Är Azov-bataljonen i Ukraina CIA / Jude-styrd?

Weapons sent to Ukraine by Spain’s “progressive” Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government are being used by a neo-Nazi militia, the Azov Battalion.

In a March 15 video posted on YouTube by the National Corps, the political wing of the Azov Battalion, a militia member can be seen unwrapping and demonstrating how to use weapons. The video explains that these anti-tank missiles are Instalaza C90 grenade launchers from Spain, RPG-75 grenades from Czechia and Pansarskott m/86 portable missiles from Sweden.

The arming of neo-Nazi groups gives the lie to the absurd claims made by Spain and the other imperialist powers that they are defending “democracy and freedom” in Ukraine against the dictatorial and expansionist ambitions of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was desperate and reactionary, but it is a response to decades of imperialist encirclement, threats and provocations. NATO is waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, with far-right paramilitary units like Azov acting as imperialism’s shock troops.

Another of these groups is the neo-Nazi C14, lead by Yevhen Karas. In a speech at the start of February at a seminar named after the Nazi-collaborationist Bandera, Karas gloated of having received large quantities of weaponry from “the West.” He said they were being armed because of their eagerness to kill Russians.

“We are now being given so much weaponry,” Karas declared, “not because as some say ‘the West is helping us’, not because they want the best for us, but because we perform the tasks set by the West, because we are the only ones who are ready to do them. Because we have fun: we have fun killing and we have fun fighting … That is the reason for the new alliance [with] Turkey, Poland, Britain and Ukraine.”

The NATO powers’ arming of neo-Nazi groups is not an unfortunate and unforeseen side-effect of a supposed defense of the Ukrainian people, but a deliberate policy choice. These forces are being armed and emboldened because of their rabid Russophobia and willingness to act as pawns for imperialism.

Canadian reporter with a strange idea of fellowship has posted on social media a photo he took, unbeknownst to me, of Marchenko and myself. The tweetosphere, inspired by the fact that the governor commanded a partisan unit known as the Aidar Battalion from 2015 to 2017 and that this unit included a handful of far-right nationalists, is using the photo to troll a Jewish intellectual for having his picture taken with a neo-Nazi. Should I respond that nothing about the Marchenko whom I know, and whom I have twice interviewed, justifies this shameful accusation? That it is the lot of all resistance movements, beginning with that of occupied France, to welcome all who join at the start, including ex-cons, outcasts, and hotheads? That I find it shameful that some preachers presume to know better than Zelensky himself which officer is most qualified to defend a symbolic city? Those points I will make upon my return. For the time being, things are heating up. The Russia-1 network is broadcasting a photomontage depicting me as an “angel of death” who must be hunted down and driven out of the city. A group of “Russian patriots” has gone so far as to create a Facebook page that puts a price on my head, offering a bounty of a million roubles to whoever takes me out.

Azov Battalion is reportedly a unit of the NGU, backed by Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs. Despite its possible official background in Ukraine, Azov Battalion is known in the West for its extreme neo-Nazi stance, and for its suspected involvement in a number of terrorist attacks and separatist incitement incidents in various countries and regions, including the riots in China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 2019.

Ironically, despite being widely regarded as a threat to world security and an enemy of human civilization, Azov Battalion was found to have ties not only with the Ukraine authorities but also with the US. After looking into the public information from the US government and some investigative reports by Western journalists, the Global Times discovered that American politicians, military and intelligence officers were highly likely to have had cooperation with the Azov Battalion, in order to foster extremist forces in Eastern Europe against Russia.

Not surprisingly, observers reportedly saw American weapons in Ukraine "flowing directly to the extremists of Azov." In December 2017, Richard Vandiver of American weapon manufacturer AirTronic told VOA that its sales of lethal weapons to Ukraine were conducted in "very close coordination" with the US Embassy, the US State Department, the Pentagon and the Ukrainian government. Weeks later, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab confirmed in a January 2018 report that Azov Battalion was a recipient of the transfer.

There must be some connections between Azov Battalion and the US, especially US intelligence agencies, said Li Wei, an expert on national security at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations.

"Supporting Ukraine's neo-Nazis serves the US' own interests," Li told the Global Times. "By inciting conflicts between Ukraine and Russia, the US has weakened Russia and further pushed Ukraine to NATO; it has also improved its relations with Europe, which has become more strategically dependent on the US. The US is really the biggest beneficiary of Russia-Ukraine tensions."
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"We've seen the US support or assist terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS)," Li said. "The US messes with the world for its own geopolitical interests."

The American government’s collaboration with committed Nazi ideologues to undercut Russian geopolitical goals is not new, nor has it been a particularly well-kept secret. In his 1988 book length expose, “Blowback,” investigative journalist Christopher Simpson lifted the cover off the CIA’s program of rehabilitating former assets of Nazi Germany, including documented war criminals, and revealed how it employed them counter the spread of communism in Europe.

According to Simpson, the CIA recruited Mykola Lebed, a Gestapo-trained leader of the Ukrainian OUN militia who oversaw the torture and slaughter of Jews in Krakow, to help bolster West Germany’s intelligence services in 1947. Two years later, the CIA smuggled Lebed into the US under a false name. He was promptly hired by the Pentagon and dispatched on widely promoted speaking tours that rallied support for Ukrainian guerillas. For the next several decades, Lebed advanced the anti-communist cause through the Prolog Research Corporation, a New York City-based publishing house that was eventually revealed as a CIA front.

In his 1991 book, “Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, journalist Russ Bellant provided a new layer of disturbing detail to the history of US collaboration with former Ukrainian Nazis. Bellant documented how the Ukrainian OUN-B militia reconstituted under the banner of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), an umbrella organization comprised of “complete OUN-B fronts.” The Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members, with the group’s chairman Lev Dobriansky, serving as ambassador to the Bahamas, and his daughter, Paula, sitting on the National Security Council. Reagan even welcomed Jaroslav Stetsko, a Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7000 Jews in Lviv, into the White House in 1983.

“Your struggle is our struggle,” Reagan told the former Nazi collaborator. “Your dream is our dream.”

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.

The Right Connections

Many surviving OUN-B members fled to Western Europe and the United States – occasionally with CIA help – where they quietly forged political alliances with right-wing elements. “You have to understand, we are an underground organization. We have spent years quietly penetrating positions of influence,” one member told journalist Russ Bellant, who documented the group’s resurgence in the United States in his 1988 book, “Old Nazis, New Right, and the Republican Party.”

In Washington, the OUN-B reconstituted under the banner of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), an umbrella organization comprised of “complete OUN-B fronts,” according to Bellant. By the mid-1980’s, the Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members, with the group’s chairman Lev Dobriansky, serving as ambassador to the Bahamas, and his daughter, Paula, sitting on the National Security Council. Reagan personally welcomed Stetsko, the Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7000 Jews in Lviv, into the White House in 1983.

“Your struggle is our struggle,” Reagan told the former Nazi collaborator. “Your dream is our dream.”

When the Justice Department launched a crusade to capture and prosecute Nazi war criminals in 1985, UCCA snapped into action, lobbying Congress to halt the initiative. “The UCCA has also played a leading role in opposing federal investigations of suspected Nazi war criminals since those queries got underway in the late 1970’s,” Bellant wrote. “Some UCCA members have many reasons to worry – reasons which began in the 1930’s.”

Still an active and influential lobbying force in Washington, the UCCA does not appear to have shed its reverence for Banderist nationalism. In 2009, on the 50th anniversary of Bandera’s death, the group proclaimed him “a symbol of strength and righteousness for his followers” who “continue[s] to inspire Ukrainians today.” A year later, the group honored the 60th anniversary of the death of Roman Shukhevych, the OUN-B commander of the Nachtigall Battalion that slaughtered Jews in Lviv and Belarus, calling him a “hero” who “fought for honor, righteousness…”

Back in Ukraine in 2010, then-President Viktor Yushchenko awarded Bandera the title of “National Hero of Ukraine,” marking the culmination of his efforts to manufacture an anti-Russian national narrative that sanitized the OUN-B’s fascism. (Yuschenko’s wife, Katherine Chumachenko, was a former Reagan administration official and ex-staffer at the right-wing Heritage Foundation). When the European Parliament condemned Yushchenko's proclamation as an affront to "European values," the UCCA-affiliated Ukrainian World Congress reacted with outrage, accusing the EU of "another attempt to rewrite Ukrainian history during WWII." On its website, the UCCA dismissed historical accounts of Bandera's collaboration with the Nazis as "Soviet propaganda."

Following the demise of Yanukovich this month, the UCCA helped organize rallies in cities across the US in support of the EuroMaidan protests. When several hundred demonstrators marchedthrough downtown Chicago, some waved Ukrainian flags while others proudly flew the red and black banners of the UPA and OUN-B. "USA supports Ukraine!" they chanted.