FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Congress Members Hit Kiev Government Support for Nazis; Vitrenko Attacked by Nazi Gang

April 27, 2018 (EIRNS)—On April 25, fifty-six members of the U.S. Congress issued a letter to then-acting Secretary of State John Sullivan urging for the U.S. to condemn the Ukrainian government’s open support for Nazi gangs, detailing several cases.

The very next day, April 26, Natalia Vitrenko and Vladimir Marchenko, the leaders of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine (PSPU) and friends of the international LaRouche movement, were attacked by Nazi thugs and doused with kefir. The two leaders were leaving a courtroom where the judge had dismissed their suit against the police who stood by, not intervening, when a fascist gang of the former Azov Brigade had attacked and defaced their apartments one year ago, on May 9, 2017.

Dr. Vitrenko is a former member of Parliament and had run for President several times, winning as much as 11% in 1999, even after her campaign was disrupted by an assassination attempt. She is a well-known economist specializing on Ukraine’s social services sector and the impact of IMF conditionalities.

The bipartisan Congressional letter, initiated by Democrats Rep. Ro Khanna (CA) and Rep. David Cicilline (RI), condemned both the Ukraine and the Polish governments for passing laws defending Nazis and Nazi supporters in World War II, but focused on the continuing fascist acts backed by the Ukraine government.

They report that Ukraine’s 2015 memory laws glorify “Nazi collaborators, and making it a criminal offense to deny their heroism.” They state there has been little public response in the U.S., although the less overt policies in Poland have been widely condemned. They write:

“The groups and individuals extolled by Ukraine include Nazi collaborators Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), as well as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). These paramilitaries and individuals in some cases collaborated with the Nazis and bear responsibility for the murder of thousands of Jews, 70-100,000 Poles, and other ethnic minorities between 1941 and 1945.

“It’s particularly troubling that much of the Nazi glorification in Ukraine is government-supported. Examples include the 2017 pro-UPA campaign conducted by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory; the naming of streets after Bandera and Shukhevych by the Kiev city council; and Lviv’s 2017 Shukhevych Fest which took place on the anniversary of the 1941 Lviv Pogroms, in which 4,000 Jews were killed.

“State-sponsored Holocaust revisionism in Ukraine is accompanied by other forms of anti-Semitism,” the letter continues. “As Israel’s Department of Diaspora Affairs pointed out in its annual report on anti-Semitism, the whitewashing of these Ukrainian heroes has coincided with the increasing incidence of anti-Semitism across Ukraine. This includes desecration of Holocaust memorials and Jewish places of worship, such as the desecration of a holy tomb in Uman with a swastika-carved pig’s head; a January 2017 march in honor of Bandera, during which participants chanted ‘Jews Out!’; as well as last summer’s firebombing of a Lviv synagogue during Shukhevych Fest.”

The Congressmen report that last November, a march of 20,000 strong took place

“in honor of the 75th anniversary of the UPA. These torchlight marches are closely linked to organizations such as the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, an armed group that was prohibited from receiving U.S. weapons and training by the recently signed Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018. Rather than disband Azov, the government incorporated it into the Ukrainian National Guard overseen by the Ministry of the Interior. The group is widely known to be closely connected to Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.”

The Congressmen demand action:

“The State Department must use all available diplomatic channels to work with the Ukrainian and Polish government to combat the rise of this hateful ideology which has historically threatened peace and security in the region.”

The appeal would be more effective if it told the whole truth—that the Nazi-supporting regime in Ukraine was placed in power, by the Obama Administration, particularly through Obama’s agent for Ukraine at the State Department, Victoria Nuland. The full story can be read at “How Obama and Soros Put Actual Nazis in Power in Ukraine,” EIR, Feb. 24, 2017.