March 31, 2022
Volodymyr Zelensky defeated Petro Poroshenko in the 2019
election on a platform that included making peace with Russia and signing the
Minsk Agreements. The Minsk Agreements would have granted a degree of autonomy
to the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of the Donbas that had voted for
independence from Ukraine after the 2014 US backed coup put a government in
power that was handpicked by the US and that was pro-West and anti-Russian. It
was intense pressure from the far right wing ultranationalists that bent
Zelensky from a Minsk backer into the shape of a Minsk rejecter. Under that
pressure from neo-Nazi parties that have large power that is disproportionate
to their small support, Zelensky abandoned his campaign peace promise and
refused to talk to the leaders of the Donbas and implement the Minsk
Agreements.
Those ultranationalist organizations, including Svoboda
Party and the Right Sector, during the 2014 coup, again cast a shadow much
larger and darker than their popular support. They commandeered and reshaped
the peaceful protest. They rejected the peaceful settlement that would have
called for a ceasefire and early elections. Several lines of evidence now
strongly suggest that the snipers in the February 20, 2014 massacre that sent
the protests spinning toward civil war were not government forces but members
of the ultranationalist insurgency. And it was they who occupied the government
building and forced the elected president to flee Ukraine.
After the coup, those neo-Nazi forces would brutally
spearhead the fight against separatist forces in the Donbas. They were in a
position to lead the fight because the most famous of them, the Azov Battalion,
had been officially incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard. These
ultranationalists had become, not only, as Richard Sakwa says in Frontline
Ukraine, "a legitimate part of the Maiden [protest]" and "the
new normal of Ukrainian state development," they had become an official
part of the Ukraine military.
They would become an official part of Ukraine government
too. Sakwa says that several core ministerial positions in the Ukrainian coup
government were taken by the Right Sector and Svoboda, both openly neo-Nazi
parties, including top national security, defense and legal posts. The deputy
prime minister and the minister of justice were both members of Svoboda. Andriy
Parabiy, one of the founders of Svoboda with what Sakwa calls “a long history of
ultra-nationalist activism” became secretary of the National Security Defense
Council. Sakwa calls Parabiy’s appointment “astonishing.”
Stephen Cohen, who was Professor Emeritus of Russian
studies and politics at Princeton, in an article on Ukraine called “America’s
Collusion With Neo-Nazis,” says that the coup government in Ukraine has
systematically rehabilitated and memorialized Ukrainian Nazi Germany
collaborators. Among the Nazi collaborators memorialized by the government of
Ukraine is Stepan Bandera who allied with the Nazis and committed atrocities
against Jews, Poles and Russians. Sakwa reports that “a giant portrait of
Bandera was . . . on the stage during the Maidan protests.”
Stepan Bandera and the less known Mikola Lebed were
prominent members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). In 1940,
the OUN split, and Bandera became the leader of the more radical OUN-B faction.
The Bandera OUN allied with the Nazis. And though the alliance may have been
formed primarily on the opportunity to establish a Ukrainian state, Bandera’s
OUN proved to be very willing collaborators.
According to Sakwa, "Bandera espoused a virulent
form of integral nationalism, an exclusive and ethnically centered definition
of the Ukrainian nation, accompanied by the murderous denigration of those who
allegedly undermined his vision, notably Poles, Jews and Russians. . . ."
Bandera’s forces would participate in the mass killings of those people.
In Covert Regime Change, Lindsey O’Rourke cites the July
1941 OUN-B declaration that Jews "have to be treated harshly. . . . We
must finish them off. . . . Regarding the Jews, we will adopt any methods that
lead to their destruction." She says that "In the days following the
German invasion, OUN-B troops launched pogroms throughout East Galacia, killing
an estimated 12,000 Jewish civilians.
The OUN-B and others would later join into the Ukrainian
Insurgent Army (UPA) to fight for Ukrainian independence from both the Russians
and the Nazis. To realize their dream of an ethnically exclusive nation,
O’Rourke says they "engaged in widespread terrorism, mass killing, and
ethnic cleansing amongst the Polish, German, Soviet, and Jewish populations in
the region." Their call was "Long live greater independent Ukraine
without Jews, Poles and Germans: Poles behind the San, Germans to Berlin, Jews
to the gallows." OUN-A leader, Mikola Lebed declared, according to
O’Rourke, that they should "cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of
the Polish population." And they tried. "In the first half of 1943,
UPA partisans . . . murdered about 40,000 Poles in Volhynia."
But why would anyone get the idea today, among Putin’s
perhaps exaggerated claim about denazifying the Ukrainian government and
forces, that the US and its allies would partner with neo-Nazi elements in
Ukraine in order to fight the Russians or bring about regime change in Russia?
Because they have.
Between Bandera and Lebed’s Nazi collaboration and the
ultranationalist hijacking of the 2014 coup is a less told story of US and UK
collaboration with Bandera and Lebed’s OUN to fight the Soviet Union during the
Cold War.
In September 1947, US intelligence encountered a group of
Ukrainian partisans in Germany. In Safe for Democracy, CIA expert John Prados
says the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council had ordered the partisans to go
west "in order to get the attention of the Allied intelligence services."
It worked. And there began the top-secret story of the covert marriage between
the US and UK and the Ukrainians who had collaborated with the Nazis in their
Cold War fight against the Soviet Union.
Even earlier, in 1946, Prados reports, the Soviets had demanded
the extradition of Stepan Bandera. But in an operation code-named
"Anyface," US intelligence protected him even though they were in
possession of information that potentially implicated him as a war criminal.
The US and UK would then each choose a partner. After the
initial US help, the UK would go on to work with Bandera and the OUN-B; the US
would work with Mikola Lebed, the chief of the security branch of the OUN-B.
In Legacy of Ashes: the History of the CIA, Tim Weiner
says that "Nightingale was the code name of a Ukrainian resistance force
[Secretary of Defense] Forestal had authorized to carry out a secret war
against Stalin. Its leaders," he says, "included Nazi collaborators
who had murdered thousands of people. . . ." A 1947 US Counter Intelligence
Corp. (CIC) report already notes the "close connection with the Bandera
movement."
According to O’Rourke, in February 1947, Lebed
"approached the CIC about the possibility of collaboration." The CIC
agreed, and, according to Weiner, the CIA smuggled Lebed into the US, telling
US immigration officials that Lebed was "rendering valuable assistance to
this Agency in Europe."
As was the case with Bandera, the CIA was not ignorant of
Lebed’s past. Weiner says, "The agency’s own files described the Ukrainian
faction led by Lebed as a ‘terrorist organization’." And they knew Lebed
had allied with the Nazis. "The Justice Department," Weiner reports,
"determined that he was a war criminal who had slaughtered Ukrainians,
Poles, and Jews." They even attempted to deport Lebed, but Allen Dulles
intervened, telling the federal immigration commissioner that Lebed was
"of inestimable value to this Agency."
A top-secret April 1948 CIA report to the National
Security Council quoted by O’Rourke would outline the proposed Cold War
collaboration with the ultranationalist Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and
suggest "their possible value to the US Government for the purposes of
propaganda, sabotage and anti-Communist political activity."
That operation would go on to receive the code name
"Operation AERODYNAMIC" and would be launched by the CIA in 1948.
O’Rourke quotes the CIA’s Frank Wisner as saying that "In view of the
extent and activity of the resistance movement in Ukraine, we consider this to
be a top priority project." She cites a CIA document acquired under the
Freedom of Information Act that reveals operational plans for "the
exploitation and expansion of the Ukrainian resistance movement" for
"political and psychological warfare [and] resistance and guerilla warfare."
Operation Aerodynamic was a failure, or "ill-fated
and tragic," as the CIA called it.
The story of the OUN’s Nazi collaboration during World
War II and the story of the ultranationalist role in the 2014 coup and the
subsequent Ukrainian military and government have been told, though rarely by
the mainstream media. But chronologically between those two events is the much
less told story of the US and its allies partnering with Ukrainian
ultranationalist Nazi collaborators to fight against the Soviet Union in the
Cold War.
Why would anyone believe that the US and its allies would
collaborate with ultranationalists in Ukraine to fight the Russians? Because
they have.
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