By Cynthia Chung for the Saker blog
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was founded in 1929 in East Galicia (located in Poland at the time) and called for an independent and ethnically homogenous Ukraine. From the beginning, the OUN had tensions between the young radical Galician students and the older military veteran leadership, who grew up in the more lenient Austro-Hungarian Empire. The younger generation had only known oppression under the new Polish rule and underground warfare. As a result, the younger faction tended to be more impulsive, violent and ruthless.
During this period, Polish persecution of Ukrainians increased and many Ukrainians, especially the youth who felt they had no future, lost faith in traditional legal approaches, in their elders and in Western democracies who were seen as turning their backs on Ukraine. The OUN assassinated Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki in 1934. Among those tried and convicted in 1936 for Pieracki’s murder, were OUN’s Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed. Both escaped when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939.
Support for the OUN increased as Polish persecution of Ukrainians continued. By the beginning of the Second World War, the OUN was estimated to have 20,000 active members and many times that number in sympathizers in Galicia. In 1940 the OUN would split into the OUN-M led by Andriy Melnyk, and OUN-B headed by Stepan Bandera which made up most of the membership in Galicia and consisted mainly of youth.
In August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the non-aggression pact known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, dividing Poland. Eastern Galicia and Volhynia were reunified with Ukraine, under the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In June 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded Western Ukraine, there were many Western Ukrainians who welcomed the invading Nazis as their ‘liberators.’ It should be noted here that this was not a sentiment predominantly shared by the rest of Ukraine, who fought in or alongside the Russian Red Army against the invading Nazis. Both the OUN-M and OUN-B would spend much of the war collaborating closely with the Germans. They had no issues with the Nazi ideology for they too believed that a solution was found in returning to a ‘pure race.’
In the case of Ukraine, this pure race consisted of a somewhat romanticised concept of ‘ethnic Ukrainian,’ based on the golden age of Kievan Rus’. The OUN believed that the ‘pure ethnic Ukrainian race’ were the only true descendants of the royal bloodline of the Rurik dynasty that ruled Kievan Rus’. And rather than looking at Belarusians and the Russians as their brothers and sisters who shared the same ancestry, the OUN viewed them more so as ‘ethnic impostors’ so to speak of this pure bloodline. This can be seen today with Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups attacking Ukrainian ethnic Russians for the past nine years in Ukraine.[1] An issue that is almost entirely ignored in the West.
It was believed that if the purity of the bloodline were returned, greatness would once again be bestowed on Ukraine, which had never really existed as a fully independent region. It was for this reason that the OUN and the SS Galician division believed that exterminating tens of thousands of Poles, Jews and any other non-ethnic Ukrainian was justified. The SS Galician division, which had an overlapping membership with the OUN, were notorious for their extreme cruelty, including acts of torture and mutilation on par with Japan’s Unit 731.
To give an idea of the level of support in Western Ukraine at the time for a ‘pure Ukrainian race,’ the SS Galician division recruited 80,000 Galician volunteers in one and a half months. The trident symbol, known also as the tryzub, is an important symbol for Ukrainians, since it comes from the days of Kievan Rus’ and its earliest use was during the rule of Vladimir/Volodymyr the Great, about 1,000 years ago. However, it is also most unfortunately why the OUN chose the tryzub for both their emblems and flag, to signify their desire to return to those glory days, which was thought could only be achieved through ethnic cleansing.
The above OUN-B flag (also used by their paramilitary unit UPA: Ukrainian Insurgent Army) is known as the ‘Blood and Soil’ flag. The ‘Blood and Soil’ nationalist slogan originated in Nazi Germany to express its ideal of a racially defined national body (blood) united with a settlement area (soil). It is also why Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups that formed from 1991 onward (after Ukraine’s independence from the USSR), more often than not, also use the tryzub.
Above image shows flags of neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine today. The Azov flag shows a combination of the Wolfsangel and Black Sun, two symbols associated with the Wehrmacht and SS.
In 1998, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), at the behest of Congress, launched what became the largest congressionally mandated, single-subject declassification effort in history. As a result, more than 8.5 million pages of records have been opened to the public under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (P.L. 105-246) and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (P.L. 106-567). These records include operational files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA, the FBI and Army intelligence. IWG issued three reports to Congress between 1999 and 2007.
A research group was put together to compile and organise key elements of this massive newly declassified database, the result was the publication of U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis in 2005, and Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War in 2011, both published by the National Archives, and which will be used as key references for the rest of this chapter.
Richard Breitman writes in U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis[2]:
“What must be the earliest history (or mini-history) of the extermination of the Jews in Lvov [Lviv] was prepared on June 5, 1945. The ten-page document pointed out that, as soon as German troops took Lvov, Ukrainians in the city denounced Jews who had cooperated with Soviet authorities during the period of Soviet occupation, 1939-1941. Those Jews were arrested, gathered near the municipal building, and beaten by the Germans and local inhabitants. Later, local inhabitants, especially from the villages nearby, ravaged the Jewish quarter and beat Jews who stood in the way of their robbery. Starting on July 1, a pogrom was organized; German police, soldiers, and local Ukrainians all took part. Many of those arrested were tortured and killed… More than twelve thousand Jews were killed in the first weeks of the German occupation of Lvov.”[3]
Norman J.W. Goda writes in U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis[4]:
“In its work to destabilize the Polish state, the OUN’s ties with Germany extended back to 1921. These ties intensified under the Nazi regime as war with Poland drew near. Galicia was allotted to the Soviets under the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, and the Germans welcomed anti-Polish Ukrainian activists into the German-occupied General Government. In 1940 and 1941, in preparation for what would become the eastern campaign, the Germans began to recruit Ukrainians, particularly from Bandera’s wing, as saboteurs, interpreters, and police, and trained them at a camp at Zakopane near Cracow [Kraków]. In the spring of 1941, the Wehrmacht also developed two Ukrainian battalions with the approval of the Banderists, one code named ‘Nightingale’ (Nachtigall) and the other code named ‘Roland’.”
What showcases the youth, and unfortunately ignorance, of the OUN-B, is that the ‘blood and soil’ slogan originating with the Nazis, to which they chose for their own OUN-B flag, was also tied to the belief that the German people were to expand into Eastern Europe, conquering and enslaving the native Slavic and Baltic population via Generalplan Ost.[5] Thus, these Ukrainian nationalists were never considered worthy of sharing in this vision of Nazi Germany but had been regarded as the ultimate slaves for the new German empire from the very beginning.
The OUN-B would learn this lesson the hard way. Eight days after Germany’s invasion of the USSR, on June 30th, 1941, OUN-B proclaimed the establishment of the Ukrainian State in the name of Bandera in Lviv and pledged loyalty to Hitler. In response, the OUN-B leaders and associates were arrested and imprisoned or killed outright by the Gestapo (approx. 1500 persons). The Germans had no intention of even allowing a semi-independent Ukraine to form. Stepan Bandera and his closest deputy Jaroslav Stetsko were initially kept under house arrest and then sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (a comparatively comfortable confinement to the other concentration camps).
Mykola Lebed was able to slip through the German police net and became the de facto leader of the OUN-B leadership, also known as the Banderists. On July 16th, 1941, the Germans absorbed Galicia into the General Government. In October 1941, the German Security Police issued a wanted poster with Lebed’s photograph. The Germans transferred administrative and senior auxiliary police positions in Western Ukraine to Melnyk’s group, OUN-M.[6] German security police formations were ordered to arrest and kill Bandera loyalists in Western Ukraine for fear that they would rise against German rule, though this order was eventually revoked. The following year Lebed would become the leader of the underground terror wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which continued in function until 1956.
Eastern Ukrainians later claimed that Mykola Lebed as leader of the OUN-B, took over the UPA by assassinating the original Ukrainian leaders. The OUN counted among its enemies those that had denied Ukrainian independence, such as the Poles and the Soviets but also including native Ukrainians. Those in the Ukraine who had failed to assimilate (such as the Jews) were also considered enemies to Ukrainian independence and at times, when it suited them, the Germans. They also regarded the Jews as the primary support and ‘spreaders’ of Bolshevism.
Breitman and Goda write:[7]
“When the war turned against the Germans in early 1943, leaders of Bandera’s group believed that the Soviets and Germans would exhaust each other, leaving an independent Ukraine as in 1918. Lebed proposed in April to ‘cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population,’ so that a resurgent Polish state would not claim the region as in 1918. Ukrainians serving as auxiliary policemen for the Germans now joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)… On a single day, July 11th, 1943, the UPA attacked some 80 localities killing… 10,000 Poles…The Banderists and UPA also resumed cooperation with the Germans.”
This was all done under the command of Mykola Lebed.
By 1943, aware that their situation was becoming increasingly insecure, the OUN tried to re-centralise their forces. However, infighting occurred between the OUN-B against the OUN-M and the UPA unit of Taras Bulba-Borovets (of the exiled Ukrainian People’s Republic) who in a letter accused the OUN-B of among other things: banditry, of wanting to establish a one-party state, and of fighting not for the people but in order to rule the people. In their struggle for dominance in Volhynia, the Banderists (OUN-B) would kill tens of thousands of Ukrainians for any link to the networks of Bulba-Borovets or Melnyk (OUN-M).[8]
By September 1944 German Army officers in northern Ukraine told their superiors in Foreign Armies East that the UPA was a “natural ally of Germany” and “a valuable aid for the German High Command,” and Himmler himself authorized intensified contacts with UPA.[9]
Norman J.W. Goda writes[10]:
“Though UPA propaganda emphasized that organization’s independence from the Germans, the UPA also ordered some young Ukrainians to volunteer for the Ukrainian SS Division ‘Galicia,’ and the rest to fight by guerilla methods. Lebed still hoped for recognition from the Germans.”
The SS Galicia Division existed from April 1943 to April 15th, 1945. Germany surrendered on May 7th, 1945. In September 1944, the Germans released Bandera and Stetsko from Sachsenhausen.
The Ukrainian Nationalist Movement: Bought and Paid for by the CIA and served à la Lebed
“[Lebed] is a well known sadist and collaborator of the Germans”[11]
– 1947 Report by The U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC)
In July 1944 Mykola Lebed helped form the Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council (UHVR), which would claim to represent the Ukrainian nation and served as an underground government in the Carpathian mountains, in opposition to the Ukrainian SSR. The dominant political party in UHVR was the Bandera group and the UPA, which from that point on served as the army of UHVR and continued to fight the Soviets until 1956. A feud erupted in 1947 between Bandera and Stetsko on one side for an independent Ukraine under a single party led by Bandera himself vs. Lebed and Father Ivan Hrynioch (chief of the UHVR Political Section) who were against Bandera being head of state.
At an August 1948 Congress of the OUN Foreign Section, Bandera (who still controlled 80% of the UHVR) expelled the Hrynioch-Lebed group. He claimed exclusive authority on the Ukrainian national movement and continued terror tactics against anti-Banderist Ukrainian leaders in Western Europe and maneuvered for control of Ukrainian émigré organizations.[12] However, Lebed who had become close with the Americans at that point was recognized, along with Hrynioch as the official UHVR representation abroad.
With the war lost, Lebed adopted a strategy similar to that of Reinhard Gehlen – he contacted the Allies after escaping Rome in 1945 with a trove of names and contacts of anti-Soviets located in Western Ukraine and in displaced persons camps in Germany. This made him attractive to the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) despite their above admission in their 1947 report. In late 1947, Lebed who it was feared would be assassinated by the Soviets in Rome, was smuggled along with his family by the CIC to Munich, Germany in December 1947 for his safety.
Norman J.W. Goda writes:[13]
“By late 1947, Lebed had thoroughly sanitized his prewar and wartime activities for American consumption. In his own rendition, he had been a victim of the Poles, the Soviets, and the Germans – he would carry the Gestapo ‘wanted’ poster for the rest of his life to prove his anti-Nazi credentials…He also published a 126-page booklet on the UPA, which chronicled the heroic struggle of Ukrainians against both Nazis and Bolsheviks, while calling for an independent, greater Ukraine that would represent the human ideals of free speech and free faith. The UPA, according to the booklet, never collaborated with the Nazis, nor is there any mention of the slaughter of Galician Jews or Poles in the book. The CIC considered the booklet to be the ‘complete background on the subject.’ The CIC overlooked the fact that under its own watch an OUN Congress held in September 1947 had split, thanks to Lebed’s criticism of the creeping democratization of the OUN. This was overlooked by the CIA which began using Lebed extensively in 1948…In June 1949…the CIA smuggled him [Lebed] into the United States with his wife and daughter under the legal cover of the Displaced Persons Act.”
The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began investigating Lebed and in March 1950 reported to Washington that numerous Ukrainian informants spoke of Lebed’s leading role among the ‘Bandera terrorists.’ The INS also reported that during the war the Banderists were trained and armed by the Gestapo and responsible for “wholesale murders of Ukrainians, Poles and Jewish [sic]…In all these actions, Lebed was one of the most important leaders.”[14]
In 1951, top INS officials informed the CIA of its findings along with the comment that Lebed would likely face deportation. The CIA responded on October 3rd, 1951, that all of the charges were false and that the Gestapo ‘wanted’ poster of Lebed proved that he “fought with equal zeal against the Nazis and Bolsheviks.”[15] INS officials as a result suspended the investigation on Lebed. In February 1952, the CIA pressed the INS to grant Lebed re-entry papers so that he could leave and re-enter the United States at will. Argyle Mackey, Commissioner of the INS, refused to grant this.
On May 5th, 1952, Allen Dulles, then Assistant Director of the CIA wrote a letter to Mackey stating[16]:
“In connection with future Agency operations of the first importance, it is urgently necessary that subject [Lebed] be able to travel in Western Europe. Before [he] undertakes such travel, however, this Agency must…assure his re-entry into the United States without investigation or incident which would attract undue attentions to his activities.”
What was in West Germany? General Reinhard Gehlen, former chief of the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East military intelligence, who had been conveniently allowed to re-enter West Germany to establish his Gehlen Organisation which would later form the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany) in 1956. Dulles also wanted Lebed’s legal status changed to that of “permanent resident,” under Section 8 of the CIA Act of 1949. The INS never investigated further after Dulles’s letter and Lebed became a naturalized U.S. citizen in March 1957.
Bandera would also be stationed in West Germany with his family after the war, where he remained the leader of the OUN-B and worked with several anti-communist organizations as well as with British Intelligence.[17] At this point Bandera had become too much of a liability and there were multiple attempts, by both the Americans and British starting in 1953, to get Bandera to step down and for Lebed to represent “the entire Ukrainian liberation movement in the homeland.” Bandera refused and went rogue. It is said that Bandera was assassinated in 1959 by a KGB agent in Munich, however, one cannot help but note that it was excellent timing and extremely beneficial for the Americans that Bandera was taken out when he was, considering what they had planned for Ukraine’s future…
Above image is the original document of the Dulles letter to Mackey on behalf of Mykola Lebed.
Among the declassified records are that of Hoover’s FBI, who had a small trove of captured German General Staff documents from 1943 and 1944, which revealed German appreciation of the UPA’s work while mentioning Lebed by name.[18] It appears this was never shared with any agency or institution, other than the CIA, despite requests from the INS during their investigation of Lebed.
The following is an indication as to what Dulles may have been referring to as the urgent need for Lebed’s re-entry into Western Europe. Breitman and Goda write:[19]
“By 1947 some 250,000 Ukrainians were living…in Germany, Austria, and Italy, many of them OUN activists or sympathizers. After 1947 UPA fighters began crossing into the U.S. zone, having reached the border on foot through Czechoslovakia.”
However, Lebed was not only urgently needed in Europe, but also within the United States. Once in the United States, Lebed was selected as the CIA’s chief contact/advisor for AERODYNAMIC. Breitman and Goda write:[20]
“AERODYNAMIC’s first phase involved infiltration into Ukraine and then exfiltration of CIA-trained Ukrainian agents. By January 1950 the CIA’s arm for the collection of secret intelligence (Office of Special Operations, OSO) and its arm for covert operations (Office of Policy Coordination, OPC) participated [author’s note: recall from Chapter 4 the OPC was the Allen Dulles rogue faction of the CIA] …Washington was especially pleased with the high level of UPA training in the Ukraine and its potential for further guerilla actions, and with ‘the extraordinary news that…active resistance to the Soviet regime was spreading steadily eastward, out of the former Polish, Greek Catholic provinces… [However] By 1954 Lebed’s group lost all contact with UHVR. By that time the Soviets subdued both the UHVR and UPA, and the CIA ended the aggressive phase of AERODYNAMIC.
Beginning in 1953 AERODYNAMIC began to operate through a Ukrainian study group under Lebed’s leadership in New York under CIA auspices, which collected Ukrainian literature and history and produced Ukrainian nationalist newspapers, bulletins, radio programming, and books for distribution in the Ukraine. In 1956 this group was formally incorporated as the non-profit Prolog Research and Publishing Association. It allowed the CIA to funnel funds as ostensible private donations without taxable footprints… the CIA turned Prolog into a for-profit enterprise called Prolog Research Corporation, which ostensibly received private contracts. Under Hrinioch [Hrynioch], Prolog maintained a Munich office named the Ukrainische Geseelschaft fur Auslandsstudein, EV. Most publications were created here.
Prolog recruited and paid Ukrainian émigré writers who were generally unaware that they worked in a CIA-controlled operation. Only the six top members of the ZP/UHVR were witting agents. Beginning in 1955, leaflets were dropped over Ukraine by air[,] and radio broadcasts titled Nova Ukraina were aired in Athens for Ukrainian consumption. These activities gave way to systematic mailing campaigns to Ukraine through Ukrainian contacts in Poland and émigré contacts in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Spain, Sweden, and elsewhere. The newspaper Suchasna Ukrainia (Ukraine Today), information bulletins, a Ukrainian language journal for intellectuals called Suchasnist (The Present), and other publications were sent to libraries, cultural institutions, administrative offices and private individuals in Ukraine. These activities encouraged Ukrainian nationalism…”
The CIA bought and paid for a brand of Ukrainian Nationalism à la Lebed. One of the most horrifying butchers of OUN/UPA was given reign to shape the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people around their nationalist identity, an identity as defined by the OUN. It has also shaped historical and cultural interpretation such as to further romanticise the concept of the great Ukrainian race of Volodymyr the Great, encouraging a further sense of superiority and further divide between themselves and Belarussians and Russians.
One CIA analyst judged that, “some form of nationalist feeling continues to exist [in the Ukraine] and…there is an obligation to support it as a cold war weapon.”[21]
Breitman and Goda continue:
“…Prolog [also] influenced [the next] Ukrainian generation…Prolog had become in the words of one senior CIA official, the sole ‘vehicle for CIA’s operations directed at the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and [its] forty million Ukrainian citizens.’
Lebed overtly distanced himself and the Ukrainian nationalist movement from the overt anti-Semitism of his Banderist days…More to protect the name of Ukrainian nationalism, he publicly condemned the ‘provocative libel’ and ‘slanderous statements’ against Jews, adding in a particularly forgetful note that, ‘the Ukrainian people…are opposed to all and any preaching of hatred for other people.’…Former Banderists…now attacked the Soviets for anti-Semitism rather than with it.
Lebed retired in 1975 but remained an adviser and consultant to Prolog and the ZP/UHVR…In the 1980s AERODYNAMIC’s name was changed to QRDYNAMIC and in the 1980s PDDYNAMIC and then QRPLUMB. In 1977 President Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski helped to expand the program owing to what he called its ‘impressive dividends’ and the ‘impact on specific audiences in the target area.’ In the 1980s Prolog expanded its operation to reach other Soviet nationalities, and in a supreme irony, these included dissident Soviet Jews. With the USSR teetering on the brink of collapse in 1990, QRPLUMB was terminated with a final payout of $1.75 million. Prolog would continue its activities, but it was on its own financially.
In June 1985 the General Accounting Office mentioned Lebed’s name in a public report on Nazis and collaborators who settled in the United States with help from U.S. intelligence agencies. The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the Department of Justice began investigating Lebed that year. The CIA worried that public scrutiny of Lebed would compromise QRPLUMB and that failure to protect Lebed would trigger outrage in the Ukrainian émigré community. It thus shielded Lebed by denying any connection between Lebed and the Nazis and by arguing that he was a Ukrainian freedom fighter. The truth, of course, was more complicated. As late as 1991 the CIA tried to dissuade OSI from approaching the German, Polish, and Soviet governments for war-related records related to the OUN. OSI eventually gave up the case, unable to procure definitive documents on Lebed.”
Mykola Lebed died in 1998 under the protection of the CIA in New Jersey at the age of 89. His papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.
Thus, it is no coincidence that the OUN ideology is inextricable from the Western Ukrainian nationalist identity today, nor that several neo-Nazi groups have formed since 1991 (since Ukraine’s independence from the USSR) who all view the OUN and Stepan Bandera as the Father of their movement.
For more on this story see my book “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set: The Birth of International Fascism and Anglo-American Foreign Policy”, free previews of chapters are available on my Substack Through A Glass Darkly.
- For more on this refer to Chapter 14 of my book “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set: The Birth of International Fascism and Anglo-American Foreign Policy”. ↑
- Breitman, Richard; Goda, Norman J.W. et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press, pg. 65. ↑
- Throughout this chapter anything marked in bold or underlined is to be considered ‘emphasis added.’ ↑
- Breitman, Richard; Goda, Norman J.W. et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press, pg. 249. ↑
- Generalplan Ost was the Nazi German government’s plan for the genocide and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale, and colonization of Central and Eastern Europe by Germans. It was to be undertaken in territories occupied by Germany during World War II. The plan was attempted during the war, resulting indirectly and directly in the deaths of millions by shootings, starvation, disease, extermination through labor, and genocide. However, its full implementation was not considered practicable during major military operations, and never materialized due to Germany’s defeat. “As a matter of fact, Hitler wanted to commit Genocide against the Slavic peoples, in order to colonize the East” [Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History by A. Dirk Moses, Berghahn Books, 2008, pg. 20.] ↑
- Breitman, Richard; Goda, Norman J.W. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives, pg. 74. ↑
- Breitman, Richard; Goda, Norman J.W. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives, pg. 75-76. ↑
- Snyder, Timothy. (2004) The Reconstruction of Nations. New Haven: Yale University Press, pg. 164. ↑
- Breitman, Richard; Goda, Norman J.W. et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press, pg. 250. ↑
- Ibid, pg. 250. ↑
- Ibid, pg. 251. ↑
- Breitman, Richard; Goda, Norman J.W. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives, pg. 78. ↑
- Breitman, Richard; Goda, Norman J.W. et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press, pg. 251. ↑
- Ibid, pg. 252. ↑
- Ibid, pg. 252. ↑
- Ibid, pg. 253. ↑
- Breitman, Richard; Goda, Norman J.W. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives, pg. 81. ↑
- Breitman, Richard; Goda, Norman J.W. et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press, pg. 254. ↑
- Breitman, Richard; Goda, Norman J.W. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives, pg. 76. ↑
- Ibid, pg. 87. ↑
- Ibid, pg. 89. ↑
As an ignorant outsider reading this all I can say is what a psychotic mess Ukraine has for a history. And now Jews run UkroNazis who once killed them with German Nazi help etc. etc., A poor outsider cannot follow all the twists and turns. But from my perspective they are all elitist and confused Nazis of one sort or the other, using each other when convenient and attacking each other when the opportunity arises. I would extend that observation to the US, UK, Western Europe, Israel, and undoubtedly others I don’t know about. I would just say it’s not a sustainable model for the development of a real and enduring human civilization.
This is very informative reading. It certainly explains a lot related to the clowns like Nuland and company and their motives. I could never put my finger on why elements of the US had such zeal for the Nazis in UKR. Now I know. Thank you.
Since we know all this,then how “should” we win? Will there be the Syria/Georgian solution of a frozen conflict? Let no one fool you on this. That solution is just another term for a Russian defeat. While Russia saved Assad from total defeat in 2015,8 years later US and terrorist forces still control 1/3 of Syria. And are busy looting it as I type this. The Syrian economy is a disaster because of the US for the population of Syria. And did I mention that Israel every few days or so bombs Syria at will. As to Georgia,while there has been no war as such since 2008. There is still a non-friendly to Russia regime in power there. And there was/is an open question of them still joining NATO. And some calls for them to join Ukraine in war against Russia (so far those calls are rejected by the not totally braindead leadership in Georgia.But the point is that there are still threats from Georgia).
No,the one and only adequate solution for this situation is a total Russian victory. Which ends any threat on the territory of the former Ukraine,neither NATO nor nazi threat. Only either a rump pro-Russian neutral state being formed out of West (and maybe Central Ukraine) Ukraine,or the entire rejoining of Ukraine into the RF will solve this problem.
Months ago I said I thought Ukrainian deaths among the military would be 300,000. And I got a lot of flack for that. People thinking I was way over estimating those numbers.Yet today people that we read estimate 120-157,000 dead among the Ukrainian forces today. And the fighting isn’t near to over.
So what to do with West Ukraine??
At the start of the SMO the population of that entire area was estimated at 8-9 million people. Probably 1,000,000 or more people have fled already. And of that 300,000 dead,at least half of them will be West Ukrainians.Which means the population will be closer to 7 million at the end. Probably 10% (or more) of those are Bandera supporters. And they will need to be dealt with. De-Banderization will need to be harsh,but it must be done.The USSR made a mistake after WWII. They worried about harming the “brotherly relationship” with the Ukrainians. And so didn’t deal with the Bandera/nazi elements in an adequate manner. We see the results of that failure today. For Russia’s future safety that mistake can’t be permitted to be made again.
Uncle Bob, with respect to you, there is no “winning” or “losing” outright in a battle such as this, this is in essence a war of good against evil – thus an eternal war. There will be no quick victory. In relation to Syria, the war was won, the real threat to Syrian statehood & independence were destroyed – in case you do not know, would it surprize you to know that ISIS was not a CIA creation? ISIS as an organisation evolved from the Iraq insurgency against the US. Their predecessor organisation ISI (which the US referred to as Al-Qaeda in Iraq) was at the height of the insurgency the most effective insurgent group against the US occupation. The ISIS that many think of today would not be credited with practically ejecting the US occupation out of Iraq, but that is a fact. I mention this to emphasise how nothing in this world is black or white. Syria is currently in control of most of its territory, that which it does not control – Idlib province, & Hasaka province, is a temporary & unsustainable situation, that is why Russia is in no rush to resolve those particular issues, they can wait. The western hemisphere has had imperial control over the world for 500 years, it is finally coming to an end, but one needs to be patient, these things do not happen as quickly as any of us would like.
Your wrong about ISIS, you don’t go deep enough. The foundation for ISIS was created by Patreus, as a civil war was formented in Iraq on exit in 2006. Shia vs Sunni. Sunni being the fraction groomed by the US against the Iranian backed Shias. Even Al-Qaeda in Iraq is an CIA invention. Originally part of justification for the 2003 invasion post 911.
As we read every cursed day, the U.S.-NATO sociopathic leadership continues to send more offensive weapons to escalate the Heroic War of Liberation against the Uka-Nazis. The Russian government along with the MOD (Ministry of Defense) must be pondering, “How do we make them stop?”
Now we have read that Russia has it all under control regardless of what munitions or personnel are sent into the Ukrainian charnel house. It appears the U.S. strategy is to tire the Russian civilian leadership, the military and the Russian people themselves since the economic sanctions gambit failed.
From the other side, the belief the inventories of western-made weapons and mercenaries will be depleted to a point that U.S.-NATO has nothing left to send and they will be forced to stop.
I don’t believe that to be the case.
In my opinion the answer is found in World War II history in central Europe. Stalin’s goal wasn’t just to defeat the Nazis in Russia but push on to take the German capital ahead of the Americans. Berlin was the prize back then and so must Kiev be now.
Zelenskyy will have surrendered if he is captured, killed or abdicates the capital.
Western Ukraine will become a rump, cut off from Kiev. President Putin may consider that a trade-off (or not).
If the Ukrainian leadership is gone by whatever means their is no geopolitical reason for the U.S. to continue, just like World War II ended in Europe after the Germans surrendered. Eastern Ukraine will elect a new leader and obviously a friend to Russia.
In 1979, the despot American puppet Shah of Iran was overthrown; he became an exiled leader and died in Egypt. When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power he communicated to the Carter Administration:
“You will see we are not in any particular animosity with the Americans,” said Khomeini, pledging his Islamic Republic will be “a humanitarian one, which will benefit the cause of peace and tranquility for all mankind.”
Russia must take Kiev and depose Zelenskyy to end the war. The U.S. will not stop and further escalation could become a continental (Europe or the U.S.A.) war if that doesn’t happen.
Thanks for posting. I have come to the very same conclusion myself. The keystone is Kiev.
This is FLASH TRAFFIC: Konstantin Gavrilov, the head of the Russia Delegation to the Organization for Security and Coorperation in Europe (OSCE) has just publicly thrown down the nuclear gauntlet to the collective west, in an official statement:
Gavrilov said that he has been instructed by his government to announce “We know that the Leopard-2 tank, as well as the Bradley and Marder infantry fighting vehicles, are armed with uranium-core armor-piercing projectiles, the use of which leads to [radioactive] contamination of the area, as happened in Yugoslavia and Iraq.
If such shells are delivered to Kyiv, we will consider this as the use of dirty nuclear bombs against Russia, with all the ensuing consequences.”
It is a fact that the US and NATO do have Depleted Beryllium and Depleted Uranium ammunition which is used as “armor piercing” and “bunker busting” projectiles. None of these projectiles causes a nuclear chain reaction, so there is no nuclear blast from them. HOWEVER, when these particular projectiles strike their target, the metal used to make the projectiles (Uranium and/or Beryllium) is so dense, that it punches through whatever it hits. AS THAT HAPPENS, layers of the projectile disintegrate into highly radioactive powder which then travels by air, polluting entire areas for decades.
In Afghanistan, when the US used such weapons against the hideouts of Osama Bin Laden, the projectiles went through hundreds of feet of rock in the mountains and shed layers of radioactive material as they penetrated. This radioactive powder then polluted the groundwater for miles inside Afghanistan, leading to contaminated wells, which then lead to horrifying birth defects in almost all pregnant women who drank the water.
These effects have been deliberately concealed from US citizens by a compliant US media, but they occurred AND ARE STILL OCCURRING to this very day.
Russia has just thrown down the nuclear gauntlet to the West.
The probability of a now-Nuclear exchange – and outright nuclear war — just got very, VERY, real.
Most military use of depleted uranium (DU) has been as 30 mm ordnance, primarily the 30 mm PGU-14/B armor-piercing incendiary round from the GAU-8 Avenger cannon of the A-10 Thunderbolt II used by the United States Air Force. 25 mm DU rounds have been used in the M242 gun mounted on the U.S. Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the Marine Corps LAV-25.
The U.S. Marine Corps uses DU in the 25 mm PGU-20 round fired by the GAU-12 Equalizer cannon of the AV-8B Harrier, and also in the 20 mm M197 gun mounted on AH-1 Cobra helicopter gunships. The United States Navy’s Phalanx CIWS’s M61 Vulcan Gatling gun used 20 mm armor-piercing penetrator rounds with discarding plastic sabots and a core made using depleted uranium, later changed to tungsten.
Another use of depleted uranium is in kinetic energy penetrators, anti-armor rounds such as the 120 mm sabot rounds fired from the British Challenger 1, Challenger 2, M1A1 and M1A2 Abrams. Kinetic energy penetrator rounds consist of a long, relatively thin penetrator surrounded by a discarding sabot. Staballoys are metal alloys of depleted uranium with a very small proportion of other metals, usually titanium or molybdenum. One formulation has a composition of 99.25% by mass of depleted uranium and 0.75% by mass of titanium. Staballoys are approximately 1.67 times as dense as lead and are designed for use in kinetic energy penetrator armor-piercing ammunition. The US Army uses DU in an alloy with around 3.5% titanium.
Depleted uranium is favored for the penetrator because it is self-sharpening and flammable. On impact with a hard target, such as an armored vehicle, the nose of the rod fractures in such a way that it remains sharp. The impact and subsequent release of heat energy causes it to ignite. When a DU penetrator reaches the interior of an armored vehicle, it catches fire, often igniting ammunition and fuel, killing the crew and possibly causing the vehicle to explode. DU is used by the U.S. Army in 120 mm or 105 mm cannons employed on the M1 Abrams tank. The Soviet/Russian military has used DU ammunition in tank main gun ammunition since the late 1970s, mostly for the 115 mm guns in the T-62 tank and the 125 mm guns in the T-64, T-72, T-80, and T-90 tanks.
The DU content in various ammunition is 180 g in 20 mm projectiles, 200 g in 25 mm ones, 280 g in 30 mm, 3.5 kg in 105 mm, and 4.5 kg in 120 mm penetrators. DU was used during the mid-1990s in the U.S. to make hand grenades, and land mines, but those applications have been discontinued, according to Alliant Techsystems. The US Navy used DU in its 20 mm Phalanx CIWS guns, but switched in the late 1990s to armor-piercing tungsten.
Only the US and the UK have acknowledged using DU weapons. 782,414 DU rounds were fired during the 1991 war in Iraq, mostly by US forces. In a three-week period of conflict in Iraq during 2003, it was estimated that between 1,000 and 2,000 tons of depleted uranium munitions were used. More than 300,000 DU rounds were fired during the 2003 war, the vast majority by US troops.
A Russian Navy ship in the Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda, conducted a simulated launch of a ZIRCON Hypersonic Missile against a “nautical target 900km away.” The Simulated launch involved the use of Electronic Warfare that actually JAMMED U.S. radar, cellular phones in the Mid-Atlantic USA, and even disrupted digital internet traffic for 34 seconds!
The Russian Navy Frigate “Admiral Gorshkov” tested the strike capabilities of Russia’s much-hyped Zircon hypersonic missile in the western Atlantic Ocean.
People in the mid-Atlantic region of the US experienced electronic warfare jamming of civilian devices like cellular phones and Internet for 34 seconds.
One source reports via COVERT INTEL “In accordance with the training situation, the frigate practiced arranging a ZIRCON hypersonic missile strike against a maritime target at a distance over 900 kilometers away.”
Ms. Chung’s writing is almost miraculously crisp and clear, and her research impeccable, as she lays bare the psychopathic roots of the conflict. Capitalism’s inherent flaws aside, almost everything that’s rotten in today’s world comes, one way or another, back to the CIA. Hard to conceive of a more malignant organization; the faster we feed it, the faster it consumes everything it touches.
I argued a while back that Russia would end by installing a new pro-Russian government in the rump Ukraine when this is all over. I also said I thought that the Russians might have found the candidate to lead that government in Victor Medvedchuk. I think this RT article is laying the groundwork for just that move:
‘There is another Ukraine’ – exiled opposition leader to RT
Vladimir Zelensky is carrying out the West’s plan of conflict with Russia, says Viktor Medvedchuk
https://www.rt.com/russia/570486-medvedchuk-another-ukraine-opposition/
Cynthia, this is an(other) EXCELLENT article that you have penned. The history of Ukraine is, imo, virtually unknown by the majority of people who consider themselves “well informed” (“I read the Washington Post, NY Times, watch ABCNNBCBS . . . ergo I must be way more informed & smarter than you, the average Putin propagandist / shill” seems to be their rather lame argument !!)
The dumbing down of & corrupting the morals in the West continues apace, throughout all levels of society. From the imposition of so called ‘sex education’ of the youngest which in reality is little more than the promotion of homosexuality, gender confusion, to encouraging the breakup of the family unit via govt financial support of single parent families. The ‘Global Warming / Climate Change’ propaganda via capture of the media & academia that will eventually lead the entire West “voting” themselves into carbon reducing ’15 minute’ cities which are nothing short of open air concentration camps is clearly obvious to anyone with more than 2 functioning brain cells who have been paying attention. The visceral hatred of President Putin & his Govt by the ‘leaders’ of the West & globalist entities (putting aside their anticipated looting of Russia) can easily (imo) be explained away by his support of traditional Christian values, his support of the nuclear family, of morality, of self reliance, everything that the ‘owners’ of the West have worked so hard to destroy in countries under their control.
I look forward to your next article Cynthia.
Cheers, Chris in Ch-Ch.
Thank You. Most thorough and extensive article on the Ukranian nationalist I’ve read. Great overview.