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© Alexandr Maksimenko/RIA Novosti
Azov battalion soldiers take an adjuration of allegiance to Ukraine in Kiev's Sophia Foursquare before beingness sent to the Donbass region

French President Emmanuel Macron claimed in his Wed address to the nation that Russia'due south 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 altogether deny the problem of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism.

Ukraine's ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi battalions made headlines afterward the 2014 February coup d'etat in the country just to exist largely overlooked and downplayed in the ensuing years by the mainstream media.

"Far-right, anti-Semitic, anti-Russian, and openly fascist groups have existed and practise exist equally a bane on modern Ukraine", CNN wrote in March 2014. It quoted a 2012 European Parliament resolution raising eighteen points of concern over policies embedded in the laws of the nation'due south parliament, and denounced "the rising nationalistic sentiment in Ukraine".

CNN admitted that Ukraine's ultra-nationalist parties and groups, including Svoboda and the Right Sector ultra-nationalists, played a significant part in the 2014 regime change in Kiev and later assumed positions in the National Security and Defense Quango, the part of the Prosecutor General, and the ministries of ecology and agriculture of the interim government.

Shortly after the coup, Ukraine saw the formation of volunteer nationalist battalions that carried out attacks against the breakaway Donbass republics and terrorised Eastern Ukrainian civilians. 1 of them, Azov, was led by Andriy Biletsky, former leader of the Kharkov branch of "the Stepan Bandera All-Ukrainian Organisation 'Tryzub'" and co-founder of the ultra-nationalist movement, the Social-National Assembly.

Biletsky was quoted equally maxim in 2010 that Ukraine's mission was to "atomic number 82 the white races of the world in a final cause...confronting Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans]". He was a member of the postal service-coup Ukrainian Parliament betwixt 2014 and 2019. Azov formally joined the Ukrainian National Baby-sit in 2014.

The Azov regiment, that even so proudly wears the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel insignia, is notorious for attacking and displacing residents in eastern Ukraine, annexation civilian property, besides equally raping and torturing detainees in Donbass, according to a 2016 UN report by the High Commissioner for Man Rights (OCHA).

Ukrainian nationalist organisations and political movements take been disseminating their ideology among young people with Kiev's backing 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. Every bit the Ukrainian outlet STRANA.ua noted in 2020, the nationalist projects were due to receive viii million hryvnia ($266,416) which is almost half of all the funds allocated by the Ukrainian government for children's and youth organisations.

The ministry'due south 2020 listing also included the project "Unconquered" - named in accolade 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 Army (UPA)*. Both OUN and UPA are infamous for collaborating with Nazi Deutschland and conducting the ethnic cleansing of Jews, Russians, Roma, and Poles in the Nazi-occupied territories of Ukraine during WWII.

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

Subsequently the western-backed Orangish Revolution, President Viktor Yushchenko altered 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 Courtroom 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 take been erected and streets named after former Nazi collaborators in Ukraine.

On 16 December 2021, the United nations General Assembly discussed a resolution that called to gainsay the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism, and other practices that fuel racism and xenophobia. The simply two countries that voted against information technology were the US and 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 correct. Information technology was formed out of a number of radical nationalist and fascist groups and was, initially, led by war veterans, frustrated past their failure to plant a Ukrainian land 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".

According to Rudling, there is no doubt that OUN was a "fascist" organization from its inception. The idea of racial purity was a leitmotif of OUN's credo. The Ukrainian nationalist printing regularly carried anti-Semitic articles since the 1930s. Later on the Nazi occupation of Ukraine in 1941, OUN teamed up with them and went on an ethnic cleansing spree in the occupied territories."

The Nachtigall Battalion, consisting almost exclusively of OUN(b) activists serving in German uniforms under Shukhevych's command, carried out mass shootings of Jews near 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 xiii,000 and 35,000".

On 29-thirty September 1941, Nazi forces and their Ukrainian collaborators executed nearly 34,000 Jews in Babi Yar, a ravine in the Ukrainian upper-case letter Kiev.

© Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP
A view of the Babyn (Babi) Yar Holocaust Memorial Heart in Kyiv on March 2, 2022

From 1943 and until the arrival of the Soviet Army, OUN - and its military fly, UPA - had carried out massive ethnic 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 subcontract tools - scythes, knives, and pitchforks. Orthodox priests blest such weapons in their churches. The bodies were often desperately mutilated...in club to dehumanise the victim and strike terror", noted the historian.

Co-ordinate 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 U.s. State Department sponsored Lebed's 1949 immigration into the US and shielded him from prosecution, according to Rudling.

After the defeat of Nazi Frg in 1945, members of OUN and their paramilitary UPA units joined foreign subversive groups, propaganda outlets, and intelligence agencies to fight confronting the USSR during the Cold State of war.

In 1956, the CIA incorporated a prepare of networks under Lebed's leadership and created the non-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 writer pointed out. They created historic forgeries and myths most the OUN and UPA being pluralistic and inclusive organisations which rescued Jews during the Holocaust and fought shoulder to shoulder against Hitler and Stalin. After the collapse of the USSR, these narratives started filling the gap left by Soviet ideology in a new Ukrainian land.

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

The problem, all the same, is that despite the manipulations of history, the fascist roots of Ukrainian radical nationalism never went away, co-ordinate to the historian. The ideological heirs of the OUN-UPA got their outset risk to receive government recognition under Viktor Yushchenko and so, after the four-year presidency of Viktor Yanukovich they returned to the stage to hijack even more ability and penetrate the fabric of Ukrainian society.

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

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Source: https://www.sott.net/article/465179-Why-is-the-West-silent-about-Ukrainian-neo-Nazi-movements-Azov-Battalion-the-Bandera-legacy