Under the Pink Swastika [EN]

How Russo-phobia in the West has empowered Ukraine's Neo Nazi vanguard, what Russia means by 'de-nazification' and what this means for the SMO and the fate of Ukraine.

Approx. 7000 words

When President Putin launched the special military operation in February of 2022, his speech contained the explicit policy objective of de-nazificiation. Many leading Russian officials, and Russian media have long sounded the alarm over the issue of Nazism in Ukraine. So has the Western media in fact, at least before 2022,where the propaganda machine went into overdrive and they attempted to gaslight us into thinking that there are no Nazis in Ukraine to be worried about and that it's Putin propaganda to think so. But even before this monotonic deluge of spin from major Western news outlets, the idea of Ukrainian nazism is extremely confusing to the average English speaking Westerner.   This essay seeks to outline why this is the case,to explain what Russian people and leaders usually intend to mean when they express concerns over ‘neo-Nazism’ and to point out some of the fundamental flaws in the cargo cult that is neo-Nazism in Ukraine.

Vilification of Russians in the West and the Root of the Confusion

Firstly, in the West, at least during my lifetime I have never seen any kind of positive mainstream media reportage about modern Russia, with the lone exception being when the FIFA World Cup was hosted there in 2018. This is all on top of decades of anti Soviet Cold War sentiment to piggyback from. With the way Western media has typically reported on controversies over the years involving groups like Pussy Riot, the promotion of Alexander Navalny or Russia’s anti-LGBT propaganda laws, Russia’s intervention in Syria, the fake news over years that claimed Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin colluded to rig the 2016 US election, or the repeated vilification of Russians in popular media such as the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series, Westerners are wound up a clockwork orange  and are well primed to see Russians as evil.  This is on top of the fact that when Russia seized Crimea in 2014, Putin was directly compared to Hitler (Johnson, 2014)  and academics, such as Motyl (2016) describe the Russian government under Putin as a form of fascism. Others have made odd claims that Russia is “re-Stalinizing” and that the Putin administration is ‘whitewashing’ the crimes of Stalin’s regime (Kuzio, 2016), despite the fact that Putin himself finds it important that works such as The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn remain on the school curriculum (Reuters, 2010).  Philosophers such as Alexander Dugin are also often described in the West as ‘Russian fascists’.

However, there has been some push back against this mentality in the West from a minority of dissenters, such as Tucker Carlson, Roger Waters or other alternative media figures like Jimmy Dore. Academia also has heterogeneity of opinion, but it is impossible to go through them all to determine what the general tone is. The ones that are most negative, and often most false, will have their arguments filter through to the media, political leaders and thus the general public, promoting a Russophobic agenda..   As Mark B. Smith (2019), a Professor of Russian History at Cambridge  illustrates throughout his book The Russia Anxiety: And How History Can Resolve It, Russophobia is not a new prejudice, nor is it even one strictly emanating from the Cold War or prior anti communism.  Smith describes this anxiety in various ways, such as:

“...Russia has sometimes seemed a unique menace in Western eyes. This feeling, usually based on error and even more often on prejudice, has come and gone for at least five centuries….At its worst, it creates a preposterous bogeyman and is itself a threat to world peace…” (pg xxv)

“The Russia Anxiety is a historically deep-seated feature of international relations. Western commentary since the end of the Cold War has often been ‘hysterical and one sided’, according to one of the most respected writers on the subject….This is not an imaginary construct in the heads of Russians. Among Westerners, feeling the Anxiety can seem instinctive and natural, even a careful response to events, but it is usually irrational, a displacement,a political choice rather than a necessity” (pg 22)

“Instant history and the willfully misunderstood history have been environments in which the Russia Anxiety has thrived. They have made possible the widespread myth of a special path of Russian history, a specially bad path, of barbarianism, poverty and unfreedom. This black legend of Russia’s damaged destiny has been a risk to world peace in the past and it might be again…” (pg 45)

Likewise, renowned international relations scholars such as John Mearsheimer has warned for close to a decade now in essays, speeches and interviews that the West is taking Ukraine down the “primrose path” that will lead to its devastation and that the anti Russia policies pursued by the West since 1991, but especially after 2008, have been foolish ideas based on Russophobia, underestimation and arrogance, like John McCain’s comments that Russia is just a “gas station with nukes.” Mearsheimer has also repeatedly pointed out that Washington’s anti Russian policies over the years have, from a purely strategic point of view, been utterly idiotic in that they have pushed Russia and China into closer cooperation while China has been increasingly seen as a peer competitor to the US. Mearsheimer argues that the US should not have pursued an aggressive policy towards Russia in order to have friendly relations as well as a great power ally in competition with China, as Russia and China, in this alternate scenario, would have likely been competitors rather than co operators. Even prominent foreign policy experts from the Cold War period, such as Steve Cohen, George Kennan, Stephen Walt and others pushed against Washington’s policy over the years, but have over time been increasingly marginalized by mainstream media, as well  as other military experts like Col. Douglas McGregor and Scott Ritter. 

The war propaganda has also vilified Russians as a nationality, particularly the soldiers,  as barbarians, with Ukrainians and their supporters recycling variations of German Nazi-era propaganda, such as by referring to them as ‘asiatic bolshevik hordes’ or ‘orcs’, which abound on social media. A particularly amusing phenomenon was the claim that Russian soldiers were surprised to find things like working toilets, washing machines and paved roads when they went into Ukraine, which is ironic considering the overwhelming majority of infrastructure in Ukraine, such as the electricity grid, had been built during Soviet times and that in modern times, Russia has been doing better than Ukraine and other former Soviet republics in every conceivable metric since 2000 and even from a purely economic point of view, Ukraine simply could not afford to continuously be on hostile terms with Russia, even prior to the start of the SMO ( Yates, 2019). This is insult is doubly ironic when it would be more appropriate to apply the metaphor to and consider Ukrainian nationalists ‘orcs’ due to them being seduced and corrupted by the power of a malevolent force. 

The current Head of Ukraine’s National Defense and Security Council, Aleksey Danilov, recently made a statement that “Russians are Asians' ' and the difference between Russians and Ukrainians is that Ukrainians have “humanity”, according to him. Given the ridiculous and extreme attempt to ‘cancel’ Russian culture and products in much of the Western world following the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine in 2022 in tandem with  sanctions, what amounts to a hate campaign has effectively taken place. As a brief aside, these attitudes at times go from the grotesque to the comical, such as the current English language spokesman for the Armed Forces of Ukraine being the American transgender, Sarah-Ashton Cirillo, who likes to refer to Russians as subhuman, or hilarious and absurd beliefs, as expressed by a currently sitting Ukrainian MP, Inna Sovsun, earlier this year that Ukraine needs to legalize gay marriage in order to show that Ukrainians are a “superior species” to Russians and because its what “Western partners expect”. 

 These expressions of hate are not just in Ukraine or  the primarily English speaking parts of the world either.  Notably, in 2022, there was an increase in bullying of Russian kids in Danish schools and an uptick of violent hate crimes against Russians in Germany. Presently, Baltic states such as Latvia and Estonia are rapidly introduced anti Russian policies in their countries aimed at restricting the rights of Russian residents, who make up approximately ¼ of the population there, in the belief that this is their chance to intimidate and ethnically cleanse Russians, in addition to the paranoia that Russians constitute a potential hostile fifth column. Even the UN has expressed concern about these discriminatory practices. This paranoia on the part of Baltic states could and the resulting policies could very well turn into a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’ situation down the line. Moreover, this idiotic attitude treats all Russians as necessarily responsible for the actions of their homeland’s government and for not revolting against or explicitly denouncing Putin, Russians are then treated as suspect and borderline criminal on the basis of their nationality. This is of course on top of the existing Russophobia previously discussed that treats Russians as inherently evil on the basis of nationality as if they were drow or tieflings in older editions of Dungeons and Dragons. Naturally, most English speaking or other Westerners these days do not apply the same standards or introspection to themselves in relation to the actions of their own governments foreign policy activities and engage in forms of excuse making that is seen as bad when others do it.

Other expressions of hatred persist, such as a recent incident at a The Killers concert in Georgia, or the disgusting, strogg-like trolls under the banner of NAFO, a NATO backed online trolling group that shit up every thread and comments section related to Russia, who gleefully support Ukrainian authorities bloodthirsty desire to engage in a global terror campaign against Russians or by turning into a hero a shark who ate a Russian man on holiday in Egypt. At the start of 2022, Meta platforms eased their hate speech rules to allow for people to openly call for killing Russians, which is a policy that still, to my knowledge, remains and has led Zuckerberg’s company to be labeled an ‘extremist organization’ within Russia.  There is a not insignificant amount of people, with the most public being the likes of the cretinous, deranged US Senator Lindsay Graham, who gleefully and borderline sadistically believes that the spending money in Ukraine to kill Russians in order to strategically defeat Russia with minimal loss of life to Americans, is great value. Not only is this a false hope, given that it increasingly looks like NATO is the one to be strategically defeated (or at the least, greatly diminished) by the present conflict, it is a disgusting attitude towards Russians and Ukrainians alike,treating the latter as mere expendable fodder, of lives of lower worth in the cause of Russophobia and American imperialism. Their callous bloodthirstiness and sadism seemingly has no limit. 

Ukrainian state spokesmen have vowed to “kill Russians all over the globe” until Ukrainian victory and some high profile terror attacks, such as what killed Daria Dugina, are an example of this desire in motion. Western leaders and press, as usual, have tended to downplay, excuse or ignore such attacks, as they have since 2014. Meanwhile, alleged Russian atrocities are always histrionically reported but subsequently dropped, but retractions are almost never made when they turn out to be false, such as Bucha. 

 A former adviser to President Zelensky, Aleksey Arestovich,  has recently admitted that such dehumanization against Russians on the part of Ukrainians and their supporters, online and elsewhere, have been counterproductive. Instead of demoralizing Russians, this extremely public display of hatred and sadism,such as in 2022 where there many recordings of Ukrainians picking up the phones of deceased Russian combatants, calling their mothers, and insulting them, have undermined Ukraine’s cause, reduced any potential sympathy for them in Russia, reinforced negative stereotypes and motivated more people to support the war and even go fight in it on the Russian side.

These attitudes and false beliefs, such as that Putin is basically a new Hitler  also partly explains why Western leaders refuse to recognize the reality of Crimea as Russian clay and so arrogantly refuse to seriously engage with Russia’s security concerns since Western leaders don’t want to be seen as ‘appeasers’ like Neville Chamberlain, despite the fact that the circumstances are completely different. Given the repeated NATO expansion over the years, much of which Russia had to swallow because they weren’t in a position to really do anything about it then, it would be more accurate to say that the United States is taking the role of Hitler and his geopolitical ambitions in this analogy. 

 Likewise,the open rhetoric about the need to ensure a ‘strategic defeat’ of Russia are naturally based on arrogance, Russophobia, the belief that they really are protecting democracy and other tortured phantasms that make them believe that, if they don’t do this or otherwise constantly harass the Russian state, that the storyline of Red Dawn or the original Modern Warfare 2 will happen any day now. Like the Party in 1984, the elites, deep state, whatever it is you wish to call them in the United States aim to extinguish all thought that differs from theirs and in the aim of using Ukraine as a springboard for attack against Russia, they have empowered the most violent and ideologically motivated Russia haters in Ukraine, the various Nazi organisations such as Azov, Right Sector or C14. As to the oft repeated retort that ‘nazis can’t be influential, Zelensky is Jewish!’ I say: Zelensky is literally an actor, he is a figurehead for the truly influential factions that have been empowered by the United States. His Jewishness is ironic, yes, especially since Azov founder Biletsky wants to defeat the “jewish led untermenschen” (which on its face means he should defeat his own organization), but it is largely incidental and has proven convenient in shielding the influential neo-Nazi vanguard from criticism. 

‘Nazi Fatigue’ 

Another theory I have about western confusion over this issue of Nazism in Ukraine, is that in Western political discourse, everyone accuses everyone else of being Nazis. Trump supporters get accused of being Nazis, people who expect people to arrive on time to work are Nazis, people who are anti fascist are actually Nazis and so on. Round and round it goes and you can probably think of scores of examples of this phenomenon from your own experiences. Even George Orwell complained about this phenomena of abusing language like this in his essay Politics and the English Language (1946):

“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way”

In short, when you refer to everything you don’t like as fascism, or communism or whatever, these words ultimately lose their meaning. Words like this, used in such fashion do have their limitations, people are tired of them but never  are tired of using them. Russians are not immune to this flippant usage, however, when Westerners see Russian leaders like Vladimir Putin or Dmitri Medvedev express their concern and opposition to the prevalence of Nazism in Ukraine in the form of prominent groups like the Azov movement, Westerners project the flippancy of their own societies discourse into the meaning of Putin’s statements. Putin and other Russian leaders do not typically use the term ‘Nazi’ or ‘fascist’ in a flippant or casual pejorative, and a very specific meaning is intended that Russians understand, but relatively few Westerners do.  This is not academic or a quibble with the nuances of Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile’s conception of the corporate state and how to structure a government, or the financial sorcery of Hjalmar Schacht. The concern is very specifically an existential one,and is the very specific component of Nazism under Hitler that saw Russians, and Slavic people more generally, as subhuman and deserving of elimination or at least displaced in an Eastern European Trail of Tears.  The Eastern Front was a war of annihilation.

The History
Just before Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, the armed forces of Germany were explicitly instructed to ignore all rules of war and were permitted to engage in cruelties that they were not allowed on the Western Front, giving the campaign in Russia its “unprecedented character” (Beevor, 2017). Likewise, the series of proposals in the Nazi government, known collectively as ‘GeneralplanOst’, had according to economist and historian Adam Tooze (2007):

“Set out a timetable for the extinction of the entire population of Eastern Europe. It should be taken no less seriously than the program outlined by Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference”.

Even some German officials in the government at that time were extraordinarily uncomfortable with this, as was written in the diary of an ambassador:

“It makes one’s hair stand on end to learn about the measures to be taken in Russia…this kind of thing turns the German into a type of being which had only existed in enemy propaganda.”

Furthermore,the manner in which Hitler and his co-ideologues conceived and formulated their attitudes on race had an explicit anti-Slavic character. While this theme is present in many of Hitler’s speeches and general Nazi era propaganda, we do not have to look any further than his part autobiography part political programme, Mein Kampf, in which Slavs are pilloried almost as much, possibly even more so than the jews are. When talking about why he believed the Austro-Hungarian empire had become decadent, he attributed it to what he perceived to be the increased relevance in public life of the various Slavic ethnic groups within the Empire and a lack of will for re-asserting the dominance of Austrian/German culture on the part of state leadership. In regards to Russians specifically, this is what Hitler had to say:

“Destiny itself seems to wish to point out the way for us here. In delivering Russia over to Bolshevism, Fate robbed the Russian people of that intellectual class which had once created the Russian State and were the guarantee of its existence. For the Russian state was not organized by the constructive political talent of the Slav element in Russia, but was much more a marvellous exemplification of the capacity for State-building possessed by the Germanic element in a race of inferior worth. Thus were man powerful Empires created all over the earth. More often than once inferior races with Germanic organizers and rulers as their leaders became formidable States and continued to exist as long as the racial nucleus remained which had originally created each respective State. For centuries Russia owed the source of its livelihood as a State to the Germanic nucleus of its governing class. But this nucleus is now almost wholly broken up and abolished. The Jew has taken its place. Just as it is impossible for the Russian to shake off the Jewish yoke by exerting his own powers, so, too, it is impossible for the Jew to keep this formidable State in existence for any long period of time. He himself is by no means an organizing element, but rather a ferment of decomposition. This colossal Empire in the East is ripe for dissolution. And the end of the Jewish domination in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a State. We are chosen by Destiny to be the witnesses of a catastrophe which will afford the strongest confirmation of the nationalist theory of race.”

And of course, we all know how this ended for Hitler and his government. 

Meanwhile, the hero of contemporary Ukrainian nationalism, Stepan Bandera, who approximately 74% of Ukrainians agree is a national hero (Goncharenko, 2023), is another figure that is typically little known to westerners and he has been largely whitewashed in the historiography and literature. One example that springs to mind is the book Man with the Poison Gun by the Ukrainian historian, Serhii Plokhy (2017), which is a biography about Bogdan Stashynsky, the man who assassinated Stepan Bandera at his West Germany apartment. While an interesting enough biography, the story is framed in such a way so as to treat the path that lead to Stashysnky assassinating Bandera as something tragic, of a man who had been manipulated into betraying his people and their cause for independence. Naturally, Plokhy is light on important biographical information about Bandera, namely his well known fanatical collaboration with the Nazi occupations, as well as him and his organization being responsible for many massacres of Poles, Jews and Russians. Plokhy sidesteps this and claims, again light on the details, that only ‘individual members’ were responsible for some of the atrocities and not Bandera and his OUN as a whole. I’ve definitely heard this line of reasoning before.

  There is also a tendency in some of the academic literature even before 2022 and the Western media’s attempt to downplay the vanguardist nazis in Ukraine as Putinist propaganda, to claim that Soviet and Russian historiography, as well as Russian state media outlets use Bandera as a phantasm, a bogeyman, in order to scare people, particular in the Donbass, as part of a cynical propaganda ploy to boost support for Russian policies and to vilify Ukrainians (Yates, 2019) . The reality is, it is not cynical, and it is not a phantom of Russian imagination to be concerned with the presence of Nazis in Ukraine. And so, I arrive at the point: When Russians talk about their concerns and opposition to Nazism, they are very specifically referring to that aspect of Nazism and its racial component that is formulated in a way so as to treat Russians as subhuman and deserving of extermination. Simply put, Russians are against an ideology which explicitly hates them and seeks to murder them. So when Russians see their neighbour Ukraine having what is effectively a vanguard of people who roam around with Nazi symbols, engage in hero worship of Hitler and Stepan Bandera, engaging in obscene cruelties for years on the contact line in Donbass and are going around claiming they are a superior race to Russians all the while becoming increasingly well organized,  militarized and influential in Ukraine’s political and security organs, all the while being backed by NATO, which as an organization is fundamentally hostile to Russia and desires her subordination to modern American liberalism, its no wonder Russians are concerned about this.

It is like when demagogues of mass movements like Julius Malema and his EFF in South Africa sing the song called ‘kill the Boer’ in a country where racial strife and violence remains a significant issue and then trying to seriously argue that whites shouldn’t be concerned because its apparently ‘just a metaphor’ or a mere ‘anti colonial song’. Or similarly in the United States where ideologues in academia and mainstream media talk about ‘eliminating Whiteness’, but people still insist that those concerned about where all this goes are just being paranoid.And just like Ukraine and the issue of its influential Nazi vanguard, the tendency of the mainstream press in English speaking countries is to ignore, or when they can’t ignore, downplay, minimize and obfuscate nowadays. 

What we have right now in Ukraine is an unholy communion between fascism and liberalism, a true pink swastika occurrence, aimed at taking down Russia. The issues with NATO was a big enough problem of its own, but empowering the most radically anti-Russian people, those being actual neo Nazis in Ukrainian society, made the situation even worse and especially frightening for the Russians in most of what is now the former Ukrainian Donbass, who lived constantly under this threat for at least 8 years before the SMO. The SMO goal of ‘denazification’ becomes crystal clear to comprehend with these factors in mind, rather than being some confusing Russian eccentricity or purely cynical WW2 remake narrativisation of the conflict.

All these things I have presented to you so far, people in the West, particularly in English speaking countries, do not know these things. People are shockingly ignorant about Russia and worse still, too many people lack the curiosity of mind to get acquainted with some basic, relevant details. It regularly amazes me how, just in relation to the present conflict in Ukraine, that people are surprised when you tell them about the Minsk agreements and the conflict from the past 9 years, let alone the history of NATO expansion. In my memory of mainstream news coverage in Australia about Donbass, whenever there has been what looked like an escalation even before the SMO, such things were never brought up in reportage. Even Putin’s attempts to force a negotiation right before the start of the SMO might as well be memory holed by the general public. This is of course because the mainstream media, at least in Australia and the United States, do not mention it at all when reporting on this issue for the simple reason that on its own, the Minsk agreements blow up their spin. Like with COVID-19, the broad mass of the public have been fed pure shit, swallowed without a fuss and telling you its cake while genuinely believing that the SMO was unprovoked. Our mainstream media is similarly so bad in regards to important topics like this that a lot of the time you end up being less informed than before you watched the segment on the evening news. The people whose job is, ostensibly, to inform us accurately about things, who are some of the biggest whiners about ‘misinformation’ end up bigger sources of misinformation than the most schizophrenic flat earth blogger much of the time. They accuse Russian state TV of being obscene propaganda, but as the fable goes, those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. 

Likewise in Australia, when students learn about the Second World War, this is learned in year 10 and there is typically very little attention paid to the Soviet front of the war, which is its essential component. Students do learn about Hitler’s anti antisemitism and holocaust, but the anti Slavic aspect of this ideology is rarely, if ever, covered. And while students can learn about the Cold War, or the period in Russia covering 1895-1924 as part of year 11 and 12 history, this is not guaranteed since the schools may not cover these topics in their history syllabus, and these are electives on top of the fact that students may leave school at 16 years of age. So the general level of education about Russia is quite sparse here, and it is likely to be similar in other English speaking countries. In my own experience, I have encountered people who still believe Russia is communist and that Putin intervened in Ukraine because he is a meanie head that wants to restore the Soviet Union. Another experience I have had is that I once took an older relative to see the film ‘Death of Stalin’ and I was asked who Stalin was. I’m not asking for people to become experts or be required to love Russia, but at least some trustworthy,basic knowledge provided by institutions to the general public would be of some use, even if it is not an easy fix . All this information isn’t censored or otherwise unavailable in English speaking countries (for now at least) , but it's not something people would normally see unless they take a special interest. Given that the Americans are often mocked for their astounding ignorance of the world outside of the USA, I can only imagine just how much worse education regarding Russia is, especially nowadays. 

Azov racial beliefs

In this essay, I have already written much and I’m not going to go into all the details  of Ukraine’s Nazi movement as it stands today, as I think there is already an excellent write up of this available on RT, in which the same article has more extensive information about Bandera than I have presented here. Instead what I would like to do before I conclude this essay is go through some of the biggest lies that contemporary Ukrainian nationalism posits. 

The first is the issue of race. Contemporary Ukrainian nazism, such as that promoted by one of Azov Group’s leaders,Andriy Biletsky, holds the following position: 

“ A subsequent Biletsky manifesto entitled “Language and Race – Primary Issues” expanded on the “social-nationalist” concept: “Ukrainian social-nationalism considers the Ukrainian Nation to be a blood-racial community… Race is everything for nation-building – Race is the basis on which the superstructure grows in the form of national culture, which again comes from the racial nature of the people, and not from language, religion, economy, etc.”

As for the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine, Biletsky wrote, “The issue of total Ukrainization in the future social nationalist state will be resolved within 3-6 months with the help of a tough and balanced state policy” (Rubinstein, 2023).

This is of course paired with the comments about supposed Russian ‘asianness’ and the recycled propaganda about Asiatic hordes. Ukrainian nationalists promote a vulgar zoological materialism and claim that they are inherently racially superior to Russians. This is what Azov’s far right useful idiot cheerleaders in the West also believe. The problem with this is that it has been empirically disproven:

“Slavic speakers of Eastern Europe are, in general, very similar in their genetic composition. Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians have almost identical proportions of Caucasus and Northern European components and have virtually no Asian influence.” (see: Trishka et al., 2017; Malyarchuk, 2001)

Furthermore, according to the most up to date census data, Russia is approximately 81% ethnically Russian with the rest being various nationalities,of which there are 192 besides Russians. This hardly constitutes an ‘asiatic horde’. The irony of this is that for ideologues like Biletsky, by the standards on the philosophy of race he subscribes to, Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians form a single blood-racial community, and therefore, what would distinguish the national culture of Ukraine comes from things like language, religion, economy, etc. rather than on the basis of zoological materialism. Furthermore, for these Hitler worshipping Ukrainian Nazis, had Hitler succeeded in his conquests in the Soviet Union, there would be no such thing as a ‘Ukrainian’ people, as Ukrainians are Slavs and therefore would have been either deported along with the Russians, killed, made second class citizens or for the tiny minority that would have been considered sufficiently Aryan, they would have been Germanised.

Desperate attempts to distort the past: The case of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk

The next lie, while not a fundamental one, is something I have come across that is illustrative of the tendency of Ukrainian nationalists and state organizations to lie, almost pathologically, and distort history. A while ago on Instagram, I came across a post from a page run by Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs which made the ridiculous claim that the purpose of 1918’s Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was that its core purpose was for Germany to help secure Ukrainian statehood in cooperation with the burgeoning Ukrainian nationalist movement of that time. This is a blatant falsehood, since this treaty was negotiated by the Bolshevik government and the German High Command of the time in order to create an armistice. The Bolsheviks were also willing to make such concessions, if necessary, for the larger interests of the ‘world revolution.  The conditions of the treaty were so severe on Russia to the point where approximately ⅓ of the European portion of the country was ceded to Germany in what has been described as the “ultimate imperial peace” which with Germany’s occupation served to fuel her “imperial ambitions” and was for Russia a “national catastrophe” that reduced her status to “little better than 17th century Muscovy” (Tooze, 2015; Figes 2017). Luckily for the Bolsheviks, the later armistice on the Western Front and the Treaty of Versailles de facto nullified the concessions made at Brest-Litovsk.

Figes also points out that while the nationalist authorities that had seized power in Kiev made an agreement with the Germans at the time, the occupation was not welcome by the peasants due to grain requisition requirements and the occupation was, ironically, welcome by bourgeois Russians in the area who preferred German rule to the Rada.  Ukrainian peasants and socialist groups at the time also engaged in resistance against the German occupation. For Imperial Germany, due to the fertile soil in Ukraine, that land was to them what India was to the British Empire. Modern Ukrainian nationalists and authorities in the country distort this history, especially in the wake of the SMO, in order to create the impression that Ukraine was always ‘western aligned’ and that Western states, Germany in particular, always cared about Ukrainian statehood. The reality is that then, as well as now, any cooperation of Ukrainian nationalists and foreign powers has been to service the cause of that foreign power’s imperial ambitions, rather than the cause of Ukrainian statehood, which would be revoked by that foreign power as soon as it became inconvenient. 

Holodomor

The next national myth of Ukraine is the Holodomor in which Ukraine’s nationalists and US State Department cheerleaders such as Anne Applebaum (2017) argue was that the famines that occurred in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s were part of a Stalinist plot to liquidate Ukrainians as an ethnic group during collectivization-dekulakization. This is false. While many people at the time, peasants in the Ukrainian SSR and the rest of the USSR faced scarcely imaginable privations and horrors during this time, the famines were not purposefully engineered, and not for the purpose of exterminating an ethnic group. The famines were a result of drought and bad harvests, which had long been a regular occurrence up to that point, the policy of collectivisation-dekulakization and the OGPUs brutal methods of enforcing in addition to the policy of mass grain exports to obtain hard currency to purchase the equipment necessary to fuel the state’s efforts to speed up the development the USSRs scientific-industrial base compounded issues but weren’t their chief cause. There is no credible evidence that Stalin or the Soviet government made genocide a state level policy in respect to Ukrainians (Kotkin, 2017) . In fact, the Soviet nationalities policy in the 1930s involved affirmative action policies for minority nationalities, in which Ukrainians were among the beneficiaries of (Fitzpatrick,2000). While the Soviet state, especially during Stalin’s tenure, was an undoubtedly full of hardship for many, the idea that Ukrainians were targeted and suffered disproportionately under communism is simply a myth. 

Germany recognized the Holodomor as a genocide in 2022, but this was obviously one based on politics and feeling the need to show solidarity with Ukraine, as opposed to a careful, independent and sober evaluation of the historical record or consultation with the works of leading historians of the Soviet period. The modern Ukrainian state engages in this mythmaking to justify their supposedly independent statehood (which is now totally dependent on the whims of the United States and its vassals) and like with the dishonoring of Ukrainian leaders in the USSR such as Khruschev and Brezhnev on top of ‘de-communization’ and ‘de-russification’ policies, the present Ukrainian state, in the clearest form of abjection ever seen, are revising and eliminating their history like the French revolutionaries who started a new calendar at Year Zero, in a vain attempt of fulfilling their fantasy of entering the ‘promised land’ and becoming part of the club of the liberal West as it stands today. Ukrainian leaders either don’t know or don’t care the population is being used. This at times lands squarely in the realm of self parody, with one relatively recent example being the renaming of a street in Kiev to ‘Orwell Street’ as part of the de-russification agenda. The irony is completely lost on them. 

Maidan

The false consciousness and wishful thinking of pro-Western Ukrainians can be seen in the 2014 Maidan coup itself. In the West we are usually told that this ‘revolution of dignity’ occurred because Viktor Yanukovich, who was President at the time, was a Putin puppet and pressured into signing a trade deal with Russia instead of the EU deal under consideration at the time. And so, when the deal with Russia was signed instead of the supposedly inherently superior deal with the EU, the people revolted to get their independence. While it is true that this did motivate people to revolt, it was based on a totally false idea of what the trade deal with the EU meant and people supported it, not because of its content or relative merits, but because of what pro Western Ukrainians believed it to be. It turned out that Yanukovych wasn’t coerced by Putin in the slightest and that the deal with Russia was signed simply because it was better than the EU one, mainly due to the EU agreement stipulating strict austerity measures (Tooze, 2019). Whether the Ukrainian is pro Western, a Nazi, or both, their attitude resembles cargo cult thinking and in a desperate attempt to be seen as ‘not-Russia’ and to identify with ‘the West’ , they build their national identity from the ‘cargo’ of Nazism and current day liberal democracy, and severely distort and revise history to give it a superficial semblance of coherence and continuity.  

Concluding statements
The typical English speaking westerner is resistant to understanding the issue of Ukraine’s influential nazi vanguard, not necessarily out of inherent stupidity, but because there is a general lack of knowledge about Russia, or Ukraine for that matter,  and many years of antipathy since at least the Cold War period and even earlier on top of that. This lack of knowledge, and other prejudices,  is then easily taken advantage of and the public is thus easily propaganized and primed to hate and dehumanize Russias by the means of mass psychology and the fact that the media outlets most people use either outright lie, gaslight or lie by omission (eg; no mention of Minsk agreements in reporting on Russia’s motivation for properly intervening). Moreover, as a result of years of propagandization, misinformation in the proper sense of the word, or prejudices based on political values like support for gay marriage, your typical native English speaker is positioned to view Putin himself as some kind of nazi himself. He is commonly derided as ‘Putler’ by anti Russian commentators. 

 On top of everyone calling each other fascists and nazis in English language political discourse , when exposed to Putin and other Russians referring to ‘denazification’ and their concerns about the level of influence of nazi movements inside the Ukrainian military and government, they are totally confused. They don’t possess the knowledge or framework of understanding to even process this information effectively at a most basic level and arrogant, irrational prejudices take hold and drive the ‘thinking’, for lack of a better term.  This applies as much to the political leadership as well as the general public. However, an upshot here is that according to various polls, enthusiasm for continued support of and deepening involvement in Ukraine is less and less; not because of any newfound fondness or understanding of Russia, but because a simple cost benefit analysis and self interest of the ordinary person re-establishes a foothold and people realize picking this fight is not worth it. Another upshot, although something of a bitter one, is that as of the past couple months, the Western media is already shifting its tone from drunk, bullish enthusiasm about Ukraine’s prospects and the hope of Russia’s and Putin’s demise, to a more bearish one regarding Ukrainian prospects.

The truth is starting to seep through the press, both to cushion the shock of people for when Ukraine is down for the count and collapses entirely, as well as assigning blame, naturally, to anyone but themselves. There are already articles going around playing the blame game, pushing it on Ukrainians,whether it be the failure of the recent counter offensive and supposed backdoor conversations about accepting peace, despite the fact that Washington has been more or less in the driver's seat in almost every respect. However, the damage is already done and unfortunately, most Western leaders and American presidential hopefuls,if their public statements are anything to go by, are unwilling to admit their error and instead want to commit further resources. This madness can only be explained by poisonous brew emanating from the swamp of American politics, an extreme Russophobic monomania, ignorance and a textbook example of sunk cost fallacy. 

On the part of Ukrainians, I have pointed out some of the issues with their contemporary expressions of nationalism and the false premises it relies on. And of course, not every Ukrainian is a hateful nazi, these feelings were far less common before 2014. Zelensky was elected President on a platform promising to resolve the issues in Donbass peacefully.  Sensible Ukrainians knew that, despite whatever private feelings they may have towards the Russian state, picking a big fight with them was not a good idea. 

However, after the Maidan coup, the Nazi movements, such as Azov, have had increasingly influential positions in the military and other aspects of society, emboldened by the backing of the United States and its NATO vassals in the same way the US supported supposedly ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria. If left unchecked for too long, Ukraine’s brand of Nazism definitely would have further metastasized among the population and the military threat, especially to residents of Donetsk and Luhansk (and other parts of Ukraine with significant portions of Russians), would have increased.   The behavior of Ukraine’s hardcore nationalist ideological battalions over the past 9 years, but especially the last year and a half make them look more like a white ISIS or perhaps more fittingly, a modern instantiation of the infamous ‘Dirlewanger Brigade’. The Nazis in Ukraine see themselves accepting the role as a supposed ‘bulwark of western civilization’ on Russia’s border. Their national identity as a distinct ‘Ukrainian’ people, instead of its origin as derived from Russian and Polish culture has, especially since Maidan, become nothing more than to be counter Russia with its artifacts pulled from the detritus of neo Nazism and putrid, contemporary Western liberalism.  Ukraine’s nationalist vanguard, encouraged by the United States,as we are seeing now, have not led the people of Ukraine to the path of national glory and prosperity, but rather to its doom. The Ukrainian nationalists are getting their ‘de russification’ and ‘de communisation’ alright, but in the complete opposite manner that they hoped for. 

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