May 6, 2022 by Oleg Karpovich, Pro-Rector of the Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy; Mikhail Troyansky, Pro-Rector of the Foreign Ministry’…
With the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, media coverage of the problems of Nazism and ultra-right forces in that country changed dramatically in the US and Europe. The West’s concern over the Nazification of Ukraine’s society and authorities is giving way to assertions that Nazis, in fact, play a limited role due to their low electoral support.
Above all, the Jewish roots of President Vladimir Zelensky are cited to prove that Ukrainian society is healthy, and it is claimed that the Azov and Aidar battalions incorporated into the National Guards cannot even be considered far right. In his recent statement, Foreign Minister of Israel Yair Lapid gave a very strange interpretation of the Holocaust.
President of Latvia Egils Levits was also loose with his interpretation of the current events in Ukraine. All differing viewpoints are dismissed out of hand as Moscow’s “relentless propaganda.” How are we to make sense of all this? Is the West making friends with Nazis now?
As soon as Russia began to act contrary to the new US policy of whitewashing and legitimising the Ukrainian Nazis, President Vladimir Putin – who declared de-Nazification one of the two main goals of the special military operation – was accused of “distorting history” although he didn’t say anything that had not already been said in the Western press many times before. In effect, he merely raised the same concerns that Washington and its allies had been expressing in the past few years. Was the collective West ever concerned over the plight of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics in the past eight years, during which their residents were subjected to merciless shelling and inhuman humiliation bordering on total destruction?
Incidentally, this is not the first time that the West has supported Nazism in the hope of using it against Russia. The seeds of this pernicious, misanthropic ideology were preserved and sown in Ukrainian soil after the end of the Great Patriotic War with the support of the US government, which was engaged in subversive activities against the USSR through the CIA and the pro-Nazi Ukrainian diaspora in the United States. This policy accelerated in 1991. People were told that they shouldn’t use the Russian language, that Ukrainian culture was superior and that they ought to boost Ukrainian nationalism. It accelerated further after the 2014 coup when all the masks finally came down. Power was seized by people who stopped concealing their ideological principles; a big part of the country’s population was taken hostage and the authorities no longer tolerated dissent.
Today, Western journalists are stubbornly refusing to admit that the Ukrainian neo-Nazis, both living in the US and serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF), remain an important asset of the US policy of hegemony. Owing to their “genetic” Russophobia, the current US administration trusts them more than any other political group in Ukraine (Joseph Biden and his son have significant business ties with Ukraine). Having funded and trained the Ukrainian nationalists, Washington expects them to play their historical role in the global war to “cancel Russia.”
Even the liberal American media, which is trying to hush up the problem, has to acknowledge from time to time the unwelcome spread of neo-Nazism in Ukraine and the growing political influence of the far right that openly declares allegiance to Nazi collaborators Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevich and praises the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) that was involved in civilian massacres.
Some experts are denouncing the pivot of the US media towards glorifying ultranationalists as a betrayal of the journalistic creed to report the truth, calling it an attempt to bury information about a very radical movement whose existence should be shaping the policy of the collective West in response to events in Ukraine.
Against this background, the West’s attempts to elevate Vladimir Zelensky, the “talking head” of the nationalists, as a world leader are cynical and dangerous both for Europe, the midwife of Nazism, and the current US administration that won’t be able to hush up or whitewash the criminal actions of its underlings for long.
Washington and the liberal media are actively lobbying for the corrupt Kiev regime, which is proud of its pro-Nazi orientation but toxic by the democratic West’s standards. These efforts may deal a considerable blow to the standing of the current US administration.
It is important to remember that it is not the first time that Western journalists have been charmed by murderers and proponents of misanthropic ideologies, whom the CIA trained to fight the Russians. Support for “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan led to the attack on the twin towers in New York in September 2001 and the protracted manhunt for Osama bin Laden that followed. The same is happening now with Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Their ideology of superiority leaves no doubt that eventually they will turn their weapons on their overseas masters. We are confident that it is only a matter of time.
WtR