13-08-2014, 05:00 PM
A reliably well-informed resident in the area that Obama’s Ukrainian regime is ethnically cleansing (i.e., exterminating and/or expelling) has informed this reporter (and all of this source’s previous reports to me have subsequently turned out to be true):
“Kiev is attempting to blow up a chemical plant that will destroy a 600 KM diameter/ 300KM radius of area — every living thing.
The largest battles of the war are starting today or tomorrow. I may not be able to update you. Lyashko wants to make our area bloody. He said it hasn’t been hit enough to feel it yet.”
The object of the Ukrainian Government’s campaign is to produce as many residents there fleeing into Russia as possible, so that the voting-base that had elected the pro-Russian Ukrainian President whom Obama overthrew in February, Viktor Yanukovych, will no longer be Ukrainian voters.
Oleh Lashko, the person my source is referring to, is a convicted embezzler who then became a leading parliamentary member of the “Bloc Yulia Tymoshenko,” led by the woman whom Obama had initially expected would become elected on 25 May 2014 as Ukraine’s new President. She was also known as “the Gas Princess,” due to her having skimmed billions from Russia’s gas-sales to the State. But another oligarch, Petro Poroshenko (‘the Chocolate King,” and also a shipbuilder), became elected President instead, because Tymoshenko was too far to the right even for most of the voters in Ukraine’s northwest. (There were only few people voting in the southeast after Obama’s coup, because the post-coup regime had already begun its campaign to exterminate them by the time of the May 25th election.)
The pro-Hitler portion of Ukraine during World War II was the country’s northwest. Ukraine’s southeast tended to prefer Stalin’s rule instead. After the end of communism, the southeast sought closer ties to Russia, whereas the northwest sought closer ties to “the West,” but came to be led actually by CIA-backed admirers of the pro-Hitler Ukrainian Stepan Bandera, whom Hitler’s forces imprisoned when it became clear that Bandera sought to establish a pro-Nazi independent Ukraine, and Hitler’s forces insisted instead on Ukraine’s total subjugation.
When Obama took over Ukraine in the February 2014 coup, his agent Victoria Nuland placed at the top of the new Ukrainian Government the leaders of Ukraine’s two nazi (or “pro-Nazi”) Parties, Right Sector, and “Freedom” or Svoboda (formerly called the Social Nationalists, but the CIA instructed them to change that name), both being led by Yulia Tymoshenko’s ally Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
The exterminations of the residents in the southeast started on May 2nd and are continuing. Obama’s people call the residents there “terrorists,” because those residents overwhelmingly oppose the Obama-installed leaders and seek to establish their own autonomous republics instead, or else to become part of Russia; but, in any case, not to be ruled by Obama’s Ukrainian regime.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
The Ukrainian army and its allied fascist paramilitary units are creating a humanitarian disaster in eastern Ukraine and the government in Kiev is blocking relief supplies to the population.
The United States and NATO are using the conflict over Russia’s plans to send an aid convoy to the besieged cities of Donetsk and Luhansk to mount new provocations against Moscow.
On Tuesday, 280 white trucks left Moscow carrying relief supplies. The Russian government has stated that the trucks are transporting a total of 2,000 tons of supplies, including 62 tons of baby food, 54 tons of medical equipment and medicine, 12,000 sleeping bags, and 69 power generators.
The spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Dmitri Peskov, said the trucks planned to cross the border to Ukraine at a point agreed with Kiev. The aid convoy was arranged following talks with both the Red Cross and the Ukrainian government. This was confirmed by former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, who is functioning as a mediator between the rebels and the Kiev regime.
According to the Associated Press, however, a spokesman for the Russian Emergencies Ministry said it remained unclear when the convoy would set off. He said the convoy could cross the border in an area controlled by pro-Russian separatists.
On Monday, representatives of the US, the European Union, Ukraine and the Red Cross had agreed to allow international aid transports to eastern Ukraine with Russian involvement. According to the Russian news agency Ria Novosti, this arrangement was confirmed in a statement by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
At the same time, the ICRC requested further information on the aid supplies, declaring, “We are still waiting for crucial information about the quantity and type of goods, as well as how and where they are to be distributed.”
For its part, the Ukrainian government made abundantly clear it will not allow the transport of much-needed relief supplies, despite the agreement struck on Monday. On Tuesday, the spokesman for the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council, Andrei Lysenko, said that its forces would stop the convoy at the border. A week was needed to clarify the need for relief goods in Donetsk and Luhansk, he said, adding, “Only then will the delivery of aid be organized.”
At a press conference in Kiev, Lysenko showed a video featuring the white trucks guarded by Russian military personnel and claimed this was proof that Moscow was using the aid convoy as a ploy to conduct a military operation.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Danylo Lubkivsky declared that Russia was playing a “completely cynical game.” Humanitarian aid was only a pretext to continue aggression in the Ukraine, he claimed.
In another statement, the deputy head of the Ukrainian President’s Office, Valery Chaly, said the regime intended to stop the trucks at the border and transfer the aid shipment to the Red Cross. He made no reference to any time frame, suggesting that Kiev planned to delay the delivery of aid as long as possible.
At the same time, NATO representatives threatened to reject any relief supplies coming from Moscow. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Tuesday that Russia could use the aid convoy to install itself permanently in eastern Ukraine. “We have to be extremely careful,” the minister said.
On Monday, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen gave an interview to Reuters alleging that a Russian military intervention in Ukraine was now “very likely.” An invasion could take place under the guise of a relief operation, Rasmussen said.
In the interview, Rasmussen announced fresh sanctions as a possible reaction by NATO countries. Last week, Rasmussen promised the Ukrainian regime military aid during a visit to Kiev.
As humanitarian deliveries are being blocked to eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian army is being equipped by NATO countries. On Friday, the Canadian Air Force delivered 32 tons of military equipment worth $5 million to Ukrainian border troops. The German government said an EU police mission in Ukraine agreed in late June could extend to training the army to fight in eastern Ukraine.
It is the Ukrainian regime and its backers in Berlin, Brussels and Washington that are responsible for a stream of provocations directed against Russia. Moscow has been placed under continuous pressure since the EU and the US orchestrated a fascist-led coup in Ukraine in February of this year and replaced President Viktor Yanukovych with a handpicked cabinet favorable to the West.
In April, the Kiev regime began military action against cities in the east of the country, where pro-Russian separatists had occupied town halls and public buildings. Thousands of people, a large majority of them civilians, have already fallen victim to the Kiev-led offensive. Hundreds of thousands have been forced to leave their homes to seek refuge.
In recent weeks, Kiev has deliberately provoked a humanitarian disaster, encircling the two major eastern cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. A spokesman for the separatists, Alexander Karaman, reported that “the water supply system, substations, medical facilities, kindergartens, schools, industrial plants, bridges and roads” had all been bombed in Donetsk.
“Today, Donetsk is virtually encircled,” he said. “There is therefore no way to bring relief supplies. Another problem is the impossibility to evacuate injured people and children. More than 3,500 refugees have assembled in the city, including many children and infants.”
According to local authorities, the electricity and water supply in Luhansk has not been functioning for the past ten days, and food and medicine are scarce. Constant artillery and rocket shelling has also been reported in the city of Gorlovka.
The management of the city’s chemical plant called on the Ukrainian armed forces to stop the bombardment of the plant. The plant contains stores of highly toxic products, which could contaminate a region with a radius of 300 kilometers, affecting Russia as well as Ukraine.
Russia’s attempt to deliver relief supplies to the region is now being used for further provocations. Any blockade of the deliveries, and/or attack on the convoy by Ukrainian forces, would lead to a rapid escalation of tensions and the possible outbreak of a war that could rapidly draw in the US and Western Europe.
The New York Times reported almost in passing on Sunday that the Ukrainian government’s offensive against ethnic Russian rebels in the east has unleashed far-right paramilitary militias that have even raised a neo-Nazi banner over the conquered town of Marinka, just west of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk.
That might seem like a big story – a U.S.-backed military operation, which has inflicted thousands of mostly civilian casualties, is being spearheaded by neo-Nazis. But the consistent pattern of the mainstream U.S. news media has been – since the start of the Ukraine crisis – to white-out the role of Ukraine’s brown-shirts.
Only occasionally is the word “neo-Nazi” mentioned and usually in the context of dismissing this inconvenient truth as “Russian propaganda.” Yet the reality has been that neo-Nazis played a key role in the violent overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych last February as well as in the subsequent coup regime holding power in Kiev and now in the eastern offensive.
On Sunday, a Times article by Andrew E. Kramer mentioned the emerging neo-Nazi paramilitary role in the final three paragraphs:
“The fighting for Donetsk has taken on a lethal pattern: The regular army bombards separatist positions from afar, followed by chaotic, violent assaults by some of the half-dozen or so paramilitary groups surrounding Donetsk who are willing to plunge into urban combat.
“Officials in Kiev say the militias and the army coordinate their actions, but the militias, which count about 7,000 fighters, are angry and, at times, uncontrollable. One known as Azov, which took over the village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag.
“In pressing their advance, the fighters took their orders from a local army commander, rather than from Kiev. In the video of the attack, no restraint was evident. Gesturing toward a suspected pro-Russian position, one soldier screamed, ‘The bastards are right there!’ Then he opened fire.”
In other words, the neo-Nazi militias that surged to the front of anti-Yanukovych protests last February have now been organized as shock troops dispatched to kill ethnic Russians in the east – and they are operating so openly that they hoist a Swastika-like neo-Nazi flag over one conquered village with a population of about 10,000.
Burying this information at the end of a long article is also typical of how the Times and other U.S. mainstream news outlets have dealt with the neo-Nazi problem in the past. When the reality gets mentioned, it usually requires a reader knowing much about Ukraine’s history and reading between the lines of a U.S. news account.
For instance, last April 6, the New York Times published a human-interest profile of a Ukrainian nationalist named Yuri Marchuk who was wounded in the uprising against Yanukovych in February. If you read deep into the story, you learn that Marchuk was a leader of the right-wing Svoboda from Lviv, which – if you did your own research – you would discover is a neo-Nazi stronghold where Ukrainian nationalists hold torch-light parades in honor of World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.
Without providing that context, the Times does mention that Lviv militants plundered a government arsenal and dispatched 600 militants a day to Kiev’s Maidan square to do battle with the police. Marchuk also described how these well-organized militants, consisting of paramilitary brigades of 100 fighters each, launched the fateful attack against the police on Feb. 20, the battle where Marchuk was wounded and where the death toll suddenly spiked into scores of protesters and about a dozen police.
Marchuk later said he visited his comrades at the occupied City Hall. What the Times doesn’t mention is that City Hall was festooned with Nazi banners and even a Confederate battle flag as a tribute to white supremacy.
The Times touched on the inconvenient neo-Nazi truth again on April 12 in an article about the mysterious death of neo-Nazi leader Oleksandr Muzychko, who was killed during a shootout with police on March 24. The article quoted a local Right Sektor leader, Roman Koval, explaining the crucial role of his organization in carrying out the anti-Yanukovych coup.
“Ukraine’s February revolution, said Mr. Koval, would never have happened without Right Sector and other militant groups,” the Times wrote.
Burning Insects
The brutality of these neo-Nazis surfaced again on May 2 when right-wing toughs in Odessa attacked an encampment of ethnic Russian protesters driving them into a trade union building which was then set on fire with Molotov cocktails. As the building was engulfed in flames, some people who tried to flee were chased and beaten, while those trapped inside heard the Ukrainian nationalists liken them to black-and-red-striped potato beetles called Colorados, because those colors are used in pro-Russian ribbons.
“Burn, Colorado, burn” went the chant.
As the fire worsened, those dying inside were serenaded with the taunting singing of the Ukrainian national anthem. The building also was spray-painted with Swastika-like symbols and graffiti reading “Galician SS,” a reference to the Ukrainian nationalist army that fought alongside the German Nazi SS in World War II, killing Russians on the eastern front.
The death by fire of dozens of people in Odessa recalled a World War II incident in 1944 when elements of a Galician SS police regiment took part in the massacre of the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka, which had been a refuge for Jews and was protected by Russian and Polish partisans. Attacked by a mixed force of Ukrainian police and German soldiers on Feb. 28, 1944, hundreds of townspeople were massacred, including many locked in barns that were set ablaze.
The legacy of World War II – especially the bitter fight between Ukrainian nationalists from the west and ethnic Russians from the east seven decades ago – is never far from the surface in Ukrainian politics. One of the heroes celebrated during the Maidan protests in Kiev was Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose name was honored in many banners including one on a podium where Sen. John McCain voiced support for the uprising to oust Yanukovych, whose political base was among ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
During World War II, Bandera headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-B, a radical paramilitary movement that sought to transform Ukraine into a racially pure state. OUN-B took part in the expulsion and extermination of thousands of Jews and Poles.
Though most of the Maidan protesters in 2013-14 appeared motivated by anger over political corruption and by a desire to join the European Union, neo-Nazis made up a significant number and surged to the front during the seizure of government buildings and the climatic clashes with police.
In the days after the Feb. 22 coup, as the neo-Nazi militias effectively controlled the government, European and U.S. diplomats scrambled to help the shaken parliament put together the semblance of a respectable regime, although at least four ministries, including national security, were awarded to the right-wing extremists in recognition of their crucial role in ousting Yanukovych.
As extraordinary as it was for a modern European state to hand ministries over to neo-Nazis, virtually the entire U.S. news media cooperated in playing down the neo-Nazi role. Stories in the U.S. media delicately step around this neo-Nazi reality by keeping out relevant context, such as the background of coup regime’s national security chief Andriy Parubiy, who founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, blending radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Parubiy was commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense forces.”
Last April, as the Kiev regime launched its “anti-terrorist operation” against the ethnic Russians in the east, Parubiy announced that his right-wing paramilitary forces, incorporated as National Guard units, would lead the way. On April 15, Parubiy went on Twitter to declare, “Reserve unit of National Guard formed #Maidan Self-defense volunteers was sent to the front line this morning.” (Parubiy resigned from his post this past week for unexplained reasons.)
Now, however, as the Ukrainian military tightens its noose around the remaining rebel strongholds, battering them with artillery fire and aerial bombardments, thousands of neo-Nazi militia members are again pressing to the front as fiercely motivated fighters determined to kill as many ethnic Russians as they can. It is a remarkable story but one that the mainstream U.S. news media would prefer not to notice.
“Kiev is attempting to blow up a chemical plant that will destroy a 600 KM diameter/ 300KM radius of area — every living thing.
The largest battles of the war are starting today or tomorrow. I may not be able to update you. Lyashko wants to make our area bloody. He said it hasn’t been hit enough to feel it yet.”
The object of the Ukrainian Government’s campaign is to produce as many residents there fleeing into Russia as possible, so that the voting-base that had elected the pro-Russian Ukrainian President whom Obama overthrew in February, Viktor Yanukovych, will no longer be Ukrainian voters.
Oleh Lashko, the person my source is referring to, is a convicted embezzler who then became a leading parliamentary member of the “Bloc Yulia Tymoshenko,” led by the woman whom Obama had initially expected would become elected on 25 May 2014 as Ukraine’s new President. She was also known as “the Gas Princess,” due to her having skimmed billions from Russia’s gas-sales to the State. But another oligarch, Petro Poroshenko (‘the Chocolate King,” and also a shipbuilder), became elected President instead, because Tymoshenko was too far to the right even for most of the voters in Ukraine’s northwest. (There were only few people voting in the southeast after Obama’s coup, because the post-coup regime had already begun its campaign to exterminate them by the time of the May 25th election.)
The pro-Hitler portion of Ukraine during World War II was the country’s northwest. Ukraine’s southeast tended to prefer Stalin’s rule instead. After the end of communism, the southeast sought closer ties to Russia, whereas the northwest sought closer ties to “the West,” but came to be led actually by CIA-backed admirers of the pro-Hitler Ukrainian Stepan Bandera, whom Hitler’s forces imprisoned when it became clear that Bandera sought to establish a pro-Nazi independent Ukraine, and Hitler’s forces insisted instead on Ukraine’s total subjugation.
When Obama took over Ukraine in the February 2014 coup, his agent Victoria Nuland placed at the top of the new Ukrainian Government the leaders of Ukraine’s two nazi (or “pro-Nazi”) Parties, Right Sector, and “Freedom” or Svoboda (formerly called the Social Nationalists, but the CIA instructed them to change that name), both being led by Yulia Tymoshenko’s ally Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
The exterminations of the residents in the southeast started on May 2nd and are continuing. Obama’s people call the residents there “terrorists,” because those residents overwhelmingly oppose the Obama-installed leaders and seek to establish their own autonomous republics instead, or else to become part of Russia; but, in any case, not to be ruled by Obama’s Ukrainian regime.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
The Ukrainian army and its allied fascist paramilitary units are creating a humanitarian disaster in eastern Ukraine and the government in Kiev is blocking relief supplies to the population.
The United States and NATO are using the conflict over Russia’s plans to send an aid convoy to the besieged cities of Donetsk and Luhansk to mount new provocations against Moscow.
On Tuesday, 280 white trucks left Moscow carrying relief supplies. The Russian government has stated that the trucks are transporting a total of 2,000 tons of supplies, including 62 tons of baby food, 54 tons of medical equipment and medicine, 12,000 sleeping bags, and 69 power generators.
The spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Dmitri Peskov, said the trucks planned to cross the border to Ukraine at a point agreed with Kiev. The aid convoy was arranged following talks with both the Red Cross and the Ukrainian government. This was confirmed by former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, who is functioning as a mediator between the rebels and the Kiev regime.
According to the Associated Press, however, a spokesman for the Russian Emergencies Ministry said it remained unclear when the convoy would set off. He said the convoy could cross the border in an area controlled by pro-Russian separatists.
On Monday, representatives of the US, the European Union, Ukraine and the Red Cross had agreed to allow international aid transports to eastern Ukraine with Russian involvement. According to the Russian news agency Ria Novosti, this arrangement was confirmed in a statement by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
At the same time, the ICRC requested further information on the aid supplies, declaring, “We are still waiting for crucial information about the quantity and type of goods, as well as how and where they are to be distributed.”
For its part, the Ukrainian government made abundantly clear it will not allow the transport of much-needed relief supplies, despite the agreement struck on Monday. On Tuesday, the spokesman for the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council, Andrei Lysenko, said that its forces would stop the convoy at the border. A week was needed to clarify the need for relief goods in Donetsk and Luhansk, he said, adding, “Only then will the delivery of aid be organized.”
At a press conference in Kiev, Lysenko showed a video featuring the white trucks guarded by Russian military personnel and claimed this was proof that Moscow was using the aid convoy as a ploy to conduct a military operation.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Danylo Lubkivsky declared that Russia was playing a “completely cynical game.” Humanitarian aid was only a pretext to continue aggression in the Ukraine, he claimed.
In another statement, the deputy head of the Ukrainian President’s Office, Valery Chaly, said the regime intended to stop the trucks at the border and transfer the aid shipment to the Red Cross. He made no reference to any time frame, suggesting that Kiev planned to delay the delivery of aid as long as possible.
At the same time, NATO representatives threatened to reject any relief supplies coming from Moscow. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Tuesday that Russia could use the aid convoy to install itself permanently in eastern Ukraine. “We have to be extremely careful,” the minister said.
On Monday, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen gave an interview to Reuters alleging that a Russian military intervention in Ukraine was now “very likely.” An invasion could take place under the guise of a relief operation, Rasmussen said.
In the interview, Rasmussen announced fresh sanctions as a possible reaction by NATO countries. Last week, Rasmussen promised the Ukrainian regime military aid during a visit to Kiev.
As humanitarian deliveries are being blocked to eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian army is being equipped by NATO countries. On Friday, the Canadian Air Force delivered 32 tons of military equipment worth $5 million to Ukrainian border troops. The German government said an EU police mission in Ukraine agreed in late June could extend to training the army to fight in eastern Ukraine.
It is the Ukrainian regime and its backers in Berlin, Brussels and Washington that are responsible for a stream of provocations directed against Russia. Moscow has been placed under continuous pressure since the EU and the US orchestrated a fascist-led coup in Ukraine in February of this year and replaced President Viktor Yanukovych with a handpicked cabinet favorable to the West.
In April, the Kiev regime began military action against cities in the east of the country, where pro-Russian separatists had occupied town halls and public buildings. Thousands of people, a large majority of them civilians, have already fallen victim to the Kiev-led offensive. Hundreds of thousands have been forced to leave their homes to seek refuge.
In recent weeks, Kiev has deliberately provoked a humanitarian disaster, encircling the two major eastern cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. A spokesman for the separatists, Alexander Karaman, reported that “the water supply system, substations, medical facilities, kindergartens, schools, industrial plants, bridges and roads” had all been bombed in Donetsk.
“Today, Donetsk is virtually encircled,” he said. “There is therefore no way to bring relief supplies. Another problem is the impossibility to evacuate injured people and children. More than 3,500 refugees have assembled in the city, including many children and infants.”
According to local authorities, the electricity and water supply in Luhansk has not been functioning for the past ten days, and food and medicine are scarce. Constant artillery and rocket shelling has also been reported in the city of Gorlovka.
The management of the city’s chemical plant called on the Ukrainian armed forces to stop the bombardment of the plant. The plant contains stores of highly toxic products, which could contaminate a region with a radius of 300 kilometers, affecting Russia as well as Ukraine.
Russia’s attempt to deliver relief supplies to the region is now being used for further provocations. Any blockade of the deliveries, and/or attack on the convoy by Ukrainian forces, would lead to a rapid escalation of tensions and the possible outbreak of a war that could rapidly draw in the US and Western Europe.
The New York Times reported almost in passing on Sunday that the Ukrainian government’s offensive against ethnic Russian rebels in the east has unleashed far-right paramilitary militias that have even raised a neo-Nazi banner over the conquered town of Marinka, just west of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk.
That might seem like a big story – a U.S.-backed military operation, which has inflicted thousands of mostly civilian casualties, is being spearheaded by neo-Nazis. But the consistent pattern of the mainstream U.S. news media has been – since the start of the Ukraine crisis – to white-out the role of Ukraine’s brown-shirts.
Only occasionally is the word “neo-Nazi” mentioned and usually in the context of dismissing this inconvenient truth as “Russian propaganda.” Yet the reality has been that neo-Nazis played a key role in the violent overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych last February as well as in the subsequent coup regime holding power in Kiev and now in the eastern offensive.
On Sunday, a Times article by Andrew E. Kramer mentioned the emerging neo-Nazi paramilitary role in the final three paragraphs:
“The fighting for Donetsk has taken on a lethal pattern: The regular army bombards separatist positions from afar, followed by chaotic, violent assaults by some of the half-dozen or so paramilitary groups surrounding Donetsk who are willing to plunge into urban combat.
“Officials in Kiev say the militias and the army coordinate their actions, but the militias, which count about 7,000 fighters, are angry and, at times, uncontrollable. One known as Azov, which took over the village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag.
“In pressing their advance, the fighters took their orders from a local army commander, rather than from Kiev. In the video of the attack, no restraint was evident. Gesturing toward a suspected pro-Russian position, one soldier screamed, ‘The bastards are right there!’ Then he opened fire.”
In other words, the neo-Nazi militias that surged to the front of anti-Yanukovych protests last February have now been organized as shock troops dispatched to kill ethnic Russians in the east – and they are operating so openly that they hoist a Swastika-like neo-Nazi flag over one conquered village with a population of about 10,000.
Burying this information at the end of a long article is also typical of how the Times and other U.S. mainstream news outlets have dealt with the neo-Nazi problem in the past. When the reality gets mentioned, it usually requires a reader knowing much about Ukraine’s history and reading between the lines of a U.S. news account.
For instance, last April 6, the New York Times published a human-interest profile of a Ukrainian nationalist named Yuri Marchuk who was wounded in the uprising against Yanukovych in February. If you read deep into the story, you learn that Marchuk was a leader of the right-wing Svoboda from Lviv, which – if you did your own research – you would discover is a neo-Nazi stronghold where Ukrainian nationalists hold torch-light parades in honor of World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.
Without providing that context, the Times does mention that Lviv militants plundered a government arsenal and dispatched 600 militants a day to Kiev’s Maidan square to do battle with the police. Marchuk also described how these well-organized militants, consisting of paramilitary brigades of 100 fighters each, launched the fateful attack against the police on Feb. 20, the battle where Marchuk was wounded and where the death toll suddenly spiked into scores of protesters and about a dozen police.
Marchuk later said he visited his comrades at the occupied City Hall. What the Times doesn’t mention is that City Hall was festooned with Nazi banners and even a Confederate battle flag as a tribute to white supremacy.
The Times touched on the inconvenient neo-Nazi truth again on April 12 in an article about the mysterious death of neo-Nazi leader Oleksandr Muzychko, who was killed during a shootout with police on March 24. The article quoted a local Right Sektor leader, Roman Koval, explaining the crucial role of his organization in carrying out the anti-Yanukovych coup.
“Ukraine’s February revolution, said Mr. Koval, would never have happened without Right Sector and other militant groups,” the Times wrote.
Burning Insects
The brutality of these neo-Nazis surfaced again on May 2 when right-wing toughs in Odessa attacked an encampment of ethnic Russian protesters driving them into a trade union building which was then set on fire with Molotov cocktails. As the building was engulfed in flames, some people who tried to flee were chased and beaten, while those trapped inside heard the Ukrainian nationalists liken them to black-and-red-striped potato beetles called Colorados, because those colors are used in pro-Russian ribbons.
“Burn, Colorado, burn” went the chant.
As the fire worsened, those dying inside were serenaded with the taunting singing of the Ukrainian national anthem. The building also was spray-painted with Swastika-like symbols and graffiti reading “Galician SS,” a reference to the Ukrainian nationalist army that fought alongside the German Nazi SS in World War II, killing Russians on the eastern front.
The death by fire of dozens of people in Odessa recalled a World War II incident in 1944 when elements of a Galician SS police regiment took part in the massacre of the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka, which had been a refuge for Jews and was protected by Russian and Polish partisans. Attacked by a mixed force of Ukrainian police and German soldiers on Feb. 28, 1944, hundreds of townspeople were massacred, including many locked in barns that were set ablaze.
The legacy of World War II – especially the bitter fight between Ukrainian nationalists from the west and ethnic Russians from the east seven decades ago – is never far from the surface in Ukrainian politics. One of the heroes celebrated during the Maidan protests in Kiev was Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose name was honored in many banners including one on a podium where Sen. John McCain voiced support for the uprising to oust Yanukovych, whose political base was among ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
During World War II, Bandera headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-B, a radical paramilitary movement that sought to transform Ukraine into a racially pure state. OUN-B took part in the expulsion and extermination of thousands of Jews and Poles.
Though most of the Maidan protesters in 2013-14 appeared motivated by anger over political corruption and by a desire to join the European Union, neo-Nazis made up a significant number and surged to the front during the seizure of government buildings and the climatic clashes with police.
In the days after the Feb. 22 coup, as the neo-Nazi militias effectively controlled the government, European and U.S. diplomats scrambled to help the shaken parliament put together the semblance of a respectable regime, although at least four ministries, including national security, were awarded to the right-wing extremists in recognition of their crucial role in ousting Yanukovych.
As extraordinary as it was for a modern European state to hand ministries over to neo-Nazis, virtually the entire U.S. news media cooperated in playing down the neo-Nazi role. Stories in the U.S. media delicately step around this neo-Nazi reality by keeping out relevant context, such as the background of coup regime’s national security chief Andriy Parubiy, who founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, blending radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Parubiy was commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense forces.”
Last April, as the Kiev regime launched its “anti-terrorist operation” against the ethnic Russians in the east, Parubiy announced that his right-wing paramilitary forces, incorporated as National Guard units, would lead the way. On April 15, Parubiy went on Twitter to declare, “Reserve unit of National Guard formed #Maidan Self-defense volunteers was sent to the front line this morning.” (Parubiy resigned from his post this past week for unexplained reasons.)
Now, however, as the Ukrainian military tightens its noose around the remaining rebel strongholds, battering them with artillery fire and aerial bombardments, thousands of neo-Nazi militia members are again pressing to the front as fiercely motivated fighters determined to kill as many ethnic Russians as they can. It is a remarkable story but one that the mainstream U.S. news media would prefer not to notice.