Is Putin Exaggerating About a Special Military Operation To Deal with a Neo-Nazi Problem?

Feb. 24, 2022 (EIRNS)—Russian President Putin’s announcement that the neo-Nazi problem inside Ukraine must be dealt with, is taken by Western media—if mentioned at all—as hyperbole meant to be fed to the ignorant Russian masses. But, neo-Nazis are not a joke. They have truly hijacked the country of Ukraine and have set nuclear powers into a showdown.

In its EIR cover story on Feb. 7 2014, the LaRouche movement unveiled the truth in a dossier published in EIR, “Western Powers Back Neo-Nazi Coup in Ukraine.”

On Feb. 21, this week, when Putin announced the recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics, he was clear as to what the neo-Nazis had done, and what Russia intended to do about them in his televised address:

“The nationalists who have seized power have unleashed a persecution, a real terror campaign against those who opposed their anti-constitutional actions. Politicians, journalists, and public activists were harassed and publicly humiliated. A wave of violence swept Ukrainian cities, including a series of high-profile and unpunished murders. One shudders at the memories of the terrible tragedy in Odessa, where peaceful protesters were brutally murdered, burned alive in the House of Trade Unions. The criminals who committed that atrocity have never been punished, and no one is even looking for them. But we know their names and we will do everything to punish them, find them and bring them to justice.”

But even less well-known are the threats, violence, and blackmail directed toward President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, should he make a move to implement the Minsk measures for peace. There’s a reason the clearly articulated steps of the agreement are so blatantly ignored.

Of a Jewish background, and speaking Russian as his native language, Zelenskyy won a surprising election landslide victory in 2019. He was considered as a fresh hope to end the Russia-baiting and the divisions pitting Ukrainians against each other. However, in October 2019, Andriy Biletsky’s National Corps mobilized a “No to Surrender” campaign, including around 10,000 demonstrators in Kiev’s Maidan, against Zelenskyy’s “capitulation” to the mutual pullback of forces in the Donbas. Biletsky had “irregular” forces enter the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) zone illegally, and threaten violence if the Ukrainian regular army pulled back. Zelenskyy described on Facebook how he went to Zolote, near the frontline, and met with the locals: “I understood one thing—how everyone wants peace. Everyone is ready for disengagement.” However, the villagers told him that armed “irregulars” occupied part of the village. Zelenskyy met with them, but they refused to listen to orders from the elected head of state, nor even from the military chain-of-command. Afterwards, the JFO confirmed that those village-occupiers that Zelenskyy had met with were indeed armed and in the zone illegally. The education of Zelenskyy, as to who ran things in Ukraine, continued with a second example.

The furthest his administration ever got on fulfilling their election mandate was a couple of months later, when they put forward one bill including an element from Minsk—that Donetsk and Luhansk could vote as to whether they should keep the Russian language. Even this proved too much. Sergey Sivokho, an adviser to the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, whom Zelenskyy had initiated into the National Platform for Reconciliation and Unity, tried to introduce this first modest step. He was publicly assaulted at the initial public conference, on March 12, 2020, on the reintegration of Donetsk and Luhansk. Sivokho, an older man with white hair, was cursed, surrounded, pressed against a wall, and finally shoved to the ground by Azov Battalion members. Apparently, that was the first and last time that even a hint of the Minsk Accords was promoted by the Kiev government.

These are just a couple of the examples, but it seems that Zelenskyy received the message—one delivered by those who worship Hitler’s Ukrainian wartime ally, Stepan Bandera, who sport the swastika-inspired insignia of the Azov Battalion, and who espouse the rage-driven, “blood and soil” ideology of “far-right nationalists.” It is not simply an ugly phenomenon. They have more control over Ukraine’s policy than the elected government, and so have hijacked Ukraine. And it is clear that, when Putin speaks of the West looking the other way during Hitler’s rise to power, and of the failure of the Soviet Union when it delayed dealing with the threat from Hitler in 1939-40, he doesn’t mean to preside over the loss of tens of millions of people again.