Author Topic: Russia - Ukraine war  (Read 21955 times)

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Offline Wonderfulspam

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #15 on: March 10, 2022, 09:44:44 AM »

PETER HITCHENS: One glorious day in Sevastopol 12 years ago, I saw what was coming. That's why I won't join this carnival of hypocrisy

In the long-ago summer of 2010, I found myself in the beautiful harbour of Sevastopol, surveying the rival fleets of Russia and Ukraine as they rode at anchor in the lovely Crimean sunshine.

One great fortress was adorned with banners proclaiming 'Glory to the Ukrainian Navy!' Another frowning bastion across the water bore the words 'Glory to the Russian Navy!'

In the streets of that elegant city, with its porticoes and statues and monuments to repeated wars, sailors from the two fleets mingled on the pavements.

The Russians looked like Russians, with their huge hats and Edwardian uniforms. The Ukrainians looked more like the US Navy on shore leave in San Diego.

It was almost funny to see. I hoped at that time that it would work out well. For the Ukrainians had begun to be silly.

In a country crammed with Russians, they were trying to make Russian a second-class language.

Russians who had lived there happily for decades were pressured to take Ukrainian citizenship and adopt Ukrainian versions of their Christian names.

The schools were promoting a national hero, Stepan Bandera, who Russians strongly disliked and regarded as a terrorist.

And they were teaching history which often had an anti-Russian tinge. Quite a few people told me they felt put upon by these policies. Why couldn't they just be left alone?

Until that point, Ukraine had been a reasonably harmonious country in its 20-odd years of existence. After that visit I saw big trouble coming, both in the Crimea and in the Don Basin, where I also travelled that year.

Far out among the abandoned slagheaps of the dying coalfields, I found the decaying semi-deserted town of Gorlovka, now in the midst of an unofficial war-zone, where it has been since 2014.

This town had been officially renamed Horlivka by Ukraine in its high-handed way, though hardly anybody I met there called it that. Gorlovka in those days still hosted the rather pleasant Cafe Barnsley, the last echo of the Soviet days when Gorlovka had been twinned with Barnsley in a gesture of Communist solidarity with Arthur Scargill's miners.

I remember, that boiling hot, almost silent afternoon, enjoying a Russian beer there, while listening to music from a Russian station on the radio. I wrote rather vaguely at the time that the people of Crimea and Donbas were hoping for – and expecting – a Russian future.

I thought that if Ukraine wanted to be a rigid ethnic nationalist state, then some sort of peaceful deal with its Russian minority was going to be needed. Little did I know what passions I had touched on.

I was amazed to find that I had done something wicked and subversive. The article was attacked as a 'dismaying lapse' by my old friend Edward Lucas, a fine journalist with whom I had spent happy times reporting the collapse of the Soviet Empire, way back in the 1980s.

I especially recall a joyous celebratory dinner with him and others in the decayed 1950s splendours of the Jalta Hotel on Wenceslas Square in Prague, on the freezing night when the Communist regime finally died there.

I replied to his rebuke by warning that 'the conventional wisdom is mistaken, that the open-mouthed sycophantic coverage of such events as the 'Orange Revolution' has done us no favours, and that the future in this part of the world is far from settled and we should perhaps prepare for further turmoil rather than imagine that we have opened a Golden Road of peace and prosperity for ever'.

I asked: 'Are the Anglosphere nations right to treat Russia as a perpetual threat and pariah long after its global ambitions have collapsed and its military power has rusted away? Its regime is miserable. But then so is that of China, with which we seek good relations.'

You see, I have been making this point for a very long time. But it never seems to do any good. In fact, I am accused of being a 'Russian shill' or even a traitor, of parroting Russian propaganda, or things of that kind.

These insults make little impact on me personally because I know they are not true and I have, over the past 30 years been insulted by experts of all kinds. It is normal, if you do what I do.

But such behaviour makes it harder for the country to keep a level head. In the atmosphere of the last few days, I half-expect to be presented with a white feather on the street by a beautiful young woman, because I refuse to join in the war hysteria now gripping the country. And it is hysteria.

I have heard a respected MP calling for the deportation of all Russians from this country – all of them. I have heard crazy people calling for a 'no-fly zone' in Ukraine.

If they got their way it would mean a terrible and immediate European war. I suspect they do not even know what they are calling for. Can you all please call off this carnival of hypocrisy?

I cannot join in it. I know too much. I know that our policy of Nato expansion – which we had promised not to do and which we knew infuriated Russians – played its part in bringing about this crisis.

I know that Ukraine's current government, now treated as if it was almost holy, was brought into being by a mob putsch openly backed by the USA in 2014.

I know that the much-admired President Zelensky in February 2021 closed down three opposition TV stations on the grounds of 'national security'. They went dark that night. I know that the opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk was put under house arrest last year on a charge of treason. Isn't this the sort of thing Putin does?

I know that Ukraine's army has used severe force against Russian civilians in the Don Basin since 2014. The Russians have done dreadful things there, too, but there are plenty of people who will tell you that. The point is that this is not a contest of saints versus sinners, or of Mordor versus the Shire.

I also find it awkward that, when Britain and the USA rightly denounced Putin's illegal invasion of a sovereign country, they seemed to have forgotten that we gave him the idea, by doing this in Iraq in 2003. Unlike them I can truly claim to have opposed both these actions.

I tire of being told that Nato is purely defensive alliance when we know it bombed Serbia in 1999, incidentally killing civilians, when Serbia had not attacked a Nato member.

I also don't recall Libya attacking a Nato member before that 'defensive' alliance launched the air war on Tripoli which also killed civilians, children included, and turned that country into a cauldron of chaos, benefiting nobody.

And then there's the other thing that sticks in my gullet. The countries of the West have egged Ukraine on into a confrontation with Russia which has predictably ended in Putin's barbaric invasion.

But while we stand and cheer at a safe distance, the Ukrainians are the ones who get shelled, bombed, besieged and driven from their homes. Is this honourable? Does sentimental praise for their bravery make up for it?

I would like to end with two quotations. The first is from the American Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman who said: 'I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.'

The other is from the 'Benedictus' in the Church of England's 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which asks God 'to give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace', which I fervently pray, for I am not sure that anything else will now do any good.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10581335/PETER-HITCHENS-saw-coming-Thats-wont-join-carnival-hypocrisy.html
I stand with Putin. Glory to Mother Putin.

Offline G-Unit

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #16 on: March 10, 2022, 10:05:36 AM »
I'm not a fan of Peter Hitchens, but he's right to point out that no-one can claim the moral high ground in this mess. As always, leaders take part in power struggles and ordinary people pay the price.
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Offline Venturi Swirl

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #17 on: March 10, 2022, 10:43:51 AM »
I'm not a fan of Peter Hitchens, but he's right to point out that no-one can claim the moral high ground in this mess. As always, leaders take part in power struggles and ordinary people pay the price.
There will always be those who hate the West and America more than they hate Russia/USSR, and they appear to be having a field day with their sanctimonious outpourings right now.  I think Ukraine can claim the moral high ground in this mess, unless you can tell me why in your opinion they are just as bad as the Russian invading forces? 
"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline G-Unit

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #18 on: March 10, 2022, 11:46:34 AM »
There will always be those who hate the West and America more than they hate Russia/USSR, and they appear to be having a field day with their sanctimonious outpourings right now.  I think Ukraine can claim the moral high ground in this mess, unless you can tell me why in your opinion they are just as bad as the Russian invading forces?

Things are not so simple as you think, and the Ukraine government is likely to end up under Russia's control, regardless of morality. Did they know they ran that risk? Probably.
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Offline Venturi Swirl

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #19 on: March 10, 2022, 12:08:09 PM »
Things are not so simple as you think, and the Ukraine government is likely to end up under Russia's control, regardless of morality. Did they know they ran that risk? Probably.
You said "no one can claim the moral high ground in this mess".  Why can Ukraine not claim the moral high ground as a sovereign state that has been invaded by a force intent on killing its men, women and children?  I expect nothing less or more than another fudged answer from you.
"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline G-Unit

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #20 on: March 10, 2022, 01:19:26 PM »
You said "no one can claim the moral high ground in this mess".  Why can Ukraine not claim the moral high ground as a sovereign state that has been invaded by a force intent on killing its men, women and children?  I expect nothing less or more than another fudged answer from you.

I don't fudge my answers, it's just that I look at the bigger picture and the historical background. Humans have been invading and killing since time began and moral considerations have never stopped them. That's because, as David Starkey explained, power is the aim, not morality.
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Offline Venturi Swirl

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #21 on: March 10, 2022, 01:42:59 PM »
I don't fudge my answers, it's just that I look at the bigger picture and the historical background. Humans have been invading and killing since time began and moral considerations have never stopped them. That's because, as David Starkey explained, power is the aim, not morality.
So because "humans have been killing and invading since time began" no one can say they have the moral high ground over anyone else.  Right you are then.  Ukraine is no better than Russia, look at all the countries they have invaded, and civilians they have murdered.  *%87
"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline G-Unit

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #22 on: March 10, 2022, 04:07:44 PM »
 ()678%
So because "humans have been killing and invading since time began" no one can say they have the moral high ground over anyone else.  Right you are then.  Ukraine is no better than Russia, look at all the countries they have invaded, and civilians they have murdered.  *%87

Killing innocent civilians is never right whoever does it and wherever it happens.
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Offline Venturi Swirl

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #23 on: March 10, 2022, 05:34:54 PM »
()678%
Killing innocent civilians is never right whoever does it and wherever it happens.
Do you condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or are you, like, Jeremy Corbyn, only able to offer banal platitudes and generalisations?
"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline Wonderfulspam

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #24 on: March 10, 2022, 06:14:58 PM »
Do you condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or are you, like, Jeremy Corbyn, only able to offer banal platitudes and generalisations?

What if she condemns it in the strongest possible terms?

What difference would that make to anything?

Will the maternity wards be somehow safer if she calls Putin, Hitler?

Maybe if we all change our Facebook profile pictures to Ukranian flags, maybe that'll help.
I stand with Putin. Glory to Mother Putin.

Offline G-Unit

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #25 on: March 10, 2022, 08:03:43 PM »
What if she condemns it in the strongest possible terms?

What difference would that make to anything?

Will the maternity wards be somehow safer if she calls Putin, Hitler?

Maybe if we all change our Facebook profile pictures to Ukranian flags, maybe that'll help.

WE are where we always are; agree wholeheartedly with VS or suffer the consequences.
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Offline Venturi Swirl

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #26 on: March 10, 2022, 09:08:29 PM »
WE are where we always are; agree wholeheartedly with VS or suffer the consequences.
What a very strange post.  I don’t expect agreement (in fact I’d start worrying if I found myself agreeing with you about anything), just an  answers to my question.  It’s called having a discussion.  I think Putin is an evil despot and don’t understand why you would be reluctant to condemn him and his actions, but would it seem happily blame  the west and their actions for the present situation instead.   If yo’re not interested in explaining your point of view to someone who doesn’t get it then that as always is your prerogative.  I don’t know what consequences you think I am going to make you suffer, if fact I never realised I had such power (Putin better watch out!).
"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline Venturi Swirl

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #27 on: March 10, 2022, 09:26:05 PM »
I must be very naive as I assumed everyone on this forum would consider Putin’s actions in Ukraine to be indefensible but it seems I was wrong.  Clearly there are Putin apologists amongst us and it would seem thst I am the one who is out of step, at least as far as this forum is concerned.  I shouldn’t be surprised I guess…  (&^&
"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline Wonderfulspam

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #28 on: March 10, 2022, 10:09:02 PM »
Are there really neo-Nazis fighting for Ukraine? Well, yes — but it's a long story



No, Putin didn't wage war to "denazify" Ukraine — but that nation's shadowy far-right militias are big trouble

Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed that he ordered the invasion of Ukraine to "denazify" its government, while Western officials, such as former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, have called this pure propaganda, insisting, "There are no Nazis in Ukraine."

In the context of the Russian invasion, the post-2014 Ukrainian government's problematic relations with extreme right-wing groups and neo-Nazi parties has become an incendiary element on both sides of the propaganda war, with Russia exaggerating it as a pretext for war and the West trying to sweep it under the carpet.

The reality behind the propaganda is that the West and its Ukrainian allies have opportunistically exploited and empowered the extreme right in Ukraine, first to pull off the 2014 coup and then by redirecting it to fight separatists in eastern Ukraine. And far from "denazifying" Ukraine, the Russian invasion is likely to further empower Ukrainian and international neo-Nazis, as it attracts fighters from around the world and provides them with weapons, military training and the combat experience that many of them are hungry for. 

Ukraine's neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and its founders, Oleh Tyahnybok and Andriy Parubiy, played leading roles in the U.S-backed coup in February 2014. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt mentioned Tyahnybok as one of the leaders they were working with in their infamous leaked phone call before the coup, even as they tried to exclude him from an official position in the post-coup government.

As formerly peaceful protests in Kyiv gave way to pitched battles with police and violent, armed marches to try to break through police barricades and reach the Parliament building, Svoboda members and the newly-formed Right Sector militia, led by Dmytro Yarosh, battled police, spearheaded marches and raided a police armory for weapons. By mid-February 2014, these men with guns were the de facto leaders of the Maidan movement.

We will never know what kind of political transition peaceful protests alone might have produced in Ukraine, or how different the new government would have been if a peaceful political process had been allowed to take its course without interference by the U.S. or violent right-wing extremists.

But it was Yarosh who took to the stage in the Maidan and rejected the Feb. 21, 2014 agreement negotiated by the French, German and Polish foreign ministers, under which President Viktor Yanukovych and opposition political leaders agreed to hold new elections later that year. Instead, Yarosh and Right Sector refused to disarm and led the climactic march on Parliament that overthrew the government.

Since 1991, Ukrainian elections had swung back and forth between leaders like Yanukovych, who was from Donetsk and had close ties with Russia, and Western-backed leaders like President Viktor Yushchenko, who was elected in 2005 after the "Orange Revolution" that followed a disputed election. Ukraine's endemic corruption tainted every government, and rapid public disillusionment with whichever leader and party won power led to a seesaw between Western- and Russian-aligned factions.

In 2014, Nuland and the State Department got their favorite, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, installed as prime minister of the post-coup government. He lasted two years until he, too, lost his job due to endless corruption scandals. Petro Poroshenko, the post-coup president, lasted a bit longer, until 2019, even after his personal tax evasion schemes were exposed in the 2016 Panama Papers and 2017 Paradise Papers.

When Yatsenyuk became prime minister, he rewarded Svoboda's role in the coup with three cabinet positions, including Oleksander Sych as deputy prime minister, and governorships of three of Ukraine's 25 provinces. Svoboda's Andriy Parubiy was appointed chairman (or speaker) of Parliament, a post he held for the next five years. Tyahnybok ran for president in 2014, but only got 1.2% of the votes, and was not re-elected to Parliament.

Ukrainian voters turned their backs on the extreme right in the 2014 post-coup elections, reducing Svoboda's 10.4% share of the national vote in 2012 to 4.7%. Svoboda lost support in areas where it held control of local governments but had failed to live up to its promises, and its support was split now that it was no longer the only party running on explicitly anti-Russian slogans and rhetoric.

After the coup, Right Sector helped to consolidate the new order by attacking and breaking up anti-coup protests, in what their leader Yarosh described to Newsweek as a "war" to "cleanse the country" of pro-Russian protesters. This campaign climaxed on May 2 with the massacre of 42 anti-coup protesters in a fiery inferno, after they took shelter from Right Sector attackers in the Trades Unions House in Odessa.

After anti-coup protests evolved into declarations of independence in Donetsk and Luhansk, the extreme right in Ukraine shifted gear to full-scale armed combat. The Ukrainian military had little enthusiasm for fighting its own people, so the government formed new National Guard units to do so.

Right Sector formed a battalion, and neo-Nazis also dominated the Azov Battalion, which was founded by Andriy Biletsky, an avowed white supremacist who claimed that Ukraine's national purpose was to rid the country of Jews and other inferior races. It was the Azov battalion that led the post-coup government's assault on the self-declared republics and retook the city of Mariupol from separatist forces.

The Minsk II agreement in 2015 ended the worst fighting and set up a buffer zone around the breakaway republics, but a low-intensity civil war continued. An estimated 14,000 people have been killed since 2014. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and other progressive members of Congress tried for several years to end U.S. military aid to the Azov Battalion. They finally did so in the fiscal 2018 Defense Appropriation Bill, but Azov reportedly continued to receive U.S. arms and training despite the ban.

In 2019, the Soufan Center, which tracks terrorist and extremist groups around the world, warned: "The Azov Battalion is emerging as a critical node in the transnational right-wing violent extremist network. … [Its] aggressive approach to networking serves one of the Azov Battalion's overarching objectives, to transform areas under its control in Ukraine into the primary hub for transnational white supremacy."

The Soufan Center described how the Azov Battalion's "aggressive networking" reaches around the world to recruit fighters and spread its white supremacist ideology. Foreign fighters who train and fight with the Azov Battalion then return to their own countries to apply what they have learned and recruit others.

Violent foreign extremists with links to Azov have included Brenton Tarrant, who massacred 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, and several members of the U.S. Rise Above Movement who were prosecuted for attacking counter-protesters at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. Other Azov veterans have returned to Australia, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the U.K. and other countries.   

Despite Svoboda's declining success in national elections, neo-Nazi and extreme nationalist groups, increasingly linked to the Azov Battalion, have maintained power on the street in Ukraine, and in local politics in the Ukrainian nationalist heartland around Lviv in western Ukraine.

After President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's election in 2019, the extreme right threatened him with removal from office, or even death, if he negotiated with separatist leaders from Donbas and followed through on the Minsk Protocol. Zelenskyy had run for election as a "peace candidate," but under threat from the right, he refused to even talk to Donbas leaders, whom he dismissed as terrorists.

During Trump's presidency, the U.S. reversed Obama's ban on weapons sales to Ukraine, and Zelenskyy's aggressive rhetoric raised new fears in Donbas and Russia that he was building up Ukraine's forces for a new offensive to retake Donetsk and Luhansk by force. 

The civil war has combined with the government's neoliberal economic policies to create fertile ground for the extreme right. The post-coup government imposed more of the same "shock therapy" that was imposed throughout Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Ukraine received a $40 billion International Monetary Fund bailout and, as part of the deal, privatized 342 state-owned enterprises; reduced public sector employment by 20%, along with salary and pension cuts; privatized health care and disinvested in public education, closing 60% of its universities.

Coupled with Ukraine's endemic corruption, these policies led to the looting of state assets by the corrupt ruling class, and to falling living standards and austerity measures for everybody else. The post-coup government upheld Poland as its model, but the reality was closer to Boris Yeltsin's Russia of the 1990s. After a nearly 25% fall in GDP between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine is still the poorest country in Europe.

As elsewhere, the failures of neoliberalism have fueled the rise of right-wing extremism and racism, and now the war with Russia promises to provide thousands of alienated young men from around the world with military training and combat experience, which they can then take home to terrorize their own countries.

The Soufan Center has compared the Azov Battalion's international networking strategy to that of al-Qaida and ISIS. U.S. and NATO support for the Azov Battalion poses similar risks as their support for al-Qaida-linked groups in Syria 10 years ago. Those chickens quickly came home to roost when they spawned ISIS and turned decisively against their Western backers.

Right now, Ukrainians are united in their resistance to Russia's invasion, but we should not be surprised when the U.S. alliance with neo-Nazi proxy forces in Ukraine, including the infusion of billions of dollars in sophisticated weapons, results in similarly violent and destructive blowback.

https://www.salon.com/2022/03/10/are-there-really-neo-nazis-fighting-for-ukraine-well-yes--but-its-a-long-story/
I stand with Putin. Glory to Mother Putin.

Offline G-Unit

Re: Russia - Ukraine war
« Reply #29 on: March 11, 2022, 07:32:06 AM »
Are there really neo-Nazis fighting for Ukraine? Well, yes — but it's a long story



No, Putin didn't wage war to "denazify" Ukraine — but that nation's shadowy far-right militias are big trouble

Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed that he ordered the invasion of Ukraine to "denazify" its government, while Western officials, such as former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, have called this pure propaganda, insisting, "There are no Nazis in Ukraine."

In the context of the Russian invasion, the post-2014 Ukrainian government's problematic relations with extreme right-wing groups and neo-Nazi parties has become an incendiary element on both sides of the propaganda war, with Russia exaggerating it as a pretext for war and the West trying to sweep it under the carpet.

The reality behind the propaganda is that the West and its Ukrainian allies have opportunistically exploited and empowered the extreme right in Ukraine, first to pull off the 2014 coup and then by redirecting it to fight separatists in eastern Ukraine. And far from "denazifying" Ukraine, the Russian invasion is likely to further empower Ukrainian and international neo-Nazis, as it attracts fighters from around the world and provides them with weapons, military training and the combat experience that many of them are hungry for. 

Ukraine's neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and its founders, Oleh Tyahnybok and Andriy Parubiy, played leading roles in the U.S-backed coup in February 2014. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt mentioned Tyahnybok as one of the leaders they were working with in their infamous leaked phone call before the coup, even as they tried to exclude him from an official position in the post-coup government.

As formerly peaceful protests in Kyiv gave way to pitched battles with police and violent, armed marches to try to break through police barricades and reach the Parliament building, Svoboda members and the newly-formed Right Sector militia, led by Dmytro Yarosh, battled police, spearheaded marches and raided a police armory for weapons. By mid-February 2014, these men with guns were the de facto leaders of the Maidan movement.

We will never know what kind of political transition peaceful protests alone might have produced in Ukraine, or how different the new government would have been if a peaceful political process had been allowed to take its course without interference by the U.S. or violent right-wing extremists.

But it was Yarosh who took to the stage in the Maidan and rejected the Feb. 21, 2014 agreement negotiated by the French, German and Polish foreign ministers, under which President Viktor Yanukovych and opposition political leaders agreed to hold new elections later that year. Instead, Yarosh and Right Sector refused to disarm and led the climactic march on Parliament that overthrew the government.

Since 1991, Ukrainian elections had swung back and forth between leaders like Yanukovych, who was from Donetsk and had close ties with Russia, and Western-backed leaders like President Viktor Yushchenko, who was elected in 2005 after the "Orange Revolution" that followed a disputed election. Ukraine's endemic corruption tainted every government, and rapid public disillusionment with whichever leader and party won power led to a seesaw between Western- and Russian-aligned factions.

In 2014, Nuland and the State Department got their favorite, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, installed as prime minister of the post-coup government. He lasted two years until he, too, lost his job due to endless corruption scandals. Petro Poroshenko, the post-coup president, lasted a bit longer, until 2019, even after his personal tax evasion schemes were exposed in the 2016 Panama Papers and 2017 Paradise Papers.

When Yatsenyuk became prime minister, he rewarded Svoboda's role in the coup with three cabinet positions, including Oleksander Sych as deputy prime minister, and governorships of three of Ukraine's 25 provinces. Svoboda's Andriy Parubiy was appointed chairman (or speaker) of Parliament, a post he held for the next five years. Tyahnybok ran for president in 2014, but only got 1.2% of the votes, and was not re-elected to Parliament.

Ukrainian voters turned their backs on the extreme right in the 2014 post-coup elections, reducing Svoboda's 10.4% share of the national vote in 2012 to 4.7%. Svoboda lost support in areas where it held control of local governments but had failed to live up to its promises, and its support was split now that it was no longer the only party running on explicitly anti-Russian slogans and rhetoric.

After the coup, Right Sector helped to consolidate the new order by attacking and breaking up anti-coup protests, in what their leader Yarosh described to Newsweek as a "war" to "cleanse the country" of pro-Russian protesters. This campaign climaxed on May 2 with the massacre of 42 anti-coup protesters in a fiery inferno, after they took shelter from Right Sector attackers in the Trades Unions House in Odessa.

After anti-coup protests evolved into declarations of independence in Donetsk and Luhansk, the extreme right in Ukraine shifted gear to full-scale armed combat. The Ukrainian military had little enthusiasm for fighting its own people, so the government formed new National Guard units to do so.

Right Sector formed a battalion, and neo-Nazis also dominated the Azov Battalion, which was founded by Andriy Biletsky, an avowed white supremacist who claimed that Ukraine's national purpose was to rid the country of Jews and other inferior races. It was the Azov battalion that led the post-coup government's assault on the self-declared republics and retook the city of Mariupol from separatist forces.

The Minsk II agreement in 2015 ended the worst fighting and set up a buffer zone around the breakaway republics, but a low-intensity civil war continued. An estimated 14,000 people have been killed since 2014. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and other progressive members of Congress tried for several years to end U.S. military aid to the Azov Battalion. They finally did so in the fiscal 2018 Defense Appropriation Bill, but Azov reportedly continued to receive U.S. arms and training despite the ban.

In 2019, the Soufan Center, which tracks terrorist and extremist groups around the world, warned: "The Azov Battalion is emerging as a critical node in the transnational right-wing violent extremist network. … [Its] aggressive approach to networking serves one of the Azov Battalion's overarching objectives, to transform areas under its control in Ukraine into the primary hub for transnational white supremacy."

The Soufan Center described how the Azov Battalion's "aggressive networking" reaches around the world to recruit fighters and spread its white supremacist ideology. Foreign fighters who train and fight with the Azov Battalion then return to their own countries to apply what they have learned and recruit others.

Violent foreign extremists with links to Azov have included Brenton Tarrant, who massacred 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, and several members of the U.S. Rise Above Movement who were prosecuted for attacking counter-protesters at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. Other Azov veterans have returned to Australia, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the U.K. and other countries.   

Despite Svoboda's declining success in national elections, neo-Nazi and extreme nationalist groups, increasingly linked to the Azov Battalion, have maintained power on the street in Ukraine, and in local politics in the Ukrainian nationalist heartland around Lviv in western Ukraine.

After President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's election in 2019, the extreme right threatened him with removal from office, or even death, if he negotiated with separatist leaders from Donbas and followed through on the Minsk Protocol. Zelenskyy had run for election as a "peace candidate," but under threat from the right, he refused to even talk to Donbas leaders, whom he dismissed as terrorists.

During Trump's presidency, the U.S. reversed Obama's ban on weapons sales to Ukraine, and Zelenskyy's aggressive rhetoric raised new fears in Donbas and Russia that he was building up Ukraine's forces for a new offensive to retake Donetsk and Luhansk by force. 

The civil war has combined with the government's neoliberal economic policies to create fertile ground for the extreme right. The post-coup government imposed more of the same "shock therapy" that was imposed throughout Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Ukraine received a $40 billion International Monetary Fund bailout and, as part of the deal, privatized 342 state-owned enterprises; reduced public sector employment by 20%, along with salary and pension cuts; privatized health care and disinvested in public education, closing 60% of its universities.

Coupled with Ukraine's endemic corruption, these policies led to the looting of state assets by the corrupt ruling class, and to falling living standards and austerity measures for everybody else. The post-coup government upheld Poland as its model, but the reality was closer to Boris Yeltsin's Russia of the 1990s. After a nearly 25% fall in GDP between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine is still the poorest country in Europe.

As elsewhere, the failures of neoliberalism have fueled the rise of right-wing extremism and racism, and now the war with Russia promises to provide thousands of alienated young men from around the world with military training and combat experience, which they can then take home to terrorize their own countries.

The Soufan Center has compared the Azov Battalion's international networking strategy to that of al-Qaida and ISIS. U.S. and NATO support for the Azov Battalion poses similar risks as their support for al-Qaida-linked groups in Syria 10 years ago. Those chickens quickly came home to roost when they spawned ISIS and turned decisively against their Western backers.

Right now, Ukrainians are united in their resistance to Russia's invasion, but we should not be surprised when the U.S. alliance with neo-Nazi proxy forces in Ukraine, including the infusion of billions of dollars in sophisticated weapons, results in similarly violent and destructive blowback.

https://www.salon.com/2022/03/10/are-there-really-neo-nazis-fighting-for-ukraine-well-yes--but-its-a-long-story/

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