How the US government used Ukrainian neo-Nazis to build up anti-Russian sentiment

U.S. citizens: Demand Congress investigate soaring excess death rates

(LifeSiteNews) — Since the beginning of the war in Donbass in 2014, the presence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine has been observed as often as it has been denied.  

This is a phenomenon so well documented that even NBC said in 2020 that “Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem is real” – even if Vladimir Putin mentions it. Though claims persist that some Russian soldiers themselves sport Nazi tattoos, as Newsweek said in 2023, this does not match the scale of Ukrainian neo-Nazism, nor does it excuse its widespread influence.

Yet to this day, the issue remains difficult for some to accept. That is because the reality of Ukraine’s ultra-nationalism is an ugly one, which completely undermines the narrative of this war. 

Jewish Nazis?

One main objection to the long-standing and obvious presence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is that President Volodymyr Zelensky is himself Jewish.

So is the oligarch who backed him, and who is credited with shaping Zelensky’s pathway from popular comedian to politician, to president.

It was Igor Kolomoisky, the Jewish billionaire and former governor of Dnipropetrovsk, who promoted Zelensky. 

READ: Globalist elites are panicking over Ukraine now that reality has caught up to them

Bizarrely, Zelensky played a schoolteacher who became president in a TV series run on Kolomoisky’s channel. As the BBC reported in September 2023, “His TV channel gave Mr Zelensky his break with the comedy series Servant of the People.”

Its final series ran alongside Zelensky’s presidential campaign, merging fantasy with reality. Shortly before the election, Zelensky was “elected” in his television role.  

In real life, he also won the election. The name of his party? “Servant of the People” – as in the TV show. 

Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter produced a remarkable two-part series on Zelensky’s unusual rise to power, noting the close sponsorship of Kolomoisky and the interplay of media narratives with political reality. 

See Part 2, which includes references to Canadian participation, including that of Deputy Premier and WEF-aligned Christina Freeland.

This is a familiar pattern. Yet the media shapes reality not only by what it introduces into the popular imagination – but also by what it excludes.

The long-standing presence of openly neo-Nazi politicians and armed militias in Ukraine is often denied by the same Western media which used to routinely report on its dangerous and growing influence. U.S. politicians such as John McCain and Victoria Nuland were regularly photographed in the company of people such as Oleh Tyahnybok, leader of the extreme nationalist party Svoboda. 

Here is Joe Biden shaking hands with Tyahnybok in April 2014:

A picture of Joe Biden inappropriately touching a fascist.

Biden on 4/22/14 with Oleh Tyanhbok, then-leader of Ukraine’s ultra-right, Bandera-worshipping Svoboda Party. https://t.co/q9CgIw22Vy pic.twitter.com/JpehoM9kGX

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 31, 2019

The imagery used by Svoboda has changed, but its origins and politics are no secret. Formerly the Social-National Party of Ukraine, it changed its name to “Freedom” under Tyahnybok in 2004.

Why would such an obvious reality be denied to Western audiences? As we shall see, the story of Ukrainian neo-Nazism is one which reveals a long-standing U.S. strategy to shape anti-Russian sentiment in Ukraine, and whose sponsors played a major role in bringing its current president to power. This is a force which may continue to shape Ukraine even after the current war is over.

Zelensky’s sponsor, Igor Kolomoisky, also backs the Azov batallion. In 2014, German TV station ZDF showed this militia deployed wearing Nazi insignia:

Kolomoisky also has his own private militia, which he used to protect his powerful financial interests in Ukraine. 

On March 20, 2015, Reuters reported that Igor Kolomoisky had led “a group of armed men in combat fatigues” in a raid on the headquarters of the Ukrainian oil company UkrTransNafta.

This was in response to an ally of Kolomoisky’s being sacked from the board.  

The following week, a report by Vox said that Kolomoisky was running his own “private army,” the Dnipro battalion, and was involved in funding many others like it – including the notorious neo-Nazi Azov battalion.

British war history YouTuber Mark Felton has produced a video detailing the provenance of the Nazi insignia displayed to this day by the Azov batallion:

These private militias have largely been absorbed into the regular Ukrainian army. Some, like the Right Sector, refused in 2014 to even register with the Ukrainian government. Vox warned in 2015, following Kolomoisky’s raid, that “we just got a glimpse of how oligarch-funded militias could bring chaos to Ukraine,” saying that the threat was not only to state owned companies, but also to the government of Ukraine itself. 

Kolomoisky funds and directs a large private militia that has been helping the Kiev government fight against the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. Militias like his – and there are dozens of them – are a source of deep concern to analysts who believe they could threaten Ukraine’s long-term stability.

Newsweek reported in 2014 that there were “over 30 nationalist volunteer battalions, all funded by private investors.”

It noted that one sponsored by Kolomoisky – the Aidar battalion – had been accused by Amnesty International of “committing ISIS-style war crimes” eight years ago. Newsweek continued:

Armed volunteers who refer to themselves as the Aidar battalion ‘have been involved in widespread abuses, including abductions, unlawful detention, ill-treatment, theft, extortion, and possible executions’, Amnesty said.

Newsweek also claimed that Kolomoisky was behind them – and other militias also accused of beheading captured pro-Russian separatists.  

The Aidar battalion is publicly backed by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who also allegedly funds the Azov, Donbas, Dnepr 1, Dnepr 2 volunteer battalions, operating under orders from Kiev.

READ: Pope Francis and Donald Trump are right. Ukraine should be negotiating peace with Russia

Yet Amnesty also noted in its 2014 briefing that the militias acted with near total impunity: “[M]embers … act with virtually no oversight or control” from Kiev.

There is a political dimension to this autonomy, which would serve the sponsors of these militias well. In 2014, whilst embedded with the Azov battalion in Mariupol, The Guardian’s Shaun Walker wrote that “Azov fighters are Ukraine’s greatest weapon and may be its greatest threat.”

Walker said he found  “almost all” the Azov fighters to be intent on “bringing the fight to Kiev” when the war in eastern Ukraine was over.

Kolomoisky now faces criminal charges both in Ukraine and from the United States government related to financial corruption. He has been in custody since his arrest in Ukraine in September 2023, with the U.S. government placing sanctions upon him following FBI raids on his U.S. properties. 

Yet the neo-Nazi private armies he sponsored have grown in value to the Zelensky regime. 

The militias have been useful in the war against Russia, credited with fiercely motivated warfighting – but also accused of atrocities.  

Yet their origins have deeper and longer roots which reach far beyond Ukraine’s corrupting oligarchy. The project of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism is one in which the U.S. government has played a decades-long role. 

The reason the existence of nationalists in Ukraine is denied is because they not only exist, but their numbers were increased and their movement was encouraged by the same regime who tell you they were never there at all. 

Why is a Jewish U.S. State Department official supporting an anti-Semitic nationalist inspired by the Nazi Party? A poll in December 2013 – and cited in an E.U. report – showed that Tyahnybok would win the presidential election, beating the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovich.

Why did Svoboda become so popular in the first place? The U.S. has directly encouraged parties such as this, in a process which accelerated in 2004. Nationalism is the power behind the putsch which placed a U.S. proxy in Ukraine. 

And then to war. 

The roots of Ukrainian nationalism 

With its roots in the 19th century rule of Western Ukraine (Galicia) by Poland, by 1940 the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement (OUN) split in two. Founded to promote a Ukrainian national state, its two factions organised behind two men: Andrii Melnyk (OUN-M) and Stepan Bandera (OUN-B)^[1]

It is this latter faction, also known as “Banderites,” whose influence would shape the modern state of Ukraine – and whose support by the U.S. would see it mobilize for war against its own Russian-speaking populations – and ultimately Russia itself. 

Stepan Bandera’s deputy, Jaroslav Stetsko, formed a new army which he led to capture the Galician capital Lvov in Western Ukraine – now under Nazi occupation.

First deputy to Stepan Bandera in the OUN-B, Stetsko reported the following in a June 25, 1941, letter to the commander: “We are creating a militia which will help remove the Jews” – the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA. 

Together with Theodore Oberländer, an Abwehr liaison officer with Ukrainian punitive detachments, Stetsko led the Nachtigall battalion in its attack on Lvov.

READ: How the US government is thwarting peace efforts in Ukraine and Israel

On June 30, 1941, at 8:00pm, that is, a week into Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, Stetsko “on behalf of the Ukrainian people and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under the leadership of Stepan Bandera” issued the “The Act of the Proclamation of the Ukrainian State” and appointed himself prime minister of the “Ukrainian government.”

Taken in defiance of Hitler, this led to Stepan Bandera’s imprisonment. Following his release, Bandera would settle in postwar West Germany. He would be assassinated by the KGB in Munich in 1959. 

His deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, found his way to a new life in the United States, with an involvement in the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). He was welcomed as a hero by the Reagan administration and met U.S. Vice President George H.W. Bush. 

He was a regular attendee of the U.S. Captive Nations Week, held since 1953. His visit to this U.S. government anti-communist initiative in 1981 is recorded in the Washington Post here.

Two years later, at the same event, he would meet the young Katerina Chumachenko – now director of the ABN, and also of the Ukrainian National Information Service (UNIS).

This lobbying group, founded in 1977, exists to promote Ukrainian national interests as coterminous with those of the U.S.

The daughter of Ukrainian emigrants to the U.S., she went on to play a key role in the U.S.-backed 2004 “Orange Revolution,” which toppled Ukrainian presidential candidate Yanukovich.

How did she achieve such influence? 

As one study in 2007 put it^[2]: 

U.S. administrations are peppered with American officials from ethnic communities who lobby for the Orange movements in their ethnic homelands, as the geopolitical aspirations of these movements largely coincide with U.S. national security interests. This was evident during the Ukrainian crisis in late 2004, when officials of Ukrainian descent and their NGO allies lobbied a reluctant Bush administration. These include Paula Dobriansky (daughter of the legendary activist Lev) at the State Department, Nadia Diuk at the National Endowment for Democracy, Taras Kuzio at George Washington University, and Adrian Karatnycky at Freedom House. One of these key Ukrainian-American activists is Katherine Chumachenko, the current first lady of Ukraine. [Emphasis added.]

Her career took her from the anti-Bolshevik movement through the U.S. State Department and USAID, and finally to the top of the Ukrainian government. A “chance” meeting with Viktor Yushchenko led to their marriage in 1993.

According to The Guardian, this “color revolution” was indeed assisted by NGOs, partnered with U.S. deep state organizations:

The Democratic party’s National Democratic Institute, the Republican party’s International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAID are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros’s open society institute.

The process is legitimized by U.S. election experts:

US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organize focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy.

READ: The incredible Catholic conversion story of a US volunteer in Ukraine

Following the “color revolution” in Ukraine, Katerina Chumachenko’s new husband, Viktor Yushchenko, became president. She would go on to foster a Ukrainian nationalism whose renascence was a key feature in the continuing project to destabilize Russia.

Her story is one which illustrates how the machinery of anti-communism was – and is – used to topple and subvert governments at home and abroad.

Anti-communism became the big business of regime change, whose wars, subterfuge, and parallel economy would shape world affairs and result in the complete corruption of American democracy at home.

The U.S. Government Committee on Foreign Affairs discussed Chumachenko, and her husband’s administration, in a 2016 paper titled “Corruption – A Danger to Democracy.”^[3]

In it, Dana Rohrabacher, chairman of the Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats, had this to say:

And let me just note that Cathy Chumachenko, who worked with me in the Reagan White House, turned out to be First Lady, and she and her husband, who came into power after that, the Orange Revolution, as has been indicated in the testimony, their administration was so corrupt that the people of Ukraine ended up voting for Yanukovych in the next election.

And Yanukovych, I might add, was democratically elected, OSCE verified it. However, he didn’t leave office in a democratic election. He left office because there was a violent revolution that started in Maidan…

Rohrabacher, who was present at the Maidan of the “Orange Revolution” in 2004, issued a solemn warning seven years ago on the fate of Ukraine:

Yanukovych deserved to be removed by his people, because he was as corrupt as the people who he replaced, who were as corrupt as the people they replaced. And I am not sure how that bodes well in the future for Ukraine, because the information I am getting now is that the current government is also deeply engaged in corrupt practices and the sending of large amounts of money to European banks.

The machinery of the death of nations

The corruption in Ukraine inherited the bureaucratic mechanisms of corruption under the Soviet Union. It has been fueled – not reformed – by vast amounts of U.S. and Western “aid,” creating a parallel system of government which displaces the visible structures of the state with a system of organized fraud and plunder.

The present-day corruption of the American Empire is also a Cold War legacy. The machinery of anti-communism not only failed to destabilize Russia, it has also transformed into an industry which has normalized the patronage of U.S. politics with the financing of foreign wars.

This shadow foreign policy has captured the U.S. State Department, and the mainstream media which conceals the facts from the populations who pay in blood and in treasure for its many adventures. This is the legacy of regime change whose fake news celebrates every foreign slaughter as a victory, in a series of wars it never wins.

Ukraine’s corruption continues to the present day. So does that of the neocons in the United States, whose politicians and media echo the Banderite call of “Slava Ukraini, heroyam slava,” as a nation is sent to its death.

U.S. citizens: Demand Congress investigate soaring excess death rates