To be generous-spirited one can assume that those who displayed a Ukrainian flag on social media did so not in a spirit of fearful social media mimesis and conformity, but because they’ve been emotionally affected by images of war, were offended by Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of a sovereign nation, and wished to show solidarity to the suffering Ukrainian people. Anyone giving any kind of succour to Ukrainian civilians or refugees was only to be applauded, and the maximum in humanitarian aid should have been supported.
But that being said, one has to assume at least that they couldn’t have, in order to have displayed that flag, bene au fait with the aetiology of the conflict, be aware of the nuances and complexities involved, the recent history of the Ukraine, and the fact that the war’s chief architect, if it can be said to have one, is Victoria Nuland. To have displayed a Ukrainian flag, you allied yourself not with Ukrainian patriotism, but with authoritarianism, right-wing extremism, ethno-Nationalism and white suprematism.
Until the very eve of the current conflict, both the UN and the EU stated on their websites that Ukraine was an authoritarian state, not a democracy (as well as being the most corrupt state in Europe). Hungary is regularly condemned in the Anglo-American liberal press, yet the Ukraine was classed as less democratic than Hungary by both of these organisations. It seems crazy then that only days later there was much hysterical shrieking about the war being a fight for democracy, which became a mantra; it is anything but that – it was a war between two authoritarian states, one just happening to be bigger and stronger than the other.
Further, its people were the poorest in Europe, whilst at the same time its leader had made himself unimaginably wealthy in an extremely short time. This indigence wasn’t just the fault of its leaders: the IMF imposed a brutal austerity package, and Joe Biden, whilst VP, urged Ukraine’s leaders to raise the pension age, make swingeing privatisations and cut gas subsidies. (Biden, as a Senator, had also played a key role in arranging hearings of the Senate Foreign relations Committee to support a war in 2002: his Staff Director was Anthony Blinken, now his Secretary of State). The Ukraine was also Europe’s largest arms trafficking market, yet a huge number of weapons have been sent there: according to the CIA, much of it is now unaccounted for, that is, ‘missing’. According to the Cato Institute, the Ukraine is "at best… a corrupt, quasi‐democratic entity with troubling repressive policies", noting that the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion is an integral part of the state's military and security apparatus. What is ironic about this is that, until the start of the war, it was the left-liberal press that reported most on Ukrainian authoritarianism, poverty, and the strong presence of neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups.
In April 2022, a peace deal was on the table: Boris Johnson and Anthony Blinken immediately flew to Ukraine and ‘persuaded’ Zelensky to reject the deal, which would have meant the return of Crimea and an agreement from Ukraine not to seek to join NATO, something which had been promised to Russia by George W H Bush decades ago, and something essential to geopolitical stability. Johnson was quite blatantly trying to divert attention from Partygate. The rejection of this peace deal meant that many more thousands of Ukrainians have been killed: since then, the country has lost a full third of its population through death and displacement. Physically, the country has been destroyed. Yet no peace deal was every likely to have been a s beneficial to Ukraine.
Strange how mere patriotism at home is derided, but ultra-nationalism abroad was encouraged and celebrated, and by the same people. Anyone who doesn’t agree that the war should go on until Ukraine is victorious, who urges diplomacy and peace talks, who encourages nuance and looking at the complex history of Ukraine-Russian relations and the history of American involvement is moronically labelled as mouthing ‘Russian propaganda’. These people seem blithely unaware that innocent Ukrainians were being used as cannon fodder and that there was always a risk of a total Russian victory, something far worse than anything that will be achieved at peace talks.
Volodymyr Zelensky was the protégé of Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, who is currently under FBI investigation for financial crimes. Kolomoisky was one of the key funders of several notorious neo-Nazi and ultra-nationalist battalions, including the Azov, Aidar, Donbass, Dnepr 1, and Dnepr 2 that, in 2https://transparency.eu/corruption-opulence-and-decadence-in-ukraine/014, terrorized Russian speakers and maintained secret torture sites in Eastern Ukraine. These battalions have proved invaluable during the war as they are quite simply the most effective, well-trained fighters. Kolomoisky used to control one of the country's largest media conglomerates: the1+1 Media Group. In 2012, its 1+1" TV channel aired Zelensky's comedy show Kvartal 95. Zelensky has since turned on Kolomoisky, and it’s clear that before the war started, he was making moves to make Ukraine more democratic and less openly corrupt. However, since the war began, he has banned all opposition parties and shut down non-state news outlets, and since the war began US State Department consistently voiced concerns about human rights, including unlawful, arbitrary killing, censorship and torture.
There is much dirt on Zelensky. The CIA is well-aware of his corruption; as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh noted in an April 2023 Substack piece: "One estimate by analysts from the CIA put the embezzled funds at $400 million in 2022. Any peace deal would have been anathema to America, and if it had been struck the flow of billions ostensibly for arms, but largely untracked, would have stopped.” Hersh revealed on May 17 2023 that government officials in Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, and Latvia have called upon Zelensky to halt hostilities with Russia – even by resigning himself, if necessary – and begin the process of rebuilding Ukraine. Hersh based this information on unnamed American intelligence community operatives: "The European leaders have made it clear that 'Zelensky can keep what he's got' — a villa in Italy and interests in offshore bank accounts — if he works up a peace deal even if he's got to be paid off, if it's the only way to get a deal'," Hersh wrote on his Substack. The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s Pandora Papers revealed that since 2012 – when his tv production company collaborated with Igor Koliminsky - Zelensky and his close circle have been the beneficiaries of a network of offshore companies, making concerted efforts to conceal their earnings. Russian troops first began amassing on the Ukrainian border after Zelensky put Viktor Medvedchuk under house arrest, and It’s hard not to see this as calculated provocation and a kind of opening salvo: Medvedchuk was not merely friends with Putin, he was like family. It’s worth noting that Zelensky’s popularity was at 23 per cent at the time.
The main reason why liberals should never have flown their Ukraine flags, however, is the role that white nationalists, antisemites and neo-Nazi’s have played in Ukraine’s recent history, going back to the second world war. What spurred me into writing this article in the first place as a reading Dan Stone’s recent book Holocaust: An Unfinished History. Drawing on the latest archival research, it shows that the Holocaust was not just German. It was also Lithuanian, Polish, Croatian, and especially Romanian and Ukrainian, too, a part of and continuance of the Central European wide history of anti-Semitism and pogroms. As Tony Judt pointed out in his essay, The Problem of Evil in Post-war Europe explaining why Eastern Europe had, post-war, “turned their heads resolutely away from” the Holocaust: “…the worst crimes against the Jews were committed there, and although the crimes were sponsored by the Germans, there was no shortage of wiling collaborators among the local occupied nations: Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Croats and others”.
The difference between Germany and these other counties is that they didn’t undergo a process of de-Nazification; this is manifested in the network of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups across Central Europe, with Ukraine at its centre. The Holocaust was German-led we can now say, but not carried out solely by them. Killings were carried out by Lithuanians, Latvians and Romanians and Croat militia, as well as civilians and those who volunteered for the Einsatsgruppen. Treblinka was run by Ukrainians; here, more Jews were murdered than the total number in Western Europe during the whole course of the war. Some 200,000 Polish Jews were denounced or murdered by Polish Citizens, though the Polish Law and Justice Party has made it a crime to say so in Poland. There were the Romanian Bogdanovka Massacre and the Bucharest Pogrom of 1941, and the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Resurgent Army took part in large-scale killings of Jews in Belarius and Eastern Galicia. Four thousand Jews were shot in one day by Lithuanian collaborators at Penary in 1941.
Central Europe also had a history of pogroms and Jew-murdering before the second world war. Between 1918 and 1921 three million Jews, 12 per cent of the population, were murdered in Ukraine in 1000 pogroms, in what has been described as ‘a drunken carnival atmosphere’. Behind this were not just a fear of Jews as Jews but the usual conflation of Jewry with Bolshevism: anti-communism and anti-Semitism are still at the heart of Ukrainian nationalism. (As it turned out, Ukrainians were quite right to fear Bolshevism: in 1931-32, 3.9 million Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin’s enforced famine).
The neo-fascist Ukrainian National guard and the massive (and militarily efficient) fascist and white nationalist Azov battalion has active relationships with far-right groups round the world, including all US-based white supremacist groups. According to Christopher Wray, former Director of the FBI, the Azov movement has been training white supremacists from around the world since 2014: it has its own publishing house, two training camps and an enormous, and growing, arsenal of weapons, including artillery. It also has its own national militia, a vigilante force which patrolled Ukraine’s city streets before the war. What kind of progressive liberal displays the flag of a country that has extrajudicial, extreme right paramilitary death squads? (The decal some kidults put over their avatars declaiming ‘sometimes anti-social, always anti-fascist’ were the same who displayed Ukrainian flags).
The Azov regiment’s stated mission is to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival”. By now, three administrations have been providing training, weapons and equipment to this genuinely far-right movement.
What might astonish some who listened to the previous American administration’s statements about who they see as the most dangerous internal threat to the US (that is, the ‘far right’) is the fact that only Ukraine and the US voted against a UN draft resolution ‘combatting glorification of Nazis, neo-Nazism and other practises that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism’.
Ukrainian neo-Nazism, if it began an insurgency against the Russians after a Russian victory, would pose more of a threat the West than what is (nuclear weapons aside) a militarily and economically weak Russia as, like Isis and al-Qaeda, it would have global reach. Azov have stated frequently that they see their white supremacist mission as a global one. CIA sources say that it is following ‘models’ of former CIA-backed insurgencies in Afghanistan and Syria. This is creating a transnational white supremacist network. The CIA has been trying to create this insurgency since at least 2015; the CIA, in despite of Merrick Garland’s statements about the threat of far-right domestic terrorism, continues to train those with overt Neo-Nazi sympathies and connections. Cynics might say that this is in order to justify a new “war on domestic terror”. Anyone who has read Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars or Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, will know that this is all par for the course for the CIA or FBI. Weiner’s mind-boggling and addictive book on the FBI, Enemies, recounts how at one point in the early 60s the Klan had more FBI agents than genuine members.
In 2014 Ukraine’s democratically elected president was toppled in a US supported, if not backed coup. It was in response to this that the war in Donbas began, and Putin took the Crimea, in order to prevent it becoming a US naval base. The Crimea is of the utmost strategic importance to Russia; Putin may be paranoid, but it is Russia’s very weakness that makes Crimea and the Ukraine as base and buffer-zone respectively, so important to him. I find it hard to believe that anyone who has been watching with half an eye can doubt that the US was fighting a proxy war, callously using the Ukraine to weaken Russia and destabilise the region, with the familiar end-game of ‘regime change’. Neo-Nazis - the white nationalist Svodoba party and Right Sector (an umbrella for a range of far-right groups) - played a key role in the installation of the new regime, which without the violence of the far-right, would not have succeeded. The ostensible trigger for the insurrection was Viktor Yanukovych’s rejection of integration with the EU: but not only did this have less than half the population’s support, this move towards Europe would have meant this already immiserated country no longer getting discounted gas from Russia. The new government in Kiev contained high-ranking members who were dedicated fascists and white nationalists.
Victoria Nuland, as Assistant Secretary of State of Europe and European Affairs, actively interfered in Ukraine’s politics and destabilised the region prior to the coup, pouring billions of dollars into ‘pro-democracy’ organisations, a tried and tested tactic for instigating coups. Both she and John McCain took part in demonstrations against what was a democratically elected government, both seen standing alongside the white nationalist leader of Svoboda. A leaked phone call between Nuland and US Ambassador to the Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, advocated ‘regime change’ and it is no secret that Nuland, Biden’s Under Secretary for Political Affairs and former foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney, is one of the driving forces behind the US’s financial and military support of Ukraine.
Nuland is the wife of Robert Kagan, founder of the Project for a New American Century: this programme is still very much alive and the Ukraine, following Iraq, is now its locus. These neocons who have been wreaking havoc on the world since 2003 most certainly include Hillary Clinton (who is very close to Kagan, Nuland, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz): when she was at the State Department, she helped to create the insurgency in Syria and personally oversaw the destruction of Libya (making her one of the main architects of the European refugee crisis and the direction of European politics since).
Even without the Crimea and Donbas, Ukraine contains a large minority of Russians. Crimea is more than 60 per cent Russian and the majority of its citizen’s want to be part of Russia; they would, for one thing, be much less poor. There is without doubt an attempt to erase Russian language and culture within the Ukraine, something that made the calls by some in the West to reject Russian culture even more ugly: racial hatred by proxy. Like skin colour, language is in truth a glancingly negligible difference between human beings, but it’s hard to see any hope of forgetting small differences in the Ukraine whilst ultra-nationalists, white nationalists and neo-Nazis play any role in the country.
One result of this conflict is to have given a fillip to white nationalists in Europe and the US. An essential read is Seymour Hersh’s Substack; it was he that first made it evident that the US was behind the Nord Stream bombing. Once it became clear that the Russians hadn’t bombed their own pipeline, the Western media quietly forgot it, despite it also being one of the major ecological disasters of our times. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had nothing to say, despite the fact that it destroyed the German economy. Nord Stream 1 provided Germany with more than half of its energy needs.
The US – which has around 5 million people in extreme poverty, more than half a million homeless, and an opioid crisis of barely comprehensible proportions – has thus far given 183 billion to the Ukraine. Only 3.9 billion of that has been for humanitarian aid – the rest for killing, much of it, as was predicted, stolen. Obviously, the US has a strategic interest in the Ukraine, the money is not being given for humanitarian reasons, and certainly not to preserve democracy. But there are other benefits, for other players. US energy companies saw their profits rise 42% as a result of the war (whilst their domestic prices have risen sharply). Every time Congress votes for more money, much of it comes back to US arms companies as profit, and to those members of Congress who voted for the money to be given to Ukraine. The same game that was played in Iraq and Afghanistan. More blatant war profiteering is hard to imagine. There are twenty members of Congress that invested in Lockheed Martin and Raytheon shortly before the war. Republican John Rutherford purchased Raytheon stock the day before Ukraine was invaded – yet he sat on the House Appropriations Committee that oversees Federal Governments spending. Marjorie Taylor Green purchased her stock in Lockheed Martin just two days before the war began.
Peace negotiations being equated with appeasement is something heretofore only done by the most hawkish and warmongering, and will always be dangerous nonsense. What we saw up until now was a case of rational and delicate diplomacy, which is supposed to be the enlightened ideal of all foreign relations, being rejected in favour of disastrous provocation. For every day that the war continues, more Ukrainian civilians and soldiers on both sides will die. The place of white nationalism and neo-Nazism in this complicated nexus is clear and well-documented; a full victory for either side would result in the influence of these growing, and in the case of a Russian victory is likely to result in white nationalist terror attacks globally. A peace deal will give neither of these corrupt, authoritarian states exactly what they want. But the terrifying prospects of a hot war between the US and Russia or a nuclear strike on Ukraine would both be avoided, as would the chance of Ukraine becoming the locus of a global neo-Nazi insurgency, though sadly foreign white nationalists will continue to be trained in Ukraine whatever happens. Flag waving is crass at the best of times, but this particular flag was always heavily stained with Jewish blood and the most noxious political poison.
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