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This article appears in the February 18, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Reprint from EIR, February 7, 2014

Western Powers Back
Neo-Nazi Coup in Ukraine

[Print version of this article]

Editor’s Note: This intelligence feature first appeared in EIR Vol. 41, No. 6, Feb. 7, 2014, pp. 4-13.

We are republishing here, with their original headlines, a package of intelligence reports and analysis EIR published eight full years ago—even before the “Maidan Coup” in Ukraine in late February 2014. With this report then, we warned our readers of a terrible and dangerous U.S. and British policy, and of the world war threatening now in the Ukraine crisis. We republish it because the United States must reverse the mistake, and negotiate a new strategic architecture with Russia to prevent a catastrophe.

Feb. 2, 2014—Western nations, led by the European Union and the Obama Administration, are backing an outright neo-Nazi regime-change coup in Ukraine. If the effort succeeds, the consequences will extend far beyond the borders of Ukraine and neighboring states. For Russia, such a coup would constitute a casus belli, coming as it does in the context of NATO missile defense expansion into Central Europe and the evolution of a U.S.-NATO doctrine of “Prompt Global Strike,” which presumes that the United States can launch a pre-emptive first strike against Russia and China and survive the retaliation.

The events in Ukraine constitute a potential trigger for a global war that could rapidly and easily escalate to a thermonuclear war of extinction. At this weekend’s Munich Security Conference, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had a heated public exchange with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in which the latter accused Russia of “bellicose rhetoric” and Lavrov responded by citing the European missile defense program as an attempt to secure a nuclear first-strike capability against Russia.

In his formal remarks at Munich and a week earlier at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, Lavrov also assailed Western governments for supporting neo-Nazi terrorist organizations in their zeal to place Ukraine under European Union and Troika control to tighten the NATO noose around Russia.

If anything, Lavrov understated the case.

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Creative Commons
The youth wing of the Social-National Party of Ukraine on parade in Lviv in 1999 under the swastika-like Wolfsangel rune, a common symbol for European neo-Nazi organizations. The party’s name evoked that of the German National-Socialist (“Nazi”) party. The Wolfsangel was dropped in 2003 and the party changed its name to Svoboda (“Freedom”) in 2004.

Ever since President Viktor Yanukovych announced that Ukraine was withdrawing its plans to sign the European Union’s Association Agreement on Nov. 21, 2013, Western-backed organizations made up of remnants of the wartime and immediate postwar Nazi collaborationist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) and their successors have launched a campaign of provocations aimed at not only bringing down the government of Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, but at overthrowing the democratically elected President Yanukovych.

The EU Eastern Partnership was initiated in December 2008 by Carl Bildt and Radek Sikorski, the foreign ministers of Sweden and Poland, in the wake of Georgia’s military showdown with Russia in South Ossetia. The Eastern Partnership targeted six countries that were formerly republics within the Soviet Union: three in the Caucasus region (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia) and three in East Central Europe (Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine). They were not to be invited to full EU membership, but drawn into an EU vise through so-called Association Agreements, each one centered on a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA). The prime target of the effort was Ukraine. Under the Association Agreement negotiated with Ukraine, but not signed, the industrial economy of Ukraine would have been dismantled, trade with Russia would have been savaged (with Russia ending its free-trade regime with Ukraine, to prevent its own markets from being flooded via Ukraine), and the European markets’ players would have grabbed for Ukraine’s agricultural and raw materials exports. The same deadly austerity regime as has been imposed on the Mediterranean states of Europe under the Troika bailout swindle would have been imposed on Ukraine.

Furthermore, the Association Agreement mandated “convergence” on security issues, with integration into European defense systems. Under such an upgraded arrangement, the long-term treaty agreements on the Russian Navy’s use of the crucial Crimean Black Sea ports would have been terminated, ultimately giving NATO forward basing on Russia’s immediate border.

While Western news accounts promoted the demonstrations in Kiev’s Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnesti, or Euromaidan as it is now called), as initially peaceful, the fact is that, from the outset, the protests included hardcore avowed neo-Nazis, right-wing “soccer hooligans” and “Afghansy” combat veterans of the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Georgia. According to Ukrainian parliamentarian Oleh Tsaryov, 350 Ukrainians returned to the country from Syria in January 2014, after fighting with the Syrian rebels, including al-Qaeda-linked groups such as the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Already, on the weekend of Nov. 30-Dec. 1, 2013, rioters were throwing Molotov cocktails and seized the Kiev Mayor’s Office, declaring it a “revolutionary headquarters.” Protesters from the opposition Svoboda Party, formerly called the Socialist-Nationalists, march under the red and black flag of Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), the Nazi collaborators who exterminated Jews and Poles as an adjunct of the Nazi war machine, and in fulfillment of their own radical ideas on ethnic purity, during World War II.

The slogan of the Svoboda Party, “Ukraine for the Ukrainians,” was Bandera’s battle cry during the OUN-B collaboration with Hitler following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. It was under that slogan that mass executions and ethnic cleansing were carried out by Bandera’s fascist fighters. Ukrainian sources have reported that the Svoboda Party was conducting paramilitary training during the Summer of 2013—months before President Yanukovych made his decision to reject the EU Association Agreement.

The neo-Nazi, racist and anti-semitic character of Svoboda did not deter Western diplomats—including U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland—from publicly meeting with the party’s leader Oleh Tyahnybok, who had been kicked out of the Our Ukraine movement in 2004 for his speeches railing against “Muscovites and Jews”—using offensive, derogatory names for both.

The Bandera fascist revival has been underway in plain sight since the “Orange Revolution” of 2004, when Viktor Yushchenko was installed as President of Ukraine through a foreign-backed street campaign heavily financed by George Soros’s International Renaissance Foundation and more than 2,000 other non-governmental organizations from Europe and America, after he had been officially declared the loser in a tight presidential contest with Viktor Yanukovych. On Jan. 22, 2010, one of Yushchenko’s last acts as President, after losing his reelection bid to Yanukovych by a wide margin, was to name Stepan Bandera a Hero of Ukraine, which is a high state honor. Yushchenko’s second wife, Kateryna Chumachenko, was herself a member of the youth group of the Banderist OUN-B in Chicago, where she was born, according to news accounts. In the 1980s, Chumachenko headed the Washington offices of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (in which OUN-B influence was great at that time, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine) and the National Captive Nations Committee, before moving over to the State Department Bureau for Human Rights. In January 2011, President Yanukovych announced that Bandera’s Hero of Ukraine status had been officially revoked.

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Oleh Tyahnybok, the head of Svoboda, denounces a “Moscow-Jewish mafia” that he says rules Ukraine, among other unpublishable epithets.

The OUN-B: A Bit of History

The Bandera OUN-B legacy is critical to understanding the nature of the armed insurrection now unfolding in Ukraine. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was founded in 1929, and within four years, Bandera was its head. In 1934, Bandera and other OUN leaders were arrested for the assassination of Bronislaw Pieracki, the Polish Minister of Internal Affairs. Bandera was freed from jail in 1938 and immediately entered into negotiations with the German Occupation Headquarters, receiving funds and arranging Abwehr training for 800 of his paramilitary commandos. By the time of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Bandera’s forces consisted of at least 7,000 fighters, organized into “mobile groups” that coordinated with German forces. Bandera received 2.5 million German marks to conduct subversive operations inside the Soviet Union. After he declared an independent Ukrainian state under his direction in 1941, Bandera was arrested and sent to Berlin. But he maintained his Nazi ties and funding, and his “mobile groups” were supplied and given air cover by the Germans throughout the war.

In 1943, Bandera’s OUN-B carried out a mass extermination campaign of Poles and Jews, killing an estimated 70,000 civilians during the summer of that year alone. Although Bandera was still running the OUN-B operations out of Berlin, the ethnic cleansing program was run by Mykola Lebed, the chief of the Sluzhba Bespeki, OUN-B’s secret police organization. In May 1941, at an OUN plenary in Krakow, the organization issued a document, “Struggle and Action of OUN During the War,” which stated, in part, “Moskali, Poles, Jews are hostile to us and must be exterminated in this struggle.” (“Moskal” is derogatory Ukrainian slang for “Muscovites,” or Russians.)

With the defeat of the Nazis and the end of the war on the European front, Bandera and many leaders of the OUN-B wound up in displaced person camps in Germany and Central Europe. According to Stephen Dorrill in his authoritative history of MI6, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, Bandera was recruited to work for MI6 in April 1948. The link to the British was arranged by Gerhard von Mende, a former top Nazi who had headed the Caucasus Division of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Ostministerium). Von Mende recruited Muslims from the Caucasus and Central Asia to fight with the Nazis during the invasion of the Soviet Union. At the close of World War II, he worked for the British through a front company, Research Service on Eastern Europe, which was a recruiting agency for principally Muslim insurgents operating inside the Soviet Union. Von Mende was instrumental in establishing a major hub of Muslim Brotherhood operations in Munich and Geneva.

Through von Mende, MI6 trained agents from the OUN-B and dropped them inside the Soviet Union to carry out sabotage and assassination operations between 1949 and 1950. A 1954 MI6 report praised Bandera as “a professional underground worker with a terrorist background and ruthless notions about the rules of the game.”

In March 1956, Bandera went to work for the German equivalent of the CIA, the BND, then headed by Gen. Reinhardt Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front during World War II. Again, von Mende was one of his sponsors and protectors. In 1959, Bandera was assassinated by the KGB in West Germany.

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A poster of Stepan Bandera hangs over the entrance of the headquarters of Euromaidan Kiev, the former offices of the Kiev City Council, January 14, 2014.

Bandera’s top OUN-B killer, Mykola Lebed, the on-site commander of the group’s secret police, fared even better at the close of World War II. Lebed was recruited by the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) in December 1946, and by 1948, was on the CIA payroll. Lebed recruited those OUN-B agents who did not go with Bandera and MI6, and participated in a number of sabotage programs behind the Iron Curtain, including “Operation Cartel” and “Operation Aerodynamics.” Lebed was brought to New York City, where he established a CIA front company, Prolog Research Corporation, under the control of Frank Wisner, who was the head of the CIA’s Directorate of Plans during the 1950s. Prolog operated well into the 1990s, getting a big boost when Zbigniew Brzezinski was President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor.

In 1985, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into Lebed’s role in the wartime genocide in Poland and Western Ukraine, but the CIA blocked the probe and it was eventually dropped. Nevertheless, in 2010, after the release of thousands of pages of wartime records, the National Archives published a documentary report, Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War, by Richard Breitman and Norman Goda, which included a detailed account of Bandera’s and Lebed’s wartime Nazi collusion and involvement in mass executions of Jews and Poles.

It is this Bandera-Lebed legacy, and the networks spawned in the postwar period, which are at the center of the current events in Ukraine.

Speaking Out

On Jan. 25, 2014, twenty-nine Ukrainian leaders of political parties, civic and religious organizations, including former presidential candidate and parliamentarian Natalia Vitrenko, sent an open letter to the United Nations Secretary General and leaders of the EU and the United States, decrying the Western support for the neo-Nazi campaign to carry out a bloody coup against a legitimately elected government.

The open letter read, in part: “You should understand that, in supporting the actions of the guerillas in Ukraine . . . you yourselves are directly protecting, inciting, and egging on Ukrainian neo-Nazis and neo-fascists.

“None of these oppositionists (Yatsenyuk, Klitschko, and Tyahnybok) hide that they are continuing the ideology and the practices of the OUN-UPA. . . . Wherever the Euromaidan people go in Ukraine, they disseminate, besides the slogans mentioned above, neo-Nazi, racist symbols. . . . Also confirming the neo-Nazi nature of the Euromaidan is the constant use of portraits of the bloody executioners of our people, Bandera and Shukhevych—agents of the Abwehr.”

The open letter posed the question to Western leaders: “Have the UN, the EU, and the U.S.A. ceased to recognize the Charter and Verdict of the International War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremburg, where the Hitlerite Nazis and their henchmen were convicted? Have human rights ceased to be a value for the countries of the EU and the world community? Is the Ukrainian nationalists’ devotion to Hitler and his mass murders of civilians now considered democracy?”

Only in the recent days, with scenes of mass violence by armed protesters finally breaking through the propaganda fog, has the Western media taken up the neo-Nazi character of the ongoing destabilization. Time magazine, on Jan. 28, headlined its coverage from Kiev “Right-Wing Thugs Are Hijacking Ukraine’s Liberal Uprising,” profiling one group of neo-Nazi hooligans called Spilna Sprava (“Common Cause,” but the Ukrainian initials spell “SS”), as being near the center of the protests.

The next day, Jan. 29, the Guardian headlined “In Ukraine, Fascists, Oligarchs and Western Expansion Are at the Heart of the Crisis,” with the kicker: “The story we’re told about the protests gripping Kiev bears only the sketchiest relationship with reality.” Guardian reporter Seumas Milne candidly wrote, “You’d never know from most of the reporting that far-right nationalists and fascists have been at the heart of the protests and attacks on government buildings. One of the three main opposition parties heading the campaign is the hard-right anti-Semitic Svoboda, whose leader Oleh Tyahnybok claims that a ‘Moscow-Jewish mafia’ controls Ukraine. The party, now running the city of Lviv, led a 15,000-strong torch-lit march earlier this month in memory of the Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, whose forces fought with the Nazis in the second world war and took part in massacres of Jews.”

Counterpunch also published a Jan. 29 article by Eric Draitser, “Ukraine and the Rebirth of Fascism,” which began with the warning: “The violence on the streets of Ukraine is far more than an expression of popular anger against a government. Instead, it is merely the latest example of the rise of the most insidious form of fascism that Europe has seen since the fall of the Third Reich. . . . In an attempt to pry Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence, the U.S.-EU-NATO alliance has, not for the first time, allied itself with fascists.”

Documentation

‘War Against Russia,
On Ukrainian Territory’

Leading Russian and Ukrainian figures mince few words, in identifying the strategic dimension of the current irregular warfare against Ukraine’s elected leaders and institutions of state.

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Russian Presidential Information Office
Presidents Viktor Yanukovych and Vladimir Putin sign cooperation agreements in Moscow on Dec. 17, 2013. Had Ukraine agreed to the Association Agreement with the EU last November, the consequences for its economy would have been disastrous.

President Vladimir Putin: Well-Organized Extremist Activities

Putin spoke in Armenia on Dec. 2, 2013, the day after the first major violence at the Euromaidan.

Regarding the events in Ukraine, they remind me less of a revolution than of a pogrom. And strange as it is, this all has little to do with Ukraine-EU relations. Because if you pay attention, no one is delving into these draft agreements, no one is looking at anything or listening to anything. People say that the dream of the Ukrainian people has been stolen. But if you look at the contents of these agreements, then while it is good to dream, many will simply not live to see their dream be realized, never experience it, because the conditions are very harsh.

. . . [E]verything that is happening now is not a revolution, but a well-organized protest. And in my view, these events were not prepared for today, but for the Presidential election campaign of Spring 2015. What’s happening now is just a little false start due to certain circumstances, but is also preparations for the Presidential election. The fact that these are preparations is obvious to all objective observers, judging from what we see on television, how well-organized and trained militant groups actually operate. That’s my assessment. Either the opposition cannot always control what happens there, or it’s just a certain political screen for extremist activities.

Ukrainian MP Oleh Tsaryov: A Real War

Oleh Tsaryov, deputy head of the majority Party of Regions caucus in Ukraine’s Supreme Rada, has been outspoken on the role of outside training and foreign fighters in preparing and waging the current insurgency. In December 2013 he accused the U.S. Embassy of sponsoring social-networking training sessions for the opposition over the past Summer. On Jan. 24, 2014, he publicized information from Russian State Duma sources on the return of 350-some Ukrainian mercenaries from Syria to Ukraine, shortly before the Jan. 19 escalation of violence on Hrushevsky Street in central Kiev. Tsaryov addressed these issues during the Jan. 22 broadcast of Pyotr Tolstoy’s “Politics” program on Channel One Russia television.

For some years, guerrilla fighters have been getting trained in special camps within Ukraine. These are the fighters who today are in combat and doing what is happening at the Maidan. People have been trained in the use of cold weapons and on how to take out Berkut [special police force] personnel. This has been pumped up in the wildest way. These people have now broken up into units of a hundred, or of ten. They are highly organized, with iron discipline. What is going on now is a war, a real war. And if you fastidious people think that you are going to be able to just sit here, and this war will bypass you, you’re dead wrong! Because what’s going on in Ukraine is a war against Russia, and that war, sooner or later, will come from our homes to yours! . . .

The main thing I want to say, is that the war now going on in Ukraine is a geopolitical war, in which the people of Ukraine have become hostages. My children, my wife, everybody who lives there. This war is taking place on Russia’s doorstep. It is a war with Russia, on Ukrainian territory.

Academician Sergei Glazyev: An Insurgency Financed from Abroad

As adviser to President Putin on Eurasian integration issues, economist Sergei Glazyev has worked tirelessly to develop proposals for Russian-Ukrainian industrial projects and improved terms for Ukraine’s trade with members of the Belarus-Kazakstan-Russia Customs Union. On Jan. 31, 2014, RIA Novosti released a pre-publication summary, with excerpts, of his forthcoming interview in Gazprom magazine.

“There are many factors in the current situation in Ukraine,” Glazyev said, “but I would highlight one of them, which is usually passed over. That is the enormous outside influence on the attitudes of the public in Ukraine. Influence from the USA and its NATO partners, who in the course of 20 years—through official State Department channels alone—have spent $5 billion (Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s figure), issued in the form of grants to develop an intellectual community of experts, oriented against the Russian Federation and directed toward shaping Russophobic attitudes in Ukrainian society.”

He continued, “Grants of $5-10,000 are handed out through thousands of NGOs to young people, students, and young specialists, who then give the payback for these grants through their publications, media statements, and in discussions.” Glazyev noted that the main criterion is that all should be anti-Russian. “The money figure should be tripled, if you take into account grants from the EU and other NATO countries, plus unofficial grants arranged through special services, which are not recorded anywhere.”

“Thus the factor of outside interference today is factor number one, which needs to be taken into account. We are not dealing with Banderists who have suddenly crawled out of the forest, but rather with the deliberate, systematic operations of a propaganda machine that has already crushed more than one government in the world and which today has created the explosive situation in Ukraine.”

Glazyev believes that how the situation will unfold depends on the President of Ukraine. “Either he defends Ukrainian statehood and puts down the insurgency, which has been provoked and financed by outside forces, or he risks losing power, and then Ukraine will face growing chaos and internal conflict, from which there is no exit in sight.”

Natalia Vitrenko: How the ‘Hot Phase’ Began

Natalia Vitrenko, leader of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, on Jan. 20 posted on her website (www.vitrenko.org) and on YouTube a video briefing titled “The War for Ukraine Enters the Hot Phase” (in Russian). The day before had seen a major escalation of violence by Euromaidan paramilitary units on Hrushevsky Street in Kiev. They attacked police barricades built to defend key government buildings, setting policemen on fire with Molotov cocktails, and shrouding central Kiev in thick black smoke from piles of burning gasoline-doused tires. This was no spontaneous reaction to the strict laws regulating demonstrations, passed by Parliament on Jan. 16, Vitrenko explained, but rather a planned escalation of the deliberately targeted violence that had begun nearly two months earlier.

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Blazing barricades in Kiev, Jan. 19, 2014. Western press coverage has almost universally attributed the violence to “police brutality,” while U.S. Sen. John McCain and others court the anti-Semitic leader of the Svoboda party.

On Jan. 19, the aggressive Euromaidan in Kiev entered a new phase: the phrase of armed clashes between trained guerrillas—terrorists—and law enforcement.

Let’s recall how this all started. It was initially advertised as “a peaceful demonstration in the Kiev Square.” But this demonstration ceased to be peaceful already on the night of Nov. 29-30, 2013. I maintain that at that point, what was implemented was a pre-planned provocation to exacerbate the situation in the country.

On Nov. 29, 2013 [at the EU Eastern Partnership summit] in Vilnius, Yanukovych did not sign the Association Agreement with the European Union. Everything had been set by the West and the pro-West Ukrainian elites, for the agreement to be signed, and that would be it: the bird in the net. The colonization of Ukraine was pre-determined. Total colonization. Economic, first and foremost; that was obvious, since opening up the domestic market by slashing protective tariffs 70% for all covered types of products would have meant a flood of cheap, competitive imports into Ukraine, blocking those of our still existing domestic industry. All possibilities for the modernization of our manufacturing would have been closed off, because the West has no use for us as a competitor: We are supposed to be a recipient, not a partner. And the Ukrainian economy would have quickly deflated, like a balloon with the air let out.

At the same time, the Association Agreement contained a scenario for political convergence. That means Ukraine’s entry into a joint defense and security policy. That means Ukraine’s joining the NATO system, and the expulsion of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation from Crimea in the months ahead. Ukraine would be completely defenseless, disarmed, and bankrupt. And this bird would be held in the cage until a convenient moment for the West to swallow it.

And suddenly this broke down. Yanukovych, at the last minute, for a whole array of reasons, . . . doesn’t sign.

The Maidan begins to be heated up. The heating up doesn’t go well. And then, on the night of Nov. 29-30, the provocation takes place. At that time, after it had been announced [from the stage] that the demonstration was winding up, and people were starting to dismantle the sound system and so forth, the Berkut [police] came on the scene to clear the Square, put up Christmas decorations, and so forth. There were only a few hundred people still in the Square, mostly young people, but among them were were trained guerrillas. That’s why, already at this point, the police started being bombarded with stones, cans, bottles, and chains. The Ministry of Internal Affairs said that some unknown gas was sprayed at the Berkut. And Berkut personnel said that they were attacked by people kicking them and beating them with chains in the crotch.

So you had the provocation against the Berkut, and a harsh response by the Berkut. And this is all filmed—at 2:00-4:00 a.m.—by TV channels that happened to have reporters at the Maidan just then. Which channels? The channels that are completely in the service of the West. The “Orange” channels. So there is an immediate political, informational “explosion,” and the beating of innocent children [by the Berkut] brings masses of people streaming to the Maidan. These people are victims of deception.

‘Project Democracy’ Runs Propaganda in Ukraine

Serhiy Leshchenko

Leshchenko is a journalist and U.S. National Endowment for Democracy Reagan-Fascell Fellow. That is, he is funded by the U.S. government through the NED.

In January, Leshchenko recorded interviews with three former U.S. officials, one academic, and the head of Freedom House, all overtly supporting the Euromaidan demonstrations. These video clips are being played back into Ukraine, including in written form in Ukrainskaya Pravda newspaper, to further enhance the impression of U.S. support for the ongoing insurgent actions in central Kiev. Highlights of Leshchenko’s interviews include the following.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

Infamous as President Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy guru in the Trilateral Commission regime of the late 1970s, Brzezinski gave Senate testimony on Jan. 15, calling on the Ukrainian opposition to unite around a single leader who should negotiate a temporary agreement with the current government, leading to the defeat and removal of the current order.

I salute the heroic people of Maidan. What you are doing is historic and vital. It is the kind of action that dramatizes your national identity, your sense of commitment to your independence, and your faith in victory. You now have to translate that into an effective political tool. You have to demonstrate not only to the Ukrainian people, but to the world, that the desire for independence, the determination to be a free European state, to be at the same time friendly with Russia, is something that unites all of you, and that you have a leadership that symbolically reflects that historical commitment. This is why you have to create a committee of national unity, you have to have visible leadership, and you have to indicate to everyone concerned, including in Kiev, in Washington, in Berlin, in Moscow, that the new generation of Ukrainians are committed to the independent Ukraine that is part of Europe, part of a Europe of which Russia eventually becomes a part, as well, and that you will not stop until that objective is achieved.

Melanne Verveer

Verveer is a former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large.

I say to all the Ukrainians who spent many long days and long nights in freezing temperatures on the Maidan in support of democracy and a better future for their country, that you not give up, because you are the future. Your commitment to democracy, your hard work, is what will bring about the future that you want to see. . . . I hope you realize what you can do if you work together to bring about the kind of flourishing democracy and integration with Europe that each and every one of you wants to see. As an American, I know that you have our respect and admiration, and that my government is working to determine whether there are other tools that can be brought to bear to support you in your efforts. . . . I don’t know what the outcome will be, but I can tell you that we stand in solidarity with all of you.

David Kramer

Former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor David Kramer currently heads Freedom House, a Cold War project founded in the 1950s by Anglo-American intelligence figure Leo Cherne.

I have been very impressed by so many Ukrainians, who have called for a Western orientation for Ukraine. . . . To them, I say that we stand with you. . . . I hope that the situation is resolved quickly and without further violence, but I also hope that my government and governments in Europe will take the necessary steps to apply pressure that I think is necessary. . . .

Prof. Francis Fukuyama

The author of The End of History and professor at Stanford University aimed his nasty remarks at Russia.

I was in Kiev in September [2013] and everybody seemed very hopeful that Ukraine would make the right decision and move towards Europe. And I said at the time that this was the only possible future for Ukraine. There’s no future in an alliance with Russia. Russia is a petrostate built on robbery, essentially, that has no longer-term goal and no long-term political freedom. And so I think, although I was very disappointed in . . . the decision taken by the leadership of Ukraine [to suspend negotiations with the EU on a radical free-trade pact], the struggle is not over. . . . I am hopeful that the struggle will continue and that Ukraine, in the end, will make the right decision, in favor of Europe.

Vitrenko: Neo-Nazis Are Taking Over

Here are the remarks by Ukrainian economist and political leader Natalia Vitrenko to a seminar on April 15, 2013, following the Schiller Institute Conference, “A New Paradigm for Civilization,” in Frankfurt, Germany, April 13-14 (translated from Russian by Rachel Douglas).

During the two days of the conference and today, we have looked very deeply into the crisis situation, as one of global destruction. But we are not the only ones, we people of reason, who are preparing for the crisis. I am convinced that the strategists of the British Empire are also working on their scenarios and preparing for this collapse. Helga [Zepp-LaRouche] alluded to this in her remarks, referring to the threat of fascism. And the processes under way in Ukraine are not unique; in Latvia, Hungary, Romania, and I’m sure in Greece and Spain, the same thing is going on. The economy has been destroyed, artificially. The oligarchical paradigm has been established, with the drastic impoverishment of the population. And then everything possible is done, to bring neo-Nazis into the political arena.

This is very clear in the example of Ukraine. We had President Kravchuk, and then President Kuchma. They listened to the IMF, they conducted reforms, but they continued to waver between Russia and the West. The West then brought Yushchenko into play. Who was he? His father was in “six different concentration camps” during World War II. Well, that’s patent nonsense, because people did not survive even one concentration camp, never mind six. At the end of the war, he went into the American zone. I believe that from that point on, his father was totally controlled. Then, Yushchenko was assigned a State Department case officer, [Kateryna Chumachenko], who was to become his wife.

Yushchenko became President not by being elected, but under pressure: Javier Solana came, others came in, and pressured the Court to make the decision in favor of Yushchenko [in 2004]. In the streets, at that time, we had the color revolution, paid for by George Soros, [Boris] Berezovsky, et al. Yushchenko becomes President. What is the first thing he does? He essentially rehabilitates all the collaborationists. Monuments begin to be built in Ukraine to Bandera, Sukhevych—to these agents of the Abwehr.

In western Ukraine the Nazi movement takes to the streets. We sound the alarm. We understand that this is even against UN resolutions. But Yushchenko, Tymoshenko, and Yatsenyuk—pro-NATO forces—are in power, and they pursue this policy. In the West, they can see that the South and the East of Ukraine are against such a scenario.

Then, Washington agrees for Yanukovych to become President. Yanukovych makes his first foreign trip to Brussels, to NATO headquarters. Yanukovych allows the Nazis onto national TV. Within six months, the Nazi party Svoboda wins the elections to the regional parliaments in western Ukraine. At that point our movement comes under heavy pressure. We are kept off the air. But the Nazi parties become more powerful.

Svoboda Nazis Enter Parliament

In the 2009 Parliamentary elections, the Nazi party Svoboda entered the Parliament and obtained Parliamentary immunity, substantial state financing, and guaranteed air time. They proceed to hold their covens without any obstacles. They march through the streets with torches and under slogans like “Ukraine over All!” “Ukraine for Ukrainians!” “Glory to Ukraine, Death to the Enemies!” “Stab the Muscovites, Slash the Russians, Hang the Communists!”

This a gross violation of the Ukrainian Constitution, because it is incitement to ethnic strife. Nobody does anything about it. Money pours in from the West. For the so-called struggle against corruption alone, NGOs receive $400 million a year from Europe. They start beating up people demonstrating for other causes: anti-fascists, Orthodox [Christians], etc. We had to set up our own self-defense units to defend our rallies. Several times, already, we have had to make citizens’ arrests of the neo-Nazi thugs and take them to the police station. We would demand that they be prosecuted for impeding our political activity. The police immediately let them go and they have orders from above to do this; “Europe” would be unhappy with the violation of democracy in Ukraine, if they touched these thugs. The government is doing nothing to stop this.

Nazi propaganda is spread openly. Books by [Dmytro] Dontsov, the “Ukrainian Nietzsche,” are openly sold in the Parliament building. Yushchenko, before leaving office, issued a decree that only the nationalists could be considered fighters for Ukraine’s independence. By the logic of this decree, the Red Army were occupiers. Russia was an occupying force. Only the collaborationists are upheld as having defended Ukraine’s independence.

I filed suit against this decree by Yushchenko. Yanukovych could have repealed the decree, but he did not. I lost the case at the local level, the Appeals Court, and I am now preparing a complaint to the Supreme Court. My father fought throughout the war, so how could he be an occupier? There have already been films shown on Ukrainian TV about how Ukrainians greeted Hitler with joy, while Stalin was a demon, the Red Army were occupiers. Then there are talk shows around these films, in which young people shout out, “Glory to Ukraine!”

The Nazis cultivate soccer fans. There have been several cases during soccer games, when at the 88th minute of the game, a firecracker is set off. This is a code for “HH” or “Heil Hitler!” The International Soccer Association had to penalize the Kiev Dynamo soccer club, forcing them to play a game with no spectators. I wrote a letter of thanks to [ISA President] Michel Platini, for being the only one to raise his voice against Nazism in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Nazis have a headquarters office in Prague. They work directly with those in Poland, the USA, and Great Britain.

I understand very well that at any moment, passions could explode in Ukraine and the streets will belong to the Nazis. Yanukovych has been a 100% puppet of the West. And so it turns out that all the people in power in Ukraine are those who hate Russia. And the fact that our population is dying out, and the fact that we are deprived of the ability to live together with our blood brothers of Belarus and Russia, doesn’t bother them at all. They constantly go running to the U.S. Embassy.

Therefore, what happens in the world will happen, and it will happen inclusively in Ukraine, as the formation of a Nazi state. And I think that a Nazi state in Ukraine is a danger for the whole world.

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EIRNS/Christopher Lewis
Ukrainian economist and political leader Natalia Vitrenko addressing an EIR seminar in Germany in 2009. A year earlier she had correctly forecast the rise of the Nazis in Ukraine.
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Inciting ethnic strife, Svoboda party members and supporters in the streets with torches under slogans such as: “Ukraine for Ukrainians!” “Death to the Enemies!” “Stab the Muscovites!” “Slash the Russians!” “Hang the Communists!”

For Further Reference,
From Our Archives

EIR, May 16, 2014. “British Imperial Project in Ukraine: Violent Coup, Fascist Axioms.” This 18-page report is a follow-on to the dossier of February 7, 2014 we have reprinted in the current EIR. The report’s four sections cover, Fascist Axioms of the OUN, The Post-Coup Ukrainian Government, Right Sector, Not a Radical Fringe, Who’s Spinning ‘False Narratives.’

EIR, Feb. 24, 2017. “Obama and Soros—Nazis in Ukraine 2014—U.S. in 2017?” This is a 17-page dossier, distributed as an off-print at the United Nations in New York City, on the third anniversary of the Maidan Coup. The seven sections include a chronology of the 2014 coup, coverage of the neo-Nazi perpetrators of regime change, the nature of color revolutions as acts of war, and a who’s who of the war-party networks in Britain and the U.S. acting to blow up Ukraine and wreck prospects of U.S.-Russian relations.

EIR, March 7, 2014. “Ukrainian Patriots Expose EU Support for Neo-Nazi Coup.” This is a transcript of a webcast made in Paris by Ukrainian economist Natalia Vitrenko, leader of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, on Feb. 24, 2014, two days after the coup in Kiev.

EIR, Feb. 3, 2012. “The ‘Democracy’ Agenda of McFaul & His Oxford Masters.” This is an in-depth report on the history and mechanisms of destabilization by use of color revolutions, ‘democracy’ movements and other false fronts for subversion.

EIR, Jan 21, 2000. “Put Britain on the List of States Sponsoring Terrorism.” This is a memorandum, dated Jan. 11, 2000, which was prepared for delivery to U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as a request to launch an investigation, pursuant to placing Great Britain on the list of states sponsoring terrorism, and subversion.

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