ukraine nazi

© Alexandr Maksimenko/RIA Novosti
Azov battalion soldiers accept an oath of fidelity to Ukraine in Kiev's Sophia Square before beingness sent to the Donbass region

French President Emmanuel Macron claimed in his Wednesday address to the nation that Russia's special operation to demilitarise and "de-Nazify" Ukraine is "not a fight against Nazism", thus joining the chorus of political leaders and media outlets in the West who downplay or birthday deny the trouble of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism.

Ukraine's ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi battalions made headlines afterwards the 2014 Feb coup d'etat in the country only to be largely disregarded and downplayed in the ensuing years by the mainstream media.

"Far-right, anti-Semitic, anti-Russian, and openly fascist groups take existed and do exist every bit a blight on modern Ukraine", CNN wrote in March 2014. It quoted a 2012 European Parliament resolution raising 18 points of concern over policies embedded in the laws of the nation's parliament, and denounced "the rise nationalistic sentiment in Ukraine".

neo nazi Ukraine Azov battalion

CNN admitted that Ukraine's ultra-nationalist parties and groups, including Svoboda and the Right Sector ultra-nationalists, played a meaning part in the 2014 regime change in Kiev and later assumed positions in the National Security and Defence force Council, the office of the Prosecutor Full general, and the ministries of ecology and agriculture of the interim regime.

Shortly after the insurrection, Ukraine saw the formation of volunteer nationalist battalions that carried out attacks against the breakaway Donbass republics and terrorised Eastern Ukrainian civilians. One of them, Azov, was led by Andriy Biletsky, former leader of the Kharkov branch of "the Stepan Bandera All-Ukrainian Organization 'Tryzub'" and co-founder of the ultra-nationalist movement, the Social-National Associates.

Biletsky was quoted every bit maxim in 2010 that Ukraine'south mission was to "lead the white races of the world in a last crusade...against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans]". He was a fellow member of the post-coup Ukrainian Parliament between 2014 and 2019. Azov formally joined the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014.

The Azov regiment, that still proudly wears the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel insignia, is notorious for attacking and displacing residents in eastern Ukraine, annexation noncombatant property, as well as raping and torturing detainees in Donbass, according to a 2016 United nations report by the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHA).

Ukrainian nationalist organisations and political movements have been disseminating their credo amidst immature people with Kiev's bankroll and funding. In 2020, the Ukrainian government allocated money for nationalist projects, including the "Cyborg Igor Branovitsky Clemency Run", "Immature Banderite Course", "Banderstadt Festival of Ukrainian Spirit", etc. As the Ukrainian outlet STRANA.ua noted in 2020, the nationalist projects were due to receive 8 one thousand thousand hryvnia ($266,416) which is almost one-half of all the funds allocated by the Ukrainian government for children's and youth organisations.

The ministry'due south 2020 listing likewise included the projection "Unconquered" - named in honour of Yaroslav Robert Melnik, a regional leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) of the Carpathian region and a "major political educator" of the Ukrainian Insurgent Regular army (UPA)*. Both OUN and UPA are infamous for collaborating with Nazi Germany and conducting the ethnic cleansing of Jews, Russians, Roma, and Poles in the Nazi-occupied territories of Ukraine during WWII.

Viktor Yushchenko orange revoluton ukraine

© AP Photo / Alexander Zemlianichenko
Opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko addresses a crowd in the key Independence Foursquare in Ukraine'southward capital Kiev, Monday, Nov.22, 2004

After the western-backed Orangish Revolution, President Viktor Yushchenko contradistinct the Ukrainian school curriculum to glorify both OUN and UPA and granted the titles of Hero of Ukraine to OUN-UPA leaders Roman Shukhevych and Stepan Bandera in 2007 and 2010, respectively.

While in May 2011, the Supreme Administrative Court of Ukraine reversed Yushchenko's orders, President Petro Poroshenko gave OUN and UPA the status of "fighters for the independence" of Ukraine in 2015. As of today, several hundred monuments and statues accept been erected and streets named after former Nazi collaborators in Ukraine.

On 16 December 2021, the Un General Assembly discussed a resolution that called to combat the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism, and other practices that fuel racism and xenophobia. The but two countries that voted against information technology were the US and Ukraine.

stephan bandara statue nazi ukraine

© Miroslav Luzetsky
Unveiling a monument to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, in Lviv.

OUN-UPA and Their Heirs

"Founded in 1929, the Arrangement of Ukrainian Nationalists became the dominant political movement of the Ukrainian far right. It was formed out of a number of radical nationalist and fascist groups and was, initially, led by war veterans, frustrated past their failure to constitute a Ukrainian state in 1917-1920", wrote Per Anders Rudling, a Swedish-American historian and associate professor at the Department of History at Lund University in a 2011 study "The OUN, the UPA, and the Holocaust: A Report in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths".

Co-ordinate to Rudling, there is no doubt that OUN was a "fascist" organisation from its inception. The idea of racial purity was a leitmotif of OUN'southward ideology. The Ukrainian nationalist press regularly carried anti-Semitic articles since the 1930s. After the Nazi occupation of Ukraine in 1941, OUN teamed up with them and went on an indigenous cleansing spree in the occupied territories."

The Nachtigall Battalion, consisting almost exclusively of OUN(b) activists serving in High german uniforms under Shukhevych'due south command, carried out mass shootings of Jews well-nigh Vinnytsia in July 1941", wrote Rudling. "At least 58 pogroms are documented in western Ukrainian cities, the estimated number of victims of which range between 13,000 and 35,000".

On 29-30 September 1941, Nazi forces and their Ukrainian collaborators executed almost 34,000 Jews in Babi Yar, a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev.

babi yar holocaust memorial

© Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP
A view of the Babyn (Babi) Yar Holocaust Memorial Eye in Kyiv on March two, 2022

From 1943 and until the arrival of the Soviet Army, OUN - and its military wing, UPA - had carried out massive indigenous cleansings of Poles in Volhynia and Galicia which claimed the lives of at least 88,700 people, including children, women, and the elderly.

"The murderers used primarily farm tools - scythes, knives, and pitchforks. Orthodox priests blest such weapons in their churches. The bodies were oft desperately mutilated...in lodge to dehumanise the victim and strike terror", noted the historian.

According to Rudling, the most vocal advocate of this bloodbath was Mykola Lebed, then-acting leader of the OUN. Remarkably, it was Lebed who established contacts with the American intelligence services in 1945 from his exile in Rome, the historian wrote. Despite describing him as "a well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans", the CIA and the US State Department sponsored Lebed'south 1949 immigration into the US and shielded him from prosecution, according to Rudling.

After the defeat of Nazi Federal republic of germany in 1945, members of OUN and their paramilitary UPA units joined foreign destructive groups, propaganda outlets, and intelligence agencies to fight against the USSR during the Cold War.

In 1956, the CIA incorporated a set of networks under Lebed'due south leadership and created the not-turn a profit Prolog (Prologue) Research and Publishing Association, whose goal was to publish anti-communist propaganda, including radio broadcasts, newspapers, and books. During the Cold War, Ukrainian diasporas and OUN-UPA veterans were busy whitewashing the organisation's crimes, the author pointed out. They created celebrated forgeries and myths virtually the OUN and UPA being pluralistic and inclusive organisations which rescued Jews during the Holocaust and fought shoulder to shoulder against Hitler and Stalin. Later on the collapse of the USSR, these narratives started filling the gap left past Soviet ideology in a new Ukrainian country.

"Different many other former Soviet republics, the Ukrainian regime did not need to develop new national myths from scratch, but imported gear up concepts developed in the Ukrainian diaspora", wrote Rudling.

The problem, however, is that despite the manipulations of history, the fascist roots of Ukrainian radical nationalism never went away, according to the historian. The ideological heirs of the OUN-UPA got their first run a risk to receive government recognition under Viktor Yushchenko and and so, after the iv-year presidency of Viktor Yanukovich they returned to the stage to hijack even more ability and penetrate the textile of Ukrainian society.

*The Ukrainian Insurgent Ground forces (UPA*) is an extremist arrangement banned in Russia since 2014.