NED and the essential Nuland-Pyatt conversation out of its reporting is an omission of evidence by NewsGuard, typical of corporate media. Omitting crucial elements of a story changes its meaning and in this case undermines NewsGuard’s account of the events of 2014.

This is an excellent example of why Parry started Consortium News: to report on crucial information that corporate media sometimes purposely and deceptively leave out to change the meaning of a story. NewsGuard should correct its story about the coup, not Consortium News. NewsGuard invites readers to request corrections by emailing them at corrections@newsguardtech.com.

Likely Reasons for the Coup

U.S. enabled Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection.

Wall Street and Washington swept in after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 under a pliable Boris Yeltsin (who received direct U.S. help to win re-election in 1996) to asset-strip the formerly state-owned industries, enrich themselves and a new class of oligarchs and impoverish the former Soviet people.

The ascension of Vladimir Putin to power on New Year’s Eve 1999 gradually began to curb U.S. influence in post-Soviet Russia, especially after Putin’s 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, in which he blasted U.S. unilateral aggression, especially in Iraq.

Eventually Putin restored sovereignty over much of the Russian economy, turning Washington and Wall Street against him. (As President Joe Biden has now made clear on more than one occasion, the U.S. aim is to overthrow him.)

In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, former U.S. national security adviser ZbigniewBrzezinski wrote:

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”

Thus U.S. “primacy,” or world dominance, which still drives Washington, is not possible without control of Eurasia, as Brzezinski argued, and that’s not possible without control of Ukraine by pushing Russia out (U.S. takeover of Ukraine in the 2014 coup) and dominating Moscow as it did when this was written in the 1990s.

Deep Western involvement in Ukrainian politics and economy never ended from those early post-Soviet days. When Yanukovych acted legally (the Rada authorized it) to reject the European Union association agreement in favor of a Russian economic package on better terms, it threatened to curtail Western economic involvement. Yanukovych became a marked man.

Yanukovych had already made Russian an official language, he had rejected NATO membership, and reversed his pro-Western predecessor’s move to glorify Nazi collaborators. Yanukovych’s predecessor, President Viktor Yuschenko, had made Ukraine’s World War II-era fascist leader Stepan Bandera a “Hero of Ukraine.”

There was genuine popular dissatisfaction among mostly Western Ukrainians with Yanukovych, which intensified and became violent after he rejected the EU deal. Within months he was overthrown.

After the Coup

The U.S.-installed government in Kiev outlawed political parties, including the Communist Party, and stripped Russian as an official language. Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions was banned in several oblasts and eventually collapsed. An American citizen became finance minister and Vice President Joe Biden became Barack Obama’s virtual viceroy in Ukraine.

Videos have emerged of Biden giving instructions to the nominal president at the time, Petro Poroshenko. By his own admission, Biden forced the resignation of Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general.

Shokin testified under oath that he was about to investigate Burisma Holdings, the company on which the vice president’s son was given a lucrative board membership just months after the U.S.-backed coup.

Biden, other U.S. officials, and the media at the time lied that Shokin was removed because he was corrupt. State Dept. memos released this year and published by Just the News (green-check) actually praise Shokin for his anti-corruption work. The question of whether the leader of a foreign nation has the right to remove another country’s prosecutor was buried.

Eight days after nearly 50 anti-coup protestors in Odessa were burned to death on May 2, 2014 by far-right counter-protestors dominated by Right Sector, the coup-resisting provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbass region declared independence from Ukraine. Russia began assisting them and, after a visit to Kiev by then C.I.A. Director John Brennan, Poroshenko launched a war against the separatists that lasted eight years, killing thousands of civilians, until Russia intervened in the civil conflict in February.

After the coup, NATO began arming, training and conducting exercises with the Ukrainian military, turning it into a de facto NATO member. These were not just the interests of part of Ukraine that were being served, but those of powerful foreign actors. It was akin to a 19th century-style colonial takeover of a country.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe

While we react with fear to the resurgence of fascist, Nazi or Japanese imperial groups, we fail to see that it was not these ideologies that provoked World War, but the alliance of rulers ready for the worst. The same configuration is about to be repeated with other groups. In a few months, if we do not react now, a Third World War may be possible.

The Second World War can serve as a lesson to us. It did not appear in a serene sky. It was not a battle of the Good guys against the Bad guys. It was just triggered by an unforeseen gathering of forces capable of destroying everything.

After the economic crisis of 1929, the whole world was convinced, and rightly so, that the capitalism of that time was over. The Soviet Union alone offered an alternative, Bolshevism. Soon the United States came up with a second alternative, the structural reforms of the New Deal, and then Italy promoted a third alternative, fascism. The great Anglo-Saxon capitalists chose to support a new regime, close to fascism, Nazism. They thought that Germany would attack the USSR, thus preserving their interests threatened by both Bolshevik collectivisations and US economic reforms. However, nothing worked out as planned, since Italy, Germany and Japan formed the Axis with their own logic and the war was not started against the Soviets, but against the great fortunes that prepared it.

In the collective imagination, we do not hold responsible the great Anglo-Saxon capitalists who supported Nazism at its beginning. On the contrary, we remember the British and American people as having participated in the victory.

From this experience we must learn that the most skilful plans can escape their promoters. Peace was threatened by the alliance of three very different regimes, Fascism, Nazism and Hakkō ichiu. None of the international relations scholars and other geopoliticians of the time foresaw this union. All of them, without exception, were wrong.

What these three ideologies had in common was that they wanted to change the world order without regard to the human consequences of their actions. This does not mean that their opponents were democratic and peaceful, far from it, but only that they refrained from exterminating entire peoples.

Let’s not mistake the adversary. We must be very vigilant, not to a particular type of political regime, but to the fact that states governed by men capable of the worst ever unite. The current danger is neither fascism, nor Nazism, nor Hakkō ichiu, three ideologies marked by their time and which do not correspond to anything today. What we must protect ourselves from, above all, is a global alliance between ideologies capable of the worst.

This is exactly what is about to happen: the current leaders of the US State Department, the government in Kiev and the next government in Tel Aviv have no limits. The union of the "Straussians", the Ukrainian "integral" nationalists and the Israeli "revisionist Zionists" can, without any qualms, plunge the world into a Third World War. Fortunately, the CIA does not share their ideas, the government in Kiev is constrained by Russian military intervention, and the Israeli Prime Minister’s coalition has not yet formed its government.

Professor Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Although he wrote extensively on natural law and Jewish philosophy, he left nothing about his political conceptions, which he reserved for certain of his students. Numerous testimonies have made his "oral" thought known to us.

The U.S. "Straussians”

This small group of about a hundred people controls the foreign policy of the United States, including the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, his deputy, Victoria Nuland, and the National Security Advisor, Jacob Sullivan.

It is in line with the thinking of the Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss "Russia declares war on the Straussians” for whom democracies showed their weaknesses during the 1930s. The only way to ensure that the next anti-Semitic regime does not massacre them is for the Jews to set up their own dictatorship; to be on the side of the hammer and not of the nail.

The "Straussians" have already shown what they are capable of by organizing the 9/11 attacks and by launching various wars to destroy the "wider Middle East".

It is amazing that, despite the controversies that tore the US ruling class apart during the Bush Jr. administration, most of today’s politicians are unaware of who the Straussians are.

The poet Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973). He created a mythology that inspired millions of Ukrainians to fight the Russians. A secret agent of the Second and Third German Reichs, he participated in the supervision of the extermination of Jews and Gypsies in Europe as administrator of the Reinhard Heydrich Institute, before being whitewashed by the Anglo-Saxon secret services.

The Ukrainian "integral nationalists”

This is a group comprising hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions. It originated in the First World War, but solidified during the interwar period, the Second World War and the Cold War “Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists ?”.

They identify with the poet and criminal against humanity Dmytro Dontsov. They see themselves as Vikings ready to fight the last battle against evil, that is, according to them, against Russian civilization.

The term "integral nationalist" should not be misleading. Dontsov chose it in reference to the thought of the Frenchman Charles Maurras. Dontsov was never a patriot, nor a nationalist in the classical sense. He never defended either the Ukrainian people or the Ukrainian land. On the contrary.

The Ukrainian "integral nationalists" have, since 1919, shown what they are capable of. They have murdered more than 4 million of their fellow citizens, including 1.6 million Jews. Since 2014, they have waged a civil war that has cost the lives of about 20,000 of their fellow citizens. They also, in 1921, amputated their land from Galicia and Volhynia to pay in advance the Polish army against the USSR.

They made an alliance with the Straussians, in 2000, during a big congress in Washington, where the Straussian Paul Wolfowitz was the guest of honor.
It is very dangerous to claim, as NATO does, that the "integral nationalists" are marginal in Ukraine. Certainly, in the spirit of this organization, it is only a question of discrediting Russia’s discourse and mobilizing for Ukraine. But these people are now murdering, without trial, those of their fellow citizens who find themselves in Russian culture.

It is particularly dangerous to participate in the delirium of the "integral nationalists" as the Bundestag has just done by adopting a resolution on the "Holodomor", i.e. the "genocide by hunger". The famine of 1932-33 was by no means caused by the Soviets in general, nor by Joseph Stalin in particular. It affected many other regions of the USSR than Ukraine. It is a climatic catastrophe. Moreover, in Ukraine itself, it did not affect the cities, but only the countryside because the Soviets decided to manage this shortage by feeding the workers rather than the peasants. To give credence to the myth of a planned genocide is to encourage anti-Russian hatred as the Nazis once encouraged anti-Jewish hatred.

Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), founder of the Jewish Legion, then of the Irgun. He called for Israel to extend over the entire British Mandate territory, i.e. over the current State of Israel, the Palestinian Territories and the Kingdom of Jordan.

Israeli "revisionist Zionists”

The "revisionist Zionists" represent about 2 million Israelis. They have managed to form a parliamentary majority by uniting several political parties behind Benjamin Netanyahu.
They claim to be inspired by the Ukrainian Vladimir Jabotinsky, the man who claimed that Palestine is "a land without a people, for a people without a land". In other words, Palestinian Arabs do not exist. They have no rights and must be expelled from their homes.

In September 1921, Jabotinsky formed a secret alliance with the Ukrainian "integral nationalist" anti-Semites, the first link in the developing Axis. This union aroused the indignation of the entire Jewish diaspora and Jabotinsky was expelled from the World Zionist Organization. In October 1937, Jabotinsky formed a new alliance with the anti-Semites of Marshal Rydz-Smigly, number 2 in Poland behind Józef Piłsudski. He was again rejected by the Jewish diaspora.

At the very beginning of World War II, Jabotinsky chose Bension Netanyahu, Benjamin’s father, as his private secretary.

It is appalling that, 75 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, most people continue to lump together different, and often opposing, views solely on the basis of the religion of those who profess them.

Revisionist Zionism" is the opposite of the Zionism of Nahum Goldman and the World Jewish Congress. It has no concern for the Jewish people and has therefore not hesitated to form alliances with anti-Semitic armed forces.

The "revisionist Zionists", including Menahem Beguin and Ariel Sharon, have shown what they are capable of with the Nakba; the forced expulsion of the majority of the Arab population of Palestine in 1948. It is this crime, whose memory haunts both Arabs and Israelis, that makes peace in Palestine impossible to this day.

Benjamin Netanyahu formed an alliance with the Straussians in 2003 at a large closed-door congress in Jerusalem «Sommet historique pour sceller l’Alliance des guerriers de Dieu». Since the election of Volodymyr Zelensky, of whom he has become a personal friend, Netanyahu has also renewed Jabotinsky’s alliance with the "integral nationalists".

The Axis is constituted.

The common ideology of the new Axis

Just as Italian Fascism, German Nazism, and Japanese Hakkō ichiu had little to do with each other, so did the Straussians, the "integral nationalists," and the "revisionist Zionists" think differently and pursue distinct goals. Only the Nazis were so anti-Semitic as to seek to kill an entire people. The fascists despised the Jews, but did not seek to exterminate them. The Japanese never engaged in this hatred and even protected the Jews in their own country and in the territories they occupied. In the same way, today if the "integral nationalists" are obsessively against Russian culture and wish to kill all Russians, men, women and children, the Straussians despise them without wishing to exterminate them, and the "revisionist Zionists" pursue other objectives.

Each of these three isolated groups represents a danger to specific populations, but all three together threaten all of humanity. They share a cult of violence and power. They have shown that they can engage in wars of extermination. All three consider that their time has come. However, not only do they have to overcome their internal oppositions, but their axis is still uncertain. For example, the Straussians have just warned the "revisionist Zionists" about the possible expansion of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories.

After the Second World War, modern international law was established with the idea of countering "war propaganda" United Nations General Assembly Resolution 110 of November 3, 1947 and Resolution 381 of November 17, 1950 “Condemnation of propaganda against peace”. International legislators, i.e. sovereign states, soon agreed that war could only be fought against by ensuring the "free flow of ideas" resolution 819 of 11 December 1954 “Strengthening of peace through the removal of barriers to free exchange of ideas".

In recent years, however, we have witnessed an extraordinary backsliding that deprives us of the thoughts of others, exposes us to war propaganda, and ultimately leads us to a global conflict.
This phenomenon began with the private censorship on social networks of the incumbent president of the United States, and continued with the public censorship of Russian media in the West. Now the thoughts of others are no longer seen as a tool to prevent wars, but as a poison that threatens us.

Western states are setting up bodies to "rectify" information that they consider falsified (Fake News)“The West renounces freedom of expression”, by Thierry Meyssan. NATO is considering the creation of a unit, called Information Ramstein, which will be responsible for censoring not Russian information sources, but Russian ideas within the 30 member states of the Atlantic Alliance "A ’Ministry of Truth’ soon to be created within NATO".

This is a complete reversal of the values of the Atlantic Alliance, which was founded in the wake of the Atlantic Charter, which incorporated President Franklin Roosevelt’s "four freedoms". The first of these freedoms was the freedom of expression.

However, before the invention of the Internet, when the United States and the Soviet Union had just guaranteed the "free circulation of ideas" with the Helsinki Agreements, the United Nations and more particularly its agency in this field, UNESCO, were worried about "information imperialism". The technical superiority of the West allowed them to impose their view of the facts on developing countries.

In 1976, during the Nairobi conference, the UN raised the question of the functioning of the media with regard to "the strengthening of peace and international understanding, the promotion of human rights and the fight against racism, apartheid and incitement to war.

Former Irish Foreign Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Seán MacBride formed a 16-member commission at Unesco. It included the Frenchman Hubert Beuve-Mery (founder of Le Monde), the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez (Nobel Prize for Literature) and the Canadian Marshall McLuhan (communication theorist). The United States was represented by Elie Abel, then dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, and Russia by the director of the Tass agency, Sergei Losev. Only the fifth and final part of the report (Communication Tomorrow) was the subject of a general debate. The MacBride commission discussed the draft of the other parts, but could not question their final wording. In any event, its report, issued in 1978, seemed to be a consensus.

In fact, by pointing out that the same facts can be perceived differently and by opening up the question of the means of the media of the North and those of the South, he was opening a Pandora’s box. At the same time, Unesco was confronted with the propaganda of the South African apartheid regime and the propaganda of Israel, which denies Muslim and Christian cultures. In the end, the United States and the United Kingdom ended the debate by withdrawing from Unesco. We know today that the British Empire had ensured its intellectual domination by creating news agencies. Whitehall closed the Information Research Department (IRD) just before the MacBride report was published "Britain’s secret propaganda war, Paul Lashmar & James Oliver, Sutton". But the war against Syria has shown that the whole system has been reconstituted in another form “The fabrication of the myth of the "Syrian revolution" by the United States. Westerners continue to falsify information at its source.

In forty years, the media landscape has been transformed: the emergence of international television news channels, websites and social networks. At the same time, there has been a huge concentration of media in the hands of a few owners. However, none of the problems listed in 1978 have changed. On the contrary, with the unipolar world, they have become worse.

The journalistic profession today consists of either writing agency reports or contextualizing the news for the media. News agencies are factual and unsourced, while the media offer commentary and analysis by referring to news agencies. Contextualization requires a great deal of historical, economic and other knowledge, which today’s journalists are largely lacking. The immediacy of radio and television does not give them the time to read books and even less to consult archives, except during in-depth investigations. Commentary and analysis have thus become considerably impoverished.

The dominant ideology in the West, which tends to become "global", has become a religion without God. There are now only two camps: that of the Good and that of the apostates. Truth is determined by a consensus among the elites, while the people reject it. Any criticism is considered blasphemous. There is no more room for debate and therefore for democracy.

The alternative press has become just as poor because it relies on the same data as the international media: news agency reports. It is indeed enough to control AFP, AP and Reuters to impose a vision of the facts on us. You can season it according to this or that tendency, Republican or Democrat, conservative or progressive, etc., but it will always be the same dish.

Since the September 11 attacks, those who challenge the official version of events have been called "conspiracy theorists ». Since the election of Donald Trump, those who contest the data of press agencies are accused of distorting reality and imagining Fake News. Journalists, after refraining from relaying the thoughts of "conspiracists", i.e. dissidents, try to correct Fake News with Checked News.

Yet, at the same time, belief in the versions of the mainstream media has collapsed. In the United States, the Gallup Institute has been measuring trust in the print media since 1973 and in the broadcast media since 1993. Trust in newspapers has fallen from 51 percent to 16 percent, and trust in radio and television has fallen from 46 percent to 11 percent.
The only solution is to increase the number of news agencies, i.e. the sources of information. Not to make them numerous, but diverse. Only then will we realize that the way an event is reported determines the way we think about it.

For example, today the three news agencies mentioned above present the conflict in Ukraine as a "Russian invasion". They claim that Moscow has not been able to take Kiev and overthrow President Zelenky, but commits war crimes every day. This is one way of looking at it. We don’t have the means to publish dispatches all the time, but we publish a weekly identical bulletin. Our criterion is different. We refer to "International Law" and not to Western "rules". Therefore, we describe the same conflict as the application of the Security Council resolution 2202 and the "responsibility to protect" the oppressed populations since 2014. The events are the same, but for some the way they tell them leads to think that the Russians are wrong, while ours leads to think that the Russian position is legal. To tell the truth, there is another difference: we interpret the facts over time. For us and for the Security Council, there has been a civil war in Ukraine for eight years with 20,000 deaths, the three major agencies pretend to ignore it. For us, the "integral nationalists" have a long criminal history, having cost the lives of 4 million of their fellow citizens, the Western agencies also pretend to ignore it “Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists?”.

This difference can be applied to all subjects. For example, the major news agencies tell us that the West has imposed sanctions to punish Russia for invading Ukraine. We do not read events in this way. Once again, referring to "International Law" and not to Western "rules", we note that the decisions of the Anglo-Saxons and the European Union violate the UN Charter. These are not "sanctions", since there has been no judgment, but economic weapons to wage war against Russia, just as castles were besieged in the past to starve those who had taken refuge there.

Each difference in the interpretation of events provokes another. For example, when we point out that the Western pseudo-sanctions have not been endorsed by the Security Council, we are told that this is quite normal since Russia has a veto right in the Council. This is to forget why the UN was organized the way it was. Its purpose is not to say what is right, but to prevent wars. This is precisely what allowed the Council to adopt resolution 2202 to resolve the civil war in Ukraine. However, the West, despite the commitment of Germany and France, did not apply it, forcing Russia to intervene.

We could go on endlessly with this double reading. The important thing to remember is that the presentation of the facts radically changes the way they are perceived. To conclude, I invite you to found news agencies that describe the facts in their own way and not in the way of our leaders. It is in this way and not by glossing over biased information that we will regain our lucidity.

The Ukrainian president addressing the G20.

I was talking to an open-minded leader of the European Parliament in Brussels ten days ago, and I listened to him tell me that the Ukrainian conflict was certainly complex, but that the most obvious thing was that Russia had invaded that country. I replied by observing that international law obliged Germany, France and Russia to implement resolution 2202, which Moscow alone had done. I continued by reminding him of the responsibility to protect the populations in case of failure of their own government. He cut me off and asked me: "If my government complains about the fate of its citizens in Russia and attacks that country, will you find that normal? Yes," I said, "if you have a Security Council resolution. Do you have one? » Disconcerted, he changed the subject. Three times I asked him if we could talk about the Ukrainian "integral nationalists". Three times he refused. We parted courteously.

The question of the responsibility to protect should have been nuanced. This principle does not allow for a war, but for a police operation, conducted with military means. That is why the Kremlin is careful not to refer to this conflict as a "war", but as a "special military operation". Both terms refer to the same facts, but "special military operation" limits the conflict. As soon as his troops entered Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin made it clear that he did not intend to annex this territory, but only to liberate the people persecuted by the Ukrainian "Nazis". In a previous long article, I pointed out that, if the expression "Nazis" is correct in the historical sense, it does not correspond to the way these people call themselves. They use the expression: "integral nationalists". Let’s remember that Ukraine is the only state in the world with an explicitly racist constitution.

The fact that international law gives Russia the upper hand does not mean that it has a blank check. Everyone must criticize the way it applies the law. Westerners still find Russia "Asian", "savage" and "brutal", even though they themselves have been far more destructive on many occasions.

Reversal of the situation

Now that the Russian and Western points of view have been clarified, it is clear that several events have prompted a Western shift.

• We are entering winter, a harsh season in Central Europe. The Russian population is aware, since the Napoleonic invasion, that it cannot defend such a large country. Therefore, they learned to use the vastness of their territory and the seasons to defeat their attackers. With winter, the front is frozen for several months. Everyone can see that, contrary to the discourse that the Russians are defeated, the Russian army has liberated the Donbass and part of Novorussia.

• Before winter fell, the Kremlin withdrew the liberated population living north of the Dnieper, and then withdrew its army, abandoning the part of Kershon located on the north bank of the Dnieper. For the first time, a natural border, the Dnieper River, marks a border between the territories controlled by Kiev and those controlled by Moscow. However, during the interwar period, it was the absence of natural borders that brought down all successive powers in Ukraine. Now Russia is in a position to hold on.

• Since the beginning of the conflict, Ukraine has been able to count on unlimited aid from the United States and its allies. However, the mid-term elections in the USA have removed the majority of the Biden administration in the House of Representatives. From now on, Washington’s support will be limited. Similarly, the European Union is also finding its limits. Its populations do not understand the rising cost of energy, the closure of certain factories and the impossibility of heating normally.

• Finally, in some circles of power, after admiring the talents of the actor Volodymyr Zelensky as a communicator, they begin to wonder about the rumors about his sudden fortune. In eight months of war, he became a billionaire. The imputation is unverifiable, but the scandal of the Pandora Papers (2021), makes it credible. Is it necessary to bleed to the four veins not to see the donations arrive in Ukraine, but disappear in offshore companies?

The Anglo-Saxons (i.e. London and Washington) wanted to turn the G20 in Bali into an anti-Russian summit. They had first lobbied for Moscow to be excluded from the Group, as they had succeeded in doing at the G8. But if Russia had been absent, China, by far the world’s largest exporter, would not have come. So it was Frenchman Emmanuel Macron who was responsible for convincing the other guests to sign a bloody declaration against Russia. For two days, Western news agencies assured that the matter was in the bag. But in the end, the final statement, while summarizing the Western point of view, closed the debate with these words: "There were other points of view and different assessments of the situation and the sanctions. Recognizing that the G20 is not the forum to resolve security issues, we know that security issues can have significant consequences for the global economy. » In other words, for the first time, the West has failed to impose its worldview on the rest of the planet.

The trap

Worse: the West imposed a video intervention by Volodymyr Zelensky as they had done on August 24 and September 27 at the United Nations Security Council. However, while Russia had tried in vain to oppose it in September in New York, it accepted it in November in Bali. At the Security Council, France, which held the presidency, violated the rules of procedure to give the floor to a head of state by video. On the contrary, at the G20, Indonesia held an absolutely neutral position and was not likely to accept giving him the floor without Russian authorization. This was obviously a trap. President Zelensky, who does not know how these bodies work, fell into it.

After having caricatured Moscow’s action, he called for its exclusion from the... "G19". G19 ". In other words, the little Ukrainian gave an order on behalf of the Anglo-Saxons to the heads of state, prime ministers and foreign ministers of the 20 largest world powers and was not heard. In reality, the dispute between these leaders was not about Ukraine, but about whether or not to submit to the American world order. All the Latin American, African and four Asian participants said that this domination was over; that the world is now multipolar.

The Westerners must have felt the ground shake under their feet. They were not the only ones. Volodymyr Zelensky saw, for the first time, that his sponsors, until now absolute masters of the world, were letting him down without hesitation in order to maintain their position for a while longer.
It is likely that Washington was in league with Moscow. The United States realizes that things are turning against it on a global scale. It will have no hesitation in blaming the Ukrainian regime. William Burns, director of the CIA, has already met Sergei Narychkin, the director of the SVR, in Turkey. These meetings follow those of Jake Sullivan, the US National Security Advisor, with several Russian officials. However, Washington has nothing to negotiate in Ukraine. Two months before the conflict in Ukraine, I explained that the core of the problem had nothing to do with this country, nor with NATO. It is essentially about the end of the unipolar world.

So it is not surprising that a few days after the G20 slap in the face, Volodymyr Zelensky contradicted his American sponsors for the first time in public. He accused Russia of having launched a missile at Poland and maintained his words when the Pentagon indicated that he was wrong, it was a Ukrainian counter-missile. The idea, for him. was to continue to act in line with the Treaty of Warsaw, concluded on April 22, 1920, by Symon Petlioura’s integral nationalists with the regime of Piłsudski; to push Poland to go to war against Russia. This was the second time Washington rang a bell in his ears. He did not hear it.

Probably, these contradictions will no longer manifest themselves in public. Western positions will soften. Ukraine has been warned: in the coming months it will have to negotiate with Russia. President Zelensky can plan his escape now, because his bruised compatriots will not forgive him for deceiving them.

The only way Ukrainians will see anything approximating a holiday season is if a ceasefire can be arranged by New Year’s Day, and it just might happen, regardless of President Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s repeated assertions that there will be no negotiations with Russia until it withdraws all its troops from all occupied territories, including Crimea. There are several reasons for the possible ceasefire.

First, the Russian hammer is about to fall on Ukraine. The gloves are coming off; electric energy stations, bridges, and even ‘decision centers’ such as central Kiev’s government buildings are being targeted. Russia is one or two more massive bombing attacks on Ukraine’s energy and transport infrastructure from permanently disabling Ukraine’s electricity, water, and railroad systems. With ‘only’ 50 percent of Ukrainian electricity infrastructure knocked out by the first three widespread bombings of electricity grid components, demonstrations are already breaking out in Odessa and other places over the deteriorating humanitarian situation, with Zelenskiy sending the Ukrainian KGB, the SBU, in to break up the protests and banning coverage in media. The Office of the President was reportedly recently informed by technicians that the electricity system has entered the stage of ‘arbitrary and uncontrolled imbalance,” and one official has urged Ukrainians to be prepared to leave the country in winter. What will the sociopolitical situation be like when these critical infrastructures are in complete collapse and temperatures are 20 degrees colder? Russia will be moving closer to the strategy of ‘shock and awe’, fully destroying all infrastructure – military or otherwise – as the US did in Serbia and Iraq and will likely take less care now to avoid civilian casualties.

After the infrastructures are completely destroyed or incapacitated, Russia’s reinforcements of 380,000 regular and newly mobilized troops will have been fully added into Russia’s forces across southeastern Ukraine. Even without these reinforcements, Russian forces continue to make small gains in Donbass around Ugledar, Bakhmut (Artemevsk), as withdrawals from and stabilization of the fronts in Kharkiv and Kherson have led to a redeployment and thus concentration of forces in Zaporozhe, Donetsk, and Luhansk. A winter offensive by some half a million troops will make substantial gains on those three fronts and multiply Ukrainian losses in personnel and materiel`, which are already high. This could lead easily to a collapse of Ukrainian forces on one or more front. On the backs of such a success Russian President Putin might also make another attempt to threaten Kiev by moving a much larger force in from Belarus than the small 30-40,000 force that advanced and then withdrew from Kiev’s surrounding districts in the first months of the war.  

Second, the West is suffering from Ukraine fatigue. NATO countries’ arms supplies have been depleted beyond what is tolerable, and social cohesion is collapsing in the face of double-digit inflation and economic recession. All this makes Russia the winner on the strategic level and is forcing Washington and Brussels to seek at least a breathing spell by way of a ceasefire. This is evidenced by the plethora of Western leaders calling on Zelenskiy to resume talks with Putin and the emergence of the ‘Sullivan plan’. Most recently, rumors have it that new British PM Rishi Sunak used a package of military and financial aide he announced during his recent trip to Kiev to cover up his message to Zelenskiy that London could no longer bear the burden of leading the European support for Kiev and that Kiev should reengage wirh Moscow. There has been a several day delay in the fourth round of rocket sorties against Ukrainian infrastructure, suggesting Putin is waiting to to see if Zelenskiy will cave and offer talks before unleashing the major assaults on Ukrainian infrastructure and the Russian winter offensive.

Third, Ukraine’s greatest political asset – Zelenskiy himself – just got devalued, putting at even greater risk Ukraine’s political stability. The Ukrainian air defense strike on Poland (accidental or intentional) and the Ukrainian president’s insistence that it was a Russian air strike, despite the evidence and nearly unanimous opposing opinion among his Western backers, has hit Zelenskiy’s credulity hard. Zelenskiy’s insistence on the Russian origins of the missile and technical aspects of Ukrainian air defense suggests that the event may have been an intentional Ukrainian false flag strike on Polish/NATO territory designed to provoke NATO or Poland into entering the war. Some in the West are beginning to wake up to the dangers of Ukrainian ultranationalism and neofascism, not to mention the growing megalomania of Zelenskiy, who has appeared on ore than one occasion to be willing to risk the advent of a global nuclear winter in order to avoid sitting at the negotiating table across from Putin. Some may now come to understand that claims that Putin wants to seize all Ukraine and restore the USSR if not conquer Europe are yarns spun by Kiev to attract military and financial assistance and ultimately draw NATO forces into the war. There remains a danger that Kiev’s dream of a NATO intervention might come to fruition is the following temptation. NATO has declared that a defeat of Ukraine in the war is a defeat for NATO, and NATO cannot be allowed to lose a war to a Russia because that would accelerate the coming of the end to U.S. hegemony. It cannot be excluded and may even be likely that should Kiev appear to be losing the war that Polish forces, NATO or some ‘coalition of the willing’ will move military forces into western Ukraine up to the Dnepr but do so without attacking Russian forces. This would force Russia to cease much of its military activity or risk attacking NATO forces and a larger European-wide war. This or something like it is probably already being considered in Washington.

For now, in order to keep the West on board, Zelenskiy is rumored to be pushing Ukrainian armed forces commander Viktor Zalyuzhniy to start a last pre-winter offensive in northern Donetsk (Svatovo and Severodonetsk) or Zaporozhe in order to put a stop to the West’s ceasefire murmurs and reboost support. At the same time there is talk of continuing Zelenskiy-Zalyuzhniy tensions over the latter’s good press and star status in the West. Tensions first emerged over disagreements of previous offensives and Zalyuzhniy’s earlier entry on the Western media stage. On the background of the deteriorating battlefield and international strategic situation, such civil-military tensions are fraught with the potential for a coup. Much of Zelenskiy’s strategy and tactics is driven more by political than by military considerations. Not least among the former is Zelenskiy’s political survival, which any ceasefire or peace talks requiring Kiev to acquiesce in the loss of more territory certainly will doom. Neofascist, military, and much of public opinion will not brook the sacrifices made in blood and treasure bringing only additional ones in Ukrainian territory. Others will ask why was not all of this averted by way of agreeing to Ukrainian neutrality and fulfilling Minsk 2 could have avoided it all.

We may be reaching the watershed moment in the Ukrainian war. No electricity, no army, no society. But here, as with any Russian occupation of central or western Ukrainian lands (not planned but perhaps a necessity at some point down the road for Putin), a quagmire awaits the Kremlin. Russia can not allow complete societal breakdown and chaos to reign in Ukraine anymore than it could tolerate a NATO-member Ukraine with a large neofascist component next door. All of the above and the approaching presidential elections scheduled in Moscow, Kiev and Washington the year after next make this winter pivotal for all the war's main parties.

Ukraine is turning into a significantly more homogeneous and far less culturally diverse country

In recent years, Ukraine has become the battleground for a 'war of monuments' waged among various political forces. In 2014, the process reached a peak during the mass demolition of statues of Vladimir Lenin and other Soviet politicians. These events fundamentally changed the symbolism and policy of the country's historical memory, paving the way to a reality in which any public speech must now be accompanied by the words 'Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!'

This was the slogan of Stepan Bandera's World War Two nationalist movement, which collaborated with Adolf Hitler's Nazis and took part in the Holocaust.

Although Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky's team initially tried to 'reset' the historical memory policy, radical nationalism got the upper hand in this symbolic battle. Following the start of Russia's military operation, this year, the so-called 'decommunization' policy became openly known as 'de-Russification' - even with over half of the population officially recognized as Russian-speaking.

Memory wars

After Russian troops entered Ukraine in February, many locals projected their hatred of Moscow onto objects of cultural and historical heritage that were in any way linked to the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, politicians actively supported such sentiment, using it as a cheap way to boost their personal ratings.

Over the past months, the number of initiatives aimed at the cultural and historical 'de-Russification' of Ukraine have ballooned. Examples abound. The Kiev City Council recently renamed 11 streets having any reference to Russia (Lomonosov, Magnitogorsk, and Belomorskaya streets, among others). It also completely excluded the Russian language from the curricula of the capital's kindergartens and schools. The decision was supported by 64 out of 120 deputies. Vadim Vasilchuk, head of the Standing Committee on Education, Science, Family, Youth and Sports of the body, commented that teaching Russian in the current situation is "inappropriate." In fact, Kiev's educational institutions stopped teaching the language in any shape or form (including as electives) at the beginning of the academic year.

Meanwhile, other Ukrainian cities saw a wave of 'de-Pushkinization' sweep through. In November, monuments to the great Russian poet were toppled in Kharkov and Zhitomir, while the monument in Odessa was painted over with the inscription 'Get out!' In Kiev, one of the oldest monuments to the bard had been taken down a few weeks earlier.

The demolition of monuments to Russian and Soviet statesmen has continued as well. The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture's expert council on 'overcoming the consequences of Russification and totalitarianism' decided to demolish monuments to Soviet military commanders Nikolay Vatutin and Nikolay Shchors (even though Leonid Kravchuk - a student at the time and later the first president of Ukraine - posed for the Shchors monument).

A memorial to Soviet soldiers erected on May 8, 1970 on the 25th anniversary of victory in WWII was demolished in Uzhgorod in November. The decision dates back to October 13. In its place, Kiev proposed a memorial to the soldiers of the 128th separate mountain assault brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine - a military unit that took an active part in the Donbass war unleashed by Kiev in 2014.

The story of one monument

Perhaps the most dramatic case of 'de-Russification' unfolded in the port city of Odessa. The city's history dates back to the end of the 18th century, when the Russian Empire colonized the northern Black Sea region. In November, Odessa's mayor, Gennady Trukhanov, announced the impending demolition of one of the historical city symbols - a monument to its founders that shows Catherine the Great and her associates, thanks to whom the city became the southern capital of the Russian Empire by the end of the 19th century.

Just a few months back, the same official had opposed the initiative. Trukhanov wrote:

"I'm not in favor of taking down statues. We may remove the monuments, but history will not change. I know that a petition has been signed by 25,000 people, but I'm going to wait. After all, should I also remove the monument to [Alexander] Pushkin or [Yuri] Gagarin? It doesn't make sense."

However, activists soon sent a petition to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, who instructed the police to investigate the mayor's activities.

Ukraine's Ministry of Culture supported the idea of taking down the monument to Catherine the Great, but according to the ministry's head, Aleksandr Tkachenko, the decision was to be made by local deputies, the official said. Finally, following numerous vandalism attacks on the monument (it was doused with paint, covered with inscriptions, and a red 'executioner's' hat was placed on Catherine the Great's head), the Odessa City Council decided to conduct an electronic survey to decide on its fate.

Trukhanov hastened to change his mind and said he would vote to transfer the monument to a "park of the imperial and Soviet past" that he proposed to create. Meanwhile, the deputy mayor of Odessa, Oleg Bryndak, offered to immediately install a fountain on the site.

An online vote was held in the shortest possible time. As a result, out of Odessa's population of about a million people, 2,900 residents voted for the demolition and 2,251 opposed it. The rest (i.e., over 990,000 people) abstained from the vote. Despite this, the public vote was recognized as legitimate. The city council is yet to make a final decision, but the outcome is not hard to predict. According to an announcement affixed to the wooden protective case now enclosing the bronze monument, preparations for its dismantling and transfer are already underway.

History repeats itself

Ironically, Catherine Square in central Odessa perfectly illustrates the shifts in historical heritage policies during critical periods for Ukraine. When the square was initially built, a public garden was laid out in its center. In 1873, the city's central water supply began functioning and the authorities installed a fountain on the spot. In 1891, the Odessa City Duma decided to build a monument honoring the centenary of the city's foundation. On the eve of the anniversary, a competition was held to decide on the best design project and finally in August 1894, construction officially began. The opening of the monument took place on May 6, 1900 and was timed to coincide with the centenary of the death of one of the city fathers, commander Alexander Suvorov. At an architectural conference one year later, Catherine Square with its monument to the city founders was recognized as the best integral architectural complex in Europe.

The monument was unveiled twice - first on May 6, 1900, and then on October 27, 2007. During the Russian Revolution, when the city was constantly changing hands, the authorities covered the monument and intended to take it down. Nobe**l Prize-winning author Ivan Bunin, who was in Odessa in 1919, wrote in _'The Cursed Days'_ [his diaries of the Revolution]:**

"Visited Catherine Square before dusk. Everything is gloomy and wet. The monument to Catherine the Great is wrapped from head to toe, bandaged with dirty, wet rags, entwined with ropes and plastered with red wooden stars. Opposite the monument is the Emergency Commission [the Provincial Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-revolution, Speculation, Sabotage, and Crimes of Office, known as the Odessa CHEKA - RT]. Red flags droop from the rain, their reflections flowing like blood in the wet asphalt."

Speculation on whether to keep the monument or not had given the authorities no peace since the 1917 Revolution, and as a result it was transferred to the Petrograd Art Commission. In May 1920, when Soviet power was established in Odessa, the monument was finally dismantled, leaving a bare round column and pedestal. The figures of Catherine the Great and her associates eventually ended up in the courtyard of the Museum of Local Lore thanks to the intercession of the writer Maksim Gorky.

In the 1920s, Catherine Square and street were renamed after Karl Marx. For the next two decades, the pedestal housed a sculpture of the famed 'Das Kapital' author. At one point, the authorities replaced the bust with a new, life-size monument. However, the statue fell during a sudden storm, supposedly due to the poor quality of the materials used in its construction (or so reads the official version). In 1931, a sculptural composition with the symbols of the proletariat - a hammer and sickle - was temporarily installed on the spot.

During the occupation of Odessa by Romanian troops during World War II, Romanian Prime Minister Ion Antonescu hastened to rename the square and street after Adolf Hitler, though this time without any monument. In the 1950s, the pedestal was removed from the square and once again replaced with a public garden. In 1965, on the day marking the 60th anniversary of the uprising on the battleship Potemkin, a bronze monument to the sailors was unveiled on the square. This monument stood for 42 years. Finally, in 2007, as part of a project to recreate the historical appearance of Odessa's city center, the 'Monument to the Founders of Odessa', an exact replica of the original, was returned to Catherine Square. And now the square is in for new changes as the political winds have shifted again.

A political pendulum

The fact that nationalism comprises the essence of cultural memory in many Eastern European countries and, as a result, the nation becomes its own victim, is once again confirmed by the changes across Ukraine's cultural and historical landscape. Moreover, Russia, which is being cast as a threat to independence and territorial integrity, is thus becoming a key element in the mechanism of collective memory and identity. In other words, the model of a suffering nation and the motif of an existential threat have prevailed, and it is the image of Russia's past and present that will be used in forming Ukrainian identity.

How has this become possible? When Ukraine gained independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union, its political (electoral) geography acquired stable borders and became integrated into the self-consciousness of the country's two parts. In fact, several population groups with powerful national identities emerged at the time: Ukrainian-speaking (mostly living in the western and central regions, and professing a purely ethnic narrative), Russian-speaking (mostly living in the center, south and east, for whom Russians were not 'strangers' or 'enemies'), and actual Russians.

These groups, particularly the Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers, long had their own heritage, language, and political representation. Recall the Orange Revolution of 2004 or the Euromaidan of 2014, during which the 'pro-Ukrainian' part of society opposed the 'pro-Russian' leader Viktor Yanukovych. Who, in reality, had spent years negotiating with the EU about eventual Ukrainian membership.

Despite certain similarities between the groups, their differences were so strong that even prior to Ukraine's independence, the authorities viewed any federalization attempts as ruinous for the nation at large.

For many years, Ukraine had existed thanks to a political pendulum between its south, east and west. A sense of unity depended on two conditions: the internal and external. The internal condition was that the political elite coming to power from any part of the country would express the interests of the entire population. The external condition was to keep the country balanced between the main centers of power. Both conditions turned out to be fragile. The former depended on how Ukraine's domestic political projects were pursued, while the latter reflected the country's ability to pursue a multi-vector policy in relations with Russia and the European Union.

2014 saw the collapse of both conditions. Prior to Euromaidan, the reunification of Crimea with Russia, and the outbreak of the armed conflict in Donbass, the disagreements about the historical narrative had been moderate. This delicate balance was upset by a policy in favor of actively building a nation state. The pendulum swung violently and suddenly the whole system lost balance.

Local elites reacted in different ways. Some emigrated fearing persecution (such as former deputy of the Odessa City Council Aleksandr Vasiliev), and others became part of a nationally-minded elite (as the aforementioned mayor of Odessa, Trukhanov, who in late 2013 to early 2014 repeatedly spoke at pro-Russian rallies).

At the same time, the main battle unfolded for the loyalty of Ukraine's so-called 'moderate' residents - i.e., the Russian-speaking Ukrainians (or Russian Ukrainians, as the renowned political scientist and Kiev resident Mikhail Pogrebinsky calls himself). This group has always been the middle ground. Having much in common with the two groups, it stood apart from both. And following the start of the conflict in 2014, the attitude of this cohort towards Russia and its culture became a key point of Ukrainian politics.

A Russian east?

Most Russian-speaking Ukrainians did not consider themselves of 'different nationality' and did not propose alternative national projects (for example, a unique regional identity associated with Ukraine's southern and eastern regions as a former part of the historical cultural region of Novorossiya). Such 'denationalization' was a result of Russia's limited foreign policy in the 1990s to early 2000s and the overall socio-economic situation.

In those years, there had been no interethnic or intercultural conflicts in Ukraine because it wasn't divided between 'Russians' and 'Ukrainians'. The eventual split occurred between those who took on Ukrainian national identity and those who didn't. In other words, following the status quo change in 2014, the southern and eastern regions became a conglomerate of territories insufficiently involved in the construction of the Ukrainian nation. While the region questioned its Ukrainian identity, it also couldn't follow the example of Donbass, which proclaimed the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and the Lugansk People's Republic (LPR) - a unique model that couldn't be applied to the rest of the south and east.

Following the start of Moscow's military operation, dissociation from Russian culture and language became inevitable. At the same time, the national identity of Russian-speaking Ukrainians has also undergone major changes. What used to be a compromise that encouraged a multiethnic and multicultural model of national development became a transitional model towards acquiring a totally Ukrainian identity - both language- and culture-wise.

A few years ago, residents of Ukraine's south and east spoke Russian while recognizing themselves as Ukrainians. Now, the Russian language and its cultural and historical symbols are undergoing irreversible changes and becoming a marker of political affiliation - namely, of being pro-Russian.

Conscious of this, the authorities are striving to gain control over historical heritage and memory policies and expect to win this battle for public opinion. The current southern and eastern regions are turning into a testing ground for experimental nation-building. Their political self-determination fully depends on the historical memory and language policies. Meanwhile, nationalism offers all the necessary tools for constructing a cohesive socio-political community. That is why such a striking 'de-Russification' initiative as the demolition of the monument to Catherine the Great in Odessa will not be the last.

For many years, the main political and cultural debate in Ukrainian society has revolved around the question of preserving or eradicating its Russian and Soviet cultural heritage. In the present situation of armed conflict, supporters of the latter skillfully use public outrage to achieve their aims. Should the process continue (and there's little reason to think it won't), in a few years Ukraine will turn into a significantly more homogeneous and far less culturally diverse country - one that has willingly renounced a major part of its heritage.

About the Author:
Alexander Nepogodin is an Odessa-born political journalist, an expert on Russia and the former Soviet Union.

The German agent, thinker of Ukrainian “integral nationalism” and criminal against humanity, Dmytro Dontsov (Metipol 1883, Montreal 1973).

Like most Western political analysts and commentators, I was unaware of the existence of Ukrainian neo-Nazis until 2014. When the president-elect was overthrown, I was living in Syria at the time and thought they were violent groupings that had burst onto the public scene to assist pro-European elements. However, since the Russian military intervention, I have gradually discovered a lot of documents and information on this political movement which, in 2021, represented one third of the Ukrainian armed forces. This article presents a synthesis of it.

At the very beginning of this story, that is to say before the First World War, Ukraine was a large plain which had always been tossed between German and Russian influences. At the time, it was not an independent state, but a province of the tsarist empire. It was populated by Germans, Bulgarians, Greeks, Poles, Rumanians, Russians, Czechs, Tatars and a very large Jewish minority supposedly descended from the ancient Khazar people.

A young poet, Dmytro Dontsov, was fascinated by the avant-garde artistic movements, believing that they would help his country to escape from its social backwardness. Since the Tsarist Empire had been immobile since the death of Catherine the Great, while the German Empire was the scientific center of the West, Dontsov chose Berlin over Moscow.

When the Great War broke out, he became an agent of the German secret service. He emigrated to Switzerland, where he published, on behalf of his masters, the Bulletin of the Nationalities of Russia in several languages, calling for the uprising of the ethnic minorities of the Tsarist Empire in order to bring about its defeat. This model was chosen by the Western secret services to organize the "Forum of Free Peoples of Russia" this summer in Prague [1].

In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution turned the tables. Dontsov’s friends supported the Russian revolution, but he remained pro-German. In the anarchy that followed, Ukraine was divided de facto by three different regimes: the nationalists of Symon Petliura (who imposed themselves in the area held today by the Zelensky administration), the anarchists of Nestor Makhno (who organized themselves in Novorosssia, the land that had been developed by Prince Potemkin and that had never known serfdom), and the Bolsheviks (especially in the Donbass). The war cry of Petliura’s followers was "Death to the Jews and Bolsheviks". They perpetrated numerous murderous pogroms.

Dmytro Dontsov returned to Ukraine before the German defeat and became the protégé of Symon Petliura. He participated briefly in the Paris peace conference but, for some unknown reason, did not remain in his delegation. In Ukraine, he helped Petliura to ally with Poland to crush the anarchists and Bolsheviks. After the capture of Kiev by the Bolsheviks, Petliura and Dontsov negotiated the Treaty of Warsaw (April 22, 1920): the Polish army undertook to push back the Bolsheviks and to liberate Ukraine in exchange for Galicia and Volhynia (exactly as the Zelensky administration is negotiating today the entry of Poland into the war against the same lands [2]). This new war was a fiasco.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, born in Odessa, thinker of "revisionist Zionism". For him Israel was "a land without a people, for a People without a land">.

To strengthen his side, Petliura secretly negotiated with the founder of the Jewish battalions in the British army (the "Jewish Legion") and now administrator of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), Vladimir Jabotinsky. In September 1921, the two men agreed to unite against the Bolsheviks in exchange for Petliura’s commitment to forbid his troops to continue their pogroms. The Jewish Legion was to become the "Jewish Gendarmerie. However, despite his efforts, Petliura did not succeed in pacifying his troops, especially as his close collaborator Dontsov was still encouraging the massacre of Jews. Finally, when the agreement was revealed, the World Zionist Organization rebelled against the Petliura regime. On January 17, 1923, the WZO set up a commission to investigate Jabotinsky’s activities. Jabotinsky refused to come and explain himself and resigned from his position.

Simon Petliura took over northern Ukraine. Protector of the "integral nationalists", he sacrificed Galicia and Volhynia to fight the Russians.

Petliura fled to Poland and then to France, where he was murdered by a Jewish anarchist from Bessarabia (now Transnistria). During the trial, the latter assumed his crime and pleaded to have avenged the hundreds of thousands of Jews murdered by the troops of Petliura and Dontsov. The trial had a great impact. The court acquitted the murderer. The League against Pogroms, later Licra (International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism), was founded on this occasion.
Not only were the nationalists defeated, but the anarchists as well. Everywhere the Bolsheviks triumphed and chose, not without debate, to join the Soviet Union.

Dmytro Dontsov published literary magazines that fascinated the youth. He continued to promote a Central Europe dominated by Germany and became closer to Nazism as it rose. He soon referred to his doctrine as Ukrainian "integral nationalism ". In doing so, he referred to the French poet, Charles Maurras. Indeed, the logic of both men was initially identical: they sought in their own culture the means to affirm a modern nationalism. However, Maurras was a Germanophobe, while Dontsov was a Germanophile. The expression "integral nationalism" is still claimed today by Dontov’s followers, who, after the fall of the Third Reich, are careful to refute the term "Nazism" with which the Russians describe it, not without reason.

According to him, "Ukrainian nationalism" is characterized by:
"the affirmation of the will to live, power, expansion" (it promotes "The right of strong races to organize peoples and nations to strengthen the existing culture and civilization")
"the desire to fight and the awareness of its extremity" (he praises the "creative violence of the initiative minority").

Its qualities are:
"fanaticism" ;
" immorality".

Finally, turning his back on his past, Dontsov became an unconditional admirer of the Führer, Adolf Hitler. His followers had founded, in 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) around Colonel Yevhen Konovalets. Konovalets called Dontsov "the spiritual dictator of the youth of Galicia". However, a quarrel arose between Dontsov and another intellectual about his extremism that led to war against all, when Konovalets was suddenly murdered. The OUN (financed by the German secret service) then split in two. The "integral nationalists" reserved for themselves the OUN-B, named after Dontsov’s favorite disciple, Stepan Bandera.

In 1932-33, the Bolshevik political commissars, who were mostly Jewish, levied a tax on crops, as in other regions of the Soviet Union. Combined with significant and unpredictable climatic hazards, this policy caused a huge famine in several regions of the USSR, including the Ukraine. It is known as "Holodomor". Contrary to what the nationalist historian Lev Dobrianski says, it was not a plan for the extermination of Ukrainians by the Russians, since other Soviet regions suffered, but an inadequate management of public resources in times of climate change. Lev Dobrianski’s daughter, Paula Dobrianski, became one of President George W. Bush’s aides. She led a merciless struggle to have historians who did not adhere to her father’s propaganda excluded from Western universities [3].

In 1934, Bandera organized, as a member of the Nazi secret service and head of the OUN-B, the assassination of the Polish Minister of the Interior, Bronisław Pieracki.

From 1939, members of the OUN-B, forming a military organization, the UPA, were trained in Germany by the German army, and then still in Germany, but by their Japanese allies. Stepan Bandera offered Dmytro Dontsov to become the leader of their organization, but the intellectual refused, preferring to play the role of a leader rather than an operational commander.

The "integral nationalists" admired the invasion of Poland, in application of the German-Soviet pact. As Henry Kissinger, who could not be suspected of pro-Sovietism, demonstrated, it was not a question of the USSR annexing Poland, but of neutralizing part of it in order to prepare for the confrontation with the Reich. On the contrary, for Chancellor Hitler, it was a question of beginning the conquest of a "vital space" in Central Europe.

From the beginning of the Second World War, under the guidance of Dmytro Dontsov, the OUN-B fought alongside the Nazi armies against the Jews and the Soviets.

The collaboration between the Ukrainian "integral nationalists" and the Nazis continued with constant massacres of the majority of the Ukrainian population, accused of being Jews or Communists, until the "liberation" of Ukraine by the Third Reich in the summer of 1941 to the cry of "Slava Ukraїni!" (Glory to Ukraine), the war cry used today by the Zelensky administration and the US Democrats. At that time, the "integral nationalists" proclaimed "independence" from the Soviet Union in the presence of Nazi representatives and Greek Orthodox clergy, not in Kiev, but in Lviv, on the model of the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia and the Ustasha in Croatia. They formed a government under the leadership of Providnyk (guide) Stepan Bandera, whose friend Yaroslav Stetsko was Prime Minister. Their support in Ukraine is estimated at 1.5 million people. That is, the "integral nationalists" have always been in the minority.

Celebration of independent Ukraine with Nazi dignitaries. Behind the speakers, the three portraits displayed are those of Stepan Bandera, Adolf Hitler and Yevhen Konovalets.

The Nazis were divided between the Reich Commissioner for the Ukraine, Erich Koch, for whom the Ukrainians were subhuman, and the Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, for whom the "integral nationalists" were true allies. Finally, on July 5, 1941, Bandera was deported to Berlin and placed under Ehrenhaft (honorable captivity), i.e., under house arrest as a high-ranking official. However, after the members of OUN-B murdered the leaders of the rival faction, OUN-M, the Nazis sanctioned Stepan Bandera and his organization on September 13, 1941. 48 of their leaders were deported to a prison camp in Auschwitz (which was not yet an extermination camp, but only a prison). The OUN-B was reorganized under German command. At that time all Ukrainian nationalists took the following oath: "Faithful son of my Fatherland, I voluntarily join the ranks of the Ukrainian Liberation Army, and with joy I swear that I will faithfully fight Bolshevism for the honor of the people. This fight we are waging together with Germany and its allies against a common enemy. With loyalty and unconditional submission I believe in Adolf Hitler as the leader and supreme commander of the Liberation Army. At any time I am prepared to give my life for the truth.

The oath of loyalty to Führer Adolf Hitler by members of the OUN.

The Nazis announced that many bodies had been discovered in the prisons, victims of "Bolshevik Jews. So the "integral nationalists" celebrated their "independence" by murdering more than 30,000 Jews and actively participating in the roundup of Jews from Kiev to Babi Yar, where 33,771 of them were shot in two days, on September 29 and 30, 1941, by the Einsatzgruppen of SS Reinhard Heydrich.

In this tumult, Dmytro Dontsov disappeared. In reality, he had gone to Prague and placed himself at the service of the architect of the Final Solution, Reinhard Heydrich, who had just been appointed vice-governor of Bohemia-Moravia. Heydrich organized the Wannsee Conference, which planned the "Final Solution of the Jewish and Gypsy Questions" [4]. He then created the Reinard Heydrich Institute in Prague to coordinate the systematic extermination of all these populations in Europe. The Ukrainian Dontsov, who now lived in Prague in great luxury, immediately became its administrator. He was one of the main architects of the largest massacre in history. Heydrich was assassinated in June 1942, but Dontsov retained his functions and privileges.

Reinhard Heydrich speaking at Prague Castle. He was in charge of managing Bohemia-Moravia. However, his real function was to coordinate the "final solution" of Jewish and Gypsy questions. Dmytro Dontsov joined his team in 1942 and oversaw massacres across Europe until the fall of the Reich. Prague Castle was the scene of the meeting of the European Political Community against Russia last October.

Stepan Bandera and his deputy Yaroslav Stetsko were placed under house arrest at the headquarters of the General Inspectorate of Concentration Camps in Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen (30 km from Berlin). They wrote letters to their supporters and to the Reich leadership in complete freedom and were not deprived of anything. In September 1944, as the Reich army retreated and Bandera’s followers began to rebel against it, the two leaders were released by the Nazis and reinstated in their previous positions. Bandera and Stetsko resumed the armed struggle, among the Nazis, against the Jews and the Bolsheviks.

Centuria Integral Nationalist Order Ceremony. According to George Washington University, by 2021 it had already penetrated the main NATO armies.

But it was already too late. The Reich collapsed. The Anglo-Saxons got Dontsov, Bandera and Stetsko. The theorist of integral nationalism was transferred to Canada, while the two practitioners of mass murder were transferred to Germany. MI6 and the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) rewrote their biographies, making their Nazi involvement and responsibility for the "Final Solution" disappear.

Stepan Bandera during his exile, celebrating the memory of Yevhen Konovalets.

Bandera and Stetsko were installed in Munich to organize the Anglo-Saxon stay-behind networks in the Soviet Union. From 1950 onwards, they had an important radio station, Radio Free Europe, which they shared with the Muslim Brotherhood of Said Ramadan (the father of Tariq Ramadan). The radio station was sponsored by the National Committee for a Free Europe, a CIA offshoot of which its director Alan Dulles was a member, as well as future president Dwight Eisenhower, newspaper magnate Henry Luce and film director Cecil B. DeMilles. Psychological warfare specialist and future patron of the Straussians, Charles D. Jackson, was chairman.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, for his part, after living in Palestine, took refuge in New York. He was joined by Benzion Netanyahu (the father of the current Israeli Prime Minister). The two men wrote the doctrinal texts of "revisionist Zionism" and the Jewish Encyclopedia.

Bandera and Stetsko moved around a lot. They organized sabotage operations throughout the Soviet Union, particularly in the Ukraine, and parachuted leaflets. For this purpose, they created the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), which brought together their Central European counterparts [5]. The British double agent, Kim Philby, informed the Soviets in advance about the actions of the Bandera. Bandera met with Dontsov in Canada and asked him to take the lead in the struggle. Once again, the intellectual refused, preferring to devote himself to his writing. He then drifted into a mystical delirium inspired by Viking myths. He announced the final battle of the Ukrainian knights against the Russian dragon. As for Bandera, he allied himself with the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek whom he met in 1958. But he was assassinated the following year by the KGB in Munich.

Funeral of Criminal Against Humanity, Stepan Bandera.

Chiang Kai-Shek and Yaroslav Stetsko at the founding of the World Anti-Communist League.

Yaroslav Stetsko continued the struggle through Radio Free Europe and the ABN. He went to the United States to testify before Senator Joseph MacCarthy’s Commission on Un-American Activities. In 1967, he and Chiang Kai-shek founded the World Anti-Communist League [6]. The League included many pro-US dictators from around the world and two schools of torture, in Panama and Taiwan. Klaus Barbie, who assassinated Jean Moulin in France and Che Guevara in Bolivia, was a member. In 1983, Stetsko was received at the White House by President Ronald Reagan and participated, along with Vice President George Bush Sr., in Lev Dobrianski’s "Captive Nations" (i.e., peoples occupied by the Soviets) ceremonies. He finally died in 1986.

But the story does not end there. His wife, Slava Stetsko, took over the leadership of these organizations. She too travelled the world to support any fight against the "communists", or rather, if we refer to Dontsov’s writings, against the Russians and the Chinese. When the USSR was dissolved, Mrs. Stetsko simply changed the title of the League to the World League for Freedom and Democracy, a name it still has today. She then devoted herself to regaining a foothold in Ukraine.

Slava Stetsko ran in the first elections of the independent Ukraine in 1994. She was elected to the Verkhovna Rada, but having been stripped of her nationality by the Soviets, she could not sit. However, she brought the Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, to the CIA offices in Munich and dictated parts of the new constitution to him. Even today, Article 16 of the new constitution states: "Preserving the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people is the responsibility of the state. Thus, Nazi racial discrimination is still proclaimed by modern Ukraine as in the worst moments of World War II.

Slava Stetsko opening the 2002 session of the Verkhovna Rada.

Slava Stetsko was re-elected at the next two sessions. She solemnly presided over the opening sessions on March 19, 1998 and on May 14, 2002.

In 2000, Lev Dobriansky organized a large symposium in Washington with many Ukrainian officials. He invited Straussian Paul Wolfowitz (a former collaborator of Charles D. Jackson). During this meeting, the "integral nationalists" put themselves at the service of the Straussians to destroy Russia [7].

Dmitro Yarosh when founding the Anti-Imperialist Front against Russia with the jihadists. He is now special adviser to the head of the Ukrainian armies.

On May 8, 2007, in Ternopol, on the initiative of the CIA, the "integral nationalists" of the Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense and Islamists created an anti-Russian "Anti-Imperialist Front" under the joint chairmanship of the Emir of Itchkeria, Dokka Umarov, and Dmytro Yarosh (the current special adviser to the head of the Ukrainian army). The meeting was attended by organizations from Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and Russia, including Islamist separatists from Crimea, Adygea, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Ossetia and Chechnya. Dokka Umarov, who was unable to go there due to international sanctions, had his contribution read out. In retrospect, the Crimean Tatars are unable to explain their presence at this meeting, if not their past service to the CIA against the Soviets.

The pro-US president, Viktor Yushchenko, created a Dmytro Dontsov Institute, following the "Orange Revolution". Yushchenko is an example of Anglo-Saxon whitewashing. He has always claimed to have no connection with the mainstream nationalists, but his father, Andrei, was a guard in a Nazi extermination camp [8]. The Dmytro Dontsov Institute would be closed in 2010, and then reopened after the 2014 coup.

President Viktor Yushchenko, shortly before the end of his term of office, elevated the criminal against humanity Stepan Bandera to the title of "Hero of the Nation".

In 2011, the mainstream nationalists succeeded in passing a law banning the commemoration of the end of World War II because it was won by the Soviets and lost by the Banderists. But President Viktor Yanukovych refused to enact it. Enraged, the "integral nationalists" attacked the procession of Red Army veterans, beating up old men. Two years later, the cities of Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk abolished the Victory Day ceremonies and banned all manifestations of joy.

In 2014, Ukrainians in Crimea and Donbass refused to recognize the coup government. Crimea, which had declared itself independent before the rest of Ukraine, reaffirmed its independence a second time and joined the Russian Federation. The Donbass sought a compromise. The "Ukrainian nationalists," led by President Petro Poroshenko, stopped providing public services there and bombed its population. In eight years, they murdered at least 16,000 of their fellow citizens in general indifference.

It was also from the 2014 coup that the full nationalist militias were incorporated into the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In their internal regulations, they enjoin each fighter to read the works of Dmytro Dontsov, including his master book, Націоналізм (Nationalism).

In April 2015, the Verkhovna Rada declared members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) "independence fighters." The law was enacted, in December 2018, by President Poroshenko. Former Waffen SS were retrospectively entitled to a pension and all sorts of benefits. The same law criminalized any claim that OUN militants and UPA fighters collaborated with the Nazis and practiced ethnic cleansing of Jews and Poles. Published in Ukraine, this article would send me to jail for writing it and you for reading it.

Inauguration of a commemorative plaque of the Criminal Against Humanity Dmytro Dontsov on the facade of the state news agency Ukrinform. During the ceremony, the general director of Ukrinform assured that Dontsov had founded, in 1918, the first Ukrainian press agency, UTA, of which Ukrinform is the successor.

On July 1, 2021, President Volodymyr Zelenski enacted the Law "On Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine" which places them under the protection of Human Rights. By default, citizens of Russian origin can no longer invoke them in court.

In February 2022, the "full nationalist" militias, which made up one-third of the country’s armed forces, planned a coordinated invasion of Crimea and the Donbass. They were stopped by the Russian military operation to implement UN Security Council Resolution 2202 to end the suffering of the people of Donbass.

Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland demonstrates her support for President Zelensky with members of the Canadian branch of the OUN. Today, Ms. Freeland is a candidate for the General Secretariat of NATO.

In March 2022, Israeli Prime Minister Nafatali Bennett, breaking with the "revisionist Zionism" of Benjamin Netanyahu (the son of Jabotinsky’s secretary), suggested to President Volodymyr Zelensky that he should agree with Russian demands and denazify his country [8]. Emboldened by this unexpected support, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dared to mention the case of the Jewish Ukrainian president, saying: "The Jewish people in their wisdom have said that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews. Every family has its black sheep, as they say." This was too much for the Israelis, who always worry when someone tries to divide them. His counterpart at the time, Yair Lapid, recalled that the Jews themselves never organized the Holocaust of which they were victims. Caught between its conscience and its alliances, the Hebrew state repeated its support for Ukraine, but refused to send it any weapons. In the end, the General Staff decided and the Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, closed any possibility of support to the successors of the mass murderers of Jews.

Ukrainians are the only nationalists who are not fighting for their people or their land, but for one idea: to annihilate the Jews and the Russians.

Main sources:
– Ukrainian Nationalism in the age of extremes. An intllectual biography of Dmytro Dontsov, Trevor Erlacher, Harvard University Press (2021).
– Stepan Bandera, The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide, and Cult, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Ibidem (2014).

Thierry Meyssan

Translation
Roger Lagassé

titre documents joints

Selon le rapport de l’IERES de l’Université George Washington (2021), l’Ordre Centuria a déjà pénétré les armées en Allemagne, au Canada, en France, en Pologne, au Royaume-Uni et aux États-Unis
(MPEG4 - 11.3 Mb)

More bad news:  the newly created U.S. coordination center in Stuttgart for Ukraine operations as a landmark on the way to WWIII

Earlier today I received an email from my good friend Professor of Law at the University of Illinois Francis A. Boyle regarding the creation in Stuttgart of a new U.S. coordination center for war operations in Ukraine headed by a 3-star general. The news item seems to have been sidelined this past week by Western mainstream coverage of the Russian withdrawal from Kherson and entry of Ukrainian forces into that city.  However, judging by Boyle’s interpretation, there is every reason to put a spotlight on this issue and to seek the broadest possible discussion in Alternative News electronic and print media.

I offer the following quote from Boyle’s email with his permission:

The story below is a pure cover story by the Pentagon. You do not need a 3 Star General and a Staff of 300 to keep tabs on U.S. Weapons in Ukraine. This is a War Command to wage war against Russia. The last time I dealt personally with a 3 Star General was  when I lectured at West Point on “Nuclear Deterrence” in their Senior Conference on that subject in front of, among others, the 3 Star General in Charge of War Operations at the Pentagon. The Pentagon puts a 3 Stars  General in Charge of War Operations—not Inventory. And you do not need a Headquarters Staff of 300 to do an Audit. It’s a War Headquarters Staff. We are going to war against Russia unless the American People can figure out some way to stop it!

Francis A. Boyle

Professor of Law

STUTTGART, Germany — A three-star general will lead a new Army headquarters in Germany that will include about 300 U.S. service members responsible for coordinating security assistance for Ukraine, a senior U.S. military official said this week.

Unquote

I refer those unfamiliar with Francis Boyle to his brief biography in the University of Illinois website:

https://law.illinois.edu/faculty-research/faculty-profiles/francis-boyle/   To that I can add, that his ‘political science’ studies for the Masters and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard were primarily in Russian/Soviet affairs, and that in his time at Harvard he worked under many of the same professors as did I.  In this sense, Boyle is a well qualified Russia expert, even if his primary listing at Illinois is as defender of human rights.  He is also particularly noteworthy this year for his efforts to promote among several key Congressmen the articles of impeachment against President Biden that he has drafted; the charges – waging undeclared war on Russia in violation of the Constitution. So far that has gained little traction, but when the new Congress with Republican majority takes its seats in 2023 the prospects of finding sponsors may be significantly improved.

Notwithstanding the worrisome or alarming news above, I close this essay with a glimmer of hope that the world has not yet gone completely mad.  From my volunteer translator in Germany, I have learned about the start of what should be a nationwide “Ami Go Home” movement in the Federal Republic. It will begin with mass demonstrations in the East German city of Leipzig on 26 November. The protests are inspired by the thinking of Oskar Lafonteine, a German politician who held leading positions in the SPD and later in Die Linke: namely the notion that it is high time for the United States occupation forces to leave Germany so that the country may recover its sovereignty. Those new to German politics may more easily identify Lafonteine as the husband of the eloquent Opposition member of the Bundestag Sahra Wagenknecht. It behooves me to add that per the advice of my translator when he forwarded to me news about the ‘Ami Go Home’ demonstration that the actual organizers are not on the German Left but, on the contrary, on the Hard Right. This interpretation has been reconfirmed by a well informed reader living in Berlin. Call this yet another ‘impersonation’ or imposter phenomenon if you will. We are living through interesting times.

Recently, I argued that Russia was provoked into beginning the ‘special military operation’ (SMO) by a series of events stretching from initial NATO claims of its goal to expand to Ukraine, NATO-Ukrainian cooperation, the Western-cultivated and ex post facto fully supported Maidan revolt (despite the neofascist Ukrainian element’s false flag snipers terrorist attack) to which Putin responded by annexing Crimea, Western support for Kiev’s attack on Donbass (including civilians), deeper Western and NATO involvement in Ukraine, Kiev’s failure to implement its obligations under the Minsk Donbass peace accords, and much else [see Gordon M. Hahn, Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West and the ‘New Cold War’ (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Books, 2018); https://gordonhahn.com/2022/02/24/coercive-diplomacy-phase-2-war-and-iron-curtain-descended/; https://gordonhahn.com/2016/01/21/report-the-russian-american-reset-nato-expansion-and-the-making-of-the-ukrainian-crisis/; https://gordonhahn.com/2016/03/09/the-real-snipers-massacre-ukraine-february-2014-updatedrevised-working-paper/; and https://www.academia.edu/37784742/Shooting_of_Maidan_Protesters_from_Maidan_Controlled_Locations_Video_Appendix_C_2018_?email_work_card=title%5D. As far as I am concerned, the ‘West/NATO expansion provoked the Ukrainian crisis and war’ is an incontrovertible fact.

More recently, I also argued, Putin decided to call off coercive diplomacy begun in spring 2021 and escalated in autumn through January 2021 by massing tropps at the Ukrainian border, when the West rejected Moscow’s appeals to end NATO expansion and sign a draft treaty on security agreements for Kiev and a European security architecture (https://gordonhahn.com/2022/01/31/putins-coercive-diplomacy/). The West’s rejection was accompanied by a major escalation in the Ukrainian military attacks along the Donbass line of contact and a threat by Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy to abandon the Budapest Memorandum, implying an attempt to acquire nuclear weapons (https://gordonhahn.com/2022/02/24/coercive-diplomacy-phase-2-war-and-iron-curtain-descended/). Zelensky said at the annual meeting of the Munich Security Conference on February 19, 2022: “I, as president, will do it for the first time. But Ukraine and I are doing it for the last time. I am launching consultations within the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. The Minister of Foreign Affairs has been asked to convene them. If they do not happen again or if their results do not guarantee the security of our country, Ukraine will have the right to think that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and that all the comprehensive decisions of 1994 are being questioned” (“Speech by Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the 58th Munich Security Conference”, by Volodymyr Zelensky, Voltaire Network, 19 February 2022). The Munich conference is attended by all the leaders of the NATO alliance and other parties interested in European security issues, and yet not one Western leader questioned the appropriateness of what would be a violation not just of the Budapest Memorandum but of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. That these immediate provocations were a direct cause of Putin’s decision to begin the SMO is not possible to prove, but the thesis is highly plausible if not likely a fact. Putin responded to Zelenskiy’s nuclear demache, saying that the only thing Ukraine needs is a uranium enrichment system, but this technical issue “is not an insoluble problem” for Ukraine, especially given the support Kiev enjoys from some nuclear powers (www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/putin-says-minsk-agreement-on-ukraine-exists-no-more/2510573). Incidentally, this is not only pertinent to Putin’s February decision but also provides some context for the struggle surrounding the Zaporozhe Nuclear Power Plant.

Now new evidence suggests that perhaps, perhaps, the West and Kiev intentionally or not engaged in additional provocations that prompted Putin’s SMO on 24 February 2022. For example, former President Petro Poroshenko has suggested that Kiev never intended to follow through on the Minsk accords and sought only to buy time for Ukraine to strengthen its military through training and weapons supplied by the West for an offensive to take back Donbass and Crimea. In a June interview to Radio Free Europe’s Ukrainian language service and the German Deutsche Welle, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said the Minsk accords were intended to “delay the war” and “create powerful armed forces”: “Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war – to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces” (www.bignewsnetwork.com/news/272589263/minsk-deal-was-used-to-buy-time-ukraines-poroshenko). Then in an August 2022 interview advisor to Zelenskiy and his Office of the President of Ukraine, Aleksei Arestovich revealed that in December 2021 the Ukrainian armed forces deployed additional troops to the Donbass contact line under the cover of a training exercise “despite the damage (the deployment) did to the economy” (https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/8504). Perhaps this is what led Zelenskiy to tell the Ukrainian tntelligence services a month before Putin’s SMO began the following: “”We have learned to deter and counter external aggression quite effectively. I am convinced that the time has come to move to offensive actions to defend our national interests” (www.president.gov.ua/en/news/zovnishnya-rozvidka-vidigraye-vazhlivu-rol-u-protidiyi-zagro-72517). Then throw into the mix the aforementioned exponential increase in firing across the contact line undertaken by Ukrainian forces first and Zelenskiy’s threat to pursue nuclear capability.

I am saying ‘provoked Putin intentionally or not’ because we do not know what Moscow knew about these new deployments. Moscow did claim that Ukraine was preparing an attack on Donbass, especially after the SMO began, even claiming that it discovered documents proving Kiev was planning an attack. But it remains unclear whether these Russian claims pertain to the newly revealed secret depoloyment. Certainly, Moscow would had Donbass and Ukraine crawling with intelligence operatives and well-covered with electronic and satellite data collection and would likely have observed the ‘secret’ deployment. Then the issue might be whether Kiev and/or the West wanted Moscow to uncover the deployment, so as to provoke Putin into attacking. Or perhaps they did not want this, but Russian intelligence nevertheless did discover it, which along with other immediate challenges noted above prompted Putin’s decision to begin the SMO.

If the provocation theory is correct than it would also be correct that the West wanted Putin to invade, and if that is so then it would be logical that the West would want the war to continue. We now know that the West directly intervened with Zelenskiy to prevent Russia and Ukraine from finalizing a tentative agreement that would have ended the war in April. A recent article in the establishment flafship foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs written by two rusologists with deep ties to the ruling Democrat Party-state revealed this: “According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries” (https://archive.ph/kxfbG and https://raheemkassam.substack.com/p/russia-and-ukraine-came-to-peace?fbclid=IwAR0n03z7v-tJOjIOFC4_eXZCjvzyJbwzcgjycFbFigo9a9LV_FOA439_o74). This is one piece of evidence that the West wants the war to continue. NATO expansion and weakening Russia trump international security and Ukrainians’ well-being. The West’s massive supply of weapons, intelligence, military expertise, training, strategic planning, and financial support and Washington’s and Brussels’s lack of any effort in the diplomatic sphere to encourage negotiations further demonstrate that the West wants the war to continue.

At the same time, there is reason to believe that Zelenskiy himself may have been manipulated by the West, there is a new video circulating that shows French President Emmanuel Macron in discussion over the phone with Zelenskiy as the Russian invasion began on February 24th. Zelenskiy can be heard pleading with Macron to organize US President Joe Bden and European leaders to make a phone call to Putin and urge him to stop the military action, claiming that if this is done, then Putin “will stop” (https://t.me/stranaua/62507). On the other hand, Zelenskiy’s suspicions regarding Biden’s and other US officials’ claims of an imminent invasion and reports that Russia engaged in a massive bribery and recruiting campaign among Ukrainians before the war, which would have almost certainly led to some reporting the effort to the authorities and tipping off the possibility of a Russian invasion suggest that the Ukrainian leadership should have been well aware of the likelihood of an attack. Yet Zelenskiy showed no desire to negotiate with Putin on the key issues Moscow sought to have addressed: NATO expansion, direct talks between Kiev and the Donbass, the incomplete Minsk peace process, and so on.

In sum, there is some reason to believe that the escalation of the Donbass war ordered by Putin in February has a more interesting pre-history and causal chain than might be assumed even those who understand that Putin did not wake up one morning and decide to seize Ukraine in some master plan to ‘reestablish the Soviet Union’ and other such delusions. At any rate, the new war’s start needs more investigation and its origins are likely only to be revealed many years from now.

About the Author

Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, http://www.canalyt.com and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, www.cetisresearch.org. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu

Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.

Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, and the Hoover Institution.

Propaganda makes you stupid. We know that the Ukrainian integral nationalists have committed abominable massacres, especially during the Second World War. But we don’t know what they have been doing on our doorstep for the last thirty years, including the civil war they have been waging for the last eight years. Our own stupidity allows us to endure the war cries of our political leaders on the side of these criminals.

Voltaire Network | Paris (France) | 27 October 2022

Slava Stetsko, the widow of Nazi Prime Minister Yaroslav Stetsko, opened the 1998 and 2002 sessions of the Verkhovna Rada.

When war comes, governments always believe that they must boost the morale of their people by showering them with propaganda. The stakes are so high, life and death, that debates get tougher and extremist positions become popular. This is exactly what we are witnessing, or rather how we are being transformed. In this game, the ideas defended by some and others have nothing to do with their ideological presuppositions, but with their proximity to power

In the etymological sense, propaganda is just the art of convincing, of propagating ideas. But in modern times, it is an art that aims at reconstructing reality in order to denigrate the adversary and magnify one’s own troops.

Contrary to a widespread idea in the West, it was not the Nazis or the Soviets who invented it, but the British and the Americans during the First World War 1.

Today, Nato coordinates efforts in this area from its Strategic Communication Centre in Riga, Latvia 2. It identifies the points on which it wants to act and organizes international programs to carry them out.

For example, NATO has identified Israel as a weak point: while former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a personal friend of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, his successor, Naftali Bennett, recognized the validity of Russian policy. He even advised the return of Crimea and Donbass and, above all, the denazification of Ukraine. The current Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, is more hesitant. He does not want to support the fundamentalist nationalists who massacred a million Jews shortly before and during the Second World War. But he also wants to stay on good terms with the West.

To bring Israel back into line, Nato is trying to persuade Tel Aviv that in case of a Russian victory, Israel would lose its position in the Middle East 3. To this end, it is spreading the lie that Iran is Russia’s military ally as widely as possible. The international press is constantly claiming that Russian drones are Iranian on the battlefield, and soon the medium-range missiles will be too. Yet Moscow knows how to manufacture these weapons and has never asked Tehran for them. Russia and Iran have repeatedly denied these allegations. But Western politicians, relying on the press and not on mere reflection, have already imposed sanctions on Iranian arms dealers. Soon Yair Lapid, son of the president of the Yad Vashem memorial, will be surrounded and forced to side with the criminals.

The British, on the other hand, traditionally excel in activating networked media and enlisting artists. MI6 relies on a group of 150 news agencies working within the PR Network 4. They convince all these companies to take up their imputations and slogans.

The founder of Ukrainian integral nationalism, Dmytro Dontsov, had an obsessive hatred of Jews and Gypsies. During the World War, he left Ukraine to become a director of the Reinhard Heydrich Institute. It was this institution, based in Czechoslovakia, that was responsible for planning the extermination of all Jews and Gypsies at the Wannsee Conference. He ended his days peacefully in the United States.

They are the ones who successively convinced you that President Vladimir Putin was dying, then that he had gone mad, or that he was facing strong opposition at home and that he would be overthrown by a coup. Their work continues today with cross interviews with soldiers in Ukraine. You hear Ukrainian soldiers say they are nationalists and Russian soldiers say they are afraid but must defend Russia. You hear that Ukrainians are not Nazis and that Russians, living under a dictatorship, are forced to fight. In reality, most Ukrainian soldiers are not "nationalists" in the sense of defenders of their homeland, but "integral nationalists" in the sense of two poets, Charles Maurras and Dmytro Dontsov 5. This is not the same thing at all.

It was only in 1925 that Pope Pius XI condemned "integral nationalism". At that time Dontsov had already written his Націоналізм (Nationalism) (1921). Maurras and Dontsov defined the nation as a tradition and thought their nationalism against others (Maurras against Germans and Dontsov against Russians). Both abhorred the French Revolution, the principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity and denounced Jews and Freemasons relentlessly. They consider religion as useful for the organization of society, but seem agnostic. These positions lead Maurras to become a Petainist and Dontsov a Hitlerian. The latter will sink into a varègue (Swedish Viking) mystical delirium. The next pope, Pius XII, repealed the condemnation of his predecessor, just before the war broke out. At the liberation, Maurras was condemned for intelligence with the enemy (he was a Germanophobe), but Dontsov was recuperated by the Anglo-Saxon secret services and exiled to Canada, then to the USA.

As for the Russian soldiers we see interviewed on our TV news, they do not tell us that they are forced to fight, but, unlike the integral nationalists, they are not fanatics. For them, war, even when defending their own, is always a horror. It is because we are repeatedly told that Russia is a dictatorship that we understand something else. We do not accept that Russia is a democracy because, for us, a democracy cannot be an authoritarian regime. Yet, for example, the Second French Republic (1848-1852) was both a democracy and an authoritarian regime.

We are easy to convince because we know nothing about Ukrainian history and culture. The most we know is that Novorossia was ruled by a French aristocrat, Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis de Richelieu, a personal friend of Tsar Alexander I. He continued the work of the Prince of Ukraine. He continued the work of Prince Grigori Potemkin who wanted to build this region on the model of Athens and Rome, which explains why today Novorossia is still of Russian culture (and not Ukrainian) without ever having known serfdom.

The Bibi Yar memorial in Kiev. 33 771 Jewish Ukrainians were shot in two days, on September 29 and 30, 1941, by the Ukrainian Waffen SS and Reinhard Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen. This massacre was celebrated as a victory by the mainstream nationalists. Today, the Ukrainian government has named the main avenue leading to it after the integral nationalist Stepan Bandera, "in honor" of the greatest criminal in its history.

A few months after his election, on May 6, 1995, Leonid Kushma, the second president of the new Ukraine, went to Munich to meet with Slava Stetsko, the widow of the Ukrainian Nazi prime minister. He agreed to the introduction of an explicit reference to Nazism in the new constitution: "preserving the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people is the responsibility of the state" (sic).

We are unaware of the atrocities in Ukraine of the interwar period and the Second World War, and have a vague idea of the violence of the USSR. We ignore that the theoretician Dontsov and his disciple Stepan Bandera did not hesitate to massacre all those who did not correspond to their "integral nationalism", first the Jews in this Khazar country, then the Russians and the Communists, the anarchists of Nestor Makhno, and many others. The "integral nationalists", who had become admirers of the Führer and deeply racist, returned to the forefront with the dissolution of the USSR 6. On May 6, 1995, President Leonid Kuchma went to Munich (to the CIA offices) to meet with the leader of the integral nationalists, Steva Stesko, the widow of the Nazi prime minister. She had just been elected to the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament), but had not been able to take her seat because she had been stripped of her Ukrainian citizenship. A month later, Ukraine adopted its current constitution, which states in its Article 16 that "preserving the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people is the responsibility of the state" (sic). Subsequently, the same Steva Stetsko twice opened the session of the Rada, concluding her speeches with the war cry of the integral nationalists: "Glory to Ukraine!

Modern Ukraine has patiently built its Nazi regime. After proclaiming the "genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people", it enacted various laws. The first one grants the benefit of human rights by the state only to Ukrainians, not to foreigners. The second defines who the majority of Ukrainians are, and the third (enacted by President Zelensky) who the minorities are. The trick is that no law speaks about Russian speakers. Therefore, by default, the courts do not recognize them the benefit of human rights.

Since 2014, a civil war has pitted the integral nationalists against the Russian-speaking populations, mainly those of Crimea and Donbass. 20,000 deaths later, the Russian Federation, applying its "responsibility to protect," launched a special military operation to implement Security Council Resolution 2202 (Minsk Agreements) and end the martyrdom of Russian speakers.

President Zelensky and his friend, Benjamin Netanyahu. The latter is now making support for Ukraine his main election campaign theme. Netanyahu is the son of the private secretary of Zeev Jabotinsky, a Ukrainian figure who allied with the mainstream nationalists against the Bolsheviks. He tried to put the Ukrainian Jewish community at the service of these anti-Semites, but was unanimously denounced within the World Zionist Organization, of which he became a director.

Nato propaganda tells us about the real sufferings of the Ukrainians, but it does not mention the eight years of torture, murder and massacres that preceded it. It talks about "our common values with Ukrainian democracy", but what values do we share with the integral nationalists and where is the democracy in Ukraine?

We do not have to choose between one or the other, but only to defend peace and therefore the Minsk Agreements and resolution 2202.

War drives us crazy. There is a reversal of values. The most extremist triumph. Some of our ministers speak of "stifling Russia" (sic). We do not see that we are supporting the very ideas we believe we are fighting against.

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Two detailed reports appeared in Moscow yesterday describing precisely how the attack on the Crimean Bridge on October 8 was organised and carried out.

The source is the Federal Security Service (FSB), with supporting evidence from the Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, and Armenia, including at least five eye-witnesses and participants, plus telephone interceptions.

The politics of this evidence, and the timing of its publication now, are plain. The humanitarian grain export agreement, promoted by United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, has been manipulated by the Ukrainians and their NATO allies – excluding Turkey – to conceal weapons shipments for military operations against Russia.

Guterres did the same thing in his conduct of the negotiations to evacuate civilians held hostage the bunkers of the Azovstal complex in Mariupol during the siege of April and May.  Guterres lied in his direct talks with Russians officials then. He continued lying to them during the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) negotiations on the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant in September. His public lying led to the unprecedented condemnation of the Secretary-General by the Russian Foreign Ministry on September 30; Guterres was dismissed as “an instrument of propaganda and pressure on member states”.  

In the newly reported interpretation of the FSB’s evidence, the shipping links  have been exposed between Odessa and the Danube River ports of Romania and Bulgaria, opening for public discussion in Moscow  the future of Odessa in the operational planning of the Russian General Staff. This is to be decided by the Stavka before President Vladimir Putin leaves for the G20 summit conference in Bali on November 15-16,  at which President Joseph Biden and Vladimir Zelensky will also be present.  

Also obvious is what is missing from these operational reports from the FSB sources. So far there has been no publication of the evidence already gathered by the FSB and military intelligence on the M.O. for coordinating the movement of the truck with its explosive charge on the bridge and its movement in parallel with the fuel train, so that the detonation would coincide and strike the train, magnifying the impact on both road and rail structures.

Reports by Vzglyad analysts, Rafael Fakhrutdinov and Yevgeny Krutikov, follow; they have been translated into English without interpolation, explanation, or comment. Maps and other captioned illustrations have been added to their running text.

HOW THE BOMB WAS TRANSPORTED BY SEA FROM ODESSA

Source:[https://vz.ru/](https://vz.ru/politics/2022/10/13/1181928.html)

The terrorist attack on the Crimean Bridge forces Russia to take Odessa
The ‘Grain Deal’  helped Kiev organize a terrorist attack against the Crimean bridge
October 13, 2022
By Rafael Fakhrutdinov

The terrorist attack against the Crimean Bridge revealed a serious flaw for Russia’s security in the ‘grain deal’.   That provided that vessels carrying grain would be inspected only in the Turkish Straits. The ship carrying explosives which left Odessa was able to safely enter the Danube River. This violation of the ‘grain deal’ will not solve the problem – after leaving Zmeiny [Snake] Island, Russia lost control over this sector of the Black Sea. What are the options?

The Federal Security Service has revealed the organizer and perpetrators of the terrorist attack on the Crimean Bridge – the responsibility has been assigned to the head of military intelligence of Ukraine Kirill Budanov. The FSB has also found out the route of the explosive device which  went off on the bridge on October 8.

The first stage of this movement is of particular interest. In early August, the dangerous cargo with a total weight of more than 22 tonnes, camouflaged under rolls of  construction film, was transported from the seaport of Odessa along the Black Sea coast and  up the Danube to the Bulgarian river port of Ruse, located inland. ‘We see a gross violation of the grain deal. The fact that a military cargo has left Odessa, directed against the Russian Federation, is an obvious violation of the agreement,’ said Deputy Head of the International Affairs Committee of the Federation Council,  Andrei Klimov.

Recall that the inspection of ships is undertaken in order to exclude the transportation of military cargo. But the subtlety is that the inspection is carried out only at the entrance and exit from the Black Sea. The JCC groups that conduct the inspection are working in harbours in the area of the Turkish Straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. But the vessel with the explosives ‘turned off’ much earlier.

As the newspaper VZGLYAD has already noted,  the ship, which left Odessa for Ruse, moved on a coastal course along the seashore, and then entered the Danube, where it proceeded through Romanian territory to the Bulgarian port. The Ukraine supports active navigation on the Danube, although this is hampered by the Ukrainian mines installed at the beginning of the Special Military Operation near Odessa and [since February 24] they have been drifting to the Danube delta and out into the Black Sea. The cargo shipment was regulated by the fact that on  July 22 in Istanbul, Russia, Turkey and the UN signed a memorandum of cooperation in the supply of Russian and Ukrainian agricultural products to the markets. Ukraine has signed its part of the agreement with Turkey and the UN. The ‘Grain deal’ was concluded for a period of 120 days until November, with the possibility of extension.

Under the terms of this agreement, a Joint Coordination Center (JCC) with the participation of Russia, Turkey and the Ukraine operates in Istanbul to monitor the departure of ships from Ukraine. The main thing to pay attention to is that the JCC is charged with the inspection of ships, in order to exclude the transportation of military cargo.

TURKISH NAVY IDENTIFICATION OF UKRAINIAN MINES IN THE BLACK SEA SINCE FEBRUARY

Source: [https://turkishnavy.net//](https://turkishnavy.net/2022/09/10/mine-scare-in-the-black-sea/) -- September 10, 2022

The main thing is that the vessel sailing from Odessa to Ruse was not subject to verification by Turkish observers as part of the ‘grain deal’. ‘We can’t check such vessels that go along the coast. Especially if the ship was sailing under the Bulgarian flag. Two neighbouring NATO countries, Romania and Bulgaria, are exploiting this,’ said military expert Vasily Dandykin.

According to the Istanbul Agreements, ‘all activities in Ukrainian territorial waters are conducted under the authority and responsibility of Ukraine” (point C of the “Initiatives for the safe transportation of grain and food from Ukrainian ports”). The Ukrainian side focuses on this point, which excludes external control. Due to the lack of control, the cargo was delivered to Bulgaria, and from there to Georgia by sea as a transit to Armenia. The cargo was sealed and was not subject to Bulgarian or Georgian customs inspection.

Website of the UN for the implementation of the grain [agreement](https://news-un-org.translate.goog/ru/story/2022/09/1431761?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc).

Russia did not have the opportunity to control the movement of the vessel along the Black Sea coast from Odessa to the Danube estuary. This is largely due to the terms of the grain  agreement. In June, as a gesture of goodwill, Russia withdrew its garrison from Zmeiny Island, which occupies a strategically important position about 35 km east of the mouth of the Danube. From Odessa to Zmeiny is about 120 km, and near the island there is the regular shipping route between the Bulgarian port of Varna and other ports of the western Black Sea region. ‘It has been demonstrated to the world community that the Russian Federation does not hinder the efforts of the UN to organize a humanitarian corridor for the export of agricultural products from the territory of Ukraine,’ RIA Novosti reported the statement by the Russian Defense Ministry regarding the withdrawal of our military from the island. After the evacuation of the garrison from Zmeiny, Ukraine resumed navigation on the Danube.

“The military intelligence agency of Ukraine has clearly calculated – why not take advantage of the situation when the Odessa port is unblocked, and deals continue to be concluded with Bulgaria in the field of construction and so on. What is not a convenient moment? The fact that the ports have been unblocked is being quietly used to carry out such operations,’ Semyon Bagdasarov, director of the Center for the Study of the Middle East and Central Asia, said air during the television program, Soloviev Live.

Theoretically, Ukrainian military intelligence could well use a cargo ship with grain going towards Istanbul, said Ivan Lizan, head of the analytical bureau of the SONAR-2050 project. ‘The explosives could also have been offloaded [at a concealed location] during the operation by disabling the vessel transponder. After that, turn the transponder on – and the ship would proceed to Istanbul, where representatives of the UN, Russia and Turkey would have boarded it and checked the cargo ship for any prohibited items, including explosives and weapons,’ Lizan said.

Altering the regime of the ‘grain deal’ – for example, so that Turkey (as the guarantor of the Istanbul Agreements) would have the opportunity to inspect ships not in the Bosphorus, but immediately after they leave the Ukrainian ports – would be problematic, says corresponding member of the Academy of Military Sciences,  Alexander Bartosh. ‘Can we, within the framework of the grain deal, oblige Turkey to inspect all vessels leaving the territorial waters of Ukraine, and check all ships? I think this would be very difficult – Ankara itself will not agree to this,’ Bartosz told VZGLYAD. ‘Besides, before that, Turkey would have to hold consultations with its NATO allies, and all this would take a very long time.’

“Nevertheless, this should clearly become a topic for negotiations between Russia and Turkey in the very near future. This is because a terrorist attack was committed on Russian territory, in which the Black Sea countries were involved,’ the interlocutor noted.

Presidents Putin and Erdogan, with their delegations, meeting in Astana on [October 13](http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69590).

According to Bagdasarov, it is necessary to go further and raise the issue of terminating the ‘grain deal’, the validity period for which, we add, will already expire in November. The expert recalled that Russia has repeatedly criticized the quality of the implementation of these agreements, Vladimir Putin pointed out that the poorest countries, which should be the recipients of supplies, receive from 3% to 5% of all the exported products. ‘A number of countries are interested in this grain deal including  Turkey as an intermediary. It is clear that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in receiving this grain, slightly improves his domestic support rating on the eve of the elections scheduled for next year. Why do we need this grain deal?’ the expert asked himself.

‘The decision to withdraw from the grain deal after the circumstances have been revealed will be made by the leadership of our country. At the same time, it is obvious that the West, represented by the United States, the EU and the UN, has not fulfilled its obligations under the deal,’ said Senator Konstantin Dolgov, former Russian Foreign Ministry Commissioner for Human Rights, Democracy and Rule of Law,  and deputy Russian Permanent Representative to the UN.

But if we assume that Russia will withdraw from the deal, then it will be quite difficult to regain control of Zmeiny [Snake] Island and the north-west of the Black Sea as a whole, Bartosh believes. ‘As for the control of the water area in the Zmeiny area, the Russian military may stop some vessel for inspection, but this will be an international scandal, since we do not have an international mandate for such actions. It will also be difficult to take this zone by military means, because it is being shot through by Ukrainian anti–ship warfare means – mobile, disguised,’ the expert points out. ‘They have not been suppressed, and if we could, we probably would have attacked them earlier. In general, the military-political leadership of the Russian Federation will not risk the lives of sailors to try to take control of the waters near this island.’

Source: [https://www.bbc.com/](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61406808)

‘Cancellation of the Ukrainian grain deal would mean the naval blockade of Odessa and the  preparation for its potential assault,’  political scientist and  former premier of the Lugansk People’s Republic, Marat Bashirov, noted a few days ago  in the Telegram channel. The establishment of control over Odessa as one of the potential targets of the Russian operation is also mentioned by Western experts.

At the end of September, the US publication_, National Interes_t, commented in predicting a possible Russian  response to the advance of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Kharkov region: ‘Moscow may launch a counteroffensive, focusing on the capture of the Black Sea port of Odessa. This city is the last exit of Ukraine to the Black Sea, and its capture would actually turn the Ukraine into a fully landlocked country. It will also give Russia a stranglehold over Ukraine’s main and vital economic outlet, because most of Kiev’s exports and imports pass through Odessa. The loss of this city would be a colossal economic and psychological blow for Ukraine.’ According to the National Interest, ‘given that Russia has transferred a significant number of troops and weapons from the east of Ukraine to the south,  even before Kiev’s offensive in the east,’ there is a high probability that Odessa is now the main target of the Russian Armed Forces.

HOW THE BOMB WAS TRANSPORTED BY ROAD AND TRUCK TO THE BRIDGE

Source: [https://vz.ru/](https://vz.ru/society/2022/10/12/1181923.html)

Ukrainian terror came to Russia through Estonia and Armenia
The moment of detention of one of the suspects in the preparation of terrorist attacks on the territory of Russia
October 12, 2022.
By Evgeny Krutikov

With unusual speed the FSB of Russia has revealed the picture of who delivered the explosives that eventually worked on the Crimean Bridge, and how. A lot of people participated in the covert operation, and it was managed by the military intelligence agency of Ukraine. Why did all this become possible and how did the explosives easily slip over several borders at once, including the Russian one?

The FSB has announced the detention of five citizens of Russia plus three citizens of Ukraine and Armenia as part of the investigation into the terrorist attack on the Crimean Bridge. The organizer of this crime is called the Ukrainian military intelligence. The FSB stated that “the organizer of the terrorist attack on the Crimean Bridge was the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, its head Kirill Budanov, employees and agents.”

Also on Wednesday, it was reported about the detention in the Bryansk region of a Ukrainian agent who was going to detonate an explosive device at one of the logistics terminals. Another saboteur was detained in the Moscow region with two portable Igla anti-aircraft complexes. Both of them entered the territory of Russia through Estonia; the weapons and explosives were unearthed in caches in the border regions.

According to the investigation, the explosive device which went off in a truck on the Crimean Bridge was camouflaged in rolls under construction plastic film on 22 pallets with a total weight of 22,770 kg. In early August this was sent from the seaport of Odessa to the Bulgarian city of Ruse under contract No. 02/08/2022 between LLC Translogistic UA (Kiev) and Baltex Capital S.A.

The Bulgarian city of Ruse is located not on the Black Sea, but on the Bulgarian bank of the Danube River in the interior of the country. Consequently, the ship, which left Odessa for Ruse, moved on a coastal course along the seashore, and then entered the Danube. Thus, it was not subject to verification by Turkish observers as part of the ‘grain deal’.

And then the cargo was delivered from Bulgaria to [Poti] Georgia by sea in transit for Armenia. That is, it was sealed and was not subject to Bulgarian or Georgian customs inspection. This is a “gray” scheme, according to which contraband is usually smuggled.

“Citizens of Ukraine Mikhail Vladimirovich Tsyurkalo, born in 1975,  Denis Olegovich Kovach, born in 1979, Roman Ivanovich Solomko, born in 1971;  citizens of Georgia Inosaridze Sandro, a broker named Levan,  and a citizen of Armenia Arthur Terchanyan, born in 1985,  were involved in organizing the shipment of cargo from Bulgaria to the port of Poti (Georgia), and then to Armenia. From September 29 to October 3, 2022, in Yerevan, at the Transalliance terminal, the cargo was cleared according to the rules of the EEC [Eurasian Economic Commission] and documents were substituted, after which its new consignor became GU AR JI GROUP LLC (Republic of Armenia, Alaverdi city), and the recorded consignee became Leader LLC (Moscow city), according to the FSB report.

Source: [https://t.me/boris_rozhin/](https://t.me/boris_rozhin/66939)

However, the cargo did not reach Moscow. On October 4, the cargo crossed the Russian-Georgian border at the Upper Lars checkpoint on a DAF truck registered in Georgia and was unloaded at the Armavir wholesale base of the Krasnodar Territory on October 6.

It should also be noted here that the cargo had already been customs cleared according to the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC)    rules in Yerevan, and therefore it was not subject to additional customs inspection at the Russian border. By the way, the Georgian side has already managed to disown what had been happening, declaring that ‘no cargo with explosives crossed the Georgian customs border.’ Formally, this is true, since the cargo had already been cleared in Yerevan according to the rules of the EEC,  and had nothing to do with the Georgian customs border. To be clear:  the customs border is different from the physical one. For transit goods going from one EEC country [Armenia] to another [Russia] through the territory of a country that is not a member of this union [Georgia], it is as if they do not cross the customs space of this transit jurisdiction.

A reproduction photo of the truck cargo and copies of the EEC customs declarations [released](https://southfront.org/russia-revealed-accomplices-and-orchestrator-of-crimean-bridge-explosion-two-more-ukrainian-terrorist-attacks-thwarted/) by the FSB.

In Armavir, the cargo was received by a local company Agro Service, engaged in the cultivation of soybeans. This is a family business, which has been owned by the Azatian family for more than 20 years – the head of the family Samvel and his children — the elder George and the younger Artem. All of them are natives of the city of Makeyevka, Donetsk People’s Republic, who moved to Krasnodar Krai a long time ago.

Samvel the father and oldest son George are mainly engaged in the affairs of their soy business. The youngest, Artem, studied to be a lawyer, but he did not find a place for himself in Armavir and some time ago went to live in the Crimea. To Simferopol to work. It was Artem Azatian who called his father from Crimea on the eve of the terrorist attack and asked him to help some friend of his. The friend had asked him to hold a cargo in his warehouse for literally a day, for which another truck would then come from Krasnodar to collect it.  The elder brother George was not sleep-walking but he was very surprised when a truck with foreign (Georgian) license plates drove up to his warehouse.

“The driver handed me a stack of invoices to sign, but I gave them back to him. Why should I read and sign other people’s documents? Father and brother agreed, I helped,” he explained. This is a normal story for the North Caucasus.

George Azatian and a company worker, tractor driver Yuri Postnikov,  organized the unloading of pallets from the Georgian truck using a forklift. During the investigation, the FSB took Postnikov’s work gloves in which he had worked on the unloading and reloading. Apparently, the investigation hopes to find traces of explosives on them. But this is unlikely. In the evening of the same day, an  Inter company truck from Krasnodar stopped by the warehouse, where the pallets were loaded.

Where did the Inter truck come from, which eventually exploded on the Crimean Bridge?

There is an electronic freight exchange in Russia, ATI.SU, created by one IT company. The exchange’s head office is located in St. Petersburg. It has been operating for more than 20 years, it is a respected structure that is used in 60 countries. It works like this. You need to transport cargo from point A to point B. You don’t have your own trucks or other means of delivery. Then you place an ad-request on this exchange with an indication of the route and the desired dates of loading / unloading. You are contacted by independent carriers, of which there are a dime a dozen in the country: people buy a vehicle (often a truck) or some other cargo vehicle and earn money on it.

You choose the carrier you like and enter into an electronic contract with him. There is a feedback system and reviews about customers and carriers. Very often, this exchange is also used by large regional transport aggregator companies which receive a certain order in a region where at that time they don’t have their own vehicles. A convenient thing.

This system is similar to the one called bareboat charter in seaborne shipping.  This is when the customer hires just the vessel without a crew for cargo transportation. Then the captain is hired, and he hires the crew. At the same time, it is only known that it is necessary to transport cargo from point A to point B, but what kind of cargo it is – even the captain does not necessarily know this. And often he doesn’t want to know.

In the case of an electronic transportation exchange, the driver also does not know what he is carrying. That is, in theory, he should know. Because he has the invoices and all other documents, but in reality the driver sees only bags or boxes. Freight forwarders usually do not look into the cargo. Another feature of such a system — carriers often do not deal with the actual manufacturer of the cargo, but with intermediaries or stockists detached from the sale and purchase deal. In our case, such intermediaries unwittingly turned out to be Samvel and Georgy Azatian who had been asked in a fraternal way to hold someone else’s cargo in their wholesale warehouse for a day.

At the height of the bombing of aircraft by various Palestinian groups in the 1970s and 1980s, airports expressly announced: do not take other people’s belongings or parcels with you on board. By the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s, such memos were already distributed in the USSR, and then in Russia. But how can you refuse a loved one?

And on the eve of the terrorist attack, an offer appeared on this electronic freight exchange from a certain transport company from Ulyanovsk ‘TEK-34’ to transport cargo from Armavir to Simferopol. A non-existent company was indicated as the recipient of the cargo in Crimea. The fact that it does not exist, this turned out much later.

The TEK-34 company was registered in the Volgograd region by a citizen of the Russian Federation Alexei Orlov, but it last showed signs of life in 2018. Then it was bought out in 2020 by Oleg Antipov, a resident of Ulyanovsk, on whose behalf the announcement was placed on the electronic exchange. Antipov has not been detained and is actively cooperating with the investigation. He claims that he was framed and ‘his conscience is clear.’

And it was like this. ‘On October 7 of this year, with the assistance of Roman Solomko, a citizen of Ukraine, Vladimir Vasilyevich Zloba, born in 1987, and five other resident  citizens of Russia, the documents for the cargo were changed again, the sender indicated LLC TEK-34 (Ulyanovsk), and the recipient was a non–existent company in the Republic of Crimea,’ the FSB reports.

That is, professional hackers hacked the website of the TEK-34 company and placed an ad on the electronic transportation exchange on behalf of Oleg Antipov.

A private trucker named Mahir Yusubov, born in 1971, a resident of Krasnodar, responded to the ad. The vehicle, of the same Inter company, was recently re–registered to his own nephew, 25–year-old Samir Yusubov, who is currently abroad.

The fact is that trucker Mahir Yusubov got into an accident somewhere near Kazan some time ago and he has remained in debt to someone. To keep himself out of  harm’s way, Yusubov says he re-registered the truck to his nephew so that his creditors wouldn’t take it away. If they would come, they would find he has nothing. That is why at first the initial suspect was the young Samir Yusubov, although the driver of the truck, 51-year-old Mahir, clearly visible on the video at the checkpoint at the Crimean Bridge, did not even look like the young and athletic Samir in body build. A few days later, Samir Saimur ogli Yusubov officially stated that he had nothing to do with the incident.

The owners of the Armavir warehouse, the Azatian family,  and trucker Mahir Yusubov did not contact each other in any way. The Azatians only knew the number of the truck which would come to pick up the cargo. Also out of the scheme is the Georgian trucker who delivered the cargo across the Russian border to Armavir.  Armenian soybean producers, a poor Azerbaijani trucker, and a Georgian driver are the entire Caucasian international that was remotely manipulated by Ukrainian military intelligence.

For all of the eight hours that Mahir Yusubov drove his truck from Armavir towards the Crimea, he was constantly contacted by a Ukrainian intelligence officer who called himself Ivan Ivanovich. For communication, an anonymous electronic number purchased on the Internet was used, as well as a real phone number registered to a citizen of Ukraine, a resident of Kremenchuk, Sergei Vladimirovich Andreichenko, born in 1988.

Most of the people involved in the scheme were used by Ukrainian intelligence and kept in the dark. Nevertheless, the investigators emphasize that their investigation of the terrorist attack continues. All of its organizers and accomplices, they say, ‘including foreign citizens, will be brought to justice in accordance with Russian law.’

There is reason to believe that now the greatest interest for the investigation is the  ‘acquaintance’ of Artem Azatian, who ‘asked in a brotherly way’ to hold the cargo in his family’s warehouse in Armavir. Why the Ukrainians needed him, it is now clear. A truck with Georgian license plates at the checkpoint of the Crimean Bridge would not just be inspected – it  would be taken apart down to the nuts and bolts. That would have been so even early on a Saturday morning. And so here was a local trucker, his own truck, Krasnodar plates. To be sure, the unfortunate Mahir Yusubov had repeatedly traveled across the bridge to the Crimea before.

The “acquaintance” of Azatian Jr. could well have been formed on the basis of a common origin – remember that the Azatian family came from Makeyevka, Donetsk — or a childhood or teenage acquaintance. This method has been used by Ukrainian intelligence for many years. A person is approached by his childhood friends, classmates. Even quite sane people can be deceived by such nostalgia.

The Ukrainian scheme used numerous loopholes,  not only in the organizational system of cargo transportation, but also in the legislation and even in the international agreements. The cargo was sent to Bulgaria by the Danube River, not by sea. Georgia is a smuggler’s paradise, where all kinds of brokers have been working for years with entrances and exits around the ports of Poti and Batumi. Russian customs and border guards cannot control how goods and cargo are cleared in Yerevan. After the Armenian customs clearance, the goods become free to move throughout the Eurasian Economic Commission area.

Yes, such operations are costly, since the cargo set sail and then traveled for a month. They are risky, because anything could go wrong at any moment. The more people who participate in the scheme, especially when they are in the dark, the greater the chance of failure. The forklift  driver Postnikov could have made a mistake when he was working on the loading in the warehouse – if he had dropped the very pallet where the fuse was, half of Armavir would have blown up.

Another point is that preliminary intelligence work had been carried out. Someone had to find out that Artem Azatian had a father and an older brother, and they have a warehouse in Armavir. The rest is not so difficult, although it requires clever planning. If we assume that the truck from Yerevan to the Crimean Bridge was remotely controlled by one employee of the Ukrainian special services (the notorious ‘Ivan Ivanovich’), then everything is quite simple.

It’s this simplicity which is frightening – for example, both of the Ukrainian terrorists who were detained on Wednesday after they crossed the Russian border from Estonia; and the one with the MANPADS who drove the rockets in his car. The Estonian border raises questions. It is worth recalling that [Natalia] Vovk, the Ukrainian citizen who is suspected of the murder of Daria Dugina, also fled from the Russian Federation to Estonia.

The detention of a Ukrainian terrorist with anti–aircraft missiles in the Moscow region is a separate story. He wanted to hit something or someone. If we are talking about passenger planes, then this is obviously the preparation of an act of international terrorism. Given these many alarming signals, it can be assumed that there may be more such groups or lone terrorists. They are controlled from a single center (GUR MO of Ukraine); they are dangerous because they are hard-bitten, relentless.

The main method for dealing with them is agent intelligence, as well as unwinding communication chains. Closing the Estonian border or normalizing customs relations are more political than counterintelligence actions.

Analytics

26/09/2022

I have been telling the story of what is happening in Lugansk for three years. The war I live in, my sorrows and joys. A year ago, the Myrotvorets website put my details in the public domain. I wrote many letters to world leaders and artists in Western countries. I had only two requests: to delete the data of all children from Myrotvorets and to help the children of Donbass to return to a peaceful life, so that we are not killed. When the confrontation with Myrotvorets started, my Ukrainian journalist friends asked me why I had not written to Zelensky, but only mentioned him in my interview. At the time, it was difficult for me to answer. I still naively believed that there could be peace between Ukraine and Donbass, and that UN Secretary General Guterres and UNICEF, as internationally renowned organisations, would help me. But, unfortunately, I was wrong. Everything I asked for was ignored by these organisations, and Ukraine decided that we could be taken back by force. My efforts and dreams remained dreams. The only thing I am glad about is that I did not write to Zelensky at that time. And now I understand why: you cannot write and ask not to kill children to the one who gives orders to bomb Donetsk, Gorlovka, Altchevsk and other cities. You can’t write to the president who sends thousands of his soldiers to their deaths, who doesn’t spare them, who gives orders for terrorist acts and the killing of children. One should not write to the president who started this massacre and who has lost half of his country. You can’t write to a loser. Every day children are dying in Donbass, in Kherson and in the Zaporozhye region. And he has only himself to blame. A president who will lose everything…

What about UNICEF, the UN, Amnesty International? Have they said anything about the children killed by the Ukrainian army? No, of course not. Like in the Myrotvorets story. They know. But they remain silent or express their concern. They are silent, always and everywhere. When children in Yugoslavia, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya were killed. And if such respected organisations turn a blind eye to the brutal murder of children, do they have anything to say about the story of Myrotvorets? I don’t think so. After all, we are the wrong children, born and living in the wrong place, according to UNICEF and Amnesty International. In one of my essays, it is said that the children of war are silent because the adults do not listen to them. This is so. Unfortunately, we – the children – are uninteresting to them. We are not like them. They seem to think that we can be killed, that we just have to do it quietly, so as not to disturb others with our cries for help. I am sorry that this is happening. I am sorry that the country where I was born is bombing and trying to destroy everything I hold dear and everything I love, under the approving smile of those who can but do not want to stop this war. Unfortunately, all those who help Ukraine do not realise that the war is coming to them.

Ordinary citizens in the United States and Europe are mostly unaware of the atrocities committed by the Ukrainian army, the brutal bombing and killing of civilians. People are told that we are bombing ourselves or that the Russian army has been shooting at us for eight years. Apparently, that’s why we were looking forward to his arrival in 2022, yeah. Another reality.

Traduction de la lettre de réponse du Pape :
Bonjour Faina.
Le Secrétariat d’État a reçu la lettre que tu as récemment adressée au Saint-Père.
Le Pape François n’est pas indifférent à la détresse des gens, en particulier de ceux qui souffrent et qui traversent des moments difficiles.
Sa Sainteté, confiant toute l’humanité au Seigneur, t’invite à te joindre à ses prières pour la paix dans le monde.
Salutations de Pâques
Monseigneur L. Roberto Cona

But I’m sure it won’t always be like this. The truth will always win out. The hardest thing is not to get discouraged when everything you do doesn’t work. You are not being listened to. Just when you think it’s no use, something happens that helps you believe again that you’re not doing it for nothing. That’s what happened with the Pope’s letter. When I was in Moscow, I received a reply from Pope Francis. According to my Italian friends, he rarely replies to anyone, but he suggested to pray for peace with me. I don’t know if he answered himself or if the answer was written for him, but the important thing is that the Pope paid attention for the first time to the request of a child from Donbass and wanted to pray with someone who is considered an enemy in Ukraine. He offered to pray for me, a child who is not considered a human being in Ukraine. And I will certainly pray with him for the hundreds of children killed by Ukraine and for the peaceful life we all need.

Faina Savenkova
Translation by Christelle Néant for Donbass Insider
English translation: Vz. yan for Donbass Insider

• Nazi “hero” of Ukrainian nationalists murdered 100,000 Poles
• The Banderites’ unspeakable torture and mass murder of civilians
• US supports neo-Nazis resurrecting Bandera’s reign of terror

“The Snake From His Lair.” Ukrainian poem. Photo credit: Public domain

**“The Snake from his Lair”

Do you recognize this snake?
The bloody devouring beast is crawling.
His protection is a spidery sign,
His name is Stepan Bandera.

His name is Judas, Cain.
These are the deeds of his snaky hands:
Fires and blazes over our land,
The spilled blood of innocent children.

And the people stood up to defend.
The country gave its verdict:
To crush the serpent in his lair
And pull out his sting and fangs.**

The above poem, written in Ukrainian on a poster in the years following World War Two, provides only dark glimpses of a time many in this age appear to have forgotten.

Generations after the end of that bloody war, which claimed an estimated 27 million Soviet lives, the fangs of the murderous Nazi, Stepan (or Stefan, or Stephan) Bandera maintain their venomous grip on Ukraine.

Even Bandera’s Wikipedia page, at the time of this writing, still notes that Bandera, a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), was a mass murderer, though his devotees, the Banderites, seem to be doing all they can to scrub information about his pogroms from the internet.

Screen-print of Stepan Bandera’s Wikipedia page.

Indeed, today Bandera is practically worshipped by Ukrainian nationalists, who have named streets after him and erected statues in his honor, in some cases on the very pedestals where statues once memorialized the Soviets who gave their lives driving the Nazis back to Berlin. Bandera’s cold eyes even gaze out from Ukrainian postage stamps, a fact not missed by purveyors of internet memes.

Ukrainian postage stamp featuring Bandera, used in a meme.

Statue of Bandera in Ukraine. Photo Credit: The Times of Israel

This may not mean much to you if you are American or even western European. But to those in many former Soviet republics whose grandparents and great-grandparents sacrificed everything to rid the land of Bandera’s ilk, and to Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors, the honoring of this Nazi collaborator said to be responsible for the mass murder of 100,000 people in Poland is offensive beyond words.

The poorly-reasoned argument that “Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is a Jew, so how can he be a Nazi,” is a figurative slap in the face of Jews outraged about the resurrection of Nazi heroes in Ukraine. A simple cursory search on Google reveals reams of horrified headlines in Israeli media concerning the rise of nationalism in Ukraine and the honoring of Bandera and other Nazi leaders.

In 1941, Bandera mobilized Ukrainian troops, outfitted them in standard Wehrmacht infantry uniforms with the blue and yellow ribbon of Ukraine on their shoulders, and followed them as they rolled into Poland on June 22, 1941, launching Operation Barbarossa.

And that was only the beginning of Bandera’s reign of terror.

Polish victims of a massacre committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the village of Lipniki, Wołyń, 1943. Photo credit: Public domain

Between 1943 and 1945, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (abbreviated UPA in Ukrainian) slaughtered thousands of Poles in towns and villages throughout Wołyń, a region in Nazi-occupied Poland that is now part of present-day Ukraine.

It’s estimated that during this period, more than 100,000 Poles died at the hands of radical Ukrainian separatists, members of Bandera’s OUN and its military arm, the UPA. Their goal was simple: Eradicate all non-Ukrainians from future Ukrainian lands.

On June 16th, 1944, the UPA attacked a train carrying women and children. Few survived. Photo credit: IPN

Victims of the train attack taken away to be buried. Photo credit: KARTA Center

The most horrific genocidal massacre, known as “Bloody Sunday,” was carried out on July 11, 1943 when right at dawn, Ukrainian insurgent detachments, aided by local Ukrainians, simultaneously surrounded and attacked 99 Polish villages in the Kowel, Włodzimierz Wołyński, Horochów and Łuck districts. They brutally slaughtered Polish civilians and destroyed their homes.

Whole villages were burned to the ground and property was looted. Investigators estimate that as many as 8,000 people — mostly women, children, and elderly — were killed on that day alone.

Their remains are still being found today.

The remains of an estimated 300 people were found by archaeologists in 2011 at a mass grave in the village of Ostówek in Ukraine where they were massacred in 1943 by the UPA. Photo credit: Darek Delmanowicz/PAP

And it didn’t end there.

It didn’t even end when Hitler’s armies withdrew in 1944.

The mass murders continued. Between 1943 and 1945, Poles were murdered in 1,865 different places in the Wołyń region. Hundreds of Poles were murdered in each of the communities of Wola Ostrowiecka, Gaj, Ostrówki and Kolodno.

The murders were carried out with shocking brutality. People were burned alive or thrown into wells. Axes, pitchforks, scythes, knives and other farming tools were used instead of guns to make the massacres look like spontaneous peasant uprisings.

The Ukrainians tortured their victims with a cruelty scarcely imaginable. People were scalped. Their noses, lips and ears were chopped off. Their eyes were gouged out, hands cut off, heads squashed in vices. Women’s breasts were sliced off and pregnant women were bayonetted in the belly. Men’s genitals were cruelly hacked off with sickles.

The Polish “Association of Memory of Victims of Crimes of Ukrainian Nationalists” (SUOZUN) is putting together a forensic reconstruction of the events surrounding the Wołyń Massacre. The evidence they have collected is shocking, revealing children that were run through with stakes, people’s throats sliced open, their tongues pulled out through their necks. People sawn in half with a carpenter’s saw. A child nailed to a door.

One woman, in an advanced stage of pregnancy, had her abdomen cut open, the fetus removed and replaced with a live cat, which was sewn inside of her. Another pregnant woman’s uterus was cut open and filled with broken glass.

According to some Polish historians, even the German butchers were shocked by these atrocities and began to protect the Poles from the Ukrainian “axe.”

The bloody frenzy of torture and murder continued well after the Nazis had left the region, only now the Ukrainian militants attacked citizens of Soviet Ukraine, specialists such as agronomists, engineers, doctors, and teachers sent in by the government to restore the republic after the war. Though the majority of these people were ethnic Ukrainians, the nationalists killed them and any villagers who cooperated with them.

These atrocities were ordered by the head of the UPA, a former Wehrmacht captain named Roman Shukhevich, who is now idolized by many Ukrainians. “The OUN should act so that all those who recognized the Soviet government are destroyed. Not intimidated, but physically destroyed! Do not be afraid that people will curse us for cruelty. Let half of the 40 million Ukrainian population remain — there is nothing terrible in this,” he wrote.

Wołyń is a region that was once part of Nazi-occupied Poland and is now part of present-day Ukraine. Photo credit: Public domain

Stepan Bandera. Photo Credit: Public domain

Polish President Andrzej Duda lays a wreath at the Wołyń Massacre memorial in Warsaw, 2019. Photo credit: Tomasz Gzell/PAP

In July of 2019, Polish President Andrzej Duda laid a wreath at the Wołyń Massacre memorial in Warsaw and gave a speech about the future of Polish-Ukrainian relations:

“If we are talking today about the building of relations between our nations, between the Polish and Ukrainian people, between our states — and let me stress here, that we want […] these to be the best possible relations — there is one thing known for sure. We need remembrance so that what happened then, will never repeat itself between our nations and our people.”

He added: “The Ukrainian side should permit the exhumations, which are necessary to mark the graves, so that the descendants [of victims] can know the places, where they can go to light a candle. And this is the condition under which the massacre could be commemorated in Wołyń.”

Bandera’s Vile Legacy Continues

Ukrainian nationalists today are not exhuming the victims of Bandera, they are resurrecting Bandera himself, perpetuating his sadistic crimes upon the blood-stained fields and communities of Eastern Ukraine.

Russian media and independent journalists have reported a wide range of atrocities committed against Russian-speaking civilians and Roma people as well as the tortures inflicted upon Russian prisoners of war.

There is video evidence of Russian captives screaming in pain as they are shot in the legs and left to bleed out and die with no medical assistance. One Russian soldier was crucified and then burned alive. The luckier ones have returned to Russian-controlled lands bearing the scars of their torture, like swastikas carved or burned into their flesh, and nightmarish memories which will never fully fade away.

The footage of these atrocities is only shocking to those unfamiliar with the brutal and inhumane tactics of the Banderites, who are picking up from where they left off in the 1950’s after the Soviet occupation of Ukraine forced their movement underground.

Civilians in the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk have been struggling for independence from their Banderite overlords since 2014, when the coup known as Maidan tore Ukraine apart. The Russian-speaking population which makes up the majority in the region known as the Donbas, in Eastern Ukraine, have been under attack for eight years by the neo-Nazis in Western Ukraine, who spread the ideology of Bandera and the Nazis, with support from the United States and other NATO countries.

If you want evidence of US involvement, there is no lack of that to be found. You can begin with the leaked conversation, intercepted by Russian intelligence, of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, where they plan the Maidan coup as casually as you might plan a dinner party.

Western media reacted to Victoria’s explosive comment, “Fuck the EU,” but ignored the real meat of the conversation, which was the naming of the puppet leaders subsequently installed in Kiev.

And there was certainly nothing casual about the bloodletting inflicted on minorities of Ukraine once the Banderites seized power.

Anti-government protesters clash with police at Independence Square on February 19, 2014 in Kiev. Photo credit: Alexander Koerner/Getty Images

The initial Maidan protests were violent and terrifying. Video footage and photographs from the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” show police bullied and attacked, in some cases shielded by medics who were trying to prevent the mob from massacring them. A TV channel captured another medic, a supporter of the revolutionaries, refusing to allow people to call an ambulance for a police officer who had lost an eye in the fighting.

Kiev journalist Sergey Rulev described his brutal torture at the hands of the Banderites:

“Four people beat me. There was a woman in a headscarf with them, who kicked me in the groin without saying a word. Then they dragged me to the occupied Ministry of Agriculture, where they searched me, took away my documents, a press pass, accreditation to the Verkhovna Rada, business cards, two phones, and two cameras. When they dragged me back to Khreshchatyk, I started screaming and calling for help. I fell to the ground and was kicked again, but no one reacted. At about noon, I was dragged into the burned-out House of Trade Unions. In the lobby, I was immediately beaten up. In the courtyard, unknown people in camouflage fatigues bound my hands, stripped me to my underwear, and continued to beat me… After that, the four of them pinned me to the floor, injected something into my arm again, and said, ‘Now you’re going to talk to us, bitch! Which special services do you work for?’”

While he was tied up, a woman began ripping out Sergey’s nails with pliers. He later identified her as Amina Okuyeva, a medic in the “Eighth Hundred” who was later awarded the title “People’s Hero of Ukraine,” after she joined what Ukrainian nationalists refer to as the “Anti-Terrorist Operation” and fought for the neo-Nazi Kiev-2 and Dzhokhar Dudayev Battalions.

Young people take part in a nationalist march on Stepan Bandera’s 109th birthday, in Lvov. Photo Credit: Sputnik/Stringer

From the first days of its existence, horror stories emerged about the so-called “Anti-Terrorist Operation” and atrocities committed by the Banderites in Donbas. Though authorities and media ignored these stories at first, eventually the cries of international human rights organizations could no longer be silenced and some of the most egregious cases had reached the courts.

Though there were some convictions in those days, a lot of people got away with serious crimes on the grounds that they were “Patriots of Ukraine.” For example, a “Right Sector” nationalist named Sergey Sternenko who was convicted of abducting one man and killing another, had his seven-year sentence reduced to one year probation on the merits of his “patriotism.”

Given this climate, it’s not surprising that 48 people were burned alive in the Trade Union Building in Odessa in May of 2014. And those responsible still await justice.

Perhaps the most horrifying crime committed by the Banderites was the creation of a “prison” in the refrigerator of the airport in Mariupol in June of 2014, which jailers referred to as “the library.” Inside, residents of Mariupol were raped, beaten or tortured to death if they were suspected of harboring any sympathies for Russia or the unrecognized republics in Donbas. The “library” was run by members of “Right Sector” and “Svoboda” (Freedom) party. One of them named Yuri Mikhalchishin, a nationalist who goes by the pseudonym “Nahtigal88” (referring to the letters “HH,” denoting Heil Hitler), openly asserts that he has followed the teachings of Mein Kampf since he was 16.

The United States’ decades-long support of the Banderites

The US political agenda in Ukraine is no secret. You can read all about it in a study produced by RAND Corporation, a DC think-tank which explored how NATO could over-extend Russia by applying economic sanctions and using Ukraine, Syria and other countries to stage proxy wars. You can download the extensive 354-page study for free, directly from RAND Corp’s site, or you can download the 12-page briefing here.

Cover of the RAND Corporation briefing “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.” Photo credit: RAND Corp.

An excerpt from the RAND Corporation briefing “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.” Photo credit: RAND Corp.

Bear in mind that this study was published in 2019, well before Russia began its “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine in February of this year, and yet it explores the possibilities of providing lethal aid to Ukraine.

But US support of neo-Nazis in Ukraine goes back much further, to the years following World War Two. And you can find the evidence of that on the CIA’s own website.

Secret documents declassified in 2007 tell of the Banderites’ association with the CIA in the years following the war, of the CIA’s early interest in retaining Bandera as an asset followed by their eventual discard. His followers’ blatant loyalty to the recently-defeated Nazis of the Third Reich was a political millstone around the CIA’s neck, which in those days was not as robust and muscular as it is now, to brazenly support neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

The entire sordid story of the CIA’s affair with Bandera is encapsulated in a thirty-three-page “draft working paper,” which is great late-night reading if you enjoy having nightmares about Nazis.

I leave you with the following screen prints taken from that document, and I will continue this investigative report on Stepan Bandera in my next article.

To be continued…

About the author:
Deborah Armstrong currently writes about geopolitics with an emphasis on Russia. She previously worked in local TV news in the United States where she won two regional Emmy Awards. In the early 1990’s, Deborah lived in the Soviet Union during its final days and worked as a television consultant at Leningrad Television.

The Nightingale’s Bloody Roost

• The wanton atrocities of Bandera and Shukhevich
• Bandera’s assassination by a love-torn KGB spy

Ukrainian auxiliary police execute a mother and child in Miropol, USSR, 1941. Photo credit: static01/nyt.com

“The OUN values the life of its members, values it highly; but — our idea in our understanding is so grand, that when we talk about its realization, not single individuals, nor hundreds, but millions of victims have to be sacrificed in order to realize it.”
— Stepan Bandera

In part one of this investigative report, we took a look at just some of the atrocities committed by Stepan Bandera and his followers — Nazi collaborators who tried to purge all Jews, Romani, Poles and Russians from future Ukrainian lands.

There was, as you saw, no crime too vile for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists — the OUN. The sheer brutality of these crimes cannot be over-emphasized, and bodies are still being dug up today.

Exhumed remains of OUN victims, Poland, 1990s. Photo credit: kresky.pl

One of the most comprehensive articles I came across while researching Bandera was published by Covert Action Magazine, in three parts. I highly recommend this article, written by Evan Reif, to anyone who is serious about understanding these dark chapters of Ukraine’s history. Much of the information to follow was gleaned from this seminal work. Reif’s article delves more deeply into the origins and history of the OUN, which I will summarize here.

The OUN was founded in 1929 from the ashes of the Ukrainian Military Organization, the UVO. The UVO was formed in 1920 by right-wing Austro-Hungarian veterans of the First World War. The UVO waged a terrorist campaign against the Soviets and the Poles, operating primarily in western Ukraine, which was occupied by Poland in those days.

The Polish government at that time was an unpopular far-right regime which implemented land reform and language laws. However, it was not the government which the UVO primarily targeted, but civilians. The Ukrainian militants worked like bandits, hitting villages, towns, and small farming communities. They tortured, raped, killed, looted, burned everything to the ground, and moved on. They knew better than to attack the military or police, which might have decimated their numbers. They were a scourge on the countryside, waging a war on farmers and peasants — men, women and children of all ages.

It was in the early 1920’s when the UVO began its official collaboration with the Germans. From 1921 until 1928, the UVO received millions of marks in aid from Germany. Due to pressure from the Soviet and Polish governments, the leaders of the UVO were eventually moved to Berlin and when the Nazis came to power, the collaboration continued.

As the years went by, the OUN took center stage, led by ever-younger, more radical members, and the UVO fell to the wayside, its role diminished. One of those young leaders was Stepan Bandera, a fascist since childhood. Bandera was born on January 1, 1909 to a Greek Catholic family, the son of a priest.

Bandera in his Plast uniform. Photo credit: Wikipedia

Original “Plast” symbol. Photo credit: Livejournal

As a child, Bandera was a member of “Plast,” a fascist youth group. That group has been reestablished in recent times, though its webpage makes it appear friendly enough, with wholesome pictures of children learning scouting skills, canoeing, and performing good deeds for the community. The same symbol appears on Plast uniforms today, only without the swastika of old. But the topic of fascist indoctrination of children in Ukraine will have to be reserved for another article.

As a young adult, Bandera moved up quickly in the ranks of the OUN, first serving as the chief propaganda officer in 1931, at the age of 22. He quickly became the second in command of the OUN in Galicia 1932 and was named head of the OUN National Executive in 1933.

Bandera was a rabid fascist who despised Jews, communists, Gypsies, Hungarians, Poles and Russians. He wanted to reclaim lands which had not been Ukrainian for centuries and violently purge all non-Ukrainians from the territory. Bandera radicalized the OUN, adding to its membership, making it larger and more efficient. In 1934, members of the OUN-B (the B denoting Bandera’s leadership) assassinated Polish foreign minister Bronisław Pieracki by shooting him at close range with a pistol.

Bandera was captured by Polish authorities and sentenced to die with other OUN leaders, but the death sentence was commuted to life and when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Bandera was released. The Nazi Abwehr, German intelligence, employed Bandera and the OUN in 1940 and began preparing for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR.

Bandera and the OUN were chosen by the highest-ranking German officers including Adolf Hitler, who instructed them to carry out brutal reprisals and terrorism against civilians in the Soviet Union. General Erwin von Lahousen testified about this at the Nuremburg trials.

But Bandera’s antagonistic personality style and his demands for Ukrainian independence at any cost split the OUN in two, with Bandera leading the OUN-B, and Andriy Melnyk, who favored a more subservient role with the Nazis, leading OUN-M.

The rift between the two groups became violent. The most radical members joined with Bandera and launched terrorist attacks against the elderly Melnyk’s group. Though OUN-M survived the war, it was clear that Bandera, and not Melnyk, now controlled the Ukrainian fascist movement.

Under the leadership of the Wehrmacht, two OUN units were formed, code-named “Roland” and “Nightingale,” led by Roman Shukhevych, a mass murderer commemorated on Ukrainian postage stamps in 2007. The two units, alongside Nazi forces, were sent to Lvov in 1941.

Roman Shukhevich on a Ukrainian postage stamp in 2007. Photo credit: Wikimedia

The Nightingale’s Bloody Roost in Lvov

Under specific orders to slaughter Jews, Poles and Russians, Nightingale entered the city of Lvov in 1943. It was a city of about 500,000 people, more than half of them Polish Catholics, with a Jewish population that had swollen to as much as 160,000 as refugees flooded in from Nazi-occupied Europe. Only twenty percent of the city was Ukrainian.

Hitlists in hand, the OUN began its bloody harvest on June 30th, abducting Polish professors suspected of harboring “anti-Nazi views” and torturing them in dorm-rooms for hours before executing them and raiding their apartments, which were then taken over by SS and OUN officers.

And that was only the first blood.

Next, Nightingale began a holocaust which lasted over a month. The group seized a castle on a hilltop overlooking Lvov and set up its “roost” there, rounding up Jews and ordering them to clear the streets of corpses and debris from bombs. That very first night there were random murders of Jews and the looting of their homes and property.

In the days before the attack, the OUN had circulated leaflets in Lvov telling the residents “Don’t throw away your weapons yet. Take them up. Destroy the enemy… Moscow, the Hungarians, the Jews — these are your enemies. Destroy them.”

A woman desperately attempts to flee attackers in Lvov. Photo credit: Wikipedia

The more bloodthirsty and criminal members of the population apparently took the advice to heart, and in the bloody weeks that followed, thousands of Jews were terrorized throughout the city. Women were driven into the streets where they were stripped, raped and murdered. Men were kicked and beaten with fists and clubs. Throngs of nationalists threw trash at them as Nazi photographers went around gleefully filming the horror.

The Wehrmacht was eager to document these atrocities which were published in newspapers or shown in news reels back in Germany, to prove that the Nazis were serious about their plans to exterminate the untermenschen — the undesirables.

On that first bloody day alone, up to 5,000 Jews were massacred by the OUN, the Nazis and those who supported them.

Nazi photographers document atrocities in Lvov. Photo credit: Vintag.

Jewish man attacked in the street in Lvov. Photo credit: Wikipedia

The Einsatzgruppen came next. These were “professional” killers. Nazis who had already “cleansed” many villages, towns and cities in Poland and the USSR. They went door to door, dragged out their targets, marched them to pits which had already been prepared, forced them to their knees and executed them with bullets to the head. Nightingale and the OUN militias assisted them every step of the way, loading Jews onto trucks, then driving them to stadiums and executing them en masse with machine guns.

The Nazis stole everything of value, down to the gold fillings in their victims’ teeth, and sent it back to Germany where the money was used to fund industrialists who made enormous profits from Nazi extermination programs.

Thousands of people were slaughtered each day as Nightingale’s bloody talons tore into Lvov. As leaders of the OUN, including Shukhevich and Bandera, reigned in their high castle above the city, making their plans for an independent, Nazi-aligned Ukraine, the streets of Lvov and the surrounding region flowed with blood. By the time the Red Army arrived to liberate Lvov in 1944, only around 150,000 people remained and only 800 of them were Jews. The rest were either murdered or shipped off to the Belzec concentration camp, a slaughter-house so efficient that fewer than a dozen survivors were ever found.

The First Deputy Chief of the OUN under Stepan Bandera was Yaroslav Stetsko, who was named the first prime minister of the short-lived “Independent State of Ukraine” in 1941. In his “Act of Proclamation of Ukrainian Statehood,” he wrote:

“The newly-formed Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian People to free itself from Muscovite occupation.”

Photo credit: Twitter

But…but… Bandera was sent to a concentration camp, so he couldn’t be bad!

Though the establishment of an independent Ukraine angered the OUN’s Nazi allies, who did not agree to it, it is grossly inaccurate to proclaim the OUN innocent of wrongdoing or to claim it was not a fascist organization. Even if the group had never collaborated with the Nazis, which it did, the OUN is guilty of enough atrocities against Jews, Poles, Russians, communists and Romani people to blacken its name forever in history as a brutal fascist organization.

In part one of this article, we looked at what the OUN did in Wołyń, where at least 100,000 people were massacred, most of them women and children. This was how the OUN operated. With brutality and hatred and no mercy whatsoever. They were violent fascists in their own right even if they had not collaborated with the Nazis. But of course, they did.

A Ukrainian Jew named Moshe Maltz wrote in his journal, later published as a memoir, while he was hiding from the Banderites:

_“Bandera men … are not discriminating about who they kill; they are gunning down the populations of entire villages.… Since there are hardly any Jews left to kill, the Bandera gangs have turned on the Poles. They are literally hacking Poles to pieces. Every day … you can see the bodies of Poles, with wires around their necks, floating down the river Bug.”

_After the declaration of Ukrainian independence, tensions rose until the Nazis arrested Bandera, Stetsko and other leaders of the OUN, and sent them to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1943.

Bandera, however, was not treated like a Jew, a Russian or any other untermensch. He was given a two-room suite with paintings and rugs and was not forced to perform any labor. He wore no uniform, ate with the guards and did not even lock his cell door at night. And he was allowed to have conjugal visits with his wife.

After less than a year, in 1944, Bandera was released and the Nazis recruited him, along with Stetsko, to carry out terrorist acts against the Red Army, which was now advancing on Germany.

The OUN did take minor retaliatory action against the Nazis in 1943, but it was slight compared to the campaign of terror the organization had previously waged against the Poles, Jews, Romani and other minorities.

Once again, it was civilians who bore the brunt of the OUN’s cruelty. In 1943, the Ukrainian nationalists killed around 12,000 “Germans” — mostly farmers and peasants under Nazi control. Only around 1,000 of these victims were actual Wehrmacht. Indeed, Soviet partisans reported that the OUN only engaged with Germans when the Germans mocked or attacked Ukrainians.

The Nazis handled this by simply transferring the more expendable Polish collaborators to the region to fight the OUN. And following the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, the OUN renewed its pact with the Nazis and reaffirmed the Soviets as their common enemy. There were little skirmishes between Nazis and OUN after that, but they were insignificant in the overall scope of their greater collaboration.

In 1943, the SS formed its Galicia Division, which incorporated members of the OUN. Modern Ukrainians have attempted to whitewash Galicia’s reputation, and marches in honor of this SS unit are a common sight in western Ukraine today.

Ukrainian youth marching with the banner of the Galicia SS in 2018. Photo credit: RIA Novosti

_“Russian Ukraine cannot be compared to Austrian Galicia… The Austrian-Galician Ruthenians are closely intertwined with the Austrian state. Therefore, in Galicia it is possible to allow the SS to form one division from the local population.”
— Adolf Hitler, 1942.

_The OUN continued its terrorist rampage in western Ukraine until Soviet occupation of the region drove the fascist movement underground. In 1944, the OUN merged with other nationalist groups to form the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council, the UHVR, headed by Ivan Hrinioch, who had previously served as a chaplain in the Nightingale unit. Roman Shukhevich was killed in a raid by Soviet forces in 1950, bringing an end to the UPA for all intents and purposes.

But there always seem to be willing sponsors available to support Ukrainian fascists. If not overtly, then covertly.

Mykola Lebed became the foreign minister for the UHVR. As head of the OUN secret police, he was a known sadist and collaborator of the Germans, according to the US army. He later became a collaborator of the CIA, according to 1953 documents declassified in 2007.

But Bandera’s antagonism and volatility split the UHVR just as it had split the OUN previously. In 1947 Bandera and Stetsko fought with Lebed and Hrinioch over the issue of the largely Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine. Bandera demanded a purely Ukrainian state, purged of all Russian influence. Lebed and Hrinioch insisted that the help of eastern Ukrainians was needed for the success of the movement. Bandera expelled them in 1948, which led to the breakup of his brief courtship by the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA.

It was not long after the war when US Army Counterintelligence found Bandera in the American occupation zone, hiding from the Soviets who wanted him to face trial for his crimes. In 1946, the Soviets made a failed attempt to capture him in Munich, where he was working under the protection of Reinhard Gehlen, a Nazi spy-turned-CIA agent. Gehlen helped countless Nazis to escape justice, including Adolf Eichmann, with the full support and backing of the CIA. In 1946, he was paid $3.5 million and he had 50 employees including 40 former SS. The CIA, in turn, used the Nazis as assets.

Bandera and the OUN secret police, the SB, formed by Lebed, served as assassins for MI6 as part of “Operation Ohio,” as it was codenamed. They hunted the refugee camps in post-war Germany for their targets, which included thousands of communists and anyone who might know too much about the OUN’s brutal reign of terror. Their terrifying reputation as hitmen earned Lebed the codename “Devil.”

The CIA valued Bandera as a potential asset because of the respect he commanded among the fascist underground. But he was far too extreme, unruly, and downright dangerous to work with, as he was uncooperative and often refused to use encrypted communications. He was just too much of a risk for the CIA to gamble with.

By 1954, the CIA forced MI6 to stop working with Bandera. That same year, Bandera was finally removed from OUN leadership. However, the CIA and the Germans continued to protect him from assassination attempts. He was guarded by Gehlen’s SS, the CIA, and the US Army Counterintelligence Corps.

The Soviets, meanwhile, had made repeated attempts to extradite Bandera so he could face trial for his war crimes. Every attempt was refused, so the KGB tried on several occasions to assassinate him, in 1947, 1948, 1952 and 1959.

Bandera continued his work for Gehlen for the remainder of his life, which ended in 1959 when a KGB agent named Bohdan Stashinsky finally succeeded in killing him. Stashinsky was an experienced assassin who had infiltrated the Bandera group in 1957 as a “German” and had already eliminated another leader of the OUN, Lev Rebet, using the same technique he was about to use on Bandera.

On October 15th, he followed Bandera to his home at Kristmanstrasse 7 in Munich where the mass-murderer was living under a false name. As his target reached the porch, Stashinsky quickly swallowed an antidote, then approached Bandera, who was struggling with the lock on the door. He asked his quarry if the key was working alright, and when Bandera raised his head to answer, Stashinsky blasted him in the face with a double-barreled cylinder loaded with ampoules of potassium cyanide. The instant he pressed the trigger, the powder charge broke the ampoules and the poison flew out. Bandera inhaled the toxic mist, causing his heart to stop. He collapsed, blood pouring from his mouth, and cracked his skull on the stairs.

The antidote protected Stashinsky, who quickly walked out of the entryway and disappeared into the night.

Initially, the cause of Bandera’s death was believed to be a stroke, which had caused him to fall. But investigators later discovered the traces of potassium cyanide in his system. The name of his assassin was unknown until 1961, when love led Stashinsky to his eventual capture.

Bohdan Stashinsky, upper right, and a diagram of the specially-made poison gun he used to kill Bandera. Photo credit: RBTH

Cupid’s arrow captures a spy

In Moscow, Bohdan Stashinsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. His handlers at the KGB, against their better judgment, also gave him permission to marry Inga Pol, an East German who had strong anti-communist leanings.

The couple settled in Moscow, but Inga returned to Germany to give birth to their son. Only four months later, their infant son died, and Stashinsky was allowed to go to the funeral in Germany. But he used the opportunity to flee to the west, instead.

On August 13, 1961, Stashinsky and his wife sneaked out of their house, leaving behind an unburied coffin containing their dead son. The smitten Stashinsky had confessed to his wife, against KGB instructions, of his involvement in the assassination of Bandera. Inga feared for her husband’s safety and convinced him to flee.

Stashinsky gave himself up to police in West Germany and was handed over to the CIA. He gave them detailed information about his activities in the KGB including the assassination of Stepan Bandera. He was sentenced to eight years in prison and Inga divorced him in 1964.

After his release in 1967, Stashinsky disappeared. Some sources claimed he stayed in the US and others claimed he fled to South Africa, perhaps changing his appearance with plastic surgery.

But no one knows if the man who killed Bandera is still alive today.

Bohdan Stashinsky and his wife, Inga. Photo source: RBTH

About the author:
Deborah Armstrong currently writes about geopolitics with an emphasis on Russia. She previously worked in local TV news in the United States where she won two regional Emmy Awards. In the early 1990’s, Deborah lived in the Soviet Union during its final days and worked as a television consultant at Leningrad Television.

The UK and Commonwealth may be mourning the passing of Queen Elizabeth II yesterday. I am in mourning as well, but for a very different reason: the gathering of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in the Ramstein air base in Germany yesterday reshuffled the deck on Western military and financial assistance to Ukraine, raising contributions to the ongoing holy crusade against Russia from still more nations and adding new, still more advanced precision strike weapons to the mix of deliveries to Kiev. It was an open summons to the Kremlin to escalate in turn, as were the test firing the same day of a new intercontinental rocket, the Minuteman III, from Vandenberg air base in California and the unannounced visit to Kiev yesterday of not only Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was featured in Western media accounts, but also other top officials of the Biden administration. The most notorious member of this delegation was surely Blinken’s deputy, Victoria Nuland, who had stage managed the February 2014 coup that put in power in Kiev the Russia-hating regime that Zelensky now heads.

The Russians may be compelled to take the bait due to the course of military action on the ground. As now becomes clear, they have just suffered some losses in very heavy ground and artillery fighting these past few days around Kharkov. The Ukrainian gains were facilitated by the advanced weaponry recently arrived from NATO countries, by the targeting data they are receiving from the U.S. and from off-stage tactical direction from NATO officers.  By ‘take the bait,’ I mean the Russians may escalate to all out war on Ukraine.  This question figured prominently in yesterday’s major news and political talk show programs of Russian state television.  I will go into these matters in some detail below.

Regrettably, all of the foregoing also obliges me to revisit the critique I published a couple of weeks ago on the latest essay in Foreign Affairs magazine by John Mearsheimer. His overarching message on the dangers of our stumbling into a nuclear war is better substantiated by the latest developments, even though I believe that Mearsheimer failed to identify the several successive steps that lie ahead before we find ourselves in such a war. Mearsheimer oversimplified Russian options to deal with setbacks on the ground. This also will be a central issue in my narrative below.

Finally, in this essay I will direct attention to the second dimension of the ongoing confrontation between Russia and the entire Collective West:  the economic war being waged on the Russian Federation via sanctions, which now far outnumber those directed against any other country on earth. This war, as I will argue, is going well for the Russians. More importantly for us all, it is the sole area in which the peoples of Europe may have a say in putting an end to the mad policies being pursued by their national governments under the direct pressure of Washington.

Over the past ten days, we have witnessed the start of the Ukrainian counter-offensive which was preceded by so much anticipation in Western media. A reversal of Russian fortunes in the war was predicted, leading to the stalemate or outright defeat for Russia which Mearsheimer and some other analysts in the US foreign policy community feared would trigger a nuclear response from the Kremlin.

In fact, the Ukrainian counter-offensive got off to a very bad start. It opened in the south, in the Kherson region.  Kherson, which is predominantly Russian-speaking, was the first major Ukrainian city to fall to the Russians and it has strategic importance for ensuring Russian domination of the Black Sea littoral.  However, first results of the Ukrainian attacks there were disastrous for the Ukrainian armed forces. It soon was obvious that they had deployed new recruits who had little or no military experience. The infantry attacked across open terrain where they were easily destroyed in vast numbers by the Russian defenders of Kherson. I have heard the figure of 5,000 Ukrainian casualties in the Kherson counter offensive.   Obviously the Russians were jubilant, though there were reports of some Ukrainian reservists being withdrawn from the field of action for redeployment elsewhere.

What followed was something the Russians evidently did not expect, namely a well prepared and implemented assault on their positions around the northeastern city of Kharkov, Ukraine’s second largest city. Kharkov was briefly surrounded by Russian forces at the start of the war, but was left in relative peace as the Russians refocused their strategy on taking the Donbas and avoiding major urban warfare except in one place, Mariupol.  Exactly what the Russian game plan has been was recently explained in a remarkable paper published by a certain ‘Marinus’ in the Marine Corps Gazette. See https://www.imetatronink.com/2022/08/a-former-us-marine-corps-officers.html

A couple of days ago I picked up the following amidst the chatter of panelists on Evening with Vladimir Solovyov: “yes, we made some mistakes, but it is inevitable in a war that mistakes are made.” As from the latest news on the apparent loss of Balakliya and surrounding villages on the outskirts of Kharkov, we can see that the Ukrainian tactics were precisely those which Russia had been using so effectively against them from day one of the ‘special military operation,’ namely a feint in one war zone followed by all-out attack on a very different region. Of course, the ‘feint’ around Kherson, if that is what it was, entailed the cynical sacrifice of thousands of young and not so young Ukrainian foot soldiers. But the resultant distraction prevented the Russians from bringing up sufficient manpower to successfully defend their positions around Kharkov, which include the strategically important city of Izyum.

Izyum is close to the Russian-Ukrainian border southeast of Kharkov and is a major logistical base for munitions and weaponry that are sent onward to support the Donbas operation. The latest information on the Russian side appears to be that the Russians have now dispatched large numbers of reservists to this area to hold their positions.  They also speak of intense artillery duels. We may well assume that both sides have experienced heavy loss of life. As yet, the outcome is unforeseeable. Meanwhile, Russian war correspondents on the ground in Donetsk insist that the Russian advance towards Slavyansk, in the center of the former Donetsk oblast, is continuing without pause, which suggests that the strikes on their munitions stores claimed by the Ukrainians have not been totally effective. If Slavyansk is taken in the coming few weeks, then Russia will quickly assume control of the entire territory of the Donbas.

In last night’s talk show program, host Vladimir Solovyov said that this latest push in the Ukrainian counter-offensive was timed to coincide with the gathering at the Ramstein air base, Germany of top officials from NATO and other allies under the direction of the visiting U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.  If the Ukrainian efforts were failing in the field, then the cry would go up:  we must provide them with more weapons and training.  And if the Ukrainian efforts in the counter-offensive were succeeding, those in attendance at Ramstein would hear exactly the same appeal to aid Kiev.

Though Evening with Solovyov, on air from about 23.00 Moscow time, offered viewers some few minutes of video recordings from the opening of the Ramstein gathering, far more complete coverage was provided to Russian audiences a few hours earlier by the afternoon news show Sixty Minutes.  Here, nearly half an hour on air was given over to lengthy excerpts from CNN and other U.S. and European mainstream television reporting about Ramstein. Host Yevgeni Popov read the Russian translation of the various Western news bulletins. His presentation clearly sought to dramatize the threat and to set off alarm bells.

For his part, Vladimir Solovyov went beyond presentation of the threat posed by the United States and its allies to analysis of Russia’s possible response.  He spoke at length, and we may assume that what he was saying had the direct approval of the Kremlin, because his guests, who are further removed from Power than he is, were, for the most part, allowed only to talk blather, such as the critique by one panelist of a recent pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia article in The New York Review of Books by Yale professor Timothy Snyder, who counts for nothing in the big strategic issues Russia faces today.

So, what did Solovyov have to say? First, that Ramstein marked a new stage in the war, because of the  more threatening nature of the weapons systems announced for delivery, such as missiles with accuracy of 1 to 2 meters when fired from distances of 20 or 30 kilometers thanks to their GPS-guided flight, in contrast to the laser-guided missiles delivered to Ukraine up till now. In the same category, there are weapons designed to destroy the Russians’ radar systems used for directing artillery fire.  Second, that Ramstein marked the further expansion of the coalition or holy crusade waging war on Russia.  Third, that in effect this is no longer a proxy war but a real direct war with NATO and should be prosecuted with appropriate mustering of all resources at home and abroad.

Said Solovyov, Russia should throw off constraints and destroy the Ukrainian dual use infrastructure which makes it possible to move Western weapons across the country to the front.  The railway system, the bridges, the electricity generating stations all should become fair targets.  Moreover, Kiev should no longer be spared missile strikes and destruction of the ministries and presidential apparatus responsible for prosecution of the war.  I note that these ideas were aired on the Solovyov program more than a month ago but then disappeared from view while the Russians were making great gains on the ground.  The latest setbacks and the new risks associated with the Western policies set out at Ramstein bring them to the surface again.

Solovyov also argued that Russia should now use in Ukraine its own most advanced weapons that have similar characteristics to what NATO is delivering to the other side. As a sub-point, Russia should consider neutralizing in one way or another the GPS guidance for U.S. weapons.  Of course, if this means destroying or blinding the respective U.S. satellites, that would mean crossing a well-known U.S. red line or casus belli.

Next, in the new circumstances, Russia should abandon its go-it-alone policy and actively seek out complementary weapons systems from previously untouchable countries, such as Iran and North Korea. Procurements from both have till now been minimal. On this issue, a couple of panelists with military expertise were allowed to explain that both these countries have sophisticated and proven weapons that could greatly assist Russia’s war effort.  Iran has unbeatable drones which carry hefty explosive charges and have proven their worth in operations that are unmentionable on public television. And North Korea has very effective tanks and highly portable field artillery which are both fully compatible with Russian military practice, because the designs were based on Chinese weapons, which in turn were copies of Russia’s own. These weapons also have shown their worth in the hands of unnamed purchasers in the Middle East. Moreover, North Korea has a vast store of munitions fully compatible with Russian artillery.  It was also mentioned in passing that insofar as Kiev has mobilized in the field many Western mercenaries and covert NATO officers, Russia should also recruit from abroad, as for example, whole brigades from North Korea available for hire.

If any of these ideas put out by Solovyov last night are indeed implemented by the Kremlin, then the present confrontation in and over Ukraine will truly become globalized, and we have the outlines of what may be called World War III.  However, I note that the use of nuclear weapons, tactical or otherwise, does not figure at all in the set of options that official Moscow discusses in relation to the challenges it faces in its Ukraine operation. Such a possibility would arise only if the NATO forces being sent to the EU’s ‘front line states’ grew in number by several times those presently assigned and appeared to be preparing to invade Russia.

Before Ramstein, before the news of Ukrainian successes on the ground in the Kharkov sector, I had plans to write about a very different development this past week that coincided with a different calendar: the end of summer vacations and return to work of our national governments.  With the return, our presidents and prime ministers would finally have to address the critical state of the European economies, which are facing the highest inflation rates in decades and an energy crisis brought about by the sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons. Speculation was rife on what exactly they would do.

I was particularly struck by several articles in the 7 September edition of The Financial Times and planned to comment on them.

For months now, the FT has been the voice of Number 10, Downing Street, at the vanguard of the Western crusade to crush Russia.  Their editorial board has consistently backed every proposal for sanctions against Russia, however hare-brained.   And yet on the 7th their journalists ran away with the show and cast doubt on the basic assumptions held by their bosses. One article by Derek Brower in the “FT Energy Source” newsletter has the self-explanatory title “The price cap idea that could worsen the energy crisis.”  As we saw today, Brower’s concern was misplaced:  finally, the EU could not agree a price cap policy. This notion, promoted from the United States by none other than the Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, is in full contradiction with the practices of the global hydrocarbon market, as even a few EU leaders understood, depriving the initiators from the Baltic States of their hoped for consensus.

Another article of the 7th in FT, by Valentina Pop, Europe Express Editor, analyzed quickly and competently the problems facing European policy-makers in their bid to alleviate the pain to households and industry that the latest electricity and heating bills would otherwise present, given that they are several times higher than just a year ago and are unaffordable by large swathes of the population. Pop identified the key issue thus:  how to provide aid quickly to those most in need given the constraints and resources available to the various government bureaucracies: “Some capitals will take many months in determining which households require help” she says.  Of course, ‘many months’ of patience in the broad population will not be there.

But the most surprising article in this collection from the  7th was in the “Opinion Lex” section of the paper which was nominally about how Russian banks have weathered the storm that broke out when the EU sanctions on their industry first were laid down shortly after the start of Russia’s ‘special military operation.’ Indeed, VTB and other major Russian banks have returned to profitability despite it all. The author finds that ‘sanctions are biting less than western politicians hoped.’ Not only did the expected banking crisis not materialize, but the ruble is at five-year peaks and inflation is falling. Moreover the official Russian financial data behind these generalizations is said to be sound by independent and trustworthy market observers. The key conclusions are saved for last: “Russia has shown it can bear the pain of western sanctions. Western Europe must endure reprisals as robustly, or concede a historic defeat.’ The ‘reprisals’ in question are the complete shutdown of Russian gas deliveries through Nord Stream I until Europe lifts its sanctions.

It is interesting that even the Opinion article by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg published on the 7th in FT carries the following grim warning:  “We face a difficult six months, with the threat of energy cuts, disruptions and perhaps even civil unrest.’ [emphasis mine]

To be sure, here and there in Europe, there are a few clever administrators who find promising solutions to the pending crisis of energy bills. In her first day in office, Britain’s new Prime Minister Liz Truss announced one such solution:  to immediately freeze the maximum energy bill per household at the present level of 2500 pounds sterling per year and then to turn around and agree with the power companies a subsidy for them to cover their losses. 

This is fine for nipping in the bud possible ‘civil unrest.’  But the question remains how Britain will finance the estimated 150 billion pounds this will cost in the first year alone. If a similar solution were approved in the EU, the overall cost would surely approach the 800 billion euros of assistance borrowed to cover losses attributable to the Covid pandemic a year ago. But whereas the Covid aid was financed by collective borrowing of the EU, no such solidarity is likely to deal with the energy crisis, given that Germany, the Netherlands and other northern Member States oppose this becoming a general practice and will apply a veto. The British solution, however clever it may be, will hardly be available to many countries in the EU on their own given their high state indebtedness.

Then there is the second question of what to do to assist industry.  Failure to give industry proper relief will result in company closures and rampant unemployment, which finally also sparks political protest. In any case, such solutions do not deal with the knock-on effects of vastly increased government borrowing to finance the energy subsidies, something which in the best of times always reduces capital available for other government services and capital available to private business for investment and job creation.

These various problems in dealing with the energy crisis that Europe created for itself by imposing sanctions on Russia may well be intractable and may well lead to spontaneous protests in a number of European countries this fall.

There is,no anti-war movement on the Old Continent to speak of.  So popular protests over the ‘heat or eat’ dilemma being imposed from the chanceries on the people without anything resembling public debate may be the salvation of us all if they induce war mongering politicans to resign.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

For about six years after the second Minsk Agreement was signed in 2015, the Kremlin tried hard to get that accord implemented. It would have ensured the autonomous status of Donbass within Ukraine and given the region influence on national politics and policies, including in the issue of the country’s geopolitical and geo-economic orientation. From the very start, however, Kiev was unwilling to cooperate on the deal’s implementation, seeing it as a win for Moscow. Washington, in pursuit of a policy to contain Russia, encouraged such an obstructionist stance, while Berlin and Paris, formally the guarantors of the agreement (alongside Russia), had no leverage in Kiev and ended up embracing the Ukrainian position. 

Vladimir Zelensky’s election to Ukraine’s presidency in 2019 initially appeared to be an opening for peace, and President Putin made a serious effort to get the Minsk agreement off the ground. Kiev, however, soon backtracked and took an even more hardline position than before. Nevertheless, until mid-2021 the Kremlin continued to see as its goals in Ukraine a resolution of the Donbass issue essentially on the basis of Minsk, and the eventual de facto recognition of Crimea’s Russian status. In June of last year, Vladimir Putin, however, published a long article on Russian-Ukrainian relations which made it clear that he viewed the current situation as a major security, political, and identity issue for his country; recognized his personal responsibility; and was resolved to do something to strategically correct it. The article did not give away Putin’s game plan, but it laid out his basic thinking on Ukraine.

Last December, Moscow passed on to Washington a package of proposals, which amounted to a list of security guarantees for Russia. These included Ukraine’s formal neutrality between Russia and NATO (“no Ukraine in NATO”); and no deployment of US and other NATO weapons and military bases in Ukraine, as well as a ban on military exercises on Ukrainian territory (“no NATO in Ukraine”). While the US agreed to discuss some military technical issues dealt with in the Russian paper it rejected Moscow’s key demands related to Ukraine and NATO. Putin had to take no for an answer.

Just before the launch of its military operation, Moscow recognized the two Donbass republics and told Kiev to vacate the parts of Donetsk and Lugansk then under Ukrainian control – or face the consequences. Kiev refused, and hostilities began. Russia’s official reason for unleashing force was defending the two newly recognized republics which had asked for military assistance. 

Shortly after the start of hostilities Russia and Ukraine began peace talks. In late March 2022 at a meeting in Istanbul, Moscow demanded that Zelensky’s government recognize the sovereignty of the two Donbass republics within their constitutional borders, as well as Russia’s own sovereignty over Crimea, which was formally incorporated into the Russian Federation in 2014, plus accept a neutral and demilitarized status for territory controlled by Kiev. At that point, Moscow still recognized the current Ukrainian authorities and was prepared to deal with them directly. For its part, Kiev initially appeared ready to accept Moscow’s demands (which were criticized by many within Russia as overly concessionary to Ukraine), but then quickly reverted to a hardline stance. Moscow has always suspected that this U-turn, as on previous occasions, was the result of US behind-the-scenes influence, often aided by the British and other allies.   

From the spring of 2022, as the fighting continued, Moscow expanded its aims. These now included the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine, meaning not only the removal of ultra-nationalist and anti-Russian elements from the Ukrainian government (increasingly characterized by Russian officials now as the “Kiev regime”), but the extirpation of their underlying ideology (based around the World War Two Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera) and its influence in society, including in education, the media, culture and other spheres.

Next to this, Moscow added something that Putin called, in his trademark caustic way, the “de-Communization” of Ukraine, meaning ridding that country, whose leadership was rejecting its Soviet past, of the Russian-populated or Russian-speaking territories that had been awarded to the Soviet Ukrainian republic of the USSR by the Communist leaders in Moscow, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. These include, besides Donbass, the entire southeast of Ukraine, from Kharkov to Odessa.

This change of policy led to dropping the early signals about Russia honoring Ukraine’s statehood outside Donbass, and to establishing Russian military government bodies in the territory seized by the Russian forces. Immediately following that, a drive started to de facto integrate these territories with Moscow. By the early fall of 2022, all of Kherson, much of Zaporozhye and part of Kharkov oblasts were being drawn into the Russian economic system; started to use the Russian ruble; adopted the Russian education system; and their population was offered a fast-track way to Russian citizenship.

As the fighting in Ukraine quickly became a proxy war between Russia and the US-led West, Russia’s views on Ukraine’s future radicalized further. While a quick cessation of hostilities and a peace settlement on Russian terms in the spring would have left Ukraine, minus Donbass, demilitarized and outside NATO, but otherwise under the present leadership with its virulently anti-Russian ideology and reliance on the West, the new thinking, as Putin’s remarks in Kaliningrad suggest, tends to regard any Ukrainian state that is not fully and securely cleansed of ultranationalist ideology and its agents as a clear and present danger; in fact, a ticking bomb right on Russia’s borders not far from its capital.  

Under these circumstances, in view of all the losses and hardships sustained, it would not suffice that Russia wins control of what was once known as Novorossiya, the northern coast of the Black Sea all the way to Transnistria. This would mean that Ukraine would be completely cut off from the sea, and Russia would gain – via referenda, it is assumed – a large swath of territory and millions of new citizens. To reach that objective, of course, the Russian forces still need to seize Nikolaev and Odessa in the south, as well as Kharkov in the east. A logical next step would be to expand Russian control to all of Ukraine east of the Dnieper River, as well as the city of Kiev that lies mostly on the right bank. If this were to happen, the Ukrainian state would shrink to the central and western regions of the country.

Neither of these outcomes, however, deals with the fundamental problem that Putin has highlighted, that is to say, of Russia having to live side-by-side with a state that will constantly seek revenge and will be used by the United States, which arms and directs it, in its effort to threaten and weaken Russia. This is the main reason behind the argument for taking over the entire territory of Ukraine to the Polish border. However, integrating central and western Ukraine into Russia would be exceedingly difficult, while trying to build a Ukrainian buffer state controlled by Russia would be a major drain on resources, as well as a constant headache. No wonder that some in Moscow would not mind if Poland were to absorb western Ukraine within some form of a common political entity which, Russia’s foreign intelligence claims, is being surreptitiously created.

Ukraine’s future will not be dictated, of course, by someone’s wishes, but by the actual developments on the battlefield. Fighting there will continue for some time, and the final outcome is not in sight. Even when the active phase of the conflict comes to an end, it is unlikely to be followed up by a peace settlement. For different reasons, each side regards the conflict as existential – and much wider than Ukraine. This means that what Russia aims for has to be won and then held firmly.

We are pleased to bring you this fresh interview with Jacques Baud, in which we cover what is now happening in the geopolitical struggle that is the Ukraine-Russia war. As always, Mr. Baud brings deep insight and clear analysis to the conversation.

The Postil (TP): You have just published your latest book on the war in Ukraine—Operation Z, published by Max Milo. Please tell us a little about it—what led you to write this book and what do you wish to convey to readers?

Jacques Baud (JB): The aim of this book is to show how the misinformation propagated by our media has contributed to push Ukraine in the wrong direction. I wrote it under the motto “from the way we understand crises derives the way we solve them.”

By hiding many aspects of this conflict, the Western media has presented us with a caricatural and artificial image of the situation, which has resulted in the polarization of minds. This has led to a widespread mindset that makes any attempt to negotiate virtually impossible.

The one-sided and biased representation provided by mainstream media is not intended to help us solve the problem, but to promote hatred of Russia. Thus, the exclusion of disabled athletes, cats, even Russian trees from competitions, the dismissal of conductors, the de-platforming of Russian artists, such as Dostoyevsky, or even the renaming of paintings aims at excluding the Russian population from society! In France, bank accounts of individuals with Russian-sounding names were even blocked. Social networks Facebook and Twitter have systematically blocked the disclosure of Ukrainian crimes under the pretext of “hate speech” but allow the call for violence against Russians.

None of these actions had any effect on the conflict, except to stimulate hatred and violence against the Russians in our countries. This manipulation is so bad that we would rather see Ukrainians die than to seek a diplomatic solution. As Republican Senator Lindsey Graham recently said, it is a matter of letting the Ukrainians fight to the last man.

It is commonly assumed that journalists work according to standards of quality and ethics to inform us in the most honest way possible. These standards are set by the Munich Charter of 1971. While writing my book I found out that no French-speaking mainstream media in Europe respects this charter as far as Russia and China are concerned. In fact, they shamelessly support an immoral policy towards Ukraine, described by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, president of Mexico, as “We provide the weapons, you provide the corpses!”

To highlight this misinformation, I wanted to show that information allowing to provide a realistic picture of the situation was available as early as February, but that our media did not relay it to the public. My goal was to show this contradiction.

In order to avoid becoming a propagandist myself in favor of one side or the other, I have relied exclusively on Western, Ukrainian (from Kiev) and Russian opposition sources. I have not taken any information from the Russian media.

TP: It is commonly said in the West that this war has “proven” that the Russian army is feeble and that its equipment is useless. Are these assertions true?

JB: No. After more than six months of war, it can be said that the Russian army is effective and efficient, and that the quality of its command & control far exceeds what we see in the West. But our perception is influenced by a reporting that is focused on the Ukrainian side, and by distortions of reality.

Firstly, there is the reality on the ground. It should be remembered that what the media call “Russians” is in fact a Russian-speaking coalition, composed of professional Russian fighters and soldiers of the popular militias of Donbass. The operations in the Donbass are mainly carried out by these militias, who fight on “their” terrain, in towns and villages they know and where they have friends and family. They are therefore advancing cautiously for themselves, but also to avoid civilian casualties. Thus, despite the claims of western propaganda, the coalition enjoys a very good popular support in the areas it occupies.

Then, just looking at a map, you can see that the Donbass is a region with a lot of built-up and inhabited areas, which means an advantage for the defender and a reduced speed of progress for the attacker in all circumstances.

Secondly, there is the way our media portray the evolution of the conflict. Ukraine is a huge country and small-scale maps hardly show the differences from one day to another. Moreover, each side has its own perception of the progress of the enemy. If we take the example of the situation on March 25, 2022, we can see that the map of the French daily newspaper Ouest-France (a) shows almost no advance of Russia, as does the Swiss RTS site (b). The map of the Russian website RIAFAN (c) may be propaganda, but if we compare it with the map of the [French Military Intelligence Directorate](https://www.defense.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/ministere-armees/Situation Ukraine au 25 mars.pdf) (DRM) (d), we see that the Russian media is probably closer to the truth. All these maps were published on the same day, but the French newspaper and the Swiss state media did not choose to use the DRM map and preferred to use a Ukrainian map. This illustrates that our media work like propaganda outlets.

Figure 1 – Comparison of the maps presented in our media on 25 March 2022. It is this way of presenting the Russian offensive that has led to the assertion that the Russian army is weak. It also shows that the information provided by the Russian media seems closer to reality than that given by Ukraine.

Thirdly, our “experts” have themselves determined the objectives of the Russian offensive. By claiming that Russia wanted to take over Ukraine and its resources, to take over Kiev in two days, etc., our experts have literally invented and attributed to the Russians objectives that Putin never mentioned. In May 2022, Claude Wild, the Swiss ambassador in Kiev, declared on RTS that the Russians had “lost the battle for Kiev.” But in reality, there was never a “battle for Kiev.” It is obviously easy to claim that the Russians did not reach their objectives—if they never tried to reach them!

Fourthly, the West and Ukraine have created a misleading picture of their adversary. In France, Switzerland and Belgium, none of the military experts on television have any knowledge of military operations and how the Russians conduct theirs. Their “expertise” comes from the rumours from the war in Afghanistan or Syria, which are often merely Western propaganda. These experts have literally falsified the presentation of Russian operations.

Thus, the objectives announced as early as February 24 by Russia were the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of the threat to the populations of Donbass. These objectives are related to the neutralization of capabilities, not the seizure of land or resources. To put it bluntly, in theory, to achieve their goals the Russians do not need to advance—it would be enough if Ukrainians themselves would come and get killed.

In other words, our politicians and media have pushed Ukraine to defend the terrain like in France during the First World War. They pushed Ukrainian troops to defend every square meter of ground in “last stand” situations. Ironically, the West has only made the Russians’ job easier.

In fact, as with the war on terror, Westerners see the enemy as they would like him to be, not as he is. As Sun Tzu said 2,500 years ago, this is the best recipe for losing a war.

One example is the so-called “hybrid war” that Russia is allegedly waging against the West. In June 2014, as the West tried to explain Russia’s (imaginary) intervention in the Donbass conflict, Russia expert Mark Galeotti “revealed” the existence of a doctrine that would illustrate the Russian concept of hybrid warfare. Known as the “Gerasimov Doctrine,” it has never really been defined by the West as to what it consists of and how it could ensure military success. But it is used to explain how Russia wages war in Donbass without sending troops there and why Ukraine consistently loses its battles against the rebels. In 2018, realizing that he was wrong, Galeotti apologized—courageously and intelligently—in an article titled, “I’m Sorry for Creating the Gerasimov Doctrine” published in Foreign Policy magazine.

Despite this, and without knowing what it meant, our media and politicians continued to pretend that Russia was waging a hybrid war against Ukraine and the West. In other words, we imagined a type of war that does not exist and we prepared Ukraine for it. This is also what explains the challenge for Ukraine to have a coherent strategy to counter Russian operations.

The West does not want to see the situation as it really is. The Russian-speaking coalition has launched its offensive with an overall strength inferior to that of the Ukrainians in a ratio of 1-2:1. To be successful when you are outnumbered, you must create local and temporary superiorities by quickly moving your forces on the battlefield.

This is what the Russians call “operational art” (operativnoe iskoustvo). This notion is poorly understood in the West. The term “operational” used in NATO has two translations in Russian: “operative” (which refers to a command level) and “operational” (which defines a condition). It is the art of maneuvering military formations, much like a chess game, in order to defeat a superior opponent.

For example, the operation around Kiev was not intended to “deceive” the Ukrainians (and the West) about their intentions, but to force the Ukrainian army to keep large forces around the capital and thus “pin them down.” In technical terms, this is what is called a “shaping operation.” Contrary to the analysis of some “experts,” it was not a “deception operation,” which would have been conceived very differently and would have involved much larger forces. The aim was to prevent a reinforcement of the main body of the Ukrainian forces in the Donbass.

The main lesson of this war at this stage confirms what we know since the Second World War: the Russians master the operational art.

TP: Questions about Russia’s military raises the obvious question—how good is Ukraine’s military today? And more importantly, why do we not hear so much about the Ukrainian army?

JB: The Ukrainian servicemen are certainly brave soldiers who perform their duty conscientiously and courageously. But my personal experience shows that in almost every crisis, the problem is at the head. The inability to understand the opponent and his logic and to have a clear picture of the actual situation is the main reason for failures.

Since the beginning of the Russian offensive, we can distinguish two ways of conducting the war. On the Ukrainian side, the war is waged in the political and informational spaces, while on the Russian side the war is waged in the physical and operational space. The two sides are not fighting in the same spaces. This is a situation that I described in 2003 in my book, La guerre asymétrique ou la défaite du vainqueur (Asymmetric War, or the Defeat of the Winner). The trouble is that at the end of the day, the reality of the terrain prevails.

On the Russian side, decisions are made by the military, while on the Ukrainian side, Zelensky is omnipresent and the central element in the conduct of the war. He makes operational decisions, apparently often against the military’s advice. This explains the rising tensions between Zelensky and the military. According to Ukrainian media, Zelensky could dismiss General Valery Zoluzhny by appointing him Minister of Defence.

The Ukrainian army has been extensively trained by American, British and Canadian officers since 2014. The trouble is that for over 20 years, Westerners have been fighting armed groups and scattered adversaries and engaged entire armies against individuals. They fight wars at the tactical level and somehow have lost the ability to fight at the strategic and operative levels. This explains partly why Ukraine is waging its war at this level.

But there is a more conceptual dimension. Zelensky and the West see war as a numerical and technological balance of forces. This is why, since 2014, the Ukrainians have never tried to seduce the rebels and they now think that the solution will come from the weapons supplied by the West. The West provided Ukraine with a few dozen M777 guns and HIMARS and MLRS missile launchers, while Ukraine had several thousand equivalent artillery pieces in February. The Russian concept of “correlation of forces,” takes into account many more factors and is more holistic than the Western approach. That is why the Russians are winning.

To comply with ill-considered policies, our media have constructed a virtual reality that gives Russia the bad role. For those who observe the course of the crisis carefully, we could almost say they presented Russia as a “mirror image” of the situation in Ukraine. Thus, when the talk about Ukrainian losses began, Western communication turned to Russian losses (with figures given by Ukraine).

The so-called “counter-offensives” proclaimed by Ukraine and the West in Kharkov and Kherson in April-May were merely “counter-attacks.” The difference between the two is that counter-offensive is an operational notion, while counter-attack is a tactical notion, which is much more limited in scope. These counterattacks were possible because the density of Russian troops in these sectors was then 1 Battle Group (BTG) per 20 km of front. By comparison, in the Donbass sector, which was the primary focus, the Russian coalition had 1-3 BTG per km. As for the great August offensive on Kherson, which was supposed to take over the south of the country, it seems to have been nothing but a myth to maintain Western support.

Today, we see that the claimed Ukrainian successes were in fact failures. The human and material losses that were attributed to Russia were in fact more in line with those of Ukraine. In mid-June, David Arakhamia, Zelensky’s chief negotiator and close adviser, spoke of 200 to 500 deaths per day, and he mentioned casualties (dead, wounded, captured, deserters) of 1,000 men per day. If we add to this the renewed demands for arms by Zelensky, we can see that the idea of a victory for Ukraine appears quite an illusion.

Because Russia’s economy was thought to be comparable to Italy’s, it was assumed that it would be equally vulnerable. Thus, the West—and the Ukrainians—thought that economic sanctions and political isolation of Russia would quickly cause its collapse, without passing through a military defeat. Indeed, this is what we understand from the interview of Oleksei Arestovich, Zelensky’s advisor and spokesman, in March 2019. This also explains why Zelensky did not sound the alarm in early 2022, as he says in his interview with the Washington Post. I think he knew that Russia would respond to the offensive Ukraine was preparing in the Donbass (which is why the bulk of his troops were in that area) and thought that sanctions would quickly lead to Russia’s collapse and defeat. This is what Bruno Le Maire, the French Minister of the Economy, had “predicted.” Clearly, the Westerners have made decisions without knowing their opponent.

As Arestovich said, the idea was that the defeat of Russia would be Ukraine’s entry ticket to NATO. So, the Ukrainians were pushed to prepare an offensive in the Donbass in order to make Russia react, and thus obtain an easy defeat through devastating sanctions. This is cynical and shows how much the West—led by the Americans—has misused Ukraine for its own objectives.

The result is that the Ukrainians did not seek Ukraine’s victory, but Russia’s defeat. This is very different and explains the Western narrative from the first days of the Russian offensive, which prophesied this defeat.

But the reality is that the sanctions did not work as expected, and Ukraine found itself dragged into combats that it had provoked, but for which it was not prepared to fight for so long.

This is why, from the outset, the Western narrative presented a mismatch between media reported and the reality on the ground. This had a perverse effect: it encouraged Ukraine to repeat its mistakes and prevented it from improving its conduct of operations. Under the pretext of fighting Vladimir Putin, we pushed Ukraine to sacrifice thousands of human lives unnecessarily.

From the beginning, it was obvious that the Ukrainians were consistently repeating their mistakes (and even the same mistakes as in 2014-2015), and soldiers were dying on the battlefield. For his part, Volodymyr Zelensky called for more and more sanctions, including the most absurd ones, because he was led to believe that they were decisive.

I am not the only one to have noticed these mistakes, and Western countries could certainly have stopped this disaster. But their leaders, excited by the (fanciful) reports of Russian losses and thinking they were paving the way for regime change, added sanctions to sanctions, turning down any possibility of negotiation. As the French Minister of Economy Bruno Le Maire said, the objective was to provoke the collapse of the Russian economy and make the Russian people suffer. This is a form of state terrorism: the idea is to make the population suffer in order to push it into revolting against its leaders (here, Putin). I am not making this up. This mechanism is detailed by Richard Nephew, head of sanctions at the State Department under Obama and currently Coordinator on Global Anti-Corruption, in his book entitled, The Art of Sanctions. Ironically, this is exactly the same logic that the Islamic State invoked to explain its attacks in France in 2015-2016. France probably does not encourage terrorism—but it does practice it.

The mainstream media do not present the war as it is, but as they would like it to be. This is pure wishful thinking. The apparent public support for the Ukrainian authorities, despite huge losses (some mention 70,000-80,000 fatalities), is achieved by banning the opposition, a ruthless hunt for officials who disagree with the government line, and “mirror” propaganda that attributes to the Russians the same failures as the Ukrainians. All this with the conscious support of the West.

TP: What should we make of the explosion at the Saki airbase in the Crimea?

JB: I do not know the details of the current security situation in Crimea. . We know that before February there were cells of volunteer fighters of Praviy Sektor (a neo-Nazi militia) in Crimea, ready to carry out terrorist-type attacks. Have these cells been neutralized? I don’t know; but one can assume so, since there is apparently very little sabotage activity in Crimea. Having said that, let us not forget that Ukrainians and Russians have lived together for many decades and there are certainly pro-Kiev individuals in the areas taken by the Russians. It is therefore realistic to think that there could be sleeper cells in these areas.

More likely it is a campaign conducted by the Ukrainian security service (SBU) in the territories occupied by the Russian-speaking coalition. This is a terrorist campaign targeting pro-Russian Ukrainian personalities and officials. It follows major changes in the leadership of the SBU, in Kiev, and in the regions, including Lvov, Ternopol since July. It is probably in the context of this same campaign that Darya Dugina was assassinated on August 21. The objective of this new campaign could be to convey the illusion that there is an ongoing resistance in the areas taken by the Russians and thus revive Western aid, which is starting to fatigue.

These sabotage activities do not really have an operational impact and seem more related to a psychological operation. It may be that these are actions like the one on Snake Island at the beginning of May, intended to demonstrate to the international public that Ukraine is acting.

What the incidents in Crimea indirectly show is that the popular resistance claimed by the West in February does not exist. It is most likely the action of Ukrainian and Western (probably British) clandestine operatives. Beyond the tactical actions, this shows the inability of the Ukrainians to activate a significant resistance movement in the areas seized by the Russian-speaking coalition.

TP: Zelensky has famously said, “Crimea is Ukrainian and we will never give it up.” Is this rhetoric, or is there a plan to attack Crimea? Are there Ukrainian operatives inside Crimea?

JB: First of all, Zelensky changes his opinion very often. In March 2022, he made a proposal to Russia, stating that he was ready to discuss a recognition of Russian sovereignty over the peninsula. It was upon the intervention of the European Union and Boris Johnson on 2 April and on 9 April that he withdrew his proposal, despite Russia’s favorable interest.

It is necessary to recall some historical facts. The cession of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 was never formally validated by the parliaments of the USSR, Russia and Ukraine during the communist era. Moreover, the Crimean people agreed to be subject to the authority of Moscow and no longer of Kiev as early as January 1991. In other words, Crimea was independent from Kiev even before Ukraine became independent from Moscow in December 1991.

In July, Aleksei Reznikov, the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, spoke loudly of a major counter-offensive on Kherson involving one million men to restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity. In reality, Ukraine has not managed to gather the troops, armor and air cover needed for this far-fetched offensive. Sabotage actions in Crimea may be a substitute for this “counter-offensive.” They seem to be more of a communication exercise than a real military action. These actions seem to be aimed rather at reassuring Western countries which are questioning the relevance of their unconditional support to Ukraine.

TP: Would you tell us about the situation around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility?

JB: In Energodar, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP), has been the target of several attacks by artillery, which Ukrainians and Russians attribute to the opposing side.

What we know is that the Russian coalition forces have occupied the ZNPP site since the beginning of March. The objective at that time was to secure the ZNPP quickly, in order to prevent it from being caught up in the fighting and thus avoid a nuclear incident. The Ukrainian personnel who were in charge of it have remained on site and continue to work under the supervision of the Ukrainian company Energoatom and the Ukrainian nuclear safety agency (SNRIU). There is therefore no fighting around the plant.

It is hard to see why the Russians would shell a nuclear plant that is under their control. This allegation is even more peculiar since the Ukrainians themselves state that there are Russian troops in the premises of the site. According to a French “expert,” the Russians would attack the power plant they control to cut off the electricity flowing to Ukraine. Not only would there be simpler ways to cut off the electricity to Ukraine (a switch, perhaps?), but Russia has not stopped the electricity supply to the Ukrainians since March. Moreover, I remind you that Russia has not stopped the flow of natural gas to Ukraine and has continued to pay Ukraine the transit fees for gas to Europe. It is Zelensky who decided to shut down the Soyuz pipeline in May.

Moreover, it should be remembered that the Russians are in an area where the population is generally favorable to them and it is hard to understand why they would take the risk of a nuclear contamination of the region.

In reality, the Ukrainians have more credible motives than the Russians that may explain such attacks against the ZNPP. , which are not mutually exclusive: an alternative to the big counter-offensive on Kherson, which they are not able to implement, and to prevent the planned referendums in the region. Further, Zelensky’s calls for demilitarizing the area of the power plant and even returning it to Ukraine would be a political and operational success for him. One might even imagine that they seek to deliberately provoke a nuclear incident in order to create a “no man’s land” and thus render the area unusable for the Russians.

By bombing the plant, Ukraine could also be trying to pressure the West to intervene in the conflict, under the pretext that Russia is seeking to disconnect the plant from the Ukrainian power grid before the fall. This suicidal behavior—as stated by UN Secretary General António Guterres—would be in line with the war waged by Ukraine since 2014.

There is strong evidence that the attacks on Energodar are Ukrainian. The fragments of projectiles fired at the site from the other side of the Dnieper are of Western origin. It seems that they come from British BRIMSTONE missiles, which are precision missiles, whose use is monitored by the British. Apparently, the West is aware of the Ukrainian attacks on the ZNPP. This might explain why Ukraine is not very supportive of an international commission of inquiry and why Western countries are putting unrealistic conditions for sending investigators from the IAEA, an agency that has not shown much integrity so far.

TP: It is reported that Zelensky is freeing criminals to fight in this war? Does this mean that Ukraine’s army is not as strong as commonly assumed?

JB: Zelensky faces the same problem as the authorities that emerged from Euromaidan in 2014. At that time, the military did not want to fight because they did not want to confront their Russian-speaking compatriots. According to a report by the British Home Office, reservists overwhelmingly refuse to attend recruitment sessions . In October-November 2017, 70% of conscripts do not show up for recall . Suicide has become a problem. According to the chief Ukrainian military prosecutor Anatoly Matios, after four years of war in the Donbass, 615 servicemen had committed suicide. Desertions have increased and reached up to 30% of the forces in certain operational areas, often in favor of the rebels.

For this reason, it became necessary to integrate more motivated, highly politicized, ultra-nationalistic and fanatical fighters into the armed forces to fight in the Donbass. Many of them are neo-Nazis. It is to eliminate these fanatical fighters that Vladimir Putin has mentioned the objective of “denazification.”

Today, the problem is slightly different. The Russians have attacked Ukraine and the Ukrainian soldiers are not a priori opposed to fighting them. But they realize that the orders they receive are not consistent with the situation on the battlefield. They understood that the decisions affecting them are not linked to military factors, but to political considerations. Ukrainian units are mutinying en masse and are increasingly refusing to fight. They say they feel abandoned by their commanders and that they are given missions without the necessary resources to execute them.

That’s why it becomes necessary to send men who are ready for anything. Because they are condemned, they can be kept under pressure. This is the same principle as Marshal Konstantin Rokossovki, who was sentenced to death by Stalin, but was released from prison in 1941 to fight against the Germans. His death sentence was lifted only after Stalin’s death in 1956.

In order to overshadow the use of criminals in the armed forces, the Russians are accused of doing the same thing. The Ukrainians and the Westerners consistently use “mirror” propaganda. As in all recent conflicts, Western influence has not led to a moralization of the conflict.

TP: Everyone speaks of how corrupt Putin is? But what about Zelensky? Is he the “heroic saint” that we are all told to admire?

JB: In October 2021, the Pandora Papers showed that Ukraine and Zelensky were the most corrupt in Europe and practiced tax evasion on a large scale. Interestingly, these documents were apparently published with the help of an American intelligence agency, and Vladimir Putin is not mentioned. More precisely, the documents mention individuals ” associated ” with him, who are said to have links with undisclosed assets, which could belong to a woman, who is believed to have had a child with him.

Yet, when our media are reporting on these documents, they routinely put a picture of Vladimir Putin, but not of Volodymyr Zelensky.

Figure 2 – Although he is not mentioned in the Pandora Papers, Vladimir Putin is consistently associated with them. Whereas Volodymyr Zelensky is never mentioned in our media, even though he is widely implicated.

I am not in a position to assess how corrupt Zelensky is. But there is no doubt that the Ukrainian society and its governance are. I contributed modestly to a NATO “Building Integrity” program in Ukraine and discovered that none of the contributing countries had any illusions about its effectiveness, and all saw the program as a kind of “window dressing” to justify Western support.

It is unlikely that the billions paid by the West to Ukraine will reach the Ukrainian people. A recent CBS News report stated that only 30-40% of the weapons supplied by the West make it to the battlefield. The rest enriches mafias and other corrupt people. Apparently, some high-tech Western weapons have been sold to the Russians, such as the French CAESAR system and presumably the American HIMARS. The CBS News report was censored to avoid undermining Western aid, but the fact remains that the US refused to supply MQ-1C drones to Ukraine for this reason.

Ukraine is a rich country, yet today it is the only country in the former USSR with a lower GDP than it had at the collapse of the Soviet Union. The problem is therefore not Zelensky himself, but the whole system, which is deeply corrupted, and which the West maintains for the sole purpose of fighting Russia.

Zelensky was elected in April 2019 on the program of reaching an agreement with Russia. But nobody let him carry out his program. The Germans and the French deliberately prevented him from implementing the Minsk agreements. The transcript of the telephone conversation of 20 February 2022 between Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin shows that France deliberately kept Ukraine away from the solution. Moreover, in Ukraine, far right and neo-Nazi political forces have publicly threatened him with death. Dmitry Yarosh, commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, declared in May 2019 that Zelensky would be hanged if he carried out his program. In other words, Zelensky is trapped between his idea of reaching an agreement with Russia and the demands of the West. Moreover, the West realizes that its strategy of war through sanctions has failed. As the economic and social problems increase, the West will find it harder to back down without losing face. A way out for Britain, the US, the EU, or France would be to remove Zelensky. That is why, with the deteriorating situation in Ukraine, I think Zelensky starts to realize that his life is threatened.

At the end of the day, Zelensky is a poor guy, because his best enemies are those on whom he depends: the Western world.

TP: There are many videos (gruesome ones) on social media of Ukrainian soldiers engaging in serious war crimes? Why is there a “blind spot” in the West for such atrocities?

JB: First of all, we must be clear: in every war, every belligerent commit war crimes. Military personnel who deliberately commit such crimes dishonor their uniform and must be punished.

The problem arises when war crimes are part of a plan or result from orders given by the higher command. This was the case when the Netherlands let its military allow the Srebrenica massacre in 1995; the torture in Afghanistan by Canadian and British troops, not to mention the countless violations of international humanitarian law by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo and elsewhere with the complicity of Poland, Lithuania or Estonia. If these are Western values, then Ukraine is in the right school.

In Ukraine, political crime has become commonplace, with the complicity of the West. Thus, those who are in favor of a negotiation are eliminated. This is the case of Denis Kireyev, one of the Ukrainian negotiators, assassinated on March 5 by the Ukrainian security service (SBU) because he was considered too favorable to Russia and as a traitor. The same thing happened to Dmitry Demyanenko, an officer of the SBU, who was assassinated on March 10, also because he was too favorable to an agreement with Russia. Remember that this is a country that considers that receiving or giving Russian humanitarian aid is “collaborationism.”

On 16 March 2022, a journalist on TV channel Ukraine 24 referred to the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and called for the massacre of Russian-speaking children. On 21 March, the military doctor Gennadiy Druzenko declared on the same channel that he had ordered his doctors to castrate Russian prisoners of war. On social networks, these statements quickly became propaganda for the Russians and the two Ukrainians apologized for having said so, but not for the substance. Ukrainian crimes were beginning to be revealed on social networks, and on 27 March Zelensky feared that this would jeopardize Western support. This was followed—rather opportunely—by the Bucha massacre on 3 April, the circumstances of which remain unclear.

Britain, which then had the chairmanship of the UN Security Council, refused three times the Russian request to set up an international commission of enquiry into the crimes of Bucha. Ukrainian socialist MP Ilya Kiva revealed on Telegram that the Bucha tragedy was planned by the British MI6 special services and implemented by the SBU.

The fundamental problem is that the Ukrainians have replaced the “operational art” with brutality. Since 2014, in order to fight the autonomists, the Ukrainian government has never tried to apply strategies based on “hearts & minds,” which the British used in the 1950s-1960s in South-East Asia, which were much less brutal but much more effective and long-lasting. Kiev preferred to conduct an Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) in the Donbass and to use the same strategies as the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fighting terrorists authorizes all kinds of brutality. It is the lack of a holistic approach to the conflict that led to the failure of the West in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali.

Counter-Insurgency Operation (COIN) requires a more sophisticated and holistic approach. But NATO is incapable of developing such strategies as I have seen first-hand in Afghanistan. The war in Donbass has been brutal for 8 years and has resulted in the death of 10,000 Ukrainian citizens plus 4,000 Ukrainian military personnel. By comparison, in 30 years, the conflict in Northern Ireland resulted in 3,700 deaths. To justify this brutality, the Ukrainians had to invent the myth of a Russian intervention in Donbass.

The problem is that the philosophy of the new Maidan leaders was to have a racially pure Ukraine. In other words, the unity of the Ukrainian people was not to be achieved through the integration of communities, but through the exclusion of communities of “inferior races.” An idea that would no doubt have pleased the grandfathers of Ursula von der Leyen and Chrystia Freeland! This explains why Ukrainians have little empathy for the country’s Russian, Magyar and Romanian-speaking minorities. This in turn explains why Hungary and Romania do not want their territories to be used for the supply of arms to Ukraine.

This is why shooting at their own citizens to intimidate them is not a problem for the Ukrainians. This explains the spraying of thousands of PFM-1 (“butterfly”) anti-personnel mines, which look like toys, on the Russian-speaking city of Donetsk in July 2022. This type of mine is used by a defender, not an attacker in its main area of operation. Moreover, in this area, the Donbass militias are fighting “at home,” with populations they know personally.

I think that war crimes have been committed on both sides, but that their media coverage has been very different. Our media have reported extensively about crimes (true or false) attributed to Russia. On the other hand, they have been extremely silent about Ukrainian crimes. We do not know the whole truth about the Bucha massacre, but the available evidence supports the hypothesis that Ukraine staged the event to cover up its own crimes. By keeping these crimes quiet, our media have been complicit with them and have created a sense of impunity that has encouraged the Ukrainians to commit further crimes.

TP: Latvia wants the West (America) to designate Russia a “terrorist state.” What do you make of this? Does this mean that the war is actually over, and Russia has won?

JB: The Estonian and Latvian demands are in response to Zelensky’s call to designate Russia as a terrorist state. Interestingly, they come at the same time a Ukrainian terrorist campaign is being unleashed in Crimea, the occupied zone of Ukraine and the rest of Russian territory. It is also interesting that Estonia was apparently complicit in the attack on Darya Dugina in August 2022.

It seems that Ukrainians communicate in a mirror image of the crimes they commit or the problems they have, in order to hide them. For example, in late May 2022, as the Azovstal surrender in Mariupol showed neo-Nazi fighters, they began to allege that there are neo-Nazis in the Russian army. In August 2022, when Kiev was carrying out actions of a terrorist nature against the Energodar power plant in Crimea and on Russian territory, Zelensky called for Russia to be considered a terrorist state.

In fact, Zelensky continues to believe that he can only solve his problem by defeating Russia and that this defeat depends on sanctions against Russia. Declaring Russia a terrorist state would lead to further isolation. That is why he is making this appeal. This shows that the label “terrorist” is more political than operational, and that those who make such proposals do not have a very clear vision of the problem. The problem is that it has implications for international relations. This is why the US State Department is concerned that Zelensky’s request will be implemented by Congress.

TP: One of the sadder outcomes of this Ukraine-Russia conflict is how the West has shown the worst of itself. Where do you think we will go from here? More of the same, or will there be changes that will have to be made in regards to NATO, neutral countries which are no longer neutral, and the way the West seeks to “govern” the world?

JB: This crisis reveals several things. First, that NATO and the European Union are only instruments of US foreign policy. These institutions no longer act in the interests of their members, but in the interests of the US. The sanctions adopted under American pressure are backfiring on Europe, which is the big loser in this whole crisis: it suffers its own sanctions and has to deal with the tensions resulting from its own decisions.

The decisions taken by Western governments reveal a generation of leaders who are young and inexperienced (such as Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin); ignorant, yet thinking they are smart (such as French President Emmanuel Macron); doctrinaire (such as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen); and fanatical (such as the leaders of the Baltic States). They all share some of the same weaknesses, not least of which is their inability to manage a complex crisis.

When the head is unable to understand the complexity of a crisis, we respond with guts and dogmatism. This is what we see happening in Europe. The Eastern European countries, especially the Baltic States and Poland, have shown themselves to be loyal servants of American policy. They have also shown immature, confrontational, and short-sighted governance. These are countries that have never integrated Western values, that continue to celebrate the forces of the Third Reich and discriminate against their own Russian-speaking population.

I am not even mentioning the European Union, which has been vehemently opposed to any diplomatic solution and has only added fuel to the fire.

The more you are involved in a conflict, the more you are involved in its outcome. If you win, all is well. But if the conflict is a failure, you will bear the burden. This is what has happened to the United States in recent conflicts and what is happening in Ukraine. The defeat of Ukraine is becoming the defeat of the West.

Another big loser in this conflict is clearly Switzerland. Its neutral status has suddenly lost all credibility. Early August, Switzerland and Ukraine concluded an agreement that would allow the Swiss embassy in Moscow to offer protection to Ukrainian citizens in Russia. However, in order to enter into force, it has to be recognized by Russia. Quite logically, Russia refused and declared that “Switzerland had unfortunately lost its status as a neutral state and could not act as an intermediary or representative.”

This is a very serious development because neutrality is not simply a unilateral declaration. It must be accepted and recognized by all to be effective. Yet Switzerland not only aligned itself with the Western countries but was even more extreme than them. It can be said that in a few weeks, Switzerland has ruined a policy that has been recognized for almost 170 years. This is a problem for Switzerland, but it may also be a problem for other countries. A neutral state can offer a way out of a crisis. Today, Western countries are looking for a way out that would allow them to get closer to Russia in the perspective of an energy crisis without losing face. Turkey has taken on this role, but it is limited, as it is part of NATO.

Figure 3 – Countries and organizations that applied sanctions to Russia. Although Switzerland is a neutral country, it stands on the first place. According to own sources, this was done under pressure and blackmail from the United States. Nevertheless, this is a severe blow to the very principle of neutrality that will have consequences in other future conflicts.

The West has created an Iron Curtain 2.0 that will affect international relations for years to come. The West’s lack of strategic vision is astonishing. While NATO is aligning itself with US foreign policy and reorienting itself towards China, Western strategy has only strengthened the Moscow-Beijing axis.

TP: What do you think this war ultimately means for Europe, the US and China?

JB: In order to answer this question, we first must answer another question: “Why is this conflict more condemnable and sanctionable than previous conflicts started by the West?”

After the disasters of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Mali, the rest of the world expected the West to help resolve this crisis with common sense. The West responded in exactly the opposite way to these expectations. Not only has no one been able to explain why this conflict was more reprehensible than previous ones, but the difference in treatment between Russia and the United States has shown that more importance is attached to the aggressor than to the victims. Efforts to bring about the collapse of Russia contrast with the total impunity of countries that have lied to the UN Security Council, practiced torture, caused the deaths of over a million people and created 37 million refugees.

This difference in treatment went unnoticed in the West. But the “rest of the world” has understood that we have moved from a “law-based international order” to a “rules-based international order” determined by the West.

On a more material level, the confiscation of Venezuelan gold by the British in 2020, of Afghanistan’s sovereign funds in 2021, and then of Russia’s sovereign funds in 2022 by the US, has raised the mistrust of the West’s allies. This shows that the non-Western world is no longer protected by law and depends on the goodwill of the West.

This conflict is probably the starting point for a new world order. The world is not going to change all at once, but the conflict has raised the attention of the rest of the world. For when we say that the “international community” condemns Russia, we are in fact talking about 18% of the world’s population.

Some actors traditionally close to the West are gradually moving away from it. On 15 July 2022, Joe Biden visited Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) with two objectives: to prevent Saudi Arabia from moving closer to Russia and China, and to ask him to increase its oil production. But four days earlier, MbS made an official request to become a member of the BRICS, and a week later, on 21 July, MbS called Vladimir Putin to confirm that he would stand by the OPEC+ decision. In other words: no oil production increase. It was a slap in the face of the West and of its most powerful representative.

Saudi Arabia has now decided to accept Chinese currency as payment for its oil. This is a major event, which tends to indicate a loss of confidence in the dollar. The consequences are potentially huge. The petrodollar was established by the US in the 1970s to finance its deficit. By forcing other countries to buy dollars, it allows the US to print dollars without being caught in an inflationary loop. Thanks to the petrodollar, the US economy—which is essentially a consumer economy—is supported by the economies of other countries around the world. The demise of the petrodollar could have disastrous consequences for the US economy, as former Republican Senator Ron Paul puts it.

In addition, the sanctions have brought China and Russia, both targeted by the West, closer together. This has accelerated the formation of a Eurasian bloc and strengthened the position of both countries in the world. India, which the US has scorned as a “second-class” partner of the “Quad,” has moved closer to Russia and China, despite disputes with the latter.

Today, China is the main provider of infrastructure in the Third World. In particular, its way of interacting with African countries is more in line with the expectations of these countries. Collaboration with former colonial powers such as France and American imperialist paternalism are no longer welcome. For example, the Central African Republic and Mali have asked France to leave their countries and have turned to Russia.

At the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit, the US proudly announced a $150 million contribution to “strengthen its position in the broader geopolitical competition with China.” But in November 2021, President Xi Jinping offered $1.5 billion to the same countries to fight the pandemic and promote economic recovery. By using its money to wage war, the US has no money left to forge and consolidate alliances.

The West’s loss of influence stems from the fact that it continues to treat the “rest of the world” like “little children” and neglects the usefulness of good diplomacy.

The war in Ukraine is not the trigger for these phenomena, which started a few years ago, but it is most certainly an eye-opener and accelerator.

TP: The western media has been pushing that Putin may be seriously ill. If Putin suddenly dies, would this make any difference at all to the war?

JB: It seems that Vladimir Putin is a unique medical case in the world: he has stomach cancer, leukemia, an unknown but incurable and terminal phase disease, and is reportedly already dead. Yet in July 2022, at the Aspen Security Forum, CIA Director William Burns said that Putin was “too healthy” and that there was “no information to suggest that he is in poor health.” This shows how those who claim to be journalists work!

This is wishful thinking and, on the higher end of the spectrum, it echoes the calls for terrorism and the physical elimination of Vladimir Putin.

The West has personalized Russian politics through Putin, because he is the one who promoted the reconstruction of Russia after the Yeltsin years. Americans like to be champions when there are no competitors and see others as enemies. This is the case with Germany, Europe, Russia and China.

But our “experts” know little about Russian politics. For in reality, Vladimir Putin is more of a “dove” in the Russian political landscape. Given the climate that we have created with Russia, it would not be impossible that his disappearance would lead to the emergence of more aggressive forces. We should not forget that countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland or Georgia have never developed European democratic values. They still have discriminatory policies towards their ethnic Russians that are far from European values, and they behave like immature agents provocateurs. I think that if Putin were to disappear for some reason, the conflicts with these countries would take on a new dimension.

TP: How unified is Russia presently? Has the war created a more serious opposition than what previously existed within Russia?

JB: No, on the contrary. The American and European leaders have a poor understanding of their enemy: the Russian people are very patriotic and cohesive. Western obsession to ” punish ” the Russian people has only brought them closer to their leaders. In fact, by seeking to divide Russian society in an effort to overthrow the government, Western sanctions—including the dumbest ones—have confirmed what the Kremlin has been saying for years: that the West has a profound hatred of Russians. What was once said to be a lie is now confirmed in Russian opinion. The consequence is that the people’s trust in the government has grown stronger.

The approval ratings given by the Levada Centre (considered by the Russian authorities as a “foreign agent”) show that public opinion has tightened around Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. In January 2022, Vladimir Putin’s approval rating was 69% and the government’s was 53%. Today, Putin’s approval rating has been stable at around 83% since March, and the government’s is at 71%. In January, 29% did not approve of Vladimir Putin’s decisions, in July it was only 15%.

According to the Levada Centre, even the Russian operation in Ukraine enjoys a majority of favorable opinions. In March, 81% of Russians were in favor of the operation; this figure dropped to 74%, probably due to the impact of sanctions at the end of March, and then it went back up. In July 2022, the operation had 76% popular support.

Figure 4 – Not all Russians support the special operation in Ukraine, but three quarters of the population do. Ukrainian war crimes, Western sanctions and the good management of the economy by the Russian authorities explain this support. [Source]

The problem is that our journalists have neither culture nor journalistic discipline and they replace them with their own beliefs. It is a form of conspiracy that aims to create a false reality based on what one believes and not on the facts. For example, few know (or want to know) that Aleksey Navalny said he would not return Crimea to Ukraine. The West’s actions have completely wiped out the opposition, not because of “Putin’s repression,” but because in Russia, resistance to foreign interference and the West’s deep contempt for Russians is a bipartisan cause. Exactly like the hatred of Russians in the West. This is why personalities like Aleksey Navalny, who never had a very high popularity, have completely disappeared from the popular media landscape.

Moreover, even if the sanctions have had a negative impact on the Russian economy, the way the government has handled things since 2014 shows a great mastery of economic mechanisms and a great realism in assessing the situation. There is a rise in prices in Russia, but it is much lower than in Europe, and while Western economies are raising their key interest rates, Russia is lowering its own.

The Russian journalist Marina Ovsyannikova has been exemplified as an expression of the opposition in Russia. Her case is interesting because, as usual, we do not say everything.

On 14 March 2022, she provoked international applause by interrupting the Russian First Channel news program with a poster calling for ending the war in Ukraine. She was arrested and fined $280.

In May, the German newspaper Die Welt offered her a job in Germany, but in Berlin, pro-Ukrainian activists demonstrated to get the newspaper to end its collaboration with her. The media outlet Politico even suggested that she might be an agent of the Kremlin!

As a result, in June 2022, she left Germany to live in Odessa, her hometown. But instead of being grateful, the Ukrainians put her on the Mirotvorets blacklist where she is accused of treason, “participation in the Kremlin’s special information and propaganda operations” and “complicity with the invaders.”

The Mirotvorets website is a “hit list” for politicians, journalists or personalities who do not share the opinion of the Ukrainian government. Several of the people on the list have been murdered. In October 2019, the UN requested the closure of the site, but this was refused by the Rada. It should be noted that none of our mainstream media has condemned this practice, which is very far from the values they claim to defend. In other words, our media support these practices that used to be attributed to South American regimes.

Figure 5 – Darya Dugina marked as “Liquidated.”

Ovsyannikova then returned to Russia, where she demonstrated against the war, calling Putin a “killer,” and was arrested by the police and placed under house arrest for three months. At this point, our media protested.

It is worth noting that Russian journalist Darya Dugina, the victim of a bomb attack in Moscow on 21 August 2022, was on the Mirotvorets list and her file was marked “liquidated.” Of course, no Western media mentioned that she was targeted by the Mirotvorets website, which is considered to be linked to the SBU, as this would tend to support Russia’s accusations.

German journalist Alina Lipp, whose revelations about Ukrainian and Western crimes in the Donbass are disturbing, has been placed on the website Mirotvorets. Moreover, Alina Lipp was sentenced in absentia to three years in prison by a German court for claiming that Russian troops had “liberated” areas in Ukraine and thus “glorified criminal activities.” As can be seen, the German authorities are functioning like the neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine. Today’s politicians are a credit to their grandparents!

One can conclude that even if there are some people who oppose the war, Russian public opinion is overwhelmingly behind its government. Western sanctions have only strengthened the credibility of the Russian president.

Ultimately, my point is not to take the same approach as our media and replace the hatred of Russia with that of Ukraine. On the contrary, it is to show that the world is not either black or white and that Western countries have taken the situation too far. Those who are compassionate about Ukraine should have pushed our governments to implement the agreed political solutions in 2014 and 2015. They haven’t done anything and are now pushing Ukraine to fight. But we are no longer in 2021. Today, we have to accept the consequences of our non-decisions and help Ukraine to recover. But this must not be done at the expense of its Russian-speaking population, as we have done until now, but with the Russian-speaking people, in an inclusive manner. If I look at the media in France, Switzerland and Belgium, we are still very far from the goal.

TP: Thank you so very much, Mr. Baud, for this most enlightening discussion.

The heads of state and government present at the Minsk II Agreement.

For the past seven years, it has been the responsibility of the guarantor powers of the Minsk II Agreement (Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia) to enforce it. They had been endorsed and legalized by the United Nations Security Council on February 17, 2015. But none of these states have done so, despite the rhetoric about the need to protect citizens threatened by their own governments.

While there was talk of possible Russian military intervention, on January 31, 2022, the Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, defied Germany, France, Russia and the UN Security Council by stating, "Compliance with the Minsk agreements means the destruction of the country. When they were signed under the armed threat of the Russians - and under the eyes of the Germans and the French - it was already clear to all rational people that it was impossible to implement these documents" [[1](#nb1 ""Ukraine security chief: Minsk peace deal may create chaos, Yuras Karmanau, (...)")].

When, after seven years, the number of Ukrainians killed by the Kiev government amounted to more than 12,000 according to the Kiev government and more than 20,000 according to the Russian Investigative Committee, only then did Moscow launch a "special military operation" against the Ukrainian "integral nationalists" (as they claim), who were described as "neo-Nazis".

Russia declared from the start of its operation that it would stick to rescuing the populations and “denazifying” Ukraine, not occupying it. Yet the West accused it of trying to take Kiev, overthrow President Zelensky and annex Ukraine, which they obviously never did. It was only after the execution of one of the Ukrainian negotiators, Denis Kireev, by his own country’s security services (SBU) and the suspension of talks by President Volodymyr Zelensky that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, announced that he was toughening his demands. From now on, the Federation claims Novorussia, that is to say all of southern Ukraine, historically Russian since Tsarina Catherine II, with the exception of thirty-three years.

It should be understood that if Russia did nothing for seven years, it was not because it was insensitive to the massacre of the Russian-speaking population of Donbass, but because it was preparing to face the predictable Western response. According to the classic quotation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Tsar Alexander II, Prince Alexander Gortchakov: "The Emperor is determined to devote, preferably, his solicitude to the well-being of his subjects and to concentrate, on the development of the internal resources of the country, an activity which would be poured outside only when the positive interests of Russia would require it absolutely. Russia is reproached for isolating itself and keeping silent in the presence of facts that are not in accordance with either law or equity. Russia is said to be sulking. Russia is not sulking. Russia is taking stock".

This police operation was called "aggression" by the West. One thing leading to another, Russia was portrayed as a "dictatorship" and its foreign policy as "imperialism". No one seems to have read the Minsk II Agreement, which was endorsed by the UN Security Council. In a telephone conversation between Presidents Putin and Macron, revealed by the Élysée Palace, the latter even expressed his lack of interest in the fate of the population of Donbass, i.e. his contempt for the Minsk II Agreement.

Today, the Western secret services are coming to the aid of the Ukrainian "integral nationalists" (the "neo-Nazis" in Russian terminology) and, instead of seeking a peaceful solution, are trying to destroy Russia from within [2].

In international law, Moscow has only implemented the 2015 Security Council resolution. It can be blamed for its brutality, but neither for rushing (seven years), nor for being illegitimate (resolution 2202). Presidents Petro Poroshenko, Francois Hollande, Vladimir Putin and Chancellor Angela Merkel had pledged, in a joint statement attached to the resolution, to do the same. If any of these powers had intervened earlier, they could have chosen other modalities of operation, but none did.

Current Western strategy in Ukraine is not conducive to peace because it does not deal with some essential aspects of the current conflict. It does not deal with the rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine, and it does not address the thirty-year failure to set up a pan-European security system that includes Russia. Both are issues of primary importance to Russia. The relationship between them may not be obvious to many in the West, but for Russia, they illustrate a mindset of promoting Western interests and values at the expense of Russia’s.

It is precisely because of this mindset that the West was caught flat-footed when Russia suddenly seized the initiative to assert its interests through military means. This has left the West in a quandary, with few palatable options. Its preferred means of coercion—economic sanctions—are bound to become less and less effective over time, just as they have been in other countries, which have always found workable substitutes to reduce dependence on the West. Russia’s importance in providing the world with essential commodities, such as oil, gas, grains, and fertilizer, gives it even more economic clout.

At the same time, the political isolation that the West has sought to impose, while it has a certain public relations appeal, further limits the West’s ability to get Russia to cooperate on other issues of vital importance, and forces Russia into new alliances that will invariably be anti-Western. Henry Kissinger has recently argued that institutionalizing such animosity would be historically unprecedented and should be avoided at all costs.

Meanwhile, despite the rhetoric from Kyiv, the war has not brought Ukraine any closer to a resolution of its own internal conflicts. The rise of Ukrainian patriotic fervor is quite real, yet it often reflects the same regional disparities that have divided Ukraine since its independence. No matter how the military conflict ends, therefore, old resentments are likely to resurface, with Russian-speakers once again being blamed for their supposedly divided loyalties. As the popular Ukrainian journalist Mikhail Dubinyanski recently put it, “it took but a moment for the front lines to stabilize, for the traditional internal hate to re-emerge.”

A lasting settlement must recognize that this conflict will not end with the withdrawal of Russian troops. A settlement must, therefore, address three vital aspects of the conflict simultaneously, or it will not last. First, the competition between Russia and the West over Ukraine, which is clearly not going to end after the fighting stops. Second, the conflict between Russian and Ukrainian elites over their respective national and cultural differences, which is only going to intensify after the war. Third, the conflict between Ukraine’s western and eastern halves, which current patriotic enthusiasm has temporarily masked.

Our proposal does not seek to end these conflicts, which are endemic, but rather to shift the competition from the military arena, with its concomitant dangers of escalation, to the arenas of economic well-being and soft power. In essence, this is the kind of competition that the West was engaged in with the Soviet Union during the heyday of détente after it decided that coexistence was preferable to mutually assured destruction.

In exchange for the cessation of hostilities and the withdrawal of its forces, Russia would be obliged to not annex the regions it currently occupies and agree to hold a status referendum there under international supervision, some ten to twenty years from now. Ukraine, for its part, would accept its temporary loss of control over Novorossiya (the regions of Donbass, Lugansk, Zaporozhye, Kherson, and Nikolayev), with the proviso that their status will be ultimately determined by the referendum outcome.

In addition, NATO would formally pledge not to consider Ukraine for membership. In deference to Ukraine, however, there would be no formal pledge of Ukrainian neutrality. This would permit Ukraine to receive a wide variety of defensive military assistance and training from other countries, short of permanent foreign bases and weapons systems capable of striking Russian territory. Ukraine’s security concerns would be further allayed by a formal pledge by Russia that it will not object to European Union (EU) membership for Ukraine, opening the door to the multi-year assistance with investments and reforms that Ukraine will desperately need to recover.

Russian security, meanwhile, would be bolstered by international recognition of Novorossiya (some of the mechanisms used to defuse the dispute over the Free Territory of Trieste and Saarland might apply). A demilitarized zone on both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian border could be created and security further enhanced by the commitment of several key states to ensure the borders of both Ukraine and Novorossiya.

Sweeteners for Ukraine

A Ukrainian state that is able to pursue the post-2014 nationalist agenda. To obtain Western security guarantees, Russia will have to give up its goal of fully de-Nazifying Ukraine.

The firm prospect of EU membership in the foreseeable future. Russia may draw some scant comfort, however, from the fact that the regime that will be built in Ukraine will then be Europe’s headache (as some are beginning to realize).

Multi-year aid and defensive weapons assistance for Ukraine.

The possibility that regions now lost could eventually rejoin Ukraine if Kyiv provides them with appealing reasons to do so. This will, of course, depend on the policies that Kyiv adopts toward those regions, but Ukrainian authorities will have the better part of two decades, and significant Western assistance, to make their case.

Sweeteners for Russia

The loss of Ukrainian territory—Crimea permanently, Novorossiya perhaps only temporarily.

No NATO membership for Ukraine.

Western sanctions lifted on Russia, Belarus, and Novorossiya. One can reasonably assume that the regions within Novorossiya will be more naturally drawn to Russia. The EU should therefore not repeat the mistake that it made in 2013 of forcing Ukrainians to choose between European and Eurasian economic integration. This time around, everything should be done to create a free trade zone that encourages these regions to become a vital bridge linking both.

Finally, there is the possibility of Novorossiya eventually choosing to join Russia, should it prove to be more appealing and successful than Ukraine. No doubt, the West will do everything in its power over the next ten to twenty years to ensure that this is not the case.

The West should welcome such a shift in the focus of competition since it regards economic success and soft power as areas of traditional strength. Russia too should also welcome it, since it argues that at heart Russians and Ukrainians share a cultural and spiritual bond that goes much deeper than economics. This would be a chance to prove or disprove this argument. Ukrainian nationalists should also welcome it since it would give them two decades in which to build a broad base of support within Ukraine for their view that Russians and Ukrainians have nothing in common and to propagate this view through cultural ties and exports to Novorossiya. Moreover, they will be able to do so among a much more homogenous Ukrainian population, with the blessing and financial support of the West.

Finally, there is the not inconsiderable security advantage that Europe and the world would derive from establishing a framework in which Russia and the West can compete in ways that would be potentially mutually beneficial, rather than assuredly mutually destructive.

It will be objected that such a settlement rewards Russian aggression. In an imperfect world, however, the morality of punishing Russia (without, mind you, ensuring its withdrawal) must be weighed against the morality of allowing further suffering in Ukraine, especially when the alternative not only stops the bloodshed but also offers a mechanism whereby, under more auspicious conditions, Ukraine could potentially regain its territories. Time, however, is of the essence. The longer settlement negotiations are delayed, the more territory that Ukraine is likely to lose to Novorossiya.

Another likely objection will no doubt be that Russian officials cannot ever be trusted to keep their word. Those who feel this way have a ready-made objection to any form of negotiations, and not just with Russia. The only thing we would point out is that by putting the status referendum a good way off into the future, the means of its implementation will be negotiated not by those who unleashed this war, but by a post-Putin Russian leadership. The type of relationship we will have with those future Russian leaders is still very much in the West’s hands to determine.

Gilbert Doctorow completed a Ph.D. in Russian history at Columbia, followed by a 25-year career in international business focused on the USSR/Russia. His two-volume Memoirs of a Russianist, published in 2021-22, has been reissued in translation in St Petersburg.

Nicolai N. Petro is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island (USA). During the collapse of the Soviet Union he served as Special Assistant for Policy in the Office of Soviet Union Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. He was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Ukraine in 2013-2014, and is the author of the forthcoming book, The Tragedy of Ukraine.

Interrupting his series of articles on the war in Ukraine, Thierry Meyssan delivers some thoughts on the evolution of the human dimension of war. The end of industrial capitalism and the globalization of exchanges do not only transform our societies and our ways of thinking, but the meaning of all our activities, including wars.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not part of any military strategy. Japan had already intended to surrender. The United States just wanted them not to surrender to the Soviets who were beginning to pour into Manchuria, but to themselves.

Since the end of World War II 77 years ago, Europeans (except for the former Yugoslavs) have known peace on their soil. They have forgotten this distant memory and discover war with horror in Ukraine. The Africans of the Great Lakes, the ex-Yugoslavs and the Muslims from Afghanistan to Libya, passing through the Horn of Africa, look at them with disgust: for many decades, the Europeans ignored their sufferings and accused them of being responsible for the misfortunes they were suffering.

The war in Ukraine started with Nazism according to some, eight years ago according to others, but it is only two months old in the consciousness of Westerners. They see some of the suffering it causes, but they do not yet perceive all its dimensions. Above all, they misinterpret it according to the experience of their great-grandparents and not according to their own experience.

Wars are only a succession of crimes

– As soon as it starts, war forbids nuances. It forces everyone to position themselves in one of the two camps. The two jaws of the beast immediately crush those who do not comply.
– The ban on nuances forces everyone to rewrite events. There are only "good guys", us, and "bad guys", those on the other side. War propaganda is so powerful that after a while, no one can distinguish the facts from the way they are described. We are all in the dark and no one knows how to turn on the light.
– War causes suffering and death without distinction. It doesn’t matter to which side you belong. It doesn’t matter if you are guilty or innocent. One suffers and dies not only from the blows of those on the other side, but also collaterally from those on one’s own side. War is not only suffering and death, but also injustice, which is much more difficult to bear.
– None of the rules of civilized nations remain. Many give in to madness and no longer behave like humans. There is no longer any authority to make people face the consequences of their actions. Most people can no longer be counted on. Man has become a wolf for man.

Something fascinating is happening. If some people turn into cruel beasts, others become luminous and their eyes enlighten us.

I spent a decade on the battlefields and never went home. Although I now flee from suffering and death, I am still irresistibly drawn to those looks. That is why I hate war and yet I miss it. Because in this tangle of horrors there is always a sublime form of humanity.

The wars of the 21st century

I would now like to offer you some thoughts that do not commit you to this or that conflict, and even less to this or that side. I will just lift a veil and invite you to look at what it hides. What I am about to say may shock you, but we can only find peace by accepting reality.

Wars are changing. I am not talking about weapons and military strategies, but about the reasons for conflicts, about their human dimension. Just as the transition from industrial capitalism to financial globalization is transforming our societies and pulverizing the principles that organized them, so this evolution is changing wars. The problem is that we are already incapable of adapting our societies to this structural change and therefore even less capable of thinking about the evolution of war.

– War always seeks to solve the problems that politics has failed to solve. It does not happen when we are ready for it, but when we have eliminated all other solutions.

This is exactly what is happening today. The US Straussians have inexorably cornered Russia in Ukraine, leaving it no option but to go to war. If the Allies insist on pushing her back, they will provoke a World War.

The periods between two eras, when human relationships must be rethought, are conducive to this kind of disaster. Some people continue to reason according to principles that have proven their effectiveness, but are no longer adapted to the world. They are nevertheless advancing and can provoke wars without wanting to.

On the night of May 9, 1945, the US air force bombed Tokyo. In one night more than 100,000 people were killed and more than 1 million were left homeless. It was the largest massacre of civilians in history.

– If, in peacetime, we distinguish between civilians and soldiers, this way of reasoning no longer makes sense in modern warfare. Democracies have swept away the organization of societies into castes or orders. Everyone can become a combatant. Mass mobilizations and total wars have blurred the lines. From now on, civilians are in charge of the military. They are no longer innocent victims, but have become the first responsible for the general misfortune of which the military are only the executors.

In the Western Middle Ages, war was the business of the nobles and of them alone. In no case did the population participate. The Catholic Church had enacted laws of war to limit the impact of conflicts on civilians. All this does not correspond anymore to what we live and is not based on anything.

The equality between men and women has also reversed the paradigms. Not only are soldiers now women, but they can be civilian commanders too. Fanaticism is no longer the exclusive domain of the so-called stronger sex. Some women are more dangerous and cruel than some men.

We are not aware of these changes. In any case, we do not draw any conclusions from them. This leads to bizarre positions such as the refusal of Westerners to repatriate the families of jihadists they have let go to the battlefields and to judge them. Everyone knows that many of these women are far more fanatical than their husbands were. Everyone knows that they represent a much greater danger. But nobody says so. They prefer to pay Kurdish mercenaries to keep them and their children in camps, as far away as possible.

Only the Russians have repatriated the children, who were already contaminated by this ideology. They entrusted them to their grandparents, hoping that the latter would be able to love and care for them.

For the past two months, we have been receiving Ukrainian civilians fleeing the fighting. They are only women and children who suffer. So we do not take any precautions. However, a third of these children have been trained in the summer camps of the Banderites. There they learned the handling of weapons and the admiration of the criminal against humanity Stepan Bandera.