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Written by Uriel Araujo, PhD, anthropology researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts
Meli Kaylan, a journalist writing for Forbes, warns that, with a cease-fire, Zelensky risks suffering a coup from the Ukrainian far-right over the issue of Donbass and Crimea. His piece is actually titled “Moscow’s hidden plans for exploiting a ceasefire with Ukraine”, and a cursory reading might leave the reader with the impression that he is writing about some evil Russian plan to support a Fascist coup d’état in Ukraine. It is a little more complicated than that, though – if one is able to read between the lines.
Kaylan argues that if Zelensky “is forced to cede the occupied territories pro-tem in exchange for promises of joining Nato”, then “ultra-nationalist elements of the army” would “revolt and stage a coup against Zelensky for giving away Donbas and Crimea.” In this scenario, those evil Russians, he argues, could exploit the situation, and so on. Kaylan does not elaborate on who these “ultra-nationalists” are. If one knows and understands the premises behind such a scenario, however, the picture becomes clear enough: Kaylan is talking about a regime that is, at the very least, hostage to neo-fascists, neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists militias. What he is basically arguing (implicitly) is that since at least 1945, much of the world (and the West particularly, one would assume) does not like such kind of people. Most people simply don’t like ultra-nationalists and Nazis, and thus, “Russian propaganda” could cunningly exploit that inconvenient fact for its own evil purposes. One must admit it is a very peculiar way of denouncing “Russian propaganda”.
The “ultra-nationalists elements of the army” mentioned by Kaylan do exist, however. Let us recall that shortly after taking the oath as Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky was the target of a quite public threat from the nation’s armed far-right, namely from Dmytro Yarosh, then adviser to no less than Valerii Zaluzhny, who at the time was the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In an interview to Ukrainian news portal Obozrevatel, Yarosh, who is also a former commander of the far-right Ukrainian Volunteer Army (UVA), said that the President would “lose his life” and end up “hanging on a tree on Khreshchatyk” if he ever “betrayed” Ukrainian nationalists by negotiating with Moscow to end the civil war in Donbass. This is what Meli Kaylan means by “ultra-nationalists”. This kind of guys.
In October 2022, there was already some controversy about the aforementioned General Valerii Zaluzhnyi being “photographed with far-right paraphernalia.” Zaluzhnyi was dismissed in February 2024 when Zelensky named a new Army Chief. Shortly after that, the General was photographed being awarded by the 67th OMBR “DUK”, a part of the 67th Separate Mechanized Brigade, formed by the so-called “Right Sector” paramilitary. The photograph might strike Westerns as being quite Fascistic – but it is very normal in post-Maidan Ukraine. The aforementioned Brigade itself was after all based on the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps (UVK), the armed wing of the Right Sector. Of course it employs fascist aesthetics and symbology. In 2015 media outlets such as the BBC and Reuters were reporting on the tensions in Ukraine over the rise of Yarosh (who went all to become an adviser to the general). The same year, Forward described him as an anti-semite. Yarosh was also on Interpol’s “wanted” list for “public incitement to extremist activities” and “public incitement to terrorist activities”. General Valerii Zaluzhnyi was appointed as Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom in March, and Yarosh remains active in Ukrainian politics.
Let us recall that when Zelensky was elected, Volodymyr Groysman served as his First Minister for a short period of time, thereby briefly making Ukraine the only country in the world (other than Israel) led by a Jewish head of state and a Jewish head of government. It is also the only country in the world whose state has legalized neo-nazi militias, making them part of the National Guard while keeping their symbology. And it is arguably the only state in the world which officially glorifies genocidal Nazi collaborators, a matter which to this day sours its otherwise good relations with neighboring Poland. For example, just last month, Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, called on Kyiv to allow the exhumation of victims of the so-called Volhynia massacres (during WWII, Ukrainian nationalists massacred about 100,000 ethnic Poles).
In January 2023, The New Statesman featured a story about the country’s “problematic nationalist heroes” (quite the euphemism), which also mentioned that “the official parliamentary Twitter account shared a photo of Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, under a portrait of Bandera. The caption directly linked the present war to Bandera’s fight against the Soviet Union: ‘The complete and final victory of Ukrainian nationalism will come when the Russian empire ceases to exist’.”
The story also lets the reader know that Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), under the leadership of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), “was responsible for the massacre of up to 100,000 Poles and tens of thousands of Jews during the war” and that both organizations “collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of western Ukraine.” One might reason that it is rather awkward for a General serving under a Jewish President to glorify Nazi collaborators and to be photographed with neo-Fascists – but again, this is post-2014 Ukraine, a country that is simply not for beginners.
It is about time to acknowledge the peculiar nature of the post-Maidan regime. Doing so, however, would surely complicate Western propaganda efforts and war rhetoric. The price for not doing so, on the other hand, has been to normalize things like the Canadian Parliament giving a standing ovation to a Nazi SS war veteran (that is, Yaroslav Hunka, who fought in the SS Division Galicia of the Waffen-SS). As the saying goes, “to hide a lie, a thousand lies are needed” – the lie being the Western propaganda notion that there is no such thing as an (often neo-Nazi) radical ethnic nationalism problem in Ukraine. There is – it has also been aided, armed, funded and whitewashed by the West and it has been a huge part of the crisis since 2014.
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idiots. dont they know the germans thought they were vermin. they only let them join the fight in 1943 when they needed idiots to fight the russian advance. oops.. history repeats itself.
wait a minute!
i have been told here in the us that there are no nazis in ukraine and that its all russian, nay, putins propaganda!
how is this possibruuuu?!
ukraine is not the only country that glorifies fascists and nazis, serbia does it as well. that shithole of a country is a stain on the world