Brandon Turbeville
21st Century Wire
In 2019, the term “nazi” has come to mean anything to the right of Karl Marx. Even liberals who support free speech have been labeled nazis and scarcely can one find anyone on the radical left who doesn’t see a “fascist” hiding under any bed. Usually, a “fascist” is just someone with a different opinion. For that reason, hearing the term “nazi” when referring to proxy fighters in Ukraine might seem questionable. Are these fighters actually nazis or do they simply not want a Communist utopia in their country?
In the Ukrainian “Euromaidan” movement, however, the term “nazi” is applied legitimately. It is also important to note the lack of coverage given to this fact by the Western mainstream press that is otherwise so quick to label activists in their own countries as supporters of Hitler. Here, the press ignored the issue altogether. At times, the term “nationalists” were used, falsely equating support for one’s country with National Socialism.
Graham, McCain, Nuland, Brennan and Biden all visit Kiev but it's Russia that's interfering in Ukraine? #Seriously??? pic.twitter.com/TUWtmQ3ar4
— the Lemniscat (@theLemniscat) April 23, 2014
Robert Parry describes the nature of the Ukrainian “nationalists” when he writes,
However, as resistance to Kiev’s right-wing regime expanded in the ethnic Russian east and south, the coup regime found itself unable to count on regular Ukrainian troops to fire on civilians. Thus, its national security chief Andriy Parubiy, himself a neo-Nazi, turned to the intensely motivated neo-Nazi shock troops who had been battle-tested during the coup.
These extremists were reorganized as special units of the National Guard and dispatched to the east and south to do the dirty work that the regular Ukrainian military was unwilling to do. Many of these extreme Ukrainian nationalists lionize World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and like Bandera dream of a racially pure Ukraine, free of Jews, ethnic Russians and other “inferior” beings. The slur of calling the Odessa protesters Colorado beetles — as they were being burned alive — was a reference to the black-and-red colors used by the ethnic Russian resistance in the east.
Though the mainstream U.S. press either describes Parubiy simply as the interim government’s chief of national security (with no further context) or possibly as a “nationalist,” his fuller background includes his founding of the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, blending radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Last year, he became commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense forces.”
Then, on April 15, after becoming the Kiev regime’s chief of national security and finding Ukrainian troops unwilling to fire on fellow Ukrainians in the east, Parubiy went on Twitter to announce, “Reserve unit of National Guard formed #Maidan Self-defense volunteers was sent to the front line this morning.”
Those National Guard forces also were reported on the ground in Odessa when the trade unions building was torched on May 2 and they showed up again in Mariupol as the police station was burned on May 9, according to a report in the New York Times on Saturday.
The Times mentioned the appearance and then disappearance of the National Guard without providing any useful background about this newly organized force. In the language used by the mainstream U.S. press and the Kiev regime, the neo-Nazi brigades are “volunteers” and “self-defense” units while the rebels resisting the post-coup regime are “pro-Russian militants” or “terrorists.” The Times reported the May 9 attack in Mariupol this way:
“Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, wrote on Facebook that about 60 pro-Russian militants had tried to seize the city’s police headquarters. The police called for support from the Ukrainian national guard, a newly formed force of quickly trained volunteers drawn from participants in last winter’s street protests in the capital. Mr. Avakov wrote that 20 ‘terrorists’ had died in the fighting, while those who survived dispersed and hid in a residential neighborhood.”
The Times added: “The national guard, though, pulled out of the city soon afterward . Residents who had gathered around the police station offered an account that differed from the interior minister’s. The city police, they said, were sympathetic to the pro-Russian side and had mutinied against an out-of-town chief newly installed by the interim government in Kiev.“
Armored vehicles had driven into the city to confront the rebellious police, not the militants, residents said. Holes in the brick wall suggested heavy weaponry. Gunfire echoed downtown.
”After the deaths inside Mariupol’s police station, the Kiev regime rejoiced at the extermination of a large number of “terrorists.” As the UK’s Independent reported, “The military action is accompanied by stridently aggressive rhetoric from politicians in Kiev who are crowing about the numbers of ‘terrorists’ killed and threatening further lethal punishment.”
The Kiev’s regime’s concern that some local police forces have at best mixed loyalties has led it again to turn to the Maidan “self-defense” forces to serve as a special “Kiev-1” police force, which was dispatched to Odessa amid that city’s recent violence. (source)
Consider the article by Tom Parfitt entitled “Ukraine Crisis: The Neo-Nazi Brigade Fighting Pro Russian Separatists,” published in the Telegraph in 2014 where the writer states,
The fighters of the Azov battalion lined up in single file to say farewell to their fallen comrade. His pallid corpse lay under the sun in an open casket trimmed with blue velvet.
Some of the men placed carnations by the body, others roses. Many struck their chests with a closed fist before touching their dead friend’s arm. One fighter had an SS tattoo on his neck[…]
As Ukraine’s armed forces tighten the noose around pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country, the western-backed government in Kiev is throwing militia groups – some openly neo-Nazi – into the front of the battle.
The Azov battalion has the most chilling reputation of all. Last week, it came to the fore as it mounted a bold attack on the rebel redoubt of Donetsk, striking deep into the suburbs of a city under siege.
[…]
But Kiev’s use of volunteer paramilitaries to stamp out the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”, proclaimed in eastern Ukraine in March, should send a shiver down Europe’s spine. Recently formed battalions such as Donbas, Dnipro and Azov, with several thousand men under their command, are officially under the control of the interior ministry but their financing is murky, their training inadequate and their ideology often alarming.
The Azov men use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook) symbol on their banner and members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites.
“Personally, I’m a Nazi,” said “Phantom”, a 23-year-old former lawyer at the ceremony wearing camouflage and holding a Kalashnikov. “I don’t hate any other nationalities but I believe each nation should have its own country.” He added: “We have one idea: to liberate our land from terrorists.”
[…]
A former history student and amateur boxer, Mr Biletsky is also head of an extremist Ukrainian group called the Social National Assembly. “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival,” he wrote in a recent commentary. “A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”But while Parfitt’s article attempts to link legitimate opposition to cultural Marxism and support for Syrian President Assad to Nazism, the fact is that neo-Nazi battalions made up the bulk of the fighting force against Yanukovych. (source)
In his article, “Ukraine: Nazis In Plain Sight,” Tony Cartalucci wrote:
The Western press recently reported the destruction of a Soviet-era statue of Vladimir Lenin in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. The Washington Post would claim in its report, “Ukrainians just pulled down a massive Lenin statue. What does that signal for Russia?,” that:
Anti-Russian protesters in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, pulled down a massive statue of Vladimir Lenin late Sunday, a sign of hardening anger toward the Kremlin in an eastern Ukrainian area where sympathies are split between Kiev and Moscow.
The pro-European protests that swept Ukraine in the winter were accompanied by a wave of Lenin statues being pulled down, eliminating symbolic vestiges of the Soviet Union that had endured after its 1991 breakup. But few such statues were toppled in eastern Ukraine, which has long been a bastion of pro-Russian sentiment and where separatists have embarked on an insurgency that has cost thousands of lives.
As usual with reports from the Western press, the deception can manifest itself just as much from what is omitted as from what is actually said. The Washington Post maintains that those who destroyed the statue were merely “anti-Russian protesters.” In reality, it was a mob led by literal Neo-Nazis of the notorious Azov Battalion – fielded and directed by Kiev’s Interior Ministry itself.
While the Washington Post attempts to claim the statue’s destruction was a manifestation of the people’s will in eastern Ukraine, it was in reality a stunt pulled by some of Kiev’s most vicious, ultra-right, and illegitimate supporters – supporters the West works continuously to obfuscate from public view.
Azov’s role in the Kharkiv incident was revealed not by the Russian media, but instead by the European Union and NATO’s own Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) monitors on the ground in Ukraine. Submitting daily reports often ignored by the Western press, the OSCE stated in its September 29, 2014 briefing that (emphasis added):
On 28 September, at 14:30hrs, the SMM observed in Kharkiv a large demonstration of some 2,000 pro-Ukraine supporters gathering in front of the Opera house. The crowd, composed of men and women of different ages and including children, was led by members of the “Azov” volunteer battalion, as well as young men and women with masks. Some of the demonstrators marched towards Liberty Square, where Lenin’s monument was located. There, the SMM observed a group of young men with masks trying to climb on top of Lenin’s statue, while the crowd present on the square had increased to approximately 5,000 people. The demonstrators who had climbed up to the statue began using an electric cutting instrument to dismantle the base of the statue. Whilst not visible on the square, the SMM observed the police deploy and set up an outer perimeter cordon around the square and three buses of police behind the regional administration building. At 22:40hrs Lenin’s Statue was pulled down by the demonstrators. As the SMM left the scene, it did not observe any further incident.
[…]
If this is who is tearing down statutes across Ukraine, including now eastern cities like Kharkiv, then to answer the Washington Post’s question as to what it “signals for Russia,” is a Nazi threat openly backed by the European Union, NATO, and the United States, lurking once again along its borders just as it did in the 1930’s and in immediate need of being addressed. This threat goes unnoticed to most among Western audiences primarily because of dishonest reporting from papers like the Washington Post as well as the West’s continuous campaign to defame and undermine Russian media who has apparently been accurately reporting the growing Nazi threat in Ukraine for some time.The Azov battalion was not the only neo-Nazi faction on the Kiev side, however. Pravi Sector (Right Sector), led by Dmytro Yarosh, also maintains an openly skinhead motive with overtly racist tendencies and penchant for street violence.
Svoboda also openly espouses Nazism but that didn’t stop John McCain from consorting with them in his efforts to help complete the color revolution mission and NATO’s domination over the entirety of the country. As Max Blumenthal wrote for alternet in his article, “Is The US Backing Neo-Nazis In Ukraine?”
One of the “Big Three” political parties behind the protests is the ultra-nationalist Svoboda, whose leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, has called for the liberation of his country from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” After the 2010 conviction of the Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk for his supporting role in the death of nearly 30,000 people at the Sobibor camp, Tyahnybok rushed to Germany to declare him a hero who was “fighting for truth.” In the Ukrainian parliament, where Svoboda holds an unprecedented 37 seats, Tyahnybok’s deputy Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn is fond of quoting Joseph Goebbels – he has even founded a think tank originally called “the Joseph Goebbels Political Research Center.” According to Per Anders Rudling, a leading academic expert on European neo-fascism, the self-described “socialist nationalist” Mykhalchyshyn is the main link between Svoboda’s official wing and neo-Nazi militias like Right Sector.
[…]
Two weeks later, 15,000 Svoboda members held a torchlight ceremony in the city of Lviv in honor of Stepan Bandera, a World War II-era Nazi collaborator who led the pro-fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B). Lviv has become the epicenter of neo-fascist activity in Ukraine, with elected Svoboda officials waging a campaign to rename its airport after Bandera and successfully changing the name of Peace Street to the name of the Nachtigall Battalion, an OUN-B wing that participated directly in the Holocaust. “’Peace’ is a holdover from Soviet stereotypes,” a Svoboda deputy explained.
Revered by Ukrainian nationalists as a legendary freedom fighter, Bandera’s real record was ignominious at best. After participating in a campaign to assassinate Ukrainians who supported accommodation with the Polish during the 1930’s, Bandera’s forces set themselves to ethnically cleanse western Ukraine of Poles in 1943 and 1944. In the process, they killed over 90,000 Poles and many Jews, whom Bandera’s top deputy and acting “Prime Minister,” Yaroslav Stetsko, were determined to exterminate. Bandera held fast to fascist ideology in the years after the war, advocating a totalitarian, ethnically pure Europe while his affiliated Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) carried out a doomed armed struggle against the Soviet Union. The bloodbath he inspired ended when KGB agents assassinated him in Munich in 1959.
In a separate article, “An Inside Look At How Us-Funded Fascists In Ukraine Mentor US White Supremacists,” Blumenthal listed the neo-Nazi battalions. He wrote,
Svoboda Party: Originally called the Social-National Party of Ukraine, a Ukrainian political party with long history of anti-Semitism. Led by Oleh Tyahnybok, Svoboda played a prominent role in the 2013-2014 Maidan uprising, where Tyahnybok shared the stage with U.S. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Chris Murphy (D-CT). Andriy Parubiy, who had co-founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine, is now Speaker of Parliament.
Azov Battalion: 3,000-member neo-Nazi formation in Ukraine’s National Guard. Azov began as a paramilitary, originally formed out of the Patriot of Ukraine neo-Nazi gang led by Andriy Biletsky, and is now a Ukrainian National Guard unit. The battalion’s logo incorporates the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel and black sun symbols. Biletsky is now a member of Ukrainian Parliament. Vadim Troyan, another Azov veteran, is now Deputy Interior Minister.
Ukrainian National Corps: Azov’s civilian arm, responsible, among other things, for coordinating with and recruiting neo-Nazis and white supremacists from around the world. The international outreach is led by Olena Semanyka, who’s been photographed with a swastika flag.
National Druzhina: Azov’s street patrol organization, established in January 2018 with the aim of “restoring Ukrainian order” to the streets. The National Druzhina — whose members pledge personal loyalty to Biletsky — has been involved in pogroms against the Roma, LGBT, and other activists.
Right Sector: Loose formation of neo-Nazis and football ultras, which supplied street muscle to the 2013-2014 Maidan uprising. Later involved in lethal suppression of anti-Maidan movements in places like Odessa.
C14: Ukrainian neo-Nazi gang that receives government funding and has been responsible for some of the lethal Roma pogroms as well as anti-LGBT violence. The 14 is a reference to the Fourteen Word slogan of white supremacy. Led by Serhiy Bondar, who spoke at America House, a cultural center funded by the U.S. government.
Interestingly enough, Blumenthal also points out that the neo-Nazis in Ukraine were welcoming Islamic fundamentalists from Chechnya into their ranks as well as other neo-Nazis from as far away as Sweden and Brazil. Much like the terrorist groups fighting against the Syrian government, it seems the neo-Nazi ranks were being filled to fight for Ukrainian “democracy” by fighters who were anything but democratic and Ukrainian. In a separate Blumenthal article referenced above, the writer noted how Svoboda welcomed Israeli politicians as well.
Thus, we see another parallel between the proxy war in Syria and that taking place in Ukraine. In Syria, the rallying cry of America’s terrorists was radical Islamic jihad. In Ukraine, it was that of National Socialism. Thus, while American media was busy labeling free speech advocates and traditional American conservatives as Nazis, actual Nazis were marching across Ukraine, railing against Jews and homosexuals, and killing ethnic Russians all to the sound of crickets.
***
Brandon Turbeville is a writer out of Florence, South Carolina. He is the author of seven books, The Road To Damascus- The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, Codex Alimentarius- The End of Health Freedom, Seven Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions, The Difference It Makes: 36 Reasons Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President, and Dispatches From A Dissident Vol. 1 and 2. He is a staff writer for Activist Post and has published over 700 hundred articles dealing with a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, war, government corruption, and civil liberties. He has been a guest on numerous alternative media broadcasts as well as mainstream outlets. Turbeville is also an occasional contributor to other media outlets such as Natural Blaze, The Anti Media, and Progressive Gazette, Era Of Wisdom, and Off Rail Alliance. His books can be found in the bookstore at BrandonTurbeville.com, www.FalseFlagPublications.blogspot.com, TheBookPatch.com, and Amazon.com.
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