Ukraine & The Perfect Recipe For War. Act Two: The Neo-Nazi Muscle

How the U.S. uses extremists to topple governments, install puppet leaders, and fight proxy wars.

Act two of a series. For act one, click here

We were given so much weaponry not because as some say the West is helping us. Not because they want the best for us. But because we perform the task set by the West. Because we are the only ones ready to do them. Because we have fun killing and we have fun fighting.

-  C14 leader Yevhen Karas

The U.S. has a long and sordid past of using extremists as their muscle. Under the rubric of “Operation Cyclone,” the CIA trained and armed a group of jihadi guerillas called the “mujahideen.” Their purpose? To topple the Russo-friendly government in Afghanistan and fight a proxy war against the Soviets. Eventually, the mujahideen metastasized into the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

When the CIA wanted to topple the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, they found the perfect fit. A group of nutjobs who raped, kidnapped, and tortured civilians called the “Contras.” They rewarded them well with money, arms, and training. After Congress banned the CIA from funding the Contras, the White House created a privatized network designed to cover the tracks of drug traffickers. In exchange, they’d help the CIA covertly traffic in money to the Contras.

As we will see, the U.S. not only uses neo-Nazis in Ukraine but also turns them into heroes.

LGBT and foreign embassies say there were not many neo-Nazis on Maidan, maybe about ten percent of ideological ones. How effective were they?  Endless... If not for the nationalists, the whole thing would have turned into a gay parade.

— C14 leader Yevhen Karas

On November 21, 2013, president Viktor Yanukovych suspended his EU association agreement. That evening, Hromadske TV captured footage of a tiny gathering of peaceful protestors on the Maidan (the Persian word for "square") in Kyiv.

A friendly bearded man wondered, "Why so few people? In a city of 5 million, only 50 came out." Two bundled-up and beanied men held a Ukrainian flag. A woman vigorously waved at the camera and let out an enthusiastic, "pryvit." - the word for "hello" in both Ukrainian and Russian. Ear-to-ear smiles plastered to the protestors’ faces. A few minutes later, a man with a cap and thick coke-bottle glasses said, "20 minutes ago, there were only about 20 people here. Now there's about a hundred." Ironically, the whole event was instigated by U.S.-funded Hromadske TV when one of its founders, Mustafa Nayyem, wrote a Facebook post challenging people to come down to the Maidan.

Over the coming days, weeks, and months, the Euromaidan would grow to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people. The temperature would drop to subfreezing. And the protest would turn violent and bloody. 

The bloodiest day was February 20, 2014. Snipers from rooftops massacred dozens of Ukrainians. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow writes in her book Blowout, “Many of the dead had been gunned down by Yanukovych’s rooftop snipers.”

But is that true? Behind the scenes, diplomats thought otherwise. In an intercepted phone call, the Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet told the EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton,

There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.

By “new coalition” he meant the opposition parties that would usurp the Yanukovych government. By “somebody” he meant the neo-Nazi factions of the opposition, specifically the Right Sector and the Svoboda party.

Canadian scholar Ivan Katchanovski substantiates these suspicions.

One, he points to:

[Videos that reveal] government snipers arrived when nearly all the victims had already been killed.

Two, he shows how the snipers were incentivized.

Two leaders of the far-right Svoboda party [Oleh Tyagnybok and Ruslan Koshulynsky] stated in separate interviews that a Western government representative told them and other Maidan leaders a few weeks before the massacre that Western governments would stop recognizing Yanukovych after casualties among protesters reached 100.

These would be christened the “heavenly hundred.”

Three, he argues that:

14 self-admitted members of the Maidan sniper units confessed that they themselves or other Maidan snipers massacred the police or protesters. And that this mass killing was done under the orders of Maidan leaders and former leaders of the pro-Western government of Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia.

To give just one example, Right Sectors'  Ivan Bubenchyk has admitted in interviews that he shot and killed two Berkut (the Ukrainian word for “riot police”) from the Music Conservatory building.

Four, Katchanovski brings our attention to BBC footage of a sniper wearing a Maidan helmet and shooting from the window of a suite on the 11th floor of the Hotel Ukraina. One occupied by Svoboda deputy Oleg Pankevich.

Five, he dredges up video evidence from Belgian’s VRT of two men escorting a group of protestors to a massacre spot where they’d be shot, killed, and filmed.

France, Germany, Poland, and Russia brokered a deal between Yanukovych and the opposition to stop the violence in exchange for early elections.  

But the extremist parts of the opposition refused.  Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh warned:

[We] will not put down our arms… before they fulfill our main requirement - resignation of Yanukovych.

Squadron leader Vladimir Parasyuk threatened,

Unless this morning you come up with a statement demanding that he steps down, then we will take arms and go, I swear.

President Viktor Yanukovych got the memo and fled for his life.

The Ukrainian Rada needs 338 votes to impeach a sitting president. They got only 328. Therefore, their ousting of Yanukovych and installing of Arseniy Yatsenyuk was unconstitutional. Of course, the U.S. immediately recognized the legitimacy of these actions. To put it in Victoria Nuland’s words, “Yats is our guy.”

But even if the U.S. was the “helping hand” and the neo-Nazis were the muscle behind the regime change, wasn’t Ukraine better off? Wasn’t it more democratic? No. The economy took a nosedive and the country took a turn for ultranationalism.

Almost as soon as Yatsenyuk assumed power, he signed the UN’s Association Agreement and took an IMF loan. Just like Yanukovych predicted, the required “shock therapy” crippled the Ukrainian economy. In 2013, Ukraine’s GDP was 190 billion USD. By 2014 its GDP plummeted to 133.5 billion USD. And by 2015 its GDP withered to a diminutive 91.5 billion USD and its inflation ballooned to a hair shy of 50%.

Part of the country, mostly ethnic Russian, didn’t accept the new government. First, there was a referendum in Crimea. Then two more in the Donbas.

Yatsenyuk called the referendum in Crimea “illegitimate,” “a circus performance.” Does a tiny region of Ukraine have the right to secede and, ultimately, join the Russian Federation? No. But that misses the point. An unconstitutionally installed prime minister questioning the constitutionality of a referendum election is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

The Donbas was a different animal. As former NATO delegate Jaques Baud tells us,

The referenda held by the two self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in May 2014 were not aimed at “independence” (независимость), as some unscrupulous journalists claimed, but at “self-determination” or “autonomy” (самостоятельность).

Three specific events not only bolstered support for the referenda but also reveal the motivation behind them.

One, the Azov Battalion’s brutal and violent occupation of Donetsk’s Mariupol. It’s a volunteer militia founded by the neo-Nazi Andriy Biletzky. In 2010, he famously said, [Ukraine’s national purpose is to] “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [inferior races].” Early funding for Azov came from Ihor Kolomoisky. He’s an oligarch with a long history of paying extremists like Dnipro, Adair, and Donbas battalions to carry out his dirty work and protect his business interests. Imagine if Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk used for-hire thugs to bully, intimidate, and eliminate their competition.

Two, the Odessa Massacre: the Right Sector burned 39 ethnic Russians alive inside the Trade Union building.

Three, the new government banned the Russian language. In 2012, the Ukrainian government adopted the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko language law. It allowed the use of the Russian language in courts and schools in areas of Ukraine with at least 10% ethnic Russian speakers. The first legislative measure of the new government was to get rid of the language law.

The referenda for autonomous status in the Donbas were not calls for secession. Nor calls to join the Russian Federation. But calls to use the Russian language in courts, schools, and other government institutions.

The new Ukrainian government didn’t recognize the referenda and, as predicted by Henry Kissinger and CIA director Bill Burns, a bloody civil war broke out in the Donbas.

The U.S. and its new puppet regime have rewarded the neo-Nazi muscle for overthrowing Yanukovych, fighting a civil war in the Donbas, and battling the Russians during the 2022 Invasion of Ukraine.

In 2018, Kyiv appointed C14 as the Municipal Guard. Besides harassing minority groups, they carried out pogroms on Romani.

Alex Rubinstein @RealAlexRubi

The C14 Nazi terror gang signed an agreement with the Kiev municipal government to patrol its streets. This footage taken just a few months later in 2018 shows them carrying out a pogrom against a Romani camp.

Shortly after, the U.S.-funded America House Kyiv invited C14 member Sergei Bondar to speak.

Ukraine incorporated the Azov Battalion into their National Guard and they became the only government-approved neo-Nazi regiment in the world.

The UN, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have accused them of torture, sexual abuse, and abduction.

The Committee for the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2016 made the following amendment:

None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to provide arms, training, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.

Under pressure from the Pentagon, the amendment was removed. The U.S. government opened up the spigot and the arms flowed in.

In 2017, congressman Ro Khanna tried to ban the Azov Battalion from receiving U.S. arms and training. But intel from Bellingcat revealed it was too late. Azov Battalion had already received American grenade launchers.

The U.S. Government likely helps create or has a substantial influence on Facebook’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy (DIO). Most of the names in the terrorism category come directly from a list maintained by the Treasury Department. Facebook’s DIO issued a tier 1 ban on Azov Battalion in 2019. That's their harshest ban. The same one they issued to the KKK.

In 2021, Facebook hired Ben Nimmo as their Global Threat Influence Operations lead. He’s a former NATO press officer and current senior fellow at the NATO think tank the Atlantic Council. I’ve previously argued, that NATO is controlled by the U.S. and its purpose is to maintain and expand American hegemony. How influential is Ben Nimmo on Facebook’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy (DIO)? Hard to tell. But my suspicion is substantial.

In light of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Facebook has amended its DIO ban. It will “allow praise of the Azov Battalion when explicitly and exclusively praising their role in defending Ukraine.”

Here’s the most telling part: “Internally published examples of speech that Facebook now deems acceptable include ‘Azov movement volunteers are real heroes.’”

But why the change of heart from “Nazis are bad” to “Nazis are heroes within the context of fighting the Russians”?

In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman write about “worthy” and “unworthy” victims. Unworthy victims make a country look bad. That’s why you rarely hear about them. Worthy victims turn a country into saviors and garner lots of media attention.

Building on Chomsky and Herman’s observation, there are also worthy and unworthy heroes. No good deed goes unpunished that goes against a hegemon’s interests. Unworthy heroes get ignored, framed as the bad guy, jailed, and sometimes killed. But any psychopath who furthers a hegemon’s interests, strengthens its narrative, and makes it look good, gets valorized as a worthy hero. All their blemishes get washed clean. Such is the case with the Azov Battalion. They are worthy heroes within the context of serving American interests and fighting a worthy devil - Russia.

What makes a worthy devil? How about Saudi Arabia? Human Rights Watch has closely documented Saidi Arabia's human rights abuses, including the wholesale slaughter of Yeminese civilians.

In a cable obtained by Wikileaks, the then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said,

Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups.

Saudi Arabia may have all the makings of a devil. But the U.S. has a long history of turning a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s crimes and flooding it with arms - arms that end up in the hands of extremists.

Even after the State Department confirmed that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia ordered the murder of WashPost journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Biden refused to punish him in any way and continued to send his country weapons.

Why? The U.S. and Saudi Arabia have a longstanding petroleum partnership and, more importantly, a security alliance. An alliance that helps the U.S. maintain its hegemony in the Middle East.

A worthy devil makes a hegemon look like the good guy. Because of Saudi Arabia’s partnership with the U.S., it’s an unworthy devil. If the U.S. wholeheartedly called out Saudi Arabia’s sins, it would have to concede its own sins. If it framed Saudi Arabia as the bad guy, it would be forced to frame itself as a bad guy.

Russia is a worthy devil because it makes the U.S. look like the good guy, it justifies the enlargement of NATO, and it creates the perfect pretext for regime change. But does Russia have the makings of a devil at all?

Act Three: The Crippling Cost Of The Putin Witch Hunt

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