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petro poroshenko
US House Admits Nazi Role in Ukraine
Jun 14, 2015
Last February, when ethnic Russian rebels were closing in on the Ukrainian port of Mariupol, the New York Times rhapsodically described the heroes defending the city and indeed Western civilization - the courageous Azov battalion facing down barbarians at the gate. What the Times didn't tell its readers was that these "heroes" were Nazis, some of them even wearing Swastikas and SS symbols.
The long Times article by Rick Lyman fit with the sorry performance of America's "paper of record" as it has descended into outright propaganda - hiding the dark side of the post-coup regime in Kiev. But what makes Lyman's sadly typical story noteworthy today is that the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives has just voted unanimously to bar U.S. assistance going to the Azov battalion because of its Nazi ties.
When even the hawkish House of Representatives can't stomach these Nazi stormtroopers who have served as Kiev's tip of the spear against the ethnic Russian population of eastern Ukraine, what does that say about the honesty and integrity of the New York Times when it finds these same Nazis so admirable?
And it wasn't like the Times didn't have space to mention the Nazi taint. The article provided much color and detail - quoting an Azov leader prominently - but just couldn't find room to mention the inconvenient truth about how these Nazis had played a key role in the ongoing civil war on the U.S. side. The Times simply referred to Azov as a "volunteer unit."
Yet, on June 10, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bipartisan amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act - from Reps. John Conyers Jr., D-Michigan, and Ted Yoho, R-Florida - that would block U.S. training of the Azov battalion and would prevent transfer of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to fighters in Iraq and Ukraine.
"I am grateful that the House of Representatives unanimously passed my amendments last night to ensure that our military does not train members of the repulsive neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, along with my measures to keep the dangerous and easily trafficked MANPADs out of these unstable regions," said Conyers on Thursday.
He described Ukraine's Azov Battalion as a 1,000-man volunteer militia of the Ukrainian National Guard that Foreign Policy Magazine has characterized as "openly neo-Nazi" and "fascist." And Azov is not some obscure force. Ukraine's Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who oversees Ukraine's armed militias, announced that Azov troops would be among the first units to be trained by the 300 U.S. military advisers who have been dispatched to Ukraine in a training mission codenamed "Fearless Guardian."
White Supremacy
On Friday, a Bloomberg News article by Leonid Bershidsky noted that "it's easy to see why" Conyers "would have a problem with the military unit commanded by Ukrainian legislator Andriy Biletsky: Conyers is a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Biletsky is a white supremacist. ...
"Biletsky had run Patriot of Ukraine [the precursor of the Azov battalion] since 2005. In a 2010 interview he described the organization as nationalist 'storm troops' ... The group's ideology was 'social nationalism' -- a term Biletsky, a historian, knew would deceive no one. ...
"In 2007, Biletsky railed against a government decision to introduce fines for racist remarks: 'So why the "Negro-love" on a legislative level? They want to break everyone who has risen to defend themselves, their family, their right to be masters of their own land! They want to destroy the Nation's biological resistance to everything alien and do to us what happened to Old Europe, where the immigrant hordes are a nightmare for the French, Germans and Belgians, where cities are "blackening" fast and crime and the drug trade are invading even the remotest corners.'"
The Bloomberg article continued, "Biletsky landed in prison in 2011, after his organization took part in a series of shootouts and fights. Following Ukraine's so-called revolution of dignity last year, he was freed as a political prisoner; right-wing organizations, with their paramilitary training, played an important part in the violent phase of the uprising against former President Viktor Yanukovych. The new authorities -- which included the ultra-nationalist party Svoboda -- wanted to show their gratitude.
"The war in the east gave Biletsky's stormtroopers a chance at a higher status than they could ever have hoped to achieve. They fought fiercely, and last fall, the 400-strong Azov Battalion became part of the National Guard, receiving permission to expand to 2,000 fighters and gaining access to heavy weaponry. So what if some of its members had Nazi symbols tattooed on their bodies and the unit's banner bore the Wolfsangel, used widely by the Nazis during World War II?
"In an interview with Ukraine's Focus magazine last September, Avakov, responsible for the National Guard, was protective of his heroes. He said of the Wolfsangel: 'In many European cities it is part of the city emblem. Yes, most of the guys who assembled in Azov have a particular worldview. But who told you you could judge them? Don't forget what the Azov Battalion did for the country. Remember the liberation of Mariupol, the fighting at Ilovaysk, the latest attacks near the Sea of Azov. May God allow anyone who criticizes them to do 10 percent of what they've done. And anyone who's going to tell me that these guys preach Nazi views, wear the swastika and so on, are bare-faced liars and fools.'"
Though the House vote on June 10 may have shined a spotlight into this dark corner of the U.S.-embraced Kiev regime, the reality has been well-known for many months - though played down in most of the Western news media, often dismissed as "Russian propaganda."
Even the Times has included at least one brief reference to this reality, though buried deep inside an article. On Aug. 10, 2014, a Times' article mentioned the Nazi taint of the Azov battalion in the last three paragraphs of a lengthy story on another topic.
"The fighting for Donetsk has taken on a lethal pattern: The regular army bombards separatist positions from afar, followed by chaotic, violent assaults by some of the half-dozen or so paramilitary groups surrounding Donetsk who are willing to plunge into urban combat," the Times reported.
"Officials in Kiev say the militias and the army coordinate their actions, but the militias, which count about 7,000 fighters, are angry and, at times, uncontrollable. One known as Azov, which took over the village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag." [See Consortiumnews.com's "NYT Discovers Ukraine's Neo-Nazis at War."]
A Shiver Down the Spine
The conservative London Telegraph offered more details about the Azov battalion in an article by correspondent Tom Parfitt, who wrote: "Kiev's use of volunteer paramilitaries to stamp out the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk 'people's republics'... should send a shiver down Europe's spine.
"Recently formed battalions such as Donbas, Dnipro and Azov, with several thousand men under their command, are officially under the control of the interior ministry but their financing is murky, their training inadequate and their ideology often alarming. The Azov men use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf's Hook) symbol on their banner and members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites."
Based on interviews with militia members, the Telegraph reported that some of the fighters doubted the reality of the Holocaust, expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and acknowledged that they are indeed Nazis.
Biletsky, the Azov commander, "is also head of an extremist Ukrainian group called the Social National Assembly," according to the Telegraph article which quoted a commentary by Biletsky as declaring: "The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen."
In other words, for the first time since World War II, a government had dispatched Nazi storm troopers to attack a European population - and officials in Kiev knew what they were doing. The Telegraph questioned Ukrainian authorities in Kiev who acknowledged that they were aware of the extremist ideologies of some militias but insisted that the higher priority was having troops who were strongly motivated to fight. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Ignoring Ukraine's Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers."]
But a rebel counteroffensive led by ethnic Russians last August reversed many of Kiev's gains and drove the Azov and other government forces back to the port city of Mariupol, where Foreign Policy's reporter Alec Luhn also encountered the Nazis. He wrote:
"Blue and yellow Ukrainian flags fly over Mariupol's burned-out city administration building and at military checkpoints around the city, but at a sport school near a huge metallurgical plant, another symbol is just as prominent: the wolfsangel('wolf trap') symbol that was widely used in the Third Reich and has been adopted by neo-Nazi groups. ...
"Pro-Russian forces have said they are fighting against Ukrainian nationalists and 'fascists' in the conflict, and in the case of Azov and other battalions, these claims are essentially true."
SS Helmets
More evidence continued to emerge about the presence of Nazis in the ranks of Ukrainian government fighters. Germans were shocked to see video of Azov militia soldiers decorating their gear with the Swastika and the "SS rune." NBC News reported: "Germans were confronted with images of their country's dark past ... when German public broadcaster ZDF showed video of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi symbols on their helmets in its evening newscast.
"The video was shot ... in Ukraine by a camera team from Norwegian broadcaster TV2. 'We were filming a report about Ukraine's AZOV battalion in the eastern city of Urzuf, when we came across these soldiers,' Oysten Bogen, a correspondent for the private television station, told NBC News. "Minutes before the images were taped, Bogen said he had asked a spokesperson whether the battalion had fascist tendencies. 'The reply was: absolutely not, we are just Ukrainian nationalists,' Bogen said."
Despite the newsworthiness of a U.S.-backed government dispatching Nazi stormtroopers to attack Ukrainian cities, the major U.S. news outlets have gone to extraordinary lengths to excuse this behavior, with the Washington Post publishing a rationalization that Azov's use of the Swastika was merely "romantic."
This curious description of the symbol most associated with the depravity of the Holocaust and the devastation of World War II can be found in the last three paragraphs of a Post lead story published in September 2014. Post correspondent Anthony Faiola portrayed the Azov fighters as "battle-scarred patriots" nobly resisting "Russian aggression" and willing to resort to "guerrilla war" if necessary.
The article found nothing objectionable about Azov's plans for "sabotage, targeted assassinations and other insurgent tactics" against Russians, although such actions in other contexts are regarded as terrorism. The extremists even extended their threats to the government of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko if he agrees to a peace deal with the ethnic Russian east that is not to the militia's liking.
"If Kiev reaches a deal with rebels that they don't support, paramilitary fighters say they could potentially strike pro-Russian targets on their own -- or even turn on the government itself," the article stated.
The Post article - like almost all of its coverage of Ukraine - was laudatory about the Kiev forces fighting ethnic Russians in the east, but the newspaper did have to do some quick thinking to explain a photograph of a Swastika gracing an Azov brigade barracks. So, in the last three paragraphs of the story, Faiola reported: "One platoon leader, who called himself Kirt, conceded that the group's far right views had attracted about two dozen foreign fighters from around Europe.
"In one room, a recruit had emblazoned a swastika above his bed. But Kirt ... dismissed questions of ideology, saying that the volunteers -- many of them still teenagers -- embrace symbols and espouse extremist notions as part of some kind of 'romantic' idea."
Despite these well-documented facts, the New York Times excised this reality from its article about the Azov battalion's defense of Mariupol last February. But isn't the role of Nazis newsworthy? In other contexts, the Times is quick to note and condemn any sign of a Nazi resurgence in Europe. However, in Ukraine, where neo-Nazis, such as Andriy Parubiy served as the coup regime's first national security chief and Nazi militias are at the center of regime's military operations, the Times goes silent on the subject.
Rather than fully inform its readers about a crisis that has the potential of becoming a nuclear showdown between the United States and Russia, the Times has chosen to simply be a fount of State Department propaganda, often terming any reference to Kiev's Nazi storm troopers to be "Russian propaganda." Now, however, a unanimous U.S. House of Representatives -- of all things -- has acknowledged the unpleasant truth.
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As G1+6 Opens in Bavaria, Will 'Junior Members' Act Like Adults?
Jun 07, 2015
President Barack Obama arrives in Germany Sunday to meet with the leaders of Germany, France, Italy, the UK, Japan, and Canada at a resort in Bavaria for the "G-7 summit."
This particular genre of summit was formerly known as the "G-8." But that was before the U.S. succeeded in blaming Russia for the violent aftermath of the U.S./EU sponsored coup d'etat in Kiev on Feb. 22, 2014, and managed to get Russia disinvited last year.
Stakes Higher Than Usual
We shall have to wait until the two-day gathering in Bavaria is over to gauge the results. But the stakes are high and - for once - it is conceivable that the U.S. will suffer a significant setback in its continuing, if increasingly quixotic, effort to exploit recent violence in Ukraine to isolate Russia.
What the summit outcome is likely to show - figuratively speaking - is whether "G-7" should be more realistically labeled "G-1-plus-six." Number 1 being, what Obama continues to call the "only indispensable country in the world"; the "six" being those countries Russian President Vladimir Putin has labeled Washington's "junior partners."
The main question is whether Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, who have witnessed, up-front-and-personal, the behavior of Washington's neocon policymakers and their Ukrainian tools, will summon the courage to act like adults.
Will the leaders of Germany and France continue to bend to the U.S. diktat? Or are they more likely, this time, to stand up on their own four feet and resist pressure from the U.S. and its UK lackey for continued punitive economic sanctions against Russia? Never mind the economic harm they do to Germany and France and other European countries.
Ukraine's Poroshenko No Stranger
Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande have had the chance personally to take the measure of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his client relationship with the U.S. At a very different kind of summit on Feb. 11-12 in Belorussia, with only puppet Poroshenko reflecting U.S. objectives, they worked out with him and Putin the so-called "Minsk II" package agreement that included a ceasefire that has pretty much held - until just recently.
Merkel and Hollande are no political novices. And, if they know their history, they know what a Petain or a Quisling looks like. In any case, they cannot have failed to recognize what Poroshenko looks like, and how he continues to do the bidding of the neocons running U.S. policy on Ukraine, who remain hell-bent on demonizing Putin and ostracizing Russia - all with little heed to the economic and the longer-term security interests of "junior partners" like Germany and France.
The German and French leaders - and of course Putin - are acutely aware of which side would see advantage in the current, pre-summit uptick in violations of the ceasefire in southeastern Ukraine. It is a safe bet they see the increased fighting as a transparently convenient cudgel in Washington's toolkit for use in its transparent effort to isolate Russia by blaming it for the violations and convincing U.S. "junior partners" of the need for continued economic sanctions.
The Roots of the Trouble in Ukraine
Europeans have a giant economic stake in what happens at the "G1-plus-six" summit in Bavaria. The trouble is that European press coverage of Ukraine is almost as poor as the thin gruel served up in U.S. media.
Odd as it strikes me, having analyzed Soviet propaganda for decades, the fawning corporate media in the U.S. have recently proven to be at least as adept at spreading half-truth and lies. Would you believe President Putin's account of what went down in Kiev since early 2014 is far more factually based? Well, you ought to believe that, because it is.
Here are excerpts from an interview Putin gave on June 6 to the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera:
"What sparked the [Ukraine] crisis? Former President Viktor Yanukovych said that he needed to think about signing Ukraine's Association Agreement with the EU, possibly make some changes and hold consultations with Russia, Ukraine's major trade and economic partner. In this connection and under this pretext riots broke out in Kiev. They were actively supported by both our European and American partners.
"Then a coup d'etat followed - a totally anti-constitutional act. ... The question is: what was the coup d'etat for? Why did they need to escalate the situation to a civil war? ... The result that we have - a coup d'etat, a civil war, hundreds of lives lost, a devastated economy and social sphere, a four-year $17.5 billion loan promised to Ukraine by the IMF and complete disintegration of economic ties with Russia...
"I would like to tell you and your readers one thing. Last year, on February 21, President Yanukovych and the Ukrainian opposition signed an agreement on how to proceed, how to organize political life in the country, and on the need to hold early elections.
"They should have worked to implement this agreement, especially since three European foreign ministers signed this agreement as guarantors of its implementation. If they were used merely for the sake of appearances ... they should have said [after the coup the next day], "You know, we did not agree to a coup d'etat, so we will not support you; you should go and hold elections instead."
Let Merkel and Hollande be reminded that German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, in addition to Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski mediated the Feb. 21, 2014 agreement and signed it as official witnesses. An envoy from Russian President Putin, Vladimir Lukin, was also involved but did not sign as witness.
There may be no such thing as a guilty conscience in high-stakes diplomacy. Still, what happened just one day before the coup in Kiev is a matter of record. Would it be too much to expect of Steinmeier and Fabius to remind their bosses of this shameless piece of failed diplomacy, before Merkel and Holland cave in once again to Washington's diktat before the beer begins flowing in Bavaria?
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NATO Claims Satellite Images Show Russian Units in Ukraine
Russia refutes charges as hard-to-verify accusations and denials by officials on all sides make assessment of facts in Ukraine difficult
Aug 28, 2014
NATO officials on Thursday released satellite images they claim show mobile Russian artillery units and supporting vehicles "engaged in military operations inside the sovereign territory of Ukraine."
The newly presented evidence comes as Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko declared from Kiev on Thursday that "Russian forces have actually entered Ukraine."
According to the Guardian:
The accusation comes just two days after the Ukrainian leader met Vladimir Putin in Minsk, since when the situation in the east has deteriorated.
Poroshenko stopped short of calling the movements an outright invasion, but convened an urgent meeting of the country's national security council to discuss the Russian moves.
In a statement about the satellite images--which were "captured in late August"--NATO claimed they "depict Russian self-propelled artillery units moving in a convoy through the Ukrainian countryside and then preparing for action by establishing firing positions in the area of Krasnodon, Ukraine." The images were provided by Digital Global, an independent U.S.-based satellite imaging firm, to whom NATO referred those interested in verifying the images. NATO said they did not alter or change the images in any way.
"Over the past two weeks we have noted a significant escalation in both the level and sophistication of Russia's military interference in Ukraine," said Brigadier General Tak, a senior NATO commander. "The satellite images released today provide additional evidence that Russian combat soldiers, equipped with sophisticated heavy weaponry, are operating inside Ukraine's sovereign territory."
The Washington Post offered this detailed explanation of the images.
Officials in Russia denied the recent and repeated accusations that its soldiers are operating in Ukraine. According to Agence France-Presse:
Russia's defence ministry on Thursday denied US and Kiev claims of its troops' direct involvement in the escalating fighting between Ukrainian forces and pro-Kremlin insurgents in the separatist east.
Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov told Russian news agencies that the "information has no relation to reality" and that army units believed by Washington to have crossed into Ukraine were conducting "tactical training exercises on their own and outlying ranges."
The comments were the first by issued by a senior Russian official in Moscow since the US ambassador to Kiev accused Moscow of providing air defence systems to the rebels and becoming "directly involved in the fighting".
On the latest developments, Reuters reports:
The latest sharp escalation in the crisis came only two days after the presidents of both countries held their first talks in more than two months and agreed to work towards launching a peace process.
Ukraine's security and defense council said the border town of Novoazovsk and other parts of Ukraine's south-east had fallen under the control of Russian forces.
"A counter-offensive by Russian troops and separatist units is continuing in south-east Ukraine," it said on Twitter.
It said Ukrainian government forces had withdrawn from Novoazovsk "to save their lives" and were now reinforcing defenses in Mariupol.
Despite what continues to be an environment where claims by government officials on all sides--from Washington, Kiev, and Moscow--remain difficult to verify and hard to believe, the play between the so-called "fog of war" on the ground in eastern Ukraine and the state-fueled propoganda on all sides remains a key feature for those trying to understand the complex and deadly situation that continues to unfold.
As Stephen Cohen, an expert on Russian and Cold War history and professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton University, confessed in an interview with radio host Thomm Hartmann on Tuesday of this week, "There is so much misinformation, whether intended or unintended, coming out of Washington... particularly [out of] Kiev... and out of Moscow that a person has to figure out what is true and what isn't true."
For Cohen's full assessment of some of the recent events and his analysis of how U.S. media have so far handled the coverage of the Ukraine conflict, watch/listen to the interview that follows:
Ukraine, A U.S.- Russia Proxy WarThom Hartmann talks with Stephen Cohen, Contributing Editor-The Nation / Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies & Politics at ...
In a striking part of his assessment, Cohen offers a nuanced view of Putin's behavior (hard to find in the U.S. press) that seems essential for those worried about the U.S./NATO narrative of events but who also remain skeptical of Putin's stance and the Russian military's possible involvement in supplying the Ukraine rebels.
"I think, but I don't know," said Cohen, "that allegations that Russia's Putin is sending higher-quality, heavier weapons to the defenders of [eastern Ukraine] is undoubtedly--not undoubtedly, but probably--true." And here's the reason, Cohen continued, "I think that Putin can not let this Russified region of Ukraine fall. He simply can't. But desperately does he not want to intervene directly. So he's trying to see, along with sending humanitarian help, whether the native rebels of eastern Ukraine can push back the Ukrainian Army that's closing in on these two cities [of Donetsk and Luhansk]."
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