Project FACTS
The following contains researched material made available to the Ukrainian community to swiftly counter cases of defamation and calumny against Ukraine and Ukrainians.
“Project FACTS” Backgrounder: Conflicting Disinformation
The Ukrainian Resistance/Liberation Movement led by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) had been accused by both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia of supporting the opposing side during World War II.
FACTS: This conflicting disinformation that was promoted by Hitler’s and Stalin’s propaganda machines is reflected in countless documents of the time. To witness:
Nazi accusation
“Ukrainian people, take notice!…Moscow gives orders to the OUN! Moscow’s agents, who receive and carry out orders from bloodthirsty Stalin and his Jewish henchmen, took root in the leadership of OUN…We know the leaders of these bandit groups. They are Moscow’s hirelings…The OUN and Bolshevism [Sovietism] are one and the same – that is why both must be destroyed! German Administration” (From German leaflets dropped from planes over Ternopil oblast (province), Ukraine, July 1943)
Soviet accusation
“[…] Your enemy is also the gang of German-Ukrainian nationalists. Having sold themselves to Hitler, all those [Stepan] Banderas, [Andriy] Melnyks and [Taras] Bulbas [Ukrainian insurgency leaders during WWII] are helping to subjugate our people, our Ukraine… They are setting up armed groups of fake partisans [UPA] with fake allegations that these units are to fight against the Germans… The Ukrainian-German nationalists are really Hitler’s accomplices. They want to break the brotherly bond between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples, to tear Soviet Ukraine away from the family of Soviet nations… And this is what they call creating ‘independence’ for Ukraine […]. Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine [Nikita Khrushchev and other Soviet officials]” (From a Soviet Government Appeal to Ukrainians, Kyiv, 12 January 1944)
The above two conflicting accusations point to the FACT that the OUN-UPA, its leaders and membership constituted an independent, never beholden to ANY THIRD PARTY PLAYERS, resistance/liberation movement of the Ukrainian people. This is documented by a vast number of Nazi and Soviet documents, as well as massive OUN/UPA archives assembled both in Ukraine and abroad. The following OUN Appeal to the Ukrainian people (early 1943) “What Should We Be Fighting For?” addresses the above-made point:
“[…] It is already almost two years that a second imperialist war is raging in the East. This is not a war for peoples’ interests. Two imperialisms, those of Berlin and Moscow, entangled themselves to satisfy their predatory appetites. The war between Moscow and Germany is first of all a war over a resources-rich Ukraine – for our grain, coal and iron… What is then the goal and a way out of this current extremely difficult situation? The goal is – a Ukrainian Independent United State. And the road to it – a National Revolution of the Ukrainian people against the invaders… Ukraine was and shall be independent!…The battle for Ukraine’s statehood is led by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under the leadership of Stepan Bandera…Ukrainian farmers, workers and working intelligentsia: Join the ranks of the Ukrainian independence movement under the OUN banner!…Death to the invaders of Ukraine and their hirelings! […].”
Unfortunately for historical FACTS and TRUTH, the disinformation campaign and outright lies targeting Ukraine’s national aspirations launched by Stalin’s Russia linger to this very day in the world information space, mainly because of the subversive efforts of Putin’s Russia and its fellow travellers and enablers in the West.
To set the record straight is the purpose of our “Project FACTS” – BASED ON FACTS!
References
“Between Hitler and Stalin. Ukraine in World War II: The Untold Story” (2013).
“The Third Reich and the Ukrainian Question: Documents, 1934-1944” (1991).
“Wolodymyr Kosyk, The Third Reich and Ukraine” (1993).
Part I – Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
Question: Soviet Union and Nazi Germany: Allies or Foes?
Facts:
Allies and partners in crime in the first phase of World War II, 1939-1941.
— On August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Non-Aggression Pact, which also partitioned the eastern part of Europe in their respective “spheres of influence”.
— On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west, which marked the start of World War II, and, on September 17, 1939, Soviet Russia invaded Poland from the east. As a result, Eastern Europe was partitioned between Moscow and Berlin, as agreed upon by the two powers on August 23, 1939.
— On September 22, 1939, Soviet and Nazi troops met in the city of Brest-Litovsk (today’s Belarus) for a Joint Victory Parade after the defeat and partition of the Polish state.
— On September 28, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Treaty of Friendship and Borders recognizing the “legitimacy” of each other’s claim to the territories they had just jointly overrun, and their division of Eastern Europe into respective “spheres of influence”.
— In all, during the first phase of World War II (1939-1941), 13 European countries were overrun: 8 by Hitler, 5 by Stalin.
— Moreover, long before the start of World War II, elements of Germany’s armed forces trained in the Soviet Union, which, in turn, the latter also provided the German armament industry with military-grade goods and supplies. This arrangement between the Nazis and the Soviets allowed Berlin to circumvent the limitations on Germany’s rearmament imposed by the victors after its defeat in World War I.
— The second phase of World War II began on June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union – possibly upstaging a coming attack by the Soviet Union on Nazi Germany.
— These twin totalitarian superpowers did have a rich history of learning from each other on how best to oppress and commit genocide. After all, Hitler’s National Socialism (NAZI) and Stalin’s own brand of “Socialism in One Country” (that is, National Socialism) were two sides of the same coin.
After Ukraine’s loss of its War of Independence in 1918-1921, the country fell again under the control of neighbouring powers, namely: Soviet Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania. This set the stage for the emergence of a massive Ukrainian Liberation/Resistance Movement spearheaded first by the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) and then by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which during World War II directed its struggle against Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Ukraine became the main battlefield between those two totalitarian superpowers, and where their violence was especially and unprecedentedly extreme.
According to Ukrainian government statistics, Ukraine’s human losses in World War II were up to 10 million dead: 4.1 – military and 5.9 – civilian, which remains the highest casualty rate among all combatant nations in World War II.
During the German occupation of Ukraine (1941-1944) up to 10,000 members of the Ukrainian Resistance Movement (OUN and UPA members) and hundreds of thousands of its supporters were killed by the Nazis.
Disinformation: The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was “totalitarian” , “xenophobic”, “extremist”, “fascist”, “anti-Semitic”.
Facts:
— At its founding Assembly in Vienna (28 January- 2 February 1929) the OUN adopted a farsighted resolution (No 7) defining the concept of what constitutes a nation. In a time of ethnocentric understanding of nationhood in Europe between World War I and World War II, the founders of the OUN provided perhaps the first modern definition of a political nation: “On the road to its self-realization in a […] historical sense, a given nation numerically increases its biophysical strength […by] an intrinsic process of continuous transformation of diverse ethnic components into a synthesis of organic national unity. From this functional perspective, a nation continually finds itself in a state of its own growth.”
The above definition of nation unmistakably reflects the motto inscribed in the Great Seal of the United States: “E PLURIBUS UNUM – FROM MANY ONE”.
— The Ukrainian Resistance Movement, spearheaded by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during World War II, remained true to the above principle, as reflected in the composition of its vast membership: besides ethnic Ukrainians, there were Ukrainians of diverse ethnic ancestry – Polish, Russian, Jewish, Greek, Crimean Tatar, Swedish, et al., who inhabited Ukraine for centuries. Moreover, the UPA welcomed into its ranks fighting units organized on a nationality basis, among them Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Georgian, and Crimean Tatar. The OUN-UPA Liberation Movement never defined its enemies on racial, religious or ethnic grounds, but whether a given individual or group supported Ukraine’s struggle for independence and freedom – or not, by siding with Ukraine’s oppressors. To be sure, among the enemy’s casualties in this fight were also ethnic Ukrainians who found themselves on the wrong side of history.
— The OUN-UPA Ukrainian Liberation Movement applied the same standard methodology in its struggle as any other of the many national liberation movements across the world, among them: The Maquis (French Resistance), the Polish Military Organization and the Home Army (AK), the Irish Republican Army, the 26th of July Movement (Cuba), the Sandinista National Liberation Movement (Nicaragua), Haganah (Israel), the African National Congress (South Africa), the Vietnamese Nationalist Party and the Viet-Cong.
Part II – Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko
STEPAN BANDERA
Stepan Bandera was born on 1 January 1909 and died on 15 October 1959. He was a revolutionary and gifted strategist of the struggle for Ukraine’s statehood.
Born into a clerical family (his father Reverend Andriy was a priest in the Ukrainian church) , from his early days Bandera was always active in Ukrainian community affairs, was a member of the Ukrainian scouting organization Plast, and an agronomy student at the Lviv Politechnical Institute.
He became a member of the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) in 1927, and of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1929. In the OUN he rose very quickly to top positions of leadership in the Homeland Executive of the organization, namely: chief of the Directorate for Publications and Propaganda (1930-32); deputy head of the Homeland Executive (1932); head of the Homeland Executive (1933-June 1934).
For his revolutionary activities he was incarcerated several times in the 1930s by the Polish occupation authorities of western Ukraine, and ultimately sentenced to death on 13 January 1936
at the so-called Warsaw Trial. However, his death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment. He was freed from prison on the fall of the Polish state when World War II broke out on 1 September 1939.
From his position of leadership in the 1930s, Bandera expanded the OUN network in western Ukraine, directing its revolutionary militancy against both Polish and Soviet Russian occupation of the western and eastern parts of Ukraine respectively. Thus, in October 1933 an OUN operative, Mykola Lemyk, assassinated Joseph Stalin’s personal envoy, Alexander Mailov, in Lviv in protest against the Holodomor – the Famine Genocide unleashed by Moscow in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933. In October 1941, Mykola Lemyk, a leading member of the OUN resistance against the Nazis, was executed by the Gestapo in the town of’ Myrhorod, Poltava province, eastern Ukraine. In June 1934 an OUN operative, Hryhoriy Matsieiko, assassinated Poland’s Minister of Internal Affairs, Bronislaw Pieracki, in Warsaw for his repressive anti-Ukrainian policies.
On the eve of the beginning of the German-Soviet war in 1941, by staying in contact with those German military circles favorably disposed to Ukrainian statehood, Bandera initiated the formation of a Ukrainian military legion, the Nachtigall and Roland battalions (of which Hitler and the Nazi party leadership were not aware). The OUN under his leadership also organized Expeditionary Groups (some 2,000 strong) with the aim of penetrating every possible region of Ukraine to promote with active members Ukraine’s independence and statehood — just as it happened in Lviv on 30 June 1941 with the Act of Proclamation of the Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood, and the formation of a Ukrainian Government headed by Yaroslav Stetsko.
Taken by surprise, the Germans demanded that Bandera and Stetsko rescind the Act of Proclamation. For their refusal to do so, Bandera was arrested by the Nazis on 5 July 1941 and Stetsko on 12 July 1941- along with other key members of the Ukrainian government.
Bandera (and Stetsko) spent most of World War II in Nazi prisons, in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (1941- 27 September 1944) and then in Berlin until their escape (with the help of the OUN underground in Germany) in 1945 from Gestapo custody during an Allied bombing raid in the city.
Stepan Bandera remained leader of the OUN until his violent death on 15 October 1959 in Munich, Germany. He was assassinated by Soviet agent Bogdan Stashynsky on direct orders from the top leadership of the Soviet Union – Secretary-General Nikita Khrushchev and KGB chief Alexander Shelepin.
In Ukrainian national memory, Stepan Bandera and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under his leadership – the OUN (B) – became symbols of the revolutionary struggle for Ukraine’s independence and statehood.
On the fate of Stepan Bandera’s family: After Stepan Bandera’s death, his wife Yaroslava and their three children settled in Canada for personal safety reasons. Stepan Bandera’s father, Reverend Andriy Bandera, was executed by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) in Kyiv on 10 July 1941. (A version has it that he was actually crucified by his executioners for being a priest in the
Ukrainian church). Stepan Bandera’s two brothers, Alexander and Vasyl, perished in a Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz; his sisters Volodymyra, Marta-Maria and Oksana were sent to Soviet concentration camps and exiled without the right to ever return to Ukraine.
YAROSLAV STETSKO
Yaroslav Stetsko was born on 19 January 1912 and died on 5 July 1986.
He was a Ukrainian political leader, ideologue of the revolutionary Ukrainian national liberation movement, and a gifted interpreter of political and social phenomena, world affairs and the dynamics of international relations. He studied at the Faculty of Law in Poland (Cracow University) and at the Faculty of Humanities in western Ukraine (Lviv University).
He joined the underground Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), and when the UVO merged with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1929, he became one of the OUN’s leading members in the 1930s: ideological and field instructor of the OUN Youth Branch and editor of its journal “Youth”; and editor of the “Bulletin of the OUN Homeland Executive”. He became a member of the Central Executive of the OUN in 1938.
For his underground activities he was arrested several times in the 1930s by the Polish occupation authorities in western Ukraine.
In 1940 he became one of the leading members of the Revolutionary Leadership faction of the OUN headed by Stepan Bandera (OUN (B)). At the OUN (B) Grand Assembly held in early 1941 in Cracow, Poland, he was elected Bandera’s second – in- command.
On the eve of the German-Soviet war (which erupted on 22 June 1941) he participated in the organization of the OUN Expeditionary Groups tasked to penetrate all regions of Ukraine to actively promote and organize “in the field” the struggle for Ukraine’s independence. As the head of one such group he reached the City of Lviv, where at the National Assembly of Ukrainian community and Church representatives the restoration of Ukrainian statehood was officially proclaimed by the “Act of 30 June 1941”. Yaroslav Stetsko was elected by the National Assembly to be the Head of the Ukrainian government, called the Ukrainian State Administration.
As extant documents in Ukraine’s state archives attest to, the Act of Proclamation of the Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood on 30 June 1941 and the Ukrainian government headed by Yaroslav Stetsko were supported by the people at spontaneous meetings and rallies in THOUSANDS of locations across Ukraine.
For refusing to rescind the Act of Proclamation, Stetsko was arrested by the Nazis in Lviv on 12 July 1941. He was first taken to Berlin and then incarcerated in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp along with Stepan Bandera and many other leading members of the OUN (B) resistance movement.
After the arrest of Stetsko and Bandera and/or arrest and execution of most members of the Ukrainian State Administration, the Germans unleashed in the Fall of 1941 a massive crackdown
against the Ukrainian Liberation Movement citing the following reason in the order of 25 November 1941 to Nazi security forces: “…the Bandera organization is preparing an uprising in
Reichkommissariat Ukraine with the aim of establishing an independent Ukrainian state. All members of Bandera’s organization must be arrested and … executed….”.
The resistance movement led by the OUN and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), commanded by Deputy Minister of Defense in the Stetsko government, General Roman Shukhevych, fought first against the Nazis and then against the Soviets – precisely to uphold and defend their latest attempt at establishing an independent Ukrainian State on 30 June 1941. That historical event has also been recognized by the Ukrainian state authorities of today’s independent Ukraine and the Ukrainian people at large as a daring attempt at nation-building.
In the Fall of 1944 Stetsko and Bandera were transferred from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to Berlin in an unrelenting effort to force them to cooperate with the German war effort. Still they refused.
During an Allied bombing raid on Berlin in early 1945 , Stetsko and Bandera managed (with the assistance of the OUN network in Germany) to escape from Gestapo custody, go underground, and eventually make their way to Ally-controlled parts of Western Europe.
After World War II Yaroslav Stetsko settled in Munich, West Germany, joined the Central Executive of the OUN (B) and became active in the world anticommunist movement: In 1946 he became the founding member of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) and its lifelong leader. He became a founding member of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) in 1971 and the founder of the European Freedom Council (UFC) in 1967 and honorary member of its leadership.
At the Fourth Grand Assembly of the OUN (B) in 1968, he was elected head of its Central Executive, a post he held until his death.
Yaroslav Stetsko’s interpretation of what the Ukrainian version of nationalism is and of what a nation is had always been: “Ukrainian nationalism is homegrown… not an imitation of extraneous doctrines and theories… Ukrainian nationalism, for example, rejects as a matter of principle, the racist component of the (former) German nazism. That is to say, it does not link the idea of a nation with particular physical and racial attributes of its members. But it always lends primacy to the spiritual core of a given nation”.
On the international stage Yaroslav Stetsko earned the respect of a statesman who advocated relentlessly the national interests of Ukraine and all other captive nations under Soviet Russian and communist domination. He met and established personal relationships with up to 30 world leaders on all continents.
Shortly before his death on 5 July 1986 he accurately foresaw that the Chornobyl disaster in Ukraine on 26 April 1986 would mark the beginning of the demise of the Soviet Russian empire – the USSR.
During his political lifetime Yaroslav Stetsko was repeatedly the target of Soviet “active measures”: several failed assassinations and kidnapping attempts, provocations, and disinformation campaigns.
Yaroslav Stetsko shared his political activism with his dedicated wife Anna Yevhenia Muzyka (Slava Stetsko, b 1920 – d 2003) – a charismatic personality, an able political organizer, a skilled politician and diplomat in her own right. Together they travelled the world to promote freedom and independence for the captive nations under Soviet Russian and communist rule.
Yaroslav Stetsko’s collected writings on ideological, political and social issues, and world affairs have been published in 3 volumes in Ukraine, along with his memoirs “30 June 1941”. A volume of his selected writings was also published in English.
Disinformation: The leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Stepan Bandera, “collaborated” with Hitler.
Facts:
On June 30, 1941, the Nachtigall Battalion reached Lviv, and OUN leaders headed by Yaroslav Stetsko declared the restoration of Ukrainian statehood and formed a government. Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko were arrested by the Germans in early July 1941 for refusing to withdraw the official Declaration of Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood of June 30, 1941 in Lviv. They spent most of WWII in Germany’s Sachsenhausen concentration camp in a special block for political prisoners. Bandera’s two brothers ( Alexander and Wasyl) died in Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz concentration camp. Bandera and Stetsko were released in the fall of 1944, placed under house arrest in Berlin, but refused to collaborate with the Nazis. In 1945 Bandera and Stetsko escaped during a bombing raid on Berlin, and went underground until the war was over.
Disinformation 1: Bandera was Hitler’s puppet.
Facts:
At the start of World War II in September 1939, Stepan Bandera was freed from the Polish prison where he had been serving a life sentence for organizing the assassination of Bronislaw Pieracky, Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland, the organizer of repressions in the 1930s against Ukrainians in Polish-occupied western Ukraine.
In February of 1940, the OUN organization split into two wings, one led by Stepan Bandera named OUN (b) (Banderite) and the other led by Col. Andriy Melnyk named OUN (m) (Melnykite) over policy issues regarding liberation activities of the OUN in Ukraine. Bandera insisted that Ukrainians must rely solely on themselves, and that any collaboration with Berlin would only be situational and transactional.
Anticipating war against the USSR, in the spring of 1941 the OUN (b) came to an agreement with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris of the German Abwehr [intelligence service] to create a Ukrainian legion consisting of 800 men grouped into two battalions, Nachtigall and Roland. Pointedly these men swore fealty to the Ukrainian nation and not Hitler. The Nazi leadership was not made aware of this plan.
On the night of June 29, 1941, the Nachtigall battalion entered Lviv along with other Wehrmacht divisions. On the very next day, Bandera’s associates, headed by Yaroslav Stetsko, proclaimed the “Act of Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood”. The newly formed Ukrainian government would join Germany in the common struggle against Moscow – but only if Ukrainian independence was recognized.
Hitler adamantly opposed this development and gave orders to “crush anyone who empowers this Slavic trash.” Members of the OUN(b) were rounded up and Bandera was arrested in Krakow on July 5, 1941 and Stetsko in Lviv on July 12. Both refused to retract the declaration and were imprisoned in the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen, spending more than three years in a high security block for high value “political persons.” The OUN (b) and the newly formed (1942) Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) became enemies to the occupying Germans.
Facing defeat, the Germans released Bandera and Stetsko from the concentration camp on September 25, 1944, brought them to Berlin and asked for their support in the war against the Soviets. They refused and remained in German confinement until their escape (with the help of the OUN underground active in Germany) during an Allied bombing raid on Berlin in 1945.
Stepan Bandera’s two brothers – Alexander and Wasyl – were murdered in Auschwitz in July 1942. Both were also leading members of the OUN.
Disinformation: West German agents, or rival Ukrainian nationalists murdered Bandera.
Facts:
On October 15, 1959, KGB agent Bohdan Stashynskiy met Stepan Bandera in the hallway of his apartment building in Munich and killed him with a special pistol firing an ampule filled with prussic acid (potassium cyanide). The OUN security service and West German police had foiled four previous attempts on the life of the nationalist leader. In a secret decree, Stashynskiy was awarded the Order of the Red Banner by the USSR.
The Soviet Union tried to lay the blame for Bandera’s assassination on the German Special Service, composing an elaborate story that he possessed some compromising materials about West German Federal Minister Theodor Oberländer and had tried to blackmail him.
Two years later, Stashynskiy surrendered to the German Special Service on his own recognizance, confessed to this murder as well as the murder of another Ukrainian leader, Lev Rebet, and was sentenced to eight years in prison. Regardless of the growing international scandal, Moscow continued to officially deny any involvement in the death of Bandera up until the era of “perestroika” in the late 1980s before the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Part III – OUN, UPA
Disinformation: The OUN / UPA (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists / Ukrainian Insurgent Army) were collaborators with the German Nazi regime.
Facts:
An image had been created that somehow, in contrast to WW1, the Second World War in Europe was actually a “good” war. Today we realize that in its essence this war was a conflict of two imperialist tyrannies: the German Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Other WWII combatants found themselves allied to one or the other side. Very few fighting forces can claim to have fought simultaneously against both tyrannies. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA, mobilized by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists to fight for an independent state for the Ukrainian nation, was one such major force. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was the underground political organization that struggled for that same goal and, as such, maintained contacts with many states including England, Japan, Italy, Lithuania as well as Germany for a decade before the war. The June 30, 1941 Proclamation of the restoration of Ukrainian statehood and proposed anti-Soviet alliance was a surprise and a challenge to the Third Reich. It took the German leadership but a week to begin arresting the OUN leadership and participants in that Proclamation. Hitler was thus forced to show his hand much earlier in his campaign than he would have liked.
It was under German occupation that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was formed in 1942. Its operations were so effective that large swaths of the countryside became so-called “insurgent republics” free of foreign forces (eg. the Kolky, Antonivetska, Winter, and Proud Hutsul “republics”). To dislodge these UPA forces the Germans often resorted to the use of armour and aircraft. Researchers have calculated that the Germans and their allies lost over 12,000 men killed in battles with the UPA.
Disinformation: The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were “Nazi collaborators”.
Facts:
At the height of the German occupaton of Ukraine (1942-1944) the UPA conducted 2,526 armed engagements against the Nazi forces. Nazi losses: 12,427 – killed; 2047 – wounded; 2448 – taken prisoner. UPA losses: 2,251 – killed; 475 – wounded; 534 – taken prisoner.
In some instances areas of Ukraine that were liberated and held by the UPA were called “insurgent republics,” and in many respects they functioned as mini “underground states.”
One of the best known was the “Kolky Republic,”which covered an area of roughly 2,500 square kilometers, located in the UPA-North military district, in the Volyn region. The “Kolky Republic” remained under UPA control until November 1943, when it was overrun by German troops using tanks, artillery and aircraft.
At the same time, the UPA was so effective that in 1943 the Nazis admitted that in western Ukraine they had no control over 75% of the arable land and 52% of the livestock. Hitler’s forces led many anti-insurgency campaigns against the UPA and in order to discredit the Ukrainian nationalist movement, German propaganda called the insurgent leaders “agents of Moscow.”
From July 1941 to the end of World War II on May 8, 1945, up to 10,000 members of the OUN were killed in their resistance against the Germans or perished in Nazi concentration camps. Total tally of losses of the OUN-UPA Ukrainian Resistance Movement: up to 13,000 dead and missing in action.
After the war, a number of survivors of the anti-Nazi resistance settled in Canada, the U.S.A. and other Western countries.
Disinformation: The UPA was “Hitler’s henchmen” and did not fight against the Nazis.
Facts:
Extremely brutal occupation policies of the Nazis forced the OUN (b) leadership to mobilize the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) by October 1942. The first regular UPA company (military unit) went into action on February 7, 1943, by overrunning the German commandant’s base in the district center Volodymyrets, Rivne oblast (province), Volyn oblast, and northwestern Ukraine.
In the spring of 1943, the UPA constantly increases the extent of resistance. Their fiercest clashes with the Germans happened near Lutsk, Kovel, Horokhiv, Rivne, Kremenets, Kostopil, Sarny and Lanivtsi (Volyn oblast). During March 1943, the insurgents seized regional centers five times. At the end of the first spring month, the German officials reported to Reichskommissar Erichlast Koch that only two areas in Volyn were free of “gangs”.
The occupation administration began undertaking extensive anti-partisan operations involving armor and aircraft. At the end of April, a division for fighting the UPA was redeployed to Berezne, Lyudvypil, Mizoch, Ostroh, Shumsk, and Kremenets (Volyn oblast).
The Nazis counterinsurgency actions proved to have little effect. While in March the UPA units attacked the German economic targets only 8 times, in April there were already 57 attacks, and 70 in May.
Heinrich Schoene, Nazi General Commissar of Volyn-Podillya, reported at a meeting in Rivne June 5, 1943 to Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg that “Ukrainian nationalists cause more difficulties than the Bolshevik gangs” to his administration.
The Soviet partisans’ leadership also recognized this fact later. Petro Vershyhora, commander of Soviet partisans, reported to the Soviet Ukrainian Partisan Movement Headquarters on March 4, 1944, “We cannot make the same mistake in Poland as we did in Volyn by passing the leadership of a popular uprising against the Germans into the hands of counterrevolutionary groups of nationalists.”
The available Nazi forces were not enough to suppress resistance. Therefore, Erich von dem Bach, commander of anti-partisan forces in the East, took charge of the struggle against the UPA in July 1943. He commanded the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer (10,000 soldiers) and 10 mechanized infantry battalions with artillery. The grouping was covered by 27 aircraft from the air and 50 tanks and armored vehicles on the ground.
However, UPA units outmaneuvered the Germans and gave the enemy no chance to destroy them. Overall, in July the insurgents attacked German bases 295 times, and supply facilities 119 times.
In early August 1943, von dem Bach was sent to another area. The German pressure weakened, and the UPA intensified their anti-German operations: 391 assaults on garrisons and 151 attacks on enterprises.
But soon, Hans-Adolf Prützmann, senior SS leader, organized a new attack on the UPA. This attack lasted from August 23 to September 9, 1943 in South Volyn. First, aircraft bombed the village of Antonivtsi, which was the headquarters of the UPA “Bohun” group. Then the punitive expedition attacked the UPA camp in Kremenets forests. The UPA battalions had to split into small units and break out of the encirclement.
In the summer of 1943 the anti-Nazi insurgency movement spread over to the Galicia region. On August 18, the Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNS, the original name of UPA in Galicia) attacked the German stone quarry in Skole, Lviv region. The nationalists freed 150 forced laborers and killed the camp security guards.
Autumn 1943 was the beginning of larger scale battles between the insurgents and the Nazis. On September 3, UPA soldiers routed a German battalion that was travelling by narrow-gauge rail in the mountains near the town of Dolyna. The invaders left about 200 soldiers dead on the battlefield. On September 25-29, the UPA company “Trembita” repelled a punitive attack on their camp on Mount Stovba.
On November 29-30, 1943, there was heavy fighting between 1.5-2 thousand Germans and the UPA “Kryvonis-II” battalion near the village of Nedilna, Sambir district. The insurgents retreated with considerable losses, almost the entire command and the leader of the battalion were killed in action.
The Germans undertook the last major counterinsurgency action in Volyn in November 1943. On November 2-3, aircraft bombed the town of Stepan and ousted the units of the UPA ”Zahrava” regiment to the north. Simultaneously, on November 3 German planes bombed and shelled the town of Kolky, where the UPA had formed the “Kolky Undrground Republic”. It should be noted that the Nazis could not seize the “republic” from June to early November 1943, and then they carried out a mop up operation, killing 600 civilians.
In October-November 1943, the UPA-UNS conducted 47 combat operations against German occupiers, and the UPA village self-defense units clashed with them 125 times. The Nazis lost more than 1,500 soldiers.
The Nazis failed to suppress the UPA resistance completely. The approaching Soviet-German front drained their military forces. Therefore, the German generals stopped undertaking actions against insurgents in Volyn. In Galicia, the confrontation lasted until the end of summer 1944. Ukrainian People’s Self Defense (UNS) was re-formed into the UPA-West. In March-May 1944, the UPA defended Ukrainian villages against looting by the Germans. In May, the Wehrmacht defeated the UPA “Halaida” and “Siromantsi” companies in Lviv oblast.
From May 31 to June 6, 1944, the units of the Wehrmacht’s 7th Armored Division fought against the UPA in the Chornyi Lis area. By mid-summer the confrontation in Galicia peaked.
The biggest clashes of the UPA-West with German troops took place around Mount Lopata on the boundary between Drohobych and Stanislav (now Ivano-Frankivsk) regions. These events were also detailed in written reports of the Polish anti-Nazi resistance. From July 6 through July 16, 1944, heavy fighting took place – both with artillery engagement and close-quarters combat. Insurgents under Vasyl Andrusyak’s command won the day. Fifty Ukrainians were killed. The invaders lost 200 soldiers and retreated.
By November, under pressure of the Red Army the Wehrmacht left Ukraine. The UPA continued to attack and disarm German units until early fall 1944.
There were episodes in the history of the Ukrainian insurgency movement when some commanders tried on their own initiative to negotiate with German commanders using the formula “neutrality in exchange for weapons” or “food in exchange for weapons.” Several cases are known when from 80 to 100 small arms were handed over to the insurgents using the above formula. But the Ukrainian underground leadership strictly prohibited such arrangements. In some cases, it even led to severe punishment. In March 1944, the UPA field court martial sentenced an UPA officer, Porphyriy Antoniuk, the first initiator of such an unauthorized negotiation, to death. In April 1944, another officer, Mykola Oliynyk, was sentenced to death by the UPA martial court. Both were executed by a firing squad in the presence of their units.
However, the talks with the German occupation officials were subsequently held by the OUN (b) leadership. The Germans wanted the OUN and UPA to stop fighting against them so they could focus on repelling the Soviet Army’s advance. The OUN members sought to secure the release of prisoners of concentration camps (Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko and many others) as well as to obtain weapons. Meetings between OUN-UPA leaders and German authorities took place in March, April, June and July 1944. As a result of them, the insurgents received some weapons, and in September – October 1944 Bandera and other Ukrainian nationalists were released from concentration camps, though they remained in Gestapo custody.
As a result, the insurgents decreased the intensity of their anti-German actions (mainly in Volyn), but did not stop them.
According to researchers, 12 thousand German invaders and their allies were killed by UPA insurgents. The Ukrainian underground and its insurgent units also lost 10-12 thousand people during the armed confrontation with the occupiers.
On August 25, 1943, Hans-Adolf Prützmann, senior SS leader, sent the following telegram: “To the Commander of the Army Group ‘South’. Due to the fact that the Reichsführer-SS ordered to send strong teams of military units previously assigned to me to the front, I have to limit myself to the remnants of these units to suppress the Ukrainian national uprising in Volyn. Since this results in large uncontrolled areas in the north of Ukraine, in the near future there will be increased pressure from gangs in the south sector.”
A German summary overview of the OUN-UPA armed resistance against the Nazis (as of 31 December 1943)
Report on the current status of the gangs (i.e. Ukrainian OUN-UPA Resistance) and the political mood in western Ukraine.
“The report presented below is a general survey of the current status of the gangs and a portrayal of political moods in western Ukraine. This report was compiled on the basis of the information provided by different trustworthy individuals. It can be considered with confidence that all the addresses are already aware of most of the issues at hand.
Nevertheless, we consider it essential to record in writing this account, so none of the details or interesting observations would be lost.”
(…)
“The Bandera Gangs. As of today, this is the most powerful bandit movement in Ukraine whose positions continue to strengthen. It is led exclusively by the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). Their main political goal – an independent Ukraine. Their slogans are uncompromising, and the anti-German sentiments of the supporters of this grouping are more and more on the rise. According to the latest reports, this gang tries to gain control over all Ukrainian ethnic territories (for example, in Romania, Transnistria, Bukovyna (province in southwestern Ukraine), Carpatho-Ukraine, and so forth). Recently, they began naming themselves as the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army).”
(…)
“The Bandera gangs. Here we must distinguish two main groupings:
- a strong grouping on the territory of Volyn (province in northwestern Ukraine);
- a grouping based in the Carpathian mountains, whose strength, as of late, has markedly increased.
The two groupings are commanded by Lebed[1], who sojourns in the Carpathian Mountains. His deputy in Volyn is captain Shukhevych.[2]
The Volyn grouping. Currently their numbers consist of 120,000 to 130,000 men commanded by older OUN members with professional military training. Basically, there are three known types of these groupings: 1) combat groups(…); 2) support groups [supply and medical services] (…); 3) concealed groups [intelligence gathering] (…).
All of these groups maintain among themselves the tightest possible intercommunication and are subject to a centralized military Command […]. There also are the so-called mobile groups [OUN Mobile Task Groups} which scour large territories and organize in all propitious localities new bandit groups.
There they would leave behind several ready [for duty] individuals, and the new groups would then move on, and in a different direction, pursing the same goal.”
(…)
“Experts on Ukrainian mentality consider that with the steady growth of the Bandera movement […] the active part of the Ukrainian population will rise up in the rebellion, akin to a popular uprising.”
(…)
Source: Document facsimile, Bundesarchiv – Militärarchiv, Freiburg, Germany (RH 2/v. 2339), in Volodymyr Kosyk (comp.), Ukraine in the Second World War in Documents: Collection of German Archival Materials (1942-1943) ,v.3, Lviv (1999), p.361-p.366.
Click on link for Ukrainian translation p.353 – p.360.
A full English-language translation of this collection of documents is forthcoming.
Part IV – Roman Shukhevych, Stepan Bandera, Nachtigall and Roland
ROMAN SHUKHEVYCH
General Roman Shukhevych, nom de guerre Taras Chuprynka (17 July 1907 – 5 March 1950)
Profession: Architect
Military service: Polish army (1928-1929)
Roman Shukhevych joined the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) in 1923 and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1929. He became one of OUN’s leading members as chief of its combat branch.
In 1936 he was imprisoned by the Polish authorities for his revolutionary activities against Polish occupation of western Ukraine. During 1938-1939, as staff officer of the nascent armed forces of the Ukrainian Carpathian Republic, he fought against the Nazi-supported invasion of the republic by Hungarian troops.
In February 1941 the OUN reached an agreement (without Hitler’s knowledge) with the German Abwehr (military intelligence) and the Wehrmacht (army) as to the creation of a Ukrainian legion – the battalions Nachtigall and Roland. The two battalions were front-line units, subordinated only to the Wehrmacht command, and, pointedly swore loyalty only to Ukraine. The OUN hoped, that should Germany recognize Ukraine’s right to statehood, the two battalions would become a nucleus for the creation of a Ukrainian army.
In April 1941 the OUN ordered Roman Shukhevych to join the Nachtigall battalion to become its OUN liaison and political and commanding officer. The relationship between the OUN and the Germans was always transactional, pragmatic and, therefore, ad hoc, with either side pursuing its own aims.
Therefore, when the Germans suppressed by force the Declaration of Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood on 30 June 1941 in Lviv along with the arrest of the Ukrainian government headed by Yaroslav Stetsko, the Ukrainian commanders and soldiers of Nachtigall and Roland openly protested and opposed Germany’s actions. As a result, on 13 August 1941 the rebellious battalions were pulled from the front line, disarmed, and sent back to their Neuhammer base in Germany.
In October 1941 the Nachtigall and Roland battalions were merged to form Schutzmannschaftbattaillon #201 (auxiliary police battalion) on a “contractual” basis. Shukhevych became a company commander in the battalion, which saw action in Belarus against Soviet partisans. When in 1942 the soldiers of the battalion refused to “renew” their “contract ” for further service, the battalion was disarmed and demobilized, and its officers arrested. Shukhevych managed to escape, went underground, and joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which was already fighting against the Germans.
Upon joining the UPA, he became leader of the OUN Home Leadership and Commander-in-Chief of the UPA in 1943, and in 1944 was elected Secretary-General of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (which in effect was an underground Ukrainian national parliament with representatives from a wide political spectrum and all regions of Ukraine).
The OUN – UPA Resistance movement NEVER defined its enemies on racial, religious, or ethnic grounds, but whether a given individual or group (INCLUDING ethnic Ukrainians) supported Ukraine’s right to statehood, independence and freedom from foreign rule — or NOT, by siding with the enemy during the liberation struggle. The wide popular base of the OUN – UPA Resistance is reflected in the composition of its vast and varied membership: Alongside the ethnic Ukrainian base, there were large numbers of Ukrainians of diverse ethnic ancestry and national origins, who joined the struggle – namely Polish, Russian, Jewish, Greek , Crimean Tatar, Swedish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Georgian, et al. Some of these groups were so numerous, that the UPA command organized them in separate national combat battalions. At the height of the struggle (1943-1945) the UPA, in effect, presented itself as a multinational armed force.
During the Nazi occupation of Lviv, the future Commander-in-Chief of the UPA, Roman Shukhevych, and his wife Natalia sheltered (September 1942 – February 1943) a Jewish girl, Irene Reichenberg, under the assumed name of Iryna Vasylivna Ryzhko. When Natalia was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 (later freed from German custody by OUN operatives and going underground), Roman Shukhevych arranged for Iryna’s sanctuary at a convent of the Basilian Order of nuns. Iryna Reichenberg – Ryzhko survived the Holocaust, raised a family and died in Kyiv in 2007 at the age of 72.
Roman Shukhevych’s son Yurii, born in 1933, who was Iryna’s childhood friend in Lviv, met several times with Iryna’s son Volodymyr Hushcha – the last time in 2017. Yurii Shukhevych spent 35 years in Soviet prisons and concentration camps (where he became totally blind) for refusing to denounce his father and the Ukrainian national liberation movement. His mother, Natalia Shukhevych, was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment. They were both arrested by the Soviets in 1945.
General Roman Shukhevych was killed in combat against Soviet security forces on 5 March 1950 in Bilohorshcha, near the city of Lviv.
Disinformation: Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych and all members of OUN(b) (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) were agents of Gestapo, SS, SD (intelligence agency of the SS and of the Nazi party) or Abwehr (military intelligence organization). They were carrying out the orders of these services. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was established by the special services of the Third Reich and was fighting alongside Hitler supporters.
Facts:
In the 1930s the OUN started cooperating with Germany for geopolitical reasons – as Germany was a strategic opponent of Poland and Russia. Back in the 1920s the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO, a predecessor to the OUN) was in touch with intelligence services of the democratic Weimar Republic. After the Nazis came to power, Germany actively pursued its intention to change the Versailles system. This coincided with the position of the OUN, as countries that were the winners of World War I failed to consider Ukrainian independence. It was the Paris Peace Conference that in fact legitimized the Polish state and its occupation of western Ukraine. Germany thus became a logical situational “ally”.
Relations between OUN and Germany were never smooth. After the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact was signed in 1934, OUN leader Yevhen Konovalets relocated from Berlin to Switzerland. That same year Germany extradited to Poland the OUN activist Mykola Lebid who was in hiding after the assassination of the Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki. Finally, Hitler agreed to the Hungarian occupation of the nascent independent Transcarpathian Ukrainian Republic in March 1939 and on Aug. 23, 1939 to the proposed Soviet occupation of western Ukraine (Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact). OUN’s relations with Lithuania, who was also Poland’s enemy, were much better (large swaths of Lithuania including the capital Vilnius were then part of the Polish state as well).
However, Germany remained the only real power capable of ever challenging Poland and the USSR. Even after the split of the OUN (into OUN(b) headed by Stepan Bandera and OUN(m) headed by Andriy Melnyk), both factions continued their contacts with the Germans.
OUN(b) managed to set up military training for members of its organization using its contacts with German intelligence, the Abwehr, and with certain German army generals who sympathized with the Ukrainian Resistance Movement.
Moreover, the OUN always had an underground military training program of its own for its members, which functioned independently from any external agencies.
In February 1941 Bandera reached an agreement with the chief of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and the commander of Wermacht’s ground forces, Walther von Brauchitsch, as to the creation of a Ukrainian legion. Two battalions subordinated to Wehrmacht command – Nachtigall and Roland were formed from OUN members. Pointedly they did not swear loyalty to Germany or Hitler, but swore loyalty only to Ukraine. Nachtigall’s Ukrainian commander was Roman Shukhevych. The Nachtigall battalion was subordinated to the Wehrmacht command.
On the night of June 29, 1941, the Nachtigall battalion entered Lviv along with other Wehrmacht units. On June 30, Bandera’s associates, headed by Yaroslav Stetsko, proclaimed the “Act of Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood”. The newly formed Ukrainian government declared its readiness to cooperate with Germany in the common struggle against Moscow – but only if Ukrainian independence was recognized. The Nazis were taken by surprise and were forced to reveal their true intentions towards Ukraine.
Members of the OUN(b) were rounded up and Bandera was arrested in Krakow on July 5, 1941 and Stetsko in Lviv on July 12. Both refused to retract the declaration and were imprisoned in the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen, spending more than three years in its high security block.
In August 1941 the Nachtigall soldiers learned about the arrest of the government headed by Yaroslav Stetsko, in which their commander Roman Shukhevych had the post of the deputy defense minister. The soldiers of the Nachtigall battalion put forward a demand to release Ukrainian state officials. On August 13, the rebellious battalions were removed from the front and sent to the rear – to the Neuhammer base. They then issued a written memorandum from Neuhammer calling to release the arrested OUN(b) members and members of the Ukrainian government as well as to return the battalion back to the Eastern front. These demands were not met and the battalions were dissolved and reorganized into one unit – 201st police battalion that was contract-based. The battalion was sent to Belarus for security duties.
On December 1, 1942, at the end of their contract, the police battalion members refused to continue their service. Germans dissolved the unit and arrested the officers. Shukhevych succeeded in escaping. He became the head of the military section of OUN(b) and later the head of the organization itself.
The relationship of the OUN(b) with the Germans was transactional, pragmatic and ad-hoc, with both sides pursuing their own aims. As early as April 1941 Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller said to his colleague from SD Walter Schellenberg that “Ukrainian nationalistic leaders are moving to their goals in an uncontrolled way.” A day after the German offensive against the USSR began on June 22, 1941, the OUN(b) sent the Reich Chancellery a memorandum (written on June 15) on how the Ukrainian issue should be handled after the dissolution of the USSR. The document stated: “Even if German troops, after they enter Ukraine, are greeted as liberators, the situation might change quickly if Germany does not come to Ukraine with the aim of restoring Ukrainian statehood … A new European order without a Ukrainian independent state is unthinkable …”
The OUN(b) already foresaw the possibility of anti-German armed resistance should Germany adopt an unfriendly position towards Ukraine’s independence.
Between September 15, 1941 and the end of that year the Germans arrested about 1,500 OUN (b) members. On November 25, 1941, the German security police even issued an order to arrest and execute the activists of the “Bandera group” who “were about to stage an uprising in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine aiming at establishing an independent Ukrainian state.”
The highly trained veterans of Nachtigall and Roland joined the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army formed by the OUN(b) in 1942) as instructors and commanders taking part in its combat operations against German forces during their occupation of Ukraine. Large areas of Ukraine were liberated and held by the UPA. Such “insurgent republics” functioned in many respects as small “underground states.” One of the best known was the “Kolky Republic,” which covered an area of 2,500 square kilometers, located in the UPA-North military district, in the Volyn region. The “Kolky Republic” remained under UPA control until November 1943, when it was overrun by German troops using tanks, artillery, and aircraft.
At the height of the German occupaton of Ukraine (1942-1944) the UPA conducted 2,526 armed engagements against the Nazi forces. Nazi losses: 12,427 – KIA; 2047 – WIA; and 2448 – taken prisoner.
Disinformation: The UPA, the Nachtigall Battalion (and the Roland Battalion), and the Galicia Division are organizations that were created by the Germans out of so-called “traitors of the Soviet fatherland.”
Facts:
As a result of long-term Russian disinformation, the names and affiliations of different Ukrainian political and military organizations have been mixed together.
A common misconception is that the Nachtigall Battalion belonged to the SS – it didn’t. This formation was created as a result of the agreement between the OUN and Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. Nachtigall’s officers and soldiers would not swear their loyalty to Germany and when the battalion was disbanded in December 1, 1942, many of them escaped from German arrest, including its leader Roman Shukhevych, and joined the ranks of the UPA to fight against Nazi Germany.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) fought against both the Germans and the Soviets. The UPA’s initial goal was to resist German occupation in order to protect the population from Nazi terror. As the invader of Ukraine, Germany was considered to be the enemy. Throughout 1943 the UPA staged successful combat operations against the Germans and was able to establish its control in the Volynian region countryside, leaving only towns in German hands. One of the UPA’s major military confrontations with the Germans lasted from July to September 1943. The Germans, commanded by SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who in 1944 would command the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, committed a massive amount of manpower and materiel to the effort. At his disposal General von dem Bach-Zelewski had the following units: 10 battalions of motorized SS troops with heavy weapons and artillery; 10,000 German and Polish police; 2 regiments of the Hungarian Army; 3 battalions of Cossacks, organized from among the Soviet prisoners of war; 50 tanks, 27 planes, and 5 armored trains. Despite this commitment of resources, the operation was largely a failure for the Germans. The UPA lost 1,237 combatants, dead or wounded, in the fighting, while the losses inflicted on German forces by the UPA were significant. The Germans suffered more than 3,000 casualties. Bach-Zelewski’s brutal campaign was also responsible for the murder of more than 5,000 civilians. The UPA fought against the Germans until November 1944, when the last Nazi forces left Ukrainian territory.
The motivation behind forming a Ukrainian military unit – the Galicia Division – within Germany’s armed forces was greatly influenced by the experience of WW1. At the beginning of WW1 Ukrainians living in Galicia (province of western Ukraine) under the Habsburg Empire formed their own regiment, the Sich Riflemen, within the Austro-Hungarian armed forces. The war in the east ended with the front lines in Ukraine, and soldiers and officers of the regiment soon formed the core of the nascent army of the newly declared Ukrainian National Republic. These experienced and disciplined soldiers allowed the UNR to fight off Soviet Russian and Polish opposing armies for three years (1918-1920) despite a total lack of support from the West. It was therefore calculated that if WW2 ended with front lines in Ukraine, or if Allied forces of the west were to invade the Soviet Union, then a highly trained, well equipped fighting force would be an effective argument for an independent Ukrainian state. Sadly, neither scenario came true, but while stationed in Slovakia, the Galicia Division saved the lives of thousands of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Soviet onslaught. It is important to note that prior to the end of WW2, the Division was renamed the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army, and surrendered to the British and Americans as such. In Canada the Deschesne Commission found that this elite fighting unit committed no war crimes. (The Waffen SS, the SS and the Impala SS were three different organizations.)
It is important to note, that during and after the Battle of Brody (July 13-22, 1944 in western Ukraine) against the advancing Soviet Army, an estimated 3 to 4 thousand soldiers of the Galicia Division (attached at the time to the 13th German Army Corps) joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) still battling the Nazi forces occupying western parts of Ukraine.
Disinformation: The Commander-in-Chief of the UPA Roman Shukhevych had a military rank of an SS-Hauptsturmführer and was decorated by Hitler with one or even two Iron Crosses (German military award) for taking part in the massacre of civilians.
Facts:
The Nachtigall and Roland battalions (Legions of Ukrainian Nationalists – DUN) resulted from the agreement between OUN and German military intelligence (Abwehr); they were seen by Ukrainian nationalists as a core for the future independent armed forces. They were not related to the SS structure and were operationally subordinate to the Wehrmacht.
It was clear for OUN(b) that they were negotiating with a totalitarian state following its own interests. In order not to become an instrument in their hands, the leaders of OUN(b) put forward their conditions: Ukrainian military units would be under their political guidance, while being subordinated to the German command in terms of military tactics and training. Ukrainian soldiers were not swearing loyalty to Germany. OUN(b) also preserved the right to grant military ranks to the soldiers and to define the unit’s internal structure. Both battalions were trained to fight on the Eastern front and could not be used against the Western allies under any circumstances. OUN negotiated the right to have its own military chaplains in the two battalions. At the same time, there would be no Nazi propaganda in the DUN units.
In spring 1941 Roland and Nachtigall were trained in military camps Neuhammer and Seibersdorf (in Poland and Austria respectively). From the very first hours of the Soviet-German war on June 22, 1941 Nachtigall was taking part in combat operations. The Roland commander from the Ukrainian side was Major Yevhen Pobihushchyi, the Nachtigall commander was Captain Roman Shukhevych.
On June 30, 1941, Nachtigall reached Lviv. All the battalion’s soldiers were given week-long leaves. At the same time, a group of OUN(b) members headed by Yaroslav Stetsko reached Lviv, where they were tasked to proclaim the restoration of Ukrainian statehood. The event took place in the evening on the same day – on June 30, 1941.
In August 1941 the Nachtigall soldiers learned about the arrest of the government headed by Yaroslav Stetsko, in which Roman Shukhevych took the post of the deputy defense minister. Soldiers of the Nachtigall battalion put forward a demand to release Ukrainian state officials. On August 13, the rebellious battalions were removed from the front and sent to the rear – in Neuhammer.
They issued a written memorandum from Neuhammer calling to release the arrested OUN(b) members and members of the Ukrainian government as well as to return the battalion back to the Eastern front. Their demands were not met and the battalions were dissolved.
In autumn 1941 both battalions were reorganized into one unit – 201st battalion that was contract-based. After additional training, the battalion was sent to Belarus for security duties.
On December 1, 1942, the contract expired, and battalion members refused to swear loyalty to Adolf Hitler. The battalion was taken to Lviv where the officers got arrested. Roman Shukhevych succeeded to escape and in November 1943 became the UPA’s Commander-in-Chief.
Roman Shukhevych did not serve in any of the SS units. The Nachtigall battalion was subordinated to the Wehrmacht command. Nachtigall was not mentioned at the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals after WWII (1945-1946).
The story about Shukhevych allegedly receiving an Iron Cross from Hitler is an outright provocation. It was spread in 2007 by the leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine Pyotr Symonenko during a parliamentary session. In 2010 a Ukrainian court made Symonenko withdraw the false accusation. Nevertheless, the myth of “Shukhevych’s Iron Crosses” is still being actively used by anti-Ukrainian provocateurs.
What actually happened is Shukhevych was awarded military service crosses not by Hitler but by the clandestine Ukrainian parliament – the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council. These were Ukrainian not German awards: the 1st class Golden Cross for combat achievements and the 1st class Golden Cross for achievements that was awarded posthumously to the UPA commander in 1950.
Disinformation: UPA General Roman Shukhevych received the Iron Cross from Hitler.
Facts:
This is total fiction. This disinformation was spread in 2007 by the leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Pyotr Symonenko, during a parliamentary session. In 2010 Symonenko admitted in court that the allegation was false. There is an official registry of people who received this medal, and Roman Shukhevych is not on the list. Shukhevych had never met Hitler and did not serve in the Galicia Division or any other SS formation.
Roman Shukhevych received two awards from the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council – the 1st Class Golden Cross for combat achievements and the 1st Class Golden Cross for overall achievements, awarded posthumously to the UPA commander in 1950.
Part V – Ukrainian Police
The Issue of the Ukrainian Police Under the Nazi German Occupation of Ukraine during World War II
There were TWO police organizations: The Ukrainian National Militia (UNM) formed by the Ukrainian National Government (also known as the Ukrainian State Administration) established by the Act of Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood (ARUS) on 30 June 1941 in Lviv (western Ukraine), and the so-called Ukrainian Auxiliary police (UAP) formed by the Germans. Nevertheless, frequently these two forces are lumped together.
The UNM was tasked to secure law and order and facilitate Ukrainian nation-building. The UAP, which along with Ukrainians was also staffed with members of other ethnic backgrounds, was forced to assist the German occupational regime in its repressive activities in Ukraine. To be sure, the membership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) led by Stepan Bandera (which initiated the ARUS) were under strict orders NOT to join the German controlled UAP.
After the suppression of the Ukrainian National Government and incarceration of its leading members in concentration camps in the beginning of July 1941, the UNM was also slated for liquidation by the German security forces. Its members were arrested or went underground to join the resistance. Numerous German field reports from Nazi-occupied Ukraine attest to these facts.
- Berlin, 3 July 1941:
— “On July 2 and 3, 1941, Einsatzgruppe B reported on the attempts of the Ukrainians headed by Bandera to confront the Germans with a fait accompli to proclaim a Ukrainian republic and organize a Ukrainian national militia”.
- Berlin, 31 July 1941:
— “Presently, the Einsatzkommandos are engaged in the dissolution of the so- called public services created by the OUN, and the formation of a NEW MILITIA [UAP]”.
- Berlin, 22 August 1941:
— “The underground activity is continuing. A leaflet urging the dissolved militia not to hand in its arms is presently being circulated […] ‘Down with foreign rule! Long live Stepan Bandera!’”.
- Berlin, 28 August 1941:
–“The dissolution of the Ukrainian militia is now taking place everywhere […]”.
- Berlin, Report, 1-15 September 1941:
— “The activity of the western Ukrainian Bandera group has an increasingly detrimental effect on the remaining Ukrainian regions […]. They present an acute danger to German interests both in the present time and in the future”.
- Berlin, 8 December 1941:
–“The assignments of the arrested OUN members correspond exactly to the recently reported attempts of this political group: The formation of a Ukrainian militia, the appointment of mayors and commanders of the militia, the dismissal of officials not authorized by the Bandera group […]”.
- Berlin, 3 July 1942:
–“It was also established that the Bandera organization has ordered its members not to join the [Ukrainian Auxiliary] police. A member of the Bandera movement is automatically excluded from the movement if he joins the police”.
( Sources: Bundesarchiv. Federal Archives. Koblenz, Germany; Auswartiges Amt.
Foreign Ministry Archives, Bonn, Germany)
Part VI – Galicia Division
Disinformation: The 14th Waffen SS Galicia Division was a “collaborationist criminal fascist” formation and participated in various war crimes during WW2.
Facts:
Between 1943 and 1945, TWENTY-FOUR non-German divisions were formed in various Nazi-occupied European countries due to a shortage of German manpower, among them: Ukraine, Holland, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, France, Norway and others.
All of these military units were designated as Waffen SS divisions. To be sure, the Waffen SS divisions participated in military operations ONLY, and NOT in police actions.
After much debate, the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC located in Krakow, Poland) acceded to the German “proposal” of forming a Ukrainian division to be officially called “14 Waffen Grenadier Division der SS, Galizische Nr. 1” – or the “Galicia Division”. Moreover, it was agreed that the Ukrainian division was to be deployed for service ONLY on the EASTERN FRONT against the Soviets. The UCC also hoped that this enterprise might help improve the treatment of Ukrainians, whom the Nazis also considered “Untermenschen” (“sub human”). The Galicia Division and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were two separate military entities with different origins and immediate objectives.
The motivation behind forming a Ukrainian military unit within Germany’s armed forces was greatly influenced by the experience of WW1. At the beginning of WW1 Ukrainians living in western Ukrainian provinces under the Austrian Empire were able to form their own regiment, the Sich Riflemen (Sichovi Striltsi), within the Austro-Hungarian armed forces. The war in the east ended with the front lines in Ukraine, and soldiers and officers of the Sichovi Striltsi soon formed the core of the nascent army of the newly declared Ukrainian National Republic (UNR). These experienced and disciplined soldiers allowed the UNR Army to fight off the invading Soviet Russian and Polish armies for three years (1918-1920) despite a total lack of support from the West. It was therefore surmised that if WW2 ended with the front lines in Ukraine, or if Allied forces of the West were to engage the Soviet Union, then a highly trained, well equipped fighting force would be an effective argument for an independent Ukrainian state. Sadly, neither scenario came true, but while stationed in Slovakia, the Galicia Division saved the lives of thousands of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Soviet onslaught. It is important to note that prior to the end of WW2, the Division became the core of the Ukrainian National Army, commanded by General Pavlo Shandruk, and surrendered to the British and Americans as such on May 8-11, 1945. After being investigated by the Allies and cleared of any crimes during the war, its members settled in Great Britain, Canada, the USA and other countries. In Canada the Deschenes Commission (February 1985 – December 1986) also found that this fighting unit committed NO war crimes.
Part VII – Killing of Jews in Lviv, Babyn Yar
Disinformation: During World War II Ukrainian nationalists as so-called “Nazi collaborators” took part in the massive killing of Jews, particularly in Lviv and Babyn Yar in Kyiv.
Facts:
The myth presenting the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) as the main actors in the killing of Jews was actively exploited by Soviet, and later Russian, disinformation to justify the campaign that Russia was waging against these organizations.
An attempt was made to create a logical sequence to deceive the public, suggesting that during WWII Ukrainians who stood for an independent Ukraine were also nationalists, and at the same time Ukrainian nationalists were killing Jews. This makes all those who stood for an independent Ukrainian state anti-semites and criminals.
In fact, the mass and systematic killing of Jews during World War II in Ukraine was conducted not by Ukrainian nationalists but by Nazi troops and their militarized units – the security service, the SS and the police.
Disinformation: Members of the OUN and the Nachtigall Battalion were the main organizers and executors of the pogrom against Jews in Lviv.
Facts:
Representatives of the German security service and the SS arrived in Lviv on July 1, the next day after the German army took the city. During this time, a Jewish pogrom took place in the city.
In April 1941 the leadership of OUN(b) issued resolutions passed at their II Congress clearly stipulating that the main goal of the Organization is fighting for Ukraine’s independence, and that Jewish pogroms are the enemy’s attempts to distract the attention of Ukrainians from attaining this goal.
As a military unit, Nachtigall neither organized nor carried out the pogrom. Moreover, the documents from the archive of the Committee for State Security (KGB) demonstrate that KGB accusations against the battalion soldiers were part of a special disinformation operation against West German Minister Theodor Oberlander in 1959-1960 by the Soviet security service. The murders of Jews, Polish intelligentsia, and Soviet sympathizers in the first days of the occupation of Lviv, known as the “Slaughter of the Lviv Professors” (Lviv Civilian Massacre), were the work of the German security units (the SD, Einsatzgruppe B). In 1997 a special Ukrainian government commission on OUN/UPA activities during WWII also confirmed this fact.
We do know that in reaction to the proclamation of the “Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State”, Nachtigall personnel were given a week off, and their German advising officer, Theodor Oberländer, was demoted and called back to Prague.
After the Red Army retreated from Lviv, no less than 2466 victims, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews, murdered by the Russians were found in the city’s prisons. Roman Shukhevych’s brother Yuriy was among those executed. Thousands more were killed in prisons in other western Ukrainian cities. They had been executed by the agents of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) of the USSR between June 22 and June 28, prior to the Soviet retreat. Similar mass executions occurred in other western Ukrainian cities: Drohobych – 1,101; Stanislaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk) – 1,000; Ternopil – 674; Rivne – 230; and many others.
Shorter Version
Disinformation: Members of the OUN and the Nachtigall Battalion were the main organizers and executors of the pogrom against Jews in Lviv.
Facts:
Representatives of the German security service and SS arrived in Lviv on July 1, the next day after the German army took the city. During this time, a Jewish pogrom took place in the city.
In April 1941 the leadership of OUN(b) issued resolutions passed at their II Congress clearly stipulating that the main goal of the Organization is fighting for Ukraine’s independence, and that Jewish pogroms are the enemy’s attempts to distract the attention of Ukrainians from attaining this goal.
As a military unit, Nachtigall neither organized nor carried out the pogrom. Moreover, the documents from the archive of the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB), the status of which was recently changed from secret to public, demonstrated that KGB accusations of the battalion fighters were part of a special operation in 1959-1960 by the Soviet security service against Ukrainian émigré leaders.
After the Red Army retreated from Lviv, thousands of victims killed by the Russians were found in the city’s prisons. They were arbitrarily executed by members of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) prior to the retreat. It caused massive anger on the part of the city’s population, while the Germans used it to direct the anger and aggression towards the Jews, despite the fact that the Jews themselves were among the victims of terror. One should also remember that Ukrainians constituted a minority in Lviv at that time.
Disinformation: Members of the OUN took part in the mass killing of Jews in Babyn Yar.
Facts:
In Kyiv a mass killing of Jews took place in Babyn Yar. After the German troops occupied the city, on September 29-30, 1941, the Sonderkommando headed by Paul Blobel and the German police killed over 33 thousand Jews. The Jews were also massively killed in the first half of October. Soviet and Russian propaganda often attributes one of the key roles in this killing to the “Banderites” from the “Bukovynsky” Battalion and from the supporting police units in Kyiv. Active use of this message in the mid-1980s coincided with the beginning of the large-scale propaganda campaign in the USSR on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials. However, the “Bukovynsky” Battalion had nothing to do with the OUN(b). Moreover, the fighters of the unit came to Kyiv only in the first half of November, over a month after the killing of Jews in Babyn Yar, so they could not have been involved in the killing.
The total number of Ukraine’s citizens murdered at Babyn Yar during the German occupation was over 150,000 people – including many members of the Ukrainian resistance, among them a renown poetess and OUN (m) member Olena Teliha.
The commander of the Kyiv police was Anatoliy Konkel. The police itself was mostly composed of Soviet prisoners of war and did not take part in the atrocities. The German Sonderkommando and German police were responsible for killing the Jews. The Kyiv population and OUN members did not take part in the killing of Jews in Babyn Yar. German war-time documents mention that the Jewish pogroms and anti-Jewish actions did not have support among the population.
OUN (b) operatives in central and eastern Ukraine, including Kyiv, were providing false passports to Jews or hiding them from the Germans. Among those who saved Jews during World War II were members of OUN, including the wife of General Roman Shukhevych (UPA’s Commander-in-Chief), Natalia, the Ukrainian priest Omelyan Kovch (OUN member since the 1930s), who died a martyr in Auschwitz for helping Jews, and Fedir (Feodor) Vovk, the Nykopol (today Dnipro oblast) district OUN (b) leader and vice-president of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (In 2002, he was awarded posthumously by Yad Vashem the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”).
Part VIII – Ukraine, Crimea, Revolution of Dignity
Disinformation: Ukraine is and always was a part of Russia. The Ukrainian state is a recent “invention” and has no actual history.
Facts:
“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names” (Confucius). The lands around today’s Moscow were on the north-eastern periphery of the Rus’ Empire, an early Ukrainian realm with its capital in Kyiv from the 9th to the 13th centuries. The invading Mongol Horde took this northern periphery in 1237 before devastating the heartland of Rus’, including Kyiv in 1240. The northern periphery with its capital in Moscow became an Ulus (province) of the Golden Horde. Kyiv and the core of the original Rus’ realm became incorporated into the Lithuanian Commonwealth, which adopted the Rus’ (Ruthenian) language and its codex of laws. The Duchy (later Tsardom) of Muscovy was greatly influenced both genetically and culturally by the Horde, and over time occupied all the lands of the Golden Horde. Muscovy was renamed by Tsar Peter I as Rossia (Latin for Rus’), as late as 1721. It was only in the 18th century that Muscovy-Rossia fully incorporated Kyiv and the core lands of Rus’ by ultimately destroying the Ukrainian Cossack State (16th-18th centuries). The Ruthenians (Rusyny) of the core Rus’ lands (Ukraine) near the Dnipro River began calling themselves Ukrainians as early as in the 12th century. However, as in the case of other modern European countries (Germany, Italy, Spain, and others), the adoption of “Ukraine” as a common name for the Ukrainian people and its land as a whole was a centuries-long incremental process, which came to a close for all of these nations – including Ukraine – as late as in the 19th century.
The word Ukraine (Ukrayina) is Ukrainian for country. Ukrainians re-established their independence from the Muscovite-Russian Empire in 1918. They lost this independence in 1921, but, after several unsuccessful attempts, fully regained it again in 1991 and were recognized as independent by all member-states of the United Nations. Indeed, Ukraine (as the Ukrainian SSR in 1945) joined the United Nations as one of its founding member-countries.
Shorter Version
Disinformation: Ukraine is and always was a part of Russia. The Ukrainian state is a recent “invention” and has no actual history.
Facts:
“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names” (Confucius). The lands around today’s Moscow were on the north-eastern periphery of the Rus’ Empire, an early Ukrainian realm with its capital in Kyiv from the 9th to the 13th centuries. The invading Mongol Horde took this northern periphery in 1237 before devastating the heartland of Rus’, including Kyiv in 1240. The northern periphery with its capital in Moscow became an Ulus (province) of the Golden Horde. Muscovy was renamed as Rossia (Greek for Rus’) hundreds of years later by Czar Peter in 1721 after Muscovy fully annexed Kyiv and the core lands of Rus’. The word Ukraine (Ukrayina) is simply Ukrainian for country and was used as early as the 12th century. However, as in the case of other modern European countries (Germany, Romania, Belarus, Italy, Spain, and others), the adoption of “Ukraine” as a common name for the Ukrainian people and its territory as a whole was an incremental process, which came to a close in the early 20th century. Ukrainians re-established their independence from the Muscovite-Russian Empire in 1918. They lost this independence in 1921, but, after several unsuccessful attempts, fully regained it again in 1991 and were recognized as independent by all member-states of the United Nations.
Disinformation: Ukraine isn’t a country.
Facts:
During the NATO Summit in Bucharest, Romania, Russian President Vladimir Putin said to then U.S. President George W. Bush: “You have to understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a country.” While this opinion fits nicely with the Kremlin’s view of the world, the facts shows it to be another myth. Ukraine within its present borders, including the Russian-annexed territory of Crimea, is an internationally recognized state, and a member of the United Nations. Indeed, Ukraine joined the United Nations as one of its founding member-countries in 1945, while Russia did not – it was represented as part of the Soviet Union.
Disinformation: Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities.
Facts:
Kyiv was the capital of the ancient Kyivan Rus Realm centered in Ukraine, which broke up in the 13th century, long before any state known as “Russia” came to exist. The modern Russian state directly precedes from Tsarist Russia, which itself proceeded from the Grand Duchy of Moscow, or Muscovy, with its capital in Moscow. Thus the “mother city” of modern Russia is, in fact, Moscow.
Disinformation: The Ukrainian language is a dialect of the “Great Russian” language.
Facts:
Within the Slavic language group, Russian is in fact the odd one out. If you could have heard an ancient East Slavic tribesman, his speech would have sounded much more like Ukrainian than Russian. Indeed, Ukrainian shares many more linguistic features with Belarusian, Czech, Slovak, Polish and Serbo-Croat than it does with Russian. Ukrainian and Russian are not mutually intelligible – the standard linguistic test for determining whether a language is a full-fledged language in its own right, and not a dialect of another. While many people in Ukraine have Russian as their first language, most people are bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian, and will switch languages depending on who they are speaking to. Politics aside, the language issue has never been problematic in Ukraine.
Shorter Version
Disinformation: The Ukrainian language is a dialect of the “Great Russian” language.
Facts:
The Ukrainian language is a separate Slavic language just as are Polish, Slovak, Czech, Serbian, Croat, Belarusian and Bulgarian. In terms of mutual intelligibility and lexicon, Ukrainian is closest to Belarusian and Slovak. The Muscovite language is closest to Bulgarian, reflecting the influence of Old Bulgarian scripture on the formation of that language. Most Muscovite speakers find that they cannot understand someone who speaks proper Ukrainian and vice-versa.
Disinformation: Ukraine is “deeply divided along ethnic and linguistic lines.”
Facts:
Since regaining its independence in 1991, Ukraine, as a modern European political nation, has mostly been a peaceful, ethnically and linguistically varied state, home to speakers of not only Ukrainian, but Russian, Eastern Yiddish, Rusyn, Romanian, Belarusian, Crimean Tatar, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish, Armenian, German and Greek. While Ukrainian is the language most commonly spoken, Russian is also widely used, and many Ukrainians are equally proficient in both. Moreover, Ukrainians will switch between the two as the situation requires, sometimes using different languages to address the members of a single conversational group. Politics had muddied the issue, but ethnic Ukrainians can be heard speaking Russian as well as Ukrainian. It is a mistake to identify a Russian-speaking Ukrainian as a “Russian,” just as it would be a mistake to say an American, Canadian, Australian, Irish person or Scot was “English” because they speak English.
Disinformation: Crimea is a Russian land.
Facts:
While Russia absorbed Crimea into its empire in the 18th century after one of its many wars with the Ottoman Empire (based in Turkey), Crimea has a long history that had little to do with Russia. Geographically, the Crimean Peninsula is an integral part of Ukraine’s mainland. The people with the greatest claim to call Crimea home, are, of course, the Crimean Tatars, an ethnos that actually developed in Crimea over at least 8 centuries, but that population was repressed and deported during the time that the Russian Empire and later Soviet Union were in control of the peninsula. Things changed for the better after Ukraine gained independence, and Crimea gained autonomy within the unitary state of Ukraine, with Crimean Tatars returning to their homeland from their places of deportation in Central Asia. Ethnic Ukrainians and Russians also inhabit Crimea but describing it as “Russian land” is to ignore a vast portion of its history, both recent and ancient. Today, Crimean Tatars want Crimea to be returned to Ukraine. Some have been killed while others are being imprisoned, along with Ukrainians, by the Russians since their 2014 military invasion and illegal occupation of the peninsula.
Disinformation: Crimea was part of Russia and was “gifted” to the Ukrainian SSR by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954.
Facts:
Crimea was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1783. Until then it had never been part of the empire. But conquest does not beget the right of possession. Even when it was part of the Russian Empire (nineteenth–early twentieth centuries) Crimea was economically bound more to Ukraine, especially through transport links and Ukrainian workers. The real motive behind the purely propagandistic “transfer to Ukraine” in 1954 was the terrible consequences of Russian “management,” Stalin’s deportation of the peninsula’s indigenous peoples, the ruinous state of the economy, and the need to supply fresh water from the Dnipro River, which operation began in 1957 with the construction of the North Crimean Canal.
The veracity of these historical explanations is confirmed by today’s water crisis in the peninsula: As soon as Russia annexed Crimea, water instantly disappeared. The conclusion here is that without Ukraine and without water Crimea cannot exist, and sooner or later it will be returned to Ukraine.
Disinformation: The conflict in eastern Ukraine is a spontaneous uprising mounted by the local Russian-speaking population against the Ukrainian state.
Facts:
There is nothing “spontaneous” in history. The Russo-Ukrainian confrontation has deep historical roots. The absorption of Ukraine and its material and human resources is one of the key prerequisites for the deployment of the Russian imperial project. The origins of the current Russo-Ukrainian war dates to the period marked by the formation of the Russian Empire and its conflict with the Ukrainian state—the Hetmanate. The subsequent process of the formation and expansion of imperial Russia was always accompanied by wars against Ukraine. Russia sought to destroy our subjectness. The history of the Ukrainian–Russian relations is a chronicle of wars, liberation uprisings mounted by the Ukrainians, and the consistent policies of the Russification and assimilation of Ukrainians.
The current armed conflict is known as a “hybrid” war, representing a new way of implementing aggressive policies. But practically all its instruments (the attempt to consolidate Russia’s influence in the Ukrainian lands by providing support to loyal Ukrainian political milieus, creating an internal-political rift in Ukrainian society with the aid of propaganda, and, finally, open military intervention and the attempt to portray aggression as an internal, civil conflict) were tested by Russian leaders back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most striking scenario was used by the Bolsheviks against the Ukrainian National Republic during the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921.
The Russian Federation is conducting a large-scale “hybrid” war by deploying to Ukrainian territory units of the RF’s regular armed forces as well as irregular forces, armed gangs, and groups of mercenaries that were created, commanded, and financed by Russia. These actions on the part of Russia correspond to Points, A, B, C, D, E, and G of Article 3, Resolution 3314 (XXIX) of the United Nations General Assembly’s “Definition of Aggression” adopted 14 December 1974, which makes them crimes of armed aggression against Ukraine.
Disinformation: The Revolution of Dignity on the Maidan in 2013–2014 was a “fascist putsch that toppled the lawfully elected President of Ukraine.”
Facts:
Recourse to rebellion against tyranny and oppression is one of the basic human rights, and it is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations on 10 December 1948. According to the Constitution of Ukraine, Ukrainians have the right to rebel. This follows from several provisions of the Constitution. Article 22 states: “Human and civil rights and freedoms are enshrined in this Constitution and are not exhaustive. Constitutional rights and freedoms are guaranteed and cannot be abolished.” In other words, the Constitution loses its meaning if its highest value—human rights—is being supplanted in Ukraine and if the system of Ukrainian statehood is not oriented in favor of its citizens and the implementation of their rights and freedoms. All bodies of state power are obliged to recognize, uphold, and protect the rights of all Ukrainian citizens.
The events that took place in Ukraine a few years before February 2014 may be easily defined as the “usurpation of power and the violation of citizens’ rights to freedom and dignity.” This period saw the toppling of the constitutional order. The power structures began to exert pressure on citizens and lay criminal charges against them. The number of crimes that the regime perpetrated against citizens increased, and their rights and freedoms were violated. The non-implementation and absence of any actions on the part of the state gave the people the legitimate right to rebel.
The grounds determining the lawfulness of the uprising against the regime were the following circumstances:
- The violation by the government of the principles of democracy, its usurpation of power.
- The violation by the government of the Constitution and human rights, in particular, the right to life, the right of social service, freedom, the right to privacy, etc.
- The government showed itself as an aggressor that encroached on the common good of the people.
- Abuse of the law on the part of the public authorities.
- Neglect of the state’s independence, the fugitive President Yanukovych’s invitation to the Russian aggressors; in other words, state treason.
In these circumstances, the rebelling people were saving Ukraine from annihilation. After Yanukovych’s escape, his associates published the following statement: “We, the Party of Regions faction in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and our fellow party members, decisively condemn the criminal orders that led to the loss of life, an empty treasury, immense debts, and shame before the Ukrainian people and the whole world, as a result of which our country has ended up on the edge of a precipice, the threat of disunion, and the loss of our national sovereignty.”
The Revolution of Dignity on the Maidan was not a “fascist putsch” but a nationwide uprising in which millions of Ukrainian citizens ACROSS Ukraine took part.
Disinformation: The Revolution of Dignity on the Maidan in 2013–2014 was a CIA plot.
Facts:
If you Google the words “Maidan” and “CIA,” you will see only postings by Russian propaganda channels. Not a single serious piece of fact-based research exists in this connection. Thus, the theory of the “hand of the CIA” is, from beginning to end, an invention of Russian propagandists.
The historical significance of the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity lies above all in the fact that it succeeded in halting the threat of destruction of Ukraine’s independence and safeguarding its European aspirations and Ukrainians’ freedom and dignity. The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy declared that Ukrainians “practically with their bare hands forced the Berkut to retreat, and with the determined action worthy of great nations inflicted a historic defeat on tyranny, and therefore they are not simply Europeans but the best of Europeans, not only in terms of history but also blood that has been shed.”
Part IX – The “Debate” on the Holodomor Death Toll
An attempt to throw off course the study of Ukraine’s Holodomor-Genocide of 1932-1933 is under way with a clear participation of adversarial actors whose aim seems to be to sow confusion, obfuscate and compromise the issue.
Clearly, the main adversarial actor on the issue of the Holodomor has always been Russia – whether Soviet or post-Soviet.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Moscow finally acknowledged that there was a famine in the USSR in the 1930s – but continues to this day to deny the Ukrainian Holodomor-Genocide of 1932-1933. To witness: In 2006 the Upper Chamber (Council of the Federation) of the Russian Parliament endorsed the publication of a 3-volume collection of documents on the famine in the USSR in the 1930s along with an “explanatory memorandum” emphasizing that the main goals of this project were:
- “To refute the singular nature of the famine in Ukraine in the 1930s”; and
- that the documents “should be selected in such a way that the tragedy of the entire Soviet peasantry will be conspicuous, without a focus on Ukraine.” Even the original title of the publication was changed from “Famine in the USSR, 1932-1933” to “Famine in the USSR, 1929-1934”, because the period of 1932-1933 has become symbolic of and associated with the Ukrainian Holodomor (More on this issue in the Compendium “Holodomor: The Ukrainian Genocide, 1932-1933”, pp.125-132).
Since this ploy to deny the Holodomor failed, Moscow and its witting and unwitting “fellow-travellers” (or worse) in Ukraine have now seemingly resorted to indirect “active measures” to compromise the historicity of the Holodomor. They raised the Holodomor death toll in Ukraine to absurdly high levels, namely 10 to 12 million victims in 1932-1933. However, such an inflated death toll in 1932-33 is a brazen demographic impossibility on all counts. To witness: the total population of the Ukrainian SSR in 1926 (as per census) was 29,287,000, and in 1939 (as per census now adjusted to eliminate Moscow’s deliberate falsification to cover up the losses caused by the Holodomor) was 30,142,600. Moreover, in 1926 there were 6,946,300 Ukrainians in the Soviet Union beyond the borders of the Ukrainian SSR, whereas in 1939 the number was only 3,359,184. As one responsible writer on the Holodomor recently put it: “More is not better.” In other words, the level of national patriotism OUGHT NOT to be considered directly proportionate to the level of the Holodomor death toll.
The “debate” on the issue of the Holodomor death toll (originating in adversarial to Ukraine quarters) has now taken an ominous turn. Trustworthy Holodomor scholars, researchers, historians and demographers who “follow the evidence” are subject to personal attacks, harassment, defamatory accusations, provocations and even threats if they challenge the 10 million figure; proven demographic and historical facts formulated by past and present Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian students of the Holodomor are being ignored, obfuscated, distorted and falsified – all this with a clear purpose of discrediting their professionalism and the issue of the Holodomor as such. The most telling issue that these adversarial actors are trying to undermine by inflating the death toll and shifting blame for this crime against humanity is: Who actually was responsible for the Holodomor? They claim that it was the “communist totalitarian regime” because “historians have long agreed that imperialism [as such] had as its goal economic exploitation, and not the physical annihilation of the subject peoples” – a blatant distortion of the history of empires in general, a specific attack on historians who study the era of the Holodomor in the context of Russian imperialism, and a clear attempt to relieve Stalin’s Soviet Russian regime of the responsibility for engineering the Holodomor and committing genocide. To be sure, numerous documents attest to the fact, that Moscow did make a political decision to weaponize the famine specifically against the non-Russian subjects of its empire, particularly against Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Volga Germans, Kuban and Don Cossacks.
The 10-million figure
The conquest of rebellious Ukraine by the Soviet Russian regime was, indeed, achieved at the cost of at least 10 million Ukrainian dead, namely:
- The man-made famine of 1921-1922
- Estimated 1.5 to 2.0 million victims;
- Ukrainian grain stocks and foodstuffs were seized by force in order to feed the Soviet Russian powerbase in the newly formed Soviet Union.
- The “Decade of Terror” of 1928-1938
- Holodomor death toll in Soviet Ukraine and Ukrainian-populated areas of Soviet Russia [and other Soviet republics] estimated at 5 million victims;
- The seized Ukrainian grain stocks and foodstuffs were sold abroad for hard currency to ostensibly finance the industrialization of the Soviet Union;
- Arrests and subsequent executions estimated at 800,000 victims;
- Forced removal of Ukrainians from Ukraine, most of whom perished in exile, estimated at 1.5 million victims.
- The man-made famine of 1946-1947
- Estimated 1.0 million victims;
- This famine affected all areas of Ukraine. The seized grain and foodstuffs were sent abroad to prop up the communist regimes imposed by Moscow after World War II on some Soviet-occupied European countries. These countries formed in 1955 the so-called “Warsaw Pact” military alliance controlled by Moscow to counter NATO – the Free World military alliance.
Summary of Ukrainian losses due to Moscow man-made famines and related repressive measures
- Death toll of the three man-made famines engineered by the Soviet Russian regime (1921-22, 1932-33, 1946-47) – up to 8 million.
- Death toll of Holodomor-related measures implemented by Moscow during the “Decade of Terror” (collectivization, mass deportations from Ukraine and mass executions) – up to 2.3 million.
TOTAL DEATH TOLL – up to 10.3 million Ukrainians
Reference: Holodomor: The Ukrainian Genocide, 1932-1933. Toronto: Ucrainica Research Institute, 2020, 318 pp.
[1] Mykola Lebed – Acting Head of the OUN (1941-43) after Stepan Bandera was imprisoned by the Nazis on 5 July 1941.
[2] General Roman Shukhevych – Head of the OUN Home Leadership and C-in-C of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army – UPA (1943-†1950).
Part X – Putin’s Russia: “Alternative Reality”
Vladimir Putin’s and Russia’s ruling elites’pathologically delusional obsession with the vintage Russian narrative of denial of the existence of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people can – hopefully – be finally put to rest by the world community of nations precisely because of Ukraine’s determined defense of its right to exist notwithstanding Moscow’s genocidal aggression. Moreover, this REALITY is also corroborated by the following historical FACTS:
- On 10 September 2022, Moscovites, with Putin in the lead, celebrated with pomp and circumstance the 875th anniversary of the founding of the city of Moscow in
- In 1982, Ukraine – although still part of the Soviet Union – and Ukrainians around the world celebrated the 1,500th anniversary of the founding of the city of Kyiv in the latter half of the 5th century A.D. However, Kyiv traces its origin to a 2-4 centuries A.D. large settlement, which was an important trading hub at the time on the shores of the Dnipro River.
- To be sure, Moscow was founded some 625 years later (in 1147) as an appanage principality of the powerful Kyiv Realm.
- In 1988, Christians around the world together with Ukrainians marked the 1000th anniversary of the official adoption in 988 A.D. of Christianity as a state religion of the Kyiv Realm during the reign of Prince Volodymyr the Great.
- The medieval Kyiv Realm and its closest appanage principalities – including the two most important ones of Chernihiv and Pereyaslav – were located in the ethnic heartland of the Ukrainian people, and remain to this day within the state boundaries of modern Ukraine with Kyiv as its ancient capital city.
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“RUSSKIY MIR” – THE “RUSSIAN WORLD” IN UKRAINE: A HISTORICAL “M.O.”
By Oleh Romanyschyn
“We will bury you”
Leader of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev threatening the West in a Moscow speech, 18 November 1956
“Don’t be under any illusion. We only look like you…Russians and Americans resemble each other physically. But inside we have very different values.”
President Vladimir Putin to Vice President Joe Biden, March 2011
“Russia is not squeaky clean. Russia is what it is. And we are not ashamed of showing who we are.”
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, BBC interview, 17 June 2022
“Russia has challenged the West as a civilization…This means that we must also go to the end.”
“Putin’s brain” Alexander Dugin, 20 August 2022
“President Vladimir Putin says Russia is fighting for its very existence in Ukraine, taking on a country that is conspiring with the West to destroy its nation. In talk shows on state television, the war is presented as a continuation of the Soviet Union’s fight for survival against Nazi Germany.”
New York Times, 1 September 2022
Sounding psychopathic, Putin denounced the West for “pure Satanism”, and portrayed the West as Russia’s “enemy” with which it is currently engaged in an “existential battle.”
Vladimir Putin, speech in Moscow “Together forever” on the “annexation” to Russia of partially occupied parts of Ukrainian territory, 30 September 2022
From Russian troops’ calls home from Ukraine:
Sergey to girlfriend: “They told us that where we’re going, there’s a lot of civilians walking around. And they gave us the order to kill everyone we see… kill any civilian and drag them into the forest…”.
Sergey to mother: ”There is a forest where the division headquarters is. I walked into it and saw a sea of corpses in civilian clothing. I’ve never seen so many corpses in my f…g life…”
(New York Times, Friday, 30 September 2022, pp. A8-9)
==========
Russian scorched-earth methods of conducting warfare against and occupation of “enemy” countries are deeply rooted in its history: blanket devastation, wholesale murder of civilians and prisoners of war, torture, rape, kidnapping, mass deportations and ethnic cleansing, plunder, looting, destruction of civilian infrastructure, lying, and spreading disinformation. This seems to point to Russia’s some innate inferiority complex (“catch up to, and overtake” the West), which is compensated by aggression, conquest, brutality, and destruction.
Just as critically important is Moscow’s vicious destruction of Ukraine’s ancient national heritage by targeting its historical and cultural monuments, churches, museums, libraries, housing archival collections, music and art institutions, and centers of learning.
What the entire world is now witnessing in real time as Moscow’s war on Ukraine unfolds is NOT “unprecedented”, “surprising”, “alleged”, “apparent”, “possible” “a dispute”, “a quarrel”, etc. as some pundits, politicians (including some world leaders), and certainly the ever-present Moscow’s “fellow-travelers” would have it. For Russia (former name Muscovy) Ukraine has ALWAYS been a historical enemy and the modus operandi (the “M.O”.) in its repeated campaigns to conquer, subjugate, to “erase”, to “resolve the Ukrainian problem”, has been the same for hundreds of years. Mass atrocities perpetrated on the civilian population and the obliteration of the civilian infrastructure have always been part of Moscow’s military doctrine, with the aim of terrorizing the enemy’s popular base into submission by the “power of the example.”
To witness in past and recent historical memory:
- As early as 1169 Andrey Bogoliubskiy – a Muscovite ruler of a Kyivan Realm appanage principality of Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma in Russia proper – waged war on Kyiv intending to replace it with his own principality as the seat of power of the Kyivan Realm. His forces plundered Kyiv ruthlessly. In 1203 Muscovy was involved in a second sack of Kyiv. Both of these attempts to “erase” Kyiv also resulted in massacres of its civilian inhabitants.
- In 1708 when Cossack Ukraine’s sovereign (Hetman) Ivan Mazepa decided to enter into an alliance with Sweden’s king Charles XII to break Moscow’s increasing hegemony over Ukraine, Russia’s (then known as Muscovy) tsar Peter I attacked the capital city of Cossack Ukraine, Baturyn, located in the Chernihiv province in the northeastern region of the country. After Baturyn fell to the Russian onslaught, ALL surviving defenders and the remaining civilian population of up to 15,000 men, women and children were massacred, the city pillaged and razed to the ground.
An ongoing archeological project (also supported proactively by Canadian academic institutions and foundations) to dig up, uncover and reconstruct the historical area of the City of Baturyn that was destroyed in 1708, constantly reveal human remains – all of them bearing forensic evidence of violent death.
Mariupol, Bucha, Borodianka, Izium, Kupiansk, Kherson, etc. – are the current versions of Russia’s “M.O.” of centuries ago in the Kyiv Realm or in the City of Baturyn.
- In the 20th century, Ukraine’s first war to regain its independence from Russia was fought in 1917-1921. The fall of the capital Kyiv on 9 February 1918 to communist Russian troops was followed by orders for the execution of all supporters of Ukrainian independence and nationhood. Over 5,000 Ukrainian citizens were shot in Kyiv alone – many of them for merely communicating in public in the Ukrainian language. Mass executions of Ukrainians were carried out by the invading Russian troops and secret police in all occupied areas of Ukraine according to a preconceived plan.
- During the “Decade of Terror” of 1928-1938, Stalin’s Soviet Russia annihilated up to 8,000,000 Ukrainians in the Soviet Union by weaponizing food supply and turning it into a weapon of mass destruction known as the Holodomor (murder or killing by starvation); by wholesale executions (up to 800,000 people) and deadly mass deportations (up to 1,5 million people) to the Siberian wilderness. This campaign of terror was enforced in Soviet Ukraine with aircraft, tanks and artillery deployed by a 1.2 million-strong Red Army occupation force consisting of 85% ethnic Russian soldiers.
A repeat scenario (including a man-made famine) was implemented by the Kremlin in 1945-1946 as well in the newly re-occupied regions of western Ukraine. Moscow deployed 500,000 NKVD (Soviet security forces) troops to help “annex” to the USSR (also by staged “popular will”) that part of the country, and combat the resistance of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) already battle-hardened in its fight against the Nazi occupation in 1942-1944.
Moreover, the Moscow-made famines of 1921-1922 and 1946-1947, which took the lives of an additional 2.5 million Ukrainians, display exactly the same “M.O.” of Russian-style destruction as during the “Decade of Terror” as well as the current Russian onslaught on Ukraine. Moscow’s aim was, and is, to prevent – in Stalin’s words – “losing Ukraine”.
- Weaponizing food supply has always been one of Russia’s favorite methods of repression of perceived enemy populations. Already as far back as in 1921, during the first Moscow-made famine in Ukraine (and other non-Russian regions of the emerging Soviet Union), the first Deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov ominously declared that “Food is a Weapon”. Now, over 100 years later, Putin has weaponized not only energy resources, but faithfully following Litvinov’s dictum, has also weaponized food supply by intermittently blocking the export of Ukrainian grain to needy countries and attacking Ukraine’s grain storage facilities.
- The Nazi German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 during WWII revealed again Moscow’s “M.O.” of destruction – this time during it’s first occupation of western Ukraine (September 1939-June 1941): scorched-earth tactics, mass deportations, at least 30,000 jailed civilians (“enemies of the people”) murdered by the retreating Russians.
All in all, Ukraine lost exceedingly more people in the so-called “peacetime” under the genocidal hegemony of the “Russkiy mir” (“Russian World”) in the 20th century (at least 10 million people in 1921-41, 1945-1950’s) than in ALL of its wars of liberation combined against Moscow’s relentless onslaughts from the mid-17th century to the present.
- On 5 September 1933 a renowned Ukrainian sociologist, political scientist and ethnologist Olgert I. Bochkowsky published an essay titled “Europa Invertebrata” (“Spineless Europe”) for ignoring Moscow’s genocidal famine in Ukraine – the Holodomor of 1932-1933.
Now, fast forward to 2014-2022 and Moscow’s armed assault on Ukraine. This historically repeat attempt by Russia to “resolve the Ukrainian problem” is currently based on Putin’s delusional premise that “Ukraine is not a country” and that “there are no Ukrainian people”. This is why O. Bochkowsky’s deeply felt disappointment with “spineless Europe” (read the West) became so timely nowadays.
In 2014 when Russia began its war of aggression against Ukraine in the Donbas, occupied the Crimea and shot down a Malaysian civilian aircraft full of passengers, the West simply failed to react adequately, and to this day has been reticent to grant Ukraine swift accession to membership at least in the European Union, not to mention NATO. It also failed then to provide Ukraine adequate military support, because it failed to grasp the perennial security threat to Europe and the free world stemming from Russia – regardless of the ruling regime in power at a given time, be it tsar Peter I, Lenin, Stalin, and now Stalin’s disciple –Putin. It then simply hoped that this “Russo-Ukrainian quarrel” would somehow “go away”.
In 2022 the West, again, was simply too slow to react to an already full-scale unprovoked invasion of Ukraine taking place in real time in the geographical center of Europe.
In either case – 2014 and 2022 – the initial stance of the West was “wait and see”, hiding behind a facade of platitudes, while hoping for the return of “business (literally!) as usual” with Russia. That is, until Ukraine with its blood, sacrifice and will to fight for its right to exist as a nation became the world epicenter of defense and struggle for civilizational values: nationhood, liberty, democracy, human dignity, and a basic modicum of decency and righteousness in international relations. As a result, the world has finally realized that Ukraine is not Russia.
The war also revealed to what extent the West, the free world, can “self-deter”
and was/is beholden to Russia’s interests, and, therefore, subject to outright blackmail, subversion, sabotage, provocations, cyber-attacks, hybrid warfare – both economic and military.
Ukrainian-born U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander S. Vindman (Ret.) accurately assessed in 2021 the United States’ (and by the same token the West’s) chronic hesitancy to provide in a timely manner effective military assistance to Ukraine to repel Russian aggression:
“Nations can self-deter, as I’ve come to understand from studying U.S.-Russia relations, with unfortunate results. Russia, in an effort to hang on to great power status, assumes the role of a foil to the U.S. and takes aggressive actions that raise the stakes and create a destabilizing sense of high risk. The U.S., keenly aware of the risk – predictably, to the Russians – too often looks only at negative outcomes from action in response to Russian outrages. Thus the U.S. scares itself off, unwittingly accomplishing the Russian purpose. For the greater security of the world, our country shouldn’t do that – and individuals shouldn’t, either.”
(“Here, Rights Matter”, 2021 LIEUTENANT COLONEL ALEXANDER S. VINDMAN was most recently the director for European Affairs on the White House’s National Security Council. Prior to retiring from the U.S. Army in 2020, he served as a foreign area officer with assignments in U.S. embassies in Kyiv, Ukraine and Moscow, Russia, and for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a Political-Military Affairs officer.)
Now we have reached a rubicon at which, regardless of how hard some world leaders of all stripes try to deny it, and/or try to “de-escalate” and “localize the conflict” to Ukraine, “appease” the Kremlin and find an “off-ramp” for Putin, “embark on a path of reconciliation” through “territorial concessions” on Ukraine’s part, etc., World War III against the free world has already begun with Moscow’s assault on Ukraine, upending in one way or another the interests of all nations and people and the security of planet Earth itself.
A telling example of such personal and political amorality displayed shamelessly by some national and even Catholic church leaders in the West by their support of Russia in its war on Ukraine hails from Italy and Vatican City according to media reports (ex.: The New York Times, 21 October 2022) on the recent general elections in that important NATO and EU member country:
Silvio Berlusconi: “I reconnected a little bit with President Putin”, whom he considers “among my five best friends”. In a meeting of Forza Italia party members he said that Putin sent him 20 bottles of vodka “and a very kind letter” for his 86th birthday in September. Berlusconi also said that he responded by sending bottles of Lambrusco wine and “an equally sweet letter”.
Matteo Salvini: The leader of the League Party used to wear T-shirts with Putin’s face on them, opposed sanctions on Russia, and even said he preferred Putin to his own Italian president.
Giuseppe Conte: The former Italian Prime Minister was to take part in a large demonstration on November 5 “demanding piece for Ukraine and an end to arms shipments,” basically advocating “Ukraine’s surrender”.
Cardinal Matteo Zuppi: The head of the Italian Church and close ally of Pope Francis was quoted by the Italian news agency ANSA as saying “better to lose a piece of sovereignty [i.e. – Ukrainian!] and resolve conflicts. Instead of taking up arms, let’s talk about it.”
Pope Francis’s reluctance to condemn – in accordance with one of the basic tenets of Christianity “Thou shall not kill” – Putin’s genocidal onslaught on Ukraine may be rooted in the Vatican’s vintage tradition of moral relativity, and the Pope’s own meeting with Putin on 4 July 2019 in the Vatican, after Moscow occupied by force Crimea and started in 2014 a murderous war in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Moreover, on that same day Pope Francis presented Putin – designated now a war criminal – with the “Guardian Angel of Peace Medal”…!
At this point the Russian Orthodox Church deserves a comment as well. This Church and its Moscow Patriarchate have always been subservient to and an arm of the Russian state at any period of its history – tsarist, communist, and now post-Soviet under the rule of “tsar-in-waiting” Vladimir Putin and his subordinate patriarch Kirill. Both of them are war criminals – Putin for starting the genocidal war on Ukraine, and Kirill for officially endorsing it with a “blessing” on behalf of the Church he is the head of.
There is no shortage, of course, of such public figures in different countries who advocate, for whatever reason, to stop support for Ukraine’s defense effort against Russia, and/or call for Ukraine’s outright “surrender” – including, unfortunately, even in the United States. Among such public figures are MAGA politicos in particular, such as former president Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy and Marjorie Taylor Green on the Republican side, and the chairwoman of the liberal Congressional Progressive Caucus, Pramila Tayapal, on the Democratic side.
Simply futile are any and all attempts to appease a terrorist state like Russia, be it governed in the past by Lenin, Stalin, and now by Putin. All of them are criminal minds devoid of any scruples to kill and destroy en masse in order to achieve their imperialistic goals by imposing on as many nations as they can their particular version of the “Russian world”. In the case of Putin, the use for that purpose even of a tactical nuclear weapon on Ukrainians, as well as to intimidate and blackmail the West into submission so it would stop helping Ukraine’s war effort, cannot be excluded.
The free world must now, finally, try and comprehend that Moscow has always respected only force, and that “Moscow does not believe in tears” – as an old Russian adage goes – and that only a tangible show of force by the free world that includes Ukraine can stop the Kremlin from further aggression.
When, with continual effective assistance of the free world, Ukraine prevails – as it MUST – against Russia and the imposition of its so-called “Russia world”, then this will be Ukraine’s last war for the foreseeable future for its independence, nationhood, and its right to exist. It will also augur and clear the way to a much more free and peaceful world for all nations willing to partake in it without being subjected to existential threats from terrorist states like Russia with unsatiated imperialistic greed.
In lieu of an afterthought:
Back in 1769 the renown German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder seems to have foreseen Ukraine’s future place and role in the world when he insightfully wrote:
“What а view from the West-North of these regions, when one day the spirit of civilization will visit them! Ukraine will become а new Greece; the beautiful heaven of this people, their merry existence, their musical nature, their fruitful land, and so on, will one day awaken; out of so many little wild peoples, as the Greeks were also once, а mannered nation will сome to bе; their borders will stretch out to the Black Sea and from there through the world. Hungary, these nations, and an area of Poland and
Russia will bе participants in this new civilization; from the northwest, this spirit will go over Europe, which lies in sleep, and make it subservient to this spirit. This all lies ahead, and must one day happen; but how? When? Through whom?”
Johann Gottfried Herder,
Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769
==============
In 1963 a young talented Ukrainian poet and dissident Vasyl Symonenko died in Ukraine at the age of 28 under suspicious circumstances. For his profoundly symbolic and insightful poetry about national and universal human values, he was consistently hounded by both the Soviet Russian KGB and state literary censors. Much of his poetry was either banned in the Ukrainian SSR or distorted by censors, but widely circulated clandestinely in its original version as “samvydav” (“self-publishing”) among the people — eventually reaching the West.
In one of his poems V. Symonenko wrote the following telling lines about his homeland in the still distant future:
“Ukraine — thou art a prayer to me,
Thou art my heartbreak everlasting…
A battle thunders now across the world
For thy life, thy right to be.”
Symonenko’s feelings, concerns and poetic vision about Ukraine’s historic struggle have already materialized, while the key questions posed by Herder are being answered. These portentous existential events taking place in Ukraine in real time are now witnessed and shared by ALL Ukrainians and, indeed, by the ENTIRE WORLD.
Oleh Romanyschyn, Ph.D.
____________________________________________________
Ukrainian Nationalism, Ustashism, and Fascism: The Subject-Matter and Context of the Discussion
Serhiy Kvit
What Is the Debate About?
In an attempt to avoid the mechanical identification with fascism of nationalist movements in stateless nations—primarily Ukrainians, Croats, and Slovaks, who did not create their own states in the wake of World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires—Oleksandr Zaitsev has proposed a new term, “ustashism” (after the “Ustaša”—the Croatian Revolutionary Organization, UHRO). Zaitsev specifically states that the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was not a fascist organization by nature. Rather, he contends that the OUN belongs to a category of political movements and corresponding ideologies that may be characterized as “revolutionary integral nationalism developing under conditions of perceived foreign oppression, and using violence for the purpose of national liberation and the creation of an independent authoritarian state.”[1]
The concept of “integral nationalism” dates back to the monarchical political organization Action française, founded by Charles Maurras in 1899. Incidentally, this was the same year that Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi authored Independent Ukraine, initially delivered as a public speech in Poltava and Kharkiv, and then published as a brochure in L’viv in 1900.[2] Maurras and Mikhnovs’kyi put forward strikingly similar slogans—“France for the French,” and “Ukraine for Ukrainians,” respectively. While these slogans appeared more or less simultaneously, they emerged independently of one another, and there is no evidence of any contact between Maurras and Mikhnovs’kyi.
Oleksandr Zaitsev notes that later the concept of “integral nationalism” was adapted and explored further by Carlton Hayes, Peter Alter, and John Armstrong in order to typologize radical nationalist movements, especially so as to distinguish between nations with or without their own states. This was a continuation of a great debate in which Anthony Smith, in particular, considered Nazism and fascism as alternatives to the tradition of European nationalism based on the idea of unique and plural free nations. Indeed, it was Smith who was the first to recognize French integral nationalism as the link between nationalism and fascism.[3] For its part, Zaitsev’s concept of “ustashism” is intended to establish a distance between the political organizations and ideologies associated with stateless nations, on the one hand, and such phenomena as (Italian) Fascism, (German) Nazism, or (Spanish) Falangism, on the other. The latter all emerged in the context of established states, and are generalized under the term “generic fascism” in the research literature.
Tomislav Dulić and Goran Miljan have criticized Oleksandr Zaitsev’s approach on the grounds that “by the late 1930s ustaštvo was basically another iteration of fascism that contained the usual specificities to suit a local historical, political, and cultural context.”[4] These authors also deny the existence of fundamental differences between nationalist organizations and their ideologies in nations with or without states, and, most interestingly, they refer to subject identity (effectively
equating this with state independence) within the USSR, as if such identity was related to the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Specifically, they point to the fact that “the status of Ukraine as one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union that nominally retained a large part of its sovereignty and the right of secession,”[5] as though this fact somehow meant that the Ukrainian nationalist movement could rightfully be designated as fascist. Contextually, such statements are ridiculous and absurd.
It is important to note that Oleksandr Zaitsev does not insist on his term: “[…] (if anyone can suggest a better one, I am ready to accept it), but I insist that ultra-nationalist (integral nationalist) movements in stateless nations are typologically different from ultra-nationalist, in particular fascist, movements in nation-states and, therefore, they should be considered a separate genus of ideological movements.”[6] In this essay, I discuss not the specific term itself, but the underlying concept, which I view as rational and useful for comparative study of nationalist movements in interwar Europe.
The Deeper Subject of the Discussion
As we can see, the discussion is complex because of the ambiguity inherent to any typology of nationalist movements. The specific national phenomena and the circumstances in which the movements developed resulted in distinctive functional features.
For example, it is extremely problematic to apply the definition “integral nationalism” in the Ukrainian context precisely because it originates from Action française and is hence associated with the latter’s characteristics.
If one examines the ideological legacy of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and specifically, the writings of Dmytro Dontsov, it immediately becomes obvious that the Ukrainian nationalist movement never emphasized ethnic exclusiveness—in any of its “active,” “volitional,” or “organized” embodiments. Indeed, we can even find the opposite in Dontsov’s works: his alternative slogan “Ukrainians for Ukraine”[7] is closer to a call for responsible leadership in the struggle to create one’s own state than to any claim to ethnic exclusivity.
At first reading it might seem that the slogan “Ukraine for Ukrainians” (authored by Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi), was quite in line with the principles of Action française. But deeper analysis of the Ukrainian context calls this claim into question. After all, the draft Ukrainian Constitution, published in September 1905 in the only issue of the Ukrainian People’s Party newspaper under the title “Independent Ukraine,” for a state which, unlike France, did not exist on the global map at that time, guaranteed all rights to national minorities.[8] Therefore, we should interpret Mikhnovs’kyi’s slogan after 1899 as a call to fight against the occupiers—a call to (re)establish an independent Ukrainian state and realize the nation’s right to self-determination. As a lawyer, Mikhnovs’kyi paid much attention to the legal justification of the Ukrainians’ right to state independence, in particular, through revision of the 1654 Pereyaslav Agreement between Ukraine and Russia.
The French context of monarchical nationalism was quite different at the time. Action française developed in the context of a strong state, and so this movement was linked to colonial traditions of global empire. It called for domination of weaker social elements that did not fit its concept of national exclusiveness and narcissism.
The idea of national “integrity” that is central to the Ukrainian liberation movement places national priorities over all else. This idea is rooted in a romantic perception of the nation, initiated by Taras Shevchenko in his poem “To my fellow-countrymen, in Ukraine and not in Ukraine, living, dead and as yet unborn, my friendly epistle” written on 14 December 1845. There we can see a nation as a community existing outside of time and space.
Taras Shevchenko’s vision was influential in shaping the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism. In particular, the OUN adopted another of Shevchenko’s formulations in viewing the Russian Empire/Soviet Union as a “prisonhouse of nations” that must be destroyed by all means. Starting from 1940, the Ukrainian nationalist movement officially used the slogan: “Freedom to the peoples! Freedom to the individual!” Such a goal would be unthinkable for fascist movements with their deeply rooted étatism.
National “integrity” was also supported by Ivan Franko, a prominent Ukrainian intellectual, in a media discussion spawned by the publication of Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi’s Independent Ukraine. In his essay “Beyond the Limits of the Possible” (1900), Franko takes the side of Mikhnovs’kyi, reflecting on the “ideal of political independence” and the “ideal of national independence.”[9] He does not express any reservation with respect to the slogan “Ukraine for Ukrainians” because he also perceived it in a national liberation sense, and not through an ethnocentric or xenophobic lens.
So, Who Was Really Who?
When considering the characteristic features of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, one should question the widespread thesis that attributes an authoritarian nature to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The OUN was authoritarian in the sense that it was a military organization. Its purpose was not only armed struggle for Ukrainian state independence, but also preparation for World War II, along with other European states and nationalist movements in stateless nations.
The authoritarianism of interwar Ukrainian nationalism did not signify an intention to accomplish any particularly authoritarian/totalitarian project once independent Ukraine had been achieved. Commentary published by Ukrainian nationalists during the interwar period should not be quoted out of context; doing so does not serve to advance our understanding of the movement.
Likewise, statements about Dmytro Dontsov’s “fascination with fascism” are actually quite dubious. Dontsov also “admired” Bolshevism, the Zaporizhian Cossacks, the Crusaders, and the figure of Mohammed—as he did any examples that could “technically” represent “cases of success” to inspire the Ukrainian liberation movement. Similarly, some Western politicians, intellectuals, and businessmen of the interwar period also once “admired” the anticommunist actions of Benito Mussolini and other authoritarian leaders.
Even in Soviet Ukraine, during the Russian Bolshevik occupation, when intellectual discussions used rhetoric like “Away from Moscow!,” the writer Mykola Khvyl’ovyi, who coined this phrase, wrote in 1926 that “the hot temper that spawns fascism cannot but invoke sympathy.”[10] Such a statement would have been treated in a very different way after the Nuremberg trials, but during the interwar period, its contextual meaning was quite different.
At that time, Dmytro Dontsov expressed his sympathy for the political system of Great Britain. In 1933, in a letter to the writer Yurii Klen, he said “I consider England the best creation of modern civilization.”[11] Likewise, in 1929, he expressed his admiration for the United States of America.[12] In no way do these facts signify his adherence to the ideals of contemporary liberal democracy. If an understanding of the true ideologies and opinions of the time is our goal, we may not ignore the interwar geopolitical context: On the eve of World War II, the Ukrainian nationalist movement was focused not on the political system of a future Ukraine, but on the struggle for its independence.
One should remember here that the OUN gave rise to three attempts to declare an independent Ukrainian state and create Ukrainian governments. These were Carpathian Ukraine (1939), the Ukrainian State (1941), and the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (1944). The latter was a prototype of a Ukrainian government designed to provide political leadership during the armed struggle of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Each of these is important for understanding the OUN’s intentions regarding the future political system of independent Ukraine. All three governments were established with elements of a coalition structure—not an authoritarian single-party state.
It should be noted that only the government headed by Avgustyn Voloshyn was actually established in Carpathian Ukraine just before World War II, and it was created as a coalition. After the war started, legal Ukrainian political parties ceased to exist. However, whenever possible, well-known public opinion leaders, experts, scholars, and individuals with different political views were involved in the Ukrainian State Administration (UDP) under Yaroslav Stets’ko, as Prime Minister.
Finally, the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council was symbolically headed by Kyrylo Osmak, a former member of the Central Council of Ukraine (1917–18), which emphasized the continuity of Ukrainian statehood since the Ukrainian People’s Republic period. That is, all three precedents for creating national governments were attempts at making the latter attractive to society as a whole. Each professed a sharing of political responsibility with leaders who had different political views, but who stood on the platform of an independent Ukraine.
Coming back to the comparative features of the Ukrainian and Croatian nationalist movements, it should be noted that they had much in common. Oleh Bahan points out that “the Croatian topic arose in 1913 for the first time in the discourse of the emerging Ukrainian nationalist movement of the 20th century, at the 2nd Student Congress in L’viv in the famous speech of Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973) titled ‘The Current State of the Nation and Our Tasks’.”[13] Bahan writes about political and institutional cooperation, exchange of ideas, and artistic contacts taking place in the context of the very similar historical task facing Ukrainians and Croats: to create their own independent state. The OUN member Bohdan Kravtsiv played a special role in the development of Ukrainian–Croatian dialogue.
The idea of typological similarity between the OUN and the Ustašas is thus fruitful. However, according to Bahan, it is important to remember how the two political traditions differ. Unlike the Ukrainians, the Croats for a long time had had state autonomy, and their own idea of monarchy, and they had been more deeply immersed in the Western European cultural and political context. At the same time, Ivan Patryliak reminds us that firstly, until 1941 the Ustašas were mostly an émigré organization, which had little influence in Croatia after the 1932 Lika uprising and which, unlike the OUN, could not boast of an extensive underground network at home. So, the Ustašas really “received” their statehood from the Nazis and fascists whose recipes they followed for nation-building. Secondly, in 1941, OUN members (specifically, the Bandera organization) strongly rejected the Slovak or Croatian type of ersatz statehood (and informed Berlin of this in a special memorandum on 23 June 1941).[14]
That memorandum was prepared by Ukrainian nationalists on 15 June 1941 and handed over to the Reich Chancellery on 23 June 1941. The text contained ruthless criticism, edification, and even threats towards the Third Reich, as well as demands for complete state independence and the creation of a full-scale Ukrainian army. The document strictly rejected the Croatian and Slovak “models”:
It must be stated that there is no analogy for resolving the Ukrainian issue. Since 1938, two new states have emerged in Europe: Slovakia and Croatia. Without taking into account the difference in area and population of the countries, the Ukrainian problem is far more outstanding […] This cannot be the final resolution of the problem on which further German-Ukrainian relations depend, and cannot be the methods to be used from the very beginning. […] The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which has for many years been leading the proactive part of the Ukrainian people in its revolutionary struggle for Ukraine’s state independence, and educating the entire Ukrainian people for this duty, is ready to lead this struggle to achieve its national ideal.[15]
After the proclamation of the Ukrainian State in L’viv on 30 June 1941, as part of the so-called “policy of fulfilled facts” pursued by the OUN, the German occupation authorities imprisoned many members of the leadership and started large-scale repressions against the nationalist movement. In response, the OUN, keeping to the promises stated in the abovecited memorandum, launched an insurgent movement and created the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Those events are highlighted by the historian Volodymyr Kosyk, whose research is based on sources in German archives.[16]
More about the Context
After World War I had come to an end, Ukrainian society was left with two possible choices: either to accept defeat and abandon any intentions to create an independent state or to continue the armed struggle. All the major players in the European arena had denied Ukrainians the right to their own state. The refurbished Russian Empire—the Soviet Union—organized the Holodomor Famine-Genocide in 1932–33 on the territory of the quasi-state called the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, threatening the physical existence of the Ukrainian nation. The Entente collaborated with the newly created states, which also pursued a policy of denationalization of the Ukrainian population in their territories (first of all, Poland, Romania, and Hungary). Altogether, those countries viewed the “Ukrainian question” from the position of “no state—no problem.” Only Czechoslovakia headed by Tomáš Masaryk was an exception.
Therefore, the Ukrainian nationalist movement did not have much choice but to cooperate with Italy, Lithuania, Finland, and Germany (with the Abwehr), on a joint anti-communist platform. For these same reasons, the Entente countries also engaged in similar cooperation. That period in history saw a sort of “fashion for authoritarianism,” a massive preparation for World War II. For the OUN, it also put forward the task of national mobilization in the face of deadly danger for Ukrainians, who had neither their own army nor state.
It does not make sense to assess the European national liberation movements of the interwar period, in particular the Ukrainian movement, through the rhetoric of the 1945–46 Nuremberg process. Doing so would mean eliding important aspects of the interwar context, such as the fact that the Allies denied military support to Finland against Soviet invasion. They turned Carl Gustaf Mannerheim into an ally of Hitler’s Germany. Likewise, it would mean ignoring the fact that Stalin had begun the war as a natural ally of Hitler. Later, he situationally continued the war within the anti-Hitler coalition, and it was this that allowed him to avoid international condemnation for crimes against humanity.
Norman Naimark points out that almost all the members of the Soviet delegation to the Nuremberg trials had been involved in the mass repressions within the USSR and therefore deserved to be put on trial alongside the Nazi criminals:
After having demonstrated his worth as a vicious and unrelenting attack dog of Stalin’s during the Moscow trials, where he abused the defendants and shouted down their attempts to clear themselves of impossible charges, Vyshinskyi was deputy foreign minister in 1946 during the Nuremberg trials and head of a secret special commission on Nuremberg that reported directly to Molotov and Stalin. The
main job of the commission […] was to make sure that there was no public discussion of Nazi-Soviet relations (not to mention cooperation!) during the period of the pact, 1939–41. The Soviet government was especially concerned that the secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet Pact were not mentioned at all.[17]
Finally, according to Norman Davies, the discursive problem that plagues the Ukrainian nationalists is rooted in the fact that they fought not only against Hitler but also against Stalin.[18] Many in the West continue to regard the latter not as a necessary evil in the fight against another evil, but as a “great ally” of the West in the Second World War.
Conclusion
When it comes to the OUN, discussions concerning typologies of European interwar nationalist movements in the 20th century are rooted in the “presumption of guilt.” According to some, given the OUN’s alleged pro-fascist orientation, it was only by mere accident that it did not materialize into a quasi-state, following the path taken by Croatia and Slovakia. Such a view comes from an observation made by Alexander Motyl, which should be considered in a broader context: “Paradoxically, repression proved to be the best thing that could have happened to the OUN, saving it from the collaborationist fate of the Croatian Ustasha or the Slovak People’s Party.”[19]
A collaborationist quasi-state of this kind did not materialize in Ukraine since it was fundamentally impossible. On the one hand, Hitler unleashed World War II, intending to expand the “living space” for the Germans into the East: Lebensraum im Osten. First of all, this applied to Ukraine. The Ukrainian territory had been devised for the Third Reich, not for Ukrainians.
On the other hand, the facts prove that the OUN was never going to agree to Hitler’s projects. The OUN was fighting the war on all fronts, against literally everyone who opposed Ukrainian independence—first of all, against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (a new iteration of the Russian Empire). It is this antiimperial focus that makes the ideological heritage of the Ukrainian liberation movement so relevant today.
This is, in particular, relevant when trying to better understand Putin’s Russia, which has set the “Great Patriotic War” narrative as the main ideological basis for the world’s largest “fake news factory,” an integral part of the global post-truth phenomenon.[20] What is the “Great Patriotic War”? In fact, it is almost the same as World War II—only without its beginning (1939–41), when the Soviet Union collaborated with Nazi Germany. Today, the unpunished crimes of the “communist paradise” have sprouted into the generic fascism of Putin’s Russia.
Finally, I would like to mention two publications that are conceptually important for the discussion on the typology of nationalism and fascism. The first is Alexander Motyl’s 2010 article
“Ukraine, Europe, and Bandera,” in which he offers extremely valuable thoughts about the nature of both phenomena:
There is no reason that nationalism must have fascist components. The striving for national liberation is perfectly compatible with every philosophy, political ideology, culture, and economic theory. Unsurprisingly, nationalist ideologies and movements have spanned the political spectrum, being found among democrats, liberals, authoritarians, militarists, fascists, Communists, Catholics, Islamists, Jews, and capitalists. Interwar nationalist movements tended to be influenced by the prevailing fascist ethos, just as post-World War II national liberation struggles tended to be influenced by the prevailing Communist ethos—which is simply to say that nationalism is malleable and can adapt itself to a variety of political ideologies, even, as in the nineteenth century, to liberalism. Fascism, meanwhile, presupposes an independent nation state and proposes to reorganize it along specifically fascist lines. In that sense, fascism is not about national liberation per se; instead, it assumes that national liberation and the attainment of a nation state have already taken place. Logically, this means
that nation-statehood is a necessary condition of fascism: that is, fascist ideologies, movements, and systems of rule can exist if and only if an independent nation state is already in existence.[21]
The second publication is the book by Myroslav Shkandrij, Ukrainian Nationalism, which presents a broad picture of the political and intellectual history of the Ukrainian nationalist movement and its values: “This generation, whatever its political colors, exhibited a remarkable enthusiasm for, and faith in, political struggle. It refused to reconcile to the existing political situation and continued to dream of an independent state, even when the odds against such a state emerging seemed overwhelming.”[22] One should also not forget about the later influence of the OUN on the development of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union: “The imprisoned dissident (Mykhailo Horyn), like other Ukrainian and Jewish prisoners, of conscience who at this time found themselves in the camps, came to admire the steadfastness of these old prisoners, their discipline, solidarity, and commitment to national rights.”[23]
When studying the Ukrainian liberation movement in the 20th century one must discard the habitual accusatory mythology that has been created by the opponents of Ukrainian independence. Shkandrij argues that “neither pursuit of ethnic purity, nor racism, nor acceptance of Nazi doctrine were central to the OUN’s ideology, nor were they officially endorsed.”[24] (Methodologically, his book is related to Aleksander Motyl’s principles.) Our main conclusion is the following: along with independence, Ukraine has attained its right to the history of the struggle for this independence. Over time, the work of professional researchers and media representation of the history of the Ukrainian liberation movement will become increasingly responsible.
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[1] Oleksandr Zaitsev, “Fascism or Ustashism? Ukrainian Integral Nationalism in Comparative Perspective, 1920s-1930s,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 48, nos. 2-3 (2015): 183–93, 184.
[2] Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi, Samostiina Ukraina (Vyd. Kosevycha, 1900).
[3] Oleksandr Zaitsev, “‘Integral’nyi natsionalizm’ iak teoretychna model’ dlia doslidzhennia ukraiins’koho natsionalistychnoho rukhu,” Ukrains’kyi Vyzvol’nyi Rukh 15 (2011): 5–25.
[4] Tomislav Dulić and Goran Miljan, “The Ustašas and Fascism: ‘Abolitionism,’ Revolution, and Ideology, 1929–42,” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 6, no. 1 (2020): 277–305, here 305.
[5] Dulić and Miljan, “The Ustašas and Fascism,” 281.
[6] Oleksandr Zaitsev, “On Ustashism and Fascism: A Response to Critics,” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 6, no. 1 (2020): 125.
[7] Dmytro Dontsov, “Na dva fronty,” Zahrava 9 (1923).
[8] Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi, “Osnovnyi Zakon ‘Samostiinoii Ukraiiny’ Spilky narodu Ukrains’koho,” Samostiina Ukraina 1 (1905). Article 117 stated: “Foreigners who settled in Ukraine 10 years before the proclamation and enactment of this principal law shall be considered as those who have lived continuously and along with natural Ukrainians (…)”.
[9] Ivan Franko, Poza mezhamy mozhlyvoho: Zibrannia tvoriv u 50 tomakh, vol. 45 (Naukova Dumka, 1976–86), 279, 280, 285.
[10] Serhiy Kvit, “The Ukrainian Liberation Movement in the Interwar Period (1923–1939),” in Konferentsiia Dmytra Shtohryna: Zbirnyk materialiv, ed. S.M. Kvit (Vydavnychyi dim “Kyievo-Mohylins’ka akademiia,” 2020), 169.
[11] R. Rakhmannyi, “Dmytro Dontsov i Iurii Klen: 1933–1939,” in Ukraina atomnoho viku: eseii ta statti, 1945-1986 (Homin Ukrainy, 1988), 21.
[12] Dmytro Dontsov, “Dukh amerykanizmu,” Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk 4 (1929).
[13] Oleh Bahan, “Khorvatska tema v ukrains’kii natsionalistychnii presi 1930-1940-kh rokiv,” in Ukraina i Horvatiia: Istorychni paraleli. Materialy Druhoii mizhnarodnoii ukrainsko-khorvatskoii naukovoii konferentsiii (Boikivske etnolohichne tovarystvo, Kafedra ukrains’koii movy ta literatury Sveučilište u Zagrebu, 2019), 366; and Dmytro Dontsov, Suchasne polozhennia natsii i nashi zavdannia (Vydavnytstvo Ukrains’koho students’koho soiuza “Moloda Ukraina,” 1913).
[14] Ivan Patryliak, “Vidhuk ofitsiinoho oponenta na dysertatsiiu Oleksandra Zaitseva ‘Ukrains’kyi intehral’nyi natsionalizm (1920–1930-ti roky): heneza, evoliutsiia, porivnial’nyi analiz’,” Kyiv, 2014.
[15] Ivan Patryliak, Vyzvol’na borot’ba OUN ta UPA (1939–1960 rr.) (Vyd. ADEFUkraina, 2019), 117.
[16] Wolodymyr Kosyk, L’Allemagne national-socialiste et l’Ukraine (Publ. de l’Est Européen, 1986); and Ukraina u Druhii svitovii viini: Zbirnyk nimets’kykh arkhivnykh materialiv (1944—1945) u 4 tomakh, edited by Volodymyr Kosyk (L’vivskyi natsional’nyi universytet im. Ivana Franka; Instytut ukrains’koii arkheohrafii ta dzhereloznavstva im. M. Hrushevs’koho NAN Ukrainy, 2000).
[17] Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton University Press, 2010), 18.
[18] Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford University Press, 1996), 1032.
[19] Alexander J. Motyl, Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (Council of Foreign Relations Press, 1993), 95.
[20] Serhiy Kvit, “A Perspective on ‘Fake News’,” Kyiv Post, 8 May 2021.
[21] Alexander Motyl, “Ukraine, Europe, and Bandera,” Cicero Foundation Great Debate Papers 10/05 (March 2010), 3–4.
[22] Myroslav Shkandrij, Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology, and Literature, 1929–1956 (Yale University Press, 2015), 12.
[23] Ibid., 12.
[24] Ibid., 268.
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“THE LIMITS OF RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA”: WHAT DID THE INCIDENT IN THE CANADIAN PARLIAMENT REVEAL?
Author: Hryhorii Rii
Translated by: Marta Olynyk
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Canada and his speech in Parliament blew up into a scandal. The world’s leading media outlets, including some Ukrainian ones, reported on the tribute that the president of Ukraine, Canada’s prime minister, and Parliament paid to Yaroslav Hunka, a “Nazi collaborator,” a native of the Ternopil region, who was a member of the SS-Galicia Division. This incident led to the resignation of the Parliamentary Speaker and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s apology to the Jewish community of Canada, because the division was supposedly responsible for killing Jews during the Second World War. The Russians went so far as to demand that war criminals in Canada be prosecuted, while Poland’s education minister announced that he was “taking steps” to extradite Hunka to Poland.
This event exposes the significant role of not so much the background of this former member of a German military formation as of the KGB-style secret intelligence “active measures” and their effect on public opinion in Canada. This term was first used in the 1950s to describe a whole array of secret operations aimed at influencing and subverting the political sphere in designated countries by creating lobby groups and engineering a situation marked by “directed” domestic instability, support for pro-Soviet political movements, and the spread of disinformation. In the 1970s and 1980s such measures particularly targeted the Ukrainian and Jewish émigré communities in the U.S. and Canada, their aim being to sow discord between the members of the two communities and to prevent any possible political rapprochment between them. According to the intelligence expert Olga Bertelsen, the most well-known example in the U.S. of the successful discreditation of both communities was the John Demjanjuk affair, which, on the one hand, drove a wedge between Ukrainians and Jews for many years to come; on the other, it became an issue that was extremely attractive to the media, resulting in the creation of the “image of Ukrainians as antisemites.” The Demjanjuk affair also distracted attention from human rights violations in the USSR and cast doubt on the observance of human rights in the U.S.
As the Demjanjuk affair unfolded, the KGB’s active measures included the cultivation of active members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) abroad; the classification as Nazi collaborators of anti-communist activists monitoring the observance of human rights principles and the spread of false information; the publication and dissemination of Michael Hanusiak’s book Lest We Forget, which contained a list of OUN members accused of being Nazi collaborators; the creation of propaganda films and their screening by anti-fascist organizations in the West; calls made by Western media outlets to extradite “Nazi criminals”; the publication of pro-Soviet articles branding Ukrainian émigrés in the West as “Nazi henchmen”; and the dissemination of petitions to various governments. In Moscow this coordinated KGB disinformation campaign encompassing all these active measures was called Operation Payback.
It had considerable success in the U.S., and in 1985 the Soviets passed a resolution to expand it to Canada, where special attention was focused on former members of the SS-Galicia Division. KGB-inspired articles published in leading Canadian newspapers and the dissemination of We Accuse, a publication containing a list of fifty-nine “collaborators” and their crimes, led the Canadian government to establish the Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes in Canada, headed by retired Quebec Superior Court judge, the Honourable Jules Deschênes, in order to investigate these claims. After almost two years of hearings, the commission members declared that the accusations against members of the SS-Galicia Division were not confirmed. Despite this, the KGB leadership deemed the operation a success, and took steps to continue it by disseminating additional disinformation via existing channels. As a result, Operation Payback helped form an image in the memory of Jews of Ukrainians as antisemites and Nazi collaborators, a stereotype that endured in Jewish media outlets and among Western academics.
One would think that scholars, particularly historians, would be an antidote to Soviet disinformation. However, the Ukrainian-American historian Sergei Zhuk has written persuasively, that the KGB learned how to use the world of academia to discredit the Ukrainian diaspora in the U.S. and Canada. Putinist Russia and the FSB. have continued these operations in pursuit of their goals to wage hybrid warfare. For example, by disseminating historical myths, Russia’s disinformation operations are aimed at influencing public opinion in various countries, thereby affecting the strategic behaviour of states. According to Zhuk, the KGB and its successor, the FSB, constantly targeted various Western centers of Slavic and Soviet Studies, seeking to influence Western experts and historical narratives.
The incident in the Canadian Parliament demonstrates the general problem faced by the West in its efforts to overcome the influence of Soviet/Russian intelligence activities that the KGB conducted during the Cold War, the goal of which was to discredit the Ukrainian diaspora in North America. Today Putinist Russia is using these very same measures as a way to exert pressure and create a convenient communication climate whose strategic goal is to undermine international support for Ukraine in the current war and to bolster the “reasonableness” of the myths surrounding Ukraine as a “fascist state,” which were disseminated at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Western countries, and especially scholarly institutions, should reconsider their established views of Russia, particularly as regards the history of the Second World War and the participation on both sides of the barricades of members of stateless peoples (enslaved by communism), in order to rid the information sphere of Soviet/Russian propaganda discourses.
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LUKE COFFEY @LUKEDCOFFE
Senior Fellow—Hudson Institute (designated as an “undesirable organization” by Russia) | Sanctioned by Russia | Слава Україні!
November 3, 2023
THREAD As Congress debates additional support for Ukraine, the anti-Ukraine swamp will fill their echo chamber by peddling myths and half-truths.
Here are the facts
FACT: We are not writing “blank checks” to Ukraine:
✔Every dollar spent in support of Ukraine is authorized by Congress and is used for a specific purpose
✔Approximately $70 billion of aid never leaves the U.S. Instead, it goes to support our worlding leading defense industry
FACT: For a modest sum of money, the US helps Ukraine dismantle Russia’s military w/out a single American in harm’s way:
✔+300k Russian troops KIA/WIA, 13,000 major pieces of equipment removed from battlefield
✔The original Russian invasion force from Feb 2022 no longer exists!
FACT: There is plenty of oversight for Ukraine aid:
✔Ukraine Oversight Interagency Working Group has 160 officials across 20 agencies monitoring aid
✔So far: “Investigations related to the Ukraine response have not yet substantiated significant
waste, fraud, or abuse.”
FACT: Europeans have now overtaken the U.S. the largest donor to Ukraine:
✔According to Kiel Institute’s aid tracker total European commitments are now more than double
those of the U.S.
✔20 European countries have given more to Ukraine than the U.S. as a percentage of GDP
FACT: A victorious Ukraine means a safer Taiwan:
✔Russia is China’s partner. A weakened Russia means a weaker China
✔Beijing is also watching how Western powers support Ukraine, so a strong and victorious Ukraine
makes Taiwan stronger and deters Chinese aggression
FACT: Europe’s stability matters to US economy:
✔45/50 states export more to Europe than China
✔When Americans are building something to be exported, that is an American job
✔European stability, which Russia threatens, brings untold benefits to the economy the American
worker
FACT: Lessons from Ukraine make our military stronger:
✔Shortcomings in defense industry are exposed & being addressed. Thankfully, these were
uncovered when US not at war
✔The performance of US made hardware gets a real-world combat test in a way not possible in a
peacetime
FACT: Lessons learned from arming Ukraine mean Taiwan is getting weapons faster:
✔For the first time ever, Presidential Drawdown Authority is being used for Taiwan
✔Taiwan’s order of HIMARS will now be arriving 1 year earlier than planned after U.S. reprioritized the sale
FACT: Iran and North Korea enable Russia to attack Ukraine. Russia supports Hamas:
✔Iran giving thousands of drones for use against Ukraine
✔North Korea giving +1 million artillery rounds for use against Ukraine
✔Russia protects Hamas at the UN. Moscow recently hosted Hamas
FACT: Ukraine is not “America’s new forever war”:
✔No US troops are fighting against Russia inside Ukraine
✔Ukrainians are not asking for, nor do they want, US troops to help them fight Russia
✔The US is not a belligerent in the conflict
FACT: The US is not engaged in a proxy war against Russia:
✔Definition of a “proxy war” is a war “fought by states acting at the instigation or on behalf of
other states”
✔The US has never instigated Ukraine to fight. The US is not forcing the Ukraine to fight on its
behalf
FACT: The US must provide both military & non-military to achieve the greatest affect:
✔Russia’s invasion eliminated 30% of Ukraine’s economy
✔Essential public services must function (e.g. law enforcement, utility workers, etc) for Ukraine to
remain on a total war footing
FACT: US aid to Ukraine does not cost “$900 per American household” as some suggest:
✔Income tax is not levied evenly across households
✔the top 1% of earners paid 42.3% of all federal income tax. The bottom 50% (those making
$42,184 or less) paid only 2.3% of all income tax.
FACT: US military aid to Ukraine is a boost to our defense industry:
✔After seeing effectiveness of US military equipment in Ukraine, NATO countries alone have *so
far* placed $90 billion in orders for US made hardware.
✔This makes America safer while creating highly-paid jobs
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Fighters against “fascists” and Ukraine: How Russia’s influence network operates in Canada
12 November 2024
Anastasiya Ringis
European Pravda
At the end of October, Canadian parliamentarians convened a Standing Committee on Public Safety Security and Defence Committee session to discuss the impact of Russian disinformation on Canada’s information landscape.
While testimonies on disinformation are not new in the country, this session gained significant attention after former minister and prominent politician from the opposition Conservative Party, Chris Alexander, accused well-known journalist David Pugliese from the Ottawa Citizen of working for Soviet (and potentially subsequently for Russian) intelligence services. Alexander didn’t stop at accusations.
As evidence, he presented KGB documents that allegedly showed Pugliese had been on the Soviet security services’ radar since 1984 and was operating under the pseudonym “Stuart.” In this context, we explored the “architecture” of Russian propaganda in Canada and its impact on the Ukrainian community.
How Canada funds Russian propaganda
The current committee on Russian disinformation in Canada’s Parliament was triggered by the uproar over the screening of the so-called documentary Russians at War at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The film’s director, Anastasia Trofimova, is a former RT (Russia Today) producer.
The film itself promotes Russian narratives, ranging from claims that Ukrainian fighters are fighting on the Russian side to the argument that “Russian soldiers are also victims of this war.”
Interestingly, RT was available on Canadian cable networks until 2020, at which point the Canadian government banned it.
The government deemed that its programming undermines the sovereignty of numerous countries, disparages certain ethnic groups in Canada, and attacks the country’s democratic institutions. However, none of the journalists or producers who have worked for RT for years have been subject to any legal action or investigation by Canadian professional organizations.
Furthermore, Trofimova’s past work for RT did not hinder her from receiving a $340,000 grant from Canada’s Media Fund to make her so-called “documentary” film. The public outcry from the Ukrainian-Canadian community forced the Canadian government to take action, prompting hearings that delivered some truly sensational revelations.
“Agent Stuart”
According to Chris Alexander, the authenticity of eight Soviet-era documents he presented to the committee was confirmed by two independent experts and several historians. These documents reportedly reveal that David Pugliese has been under KGB surveillance since 1984 due to his potential to work in prominent media outlets in Canada and the United States.
A KGB agent, known only as Ivan, allegedly met Pugliese in 1982 during a public lecture about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The file on Pugliese indicates that Ivan was instructed to develop a relationship with him, assess his potential in the media field, and investigate his connections with government officials, journalists, activists, and business figures.
One document dated April 6, 1990, mentions Pugliese’s work at the Ottawa Citizen, prompting the head of the 1st Department of the KGB to request permission from Moscow to use Pugliese for the interests of the “S” Directorate (the KGB’s foreign intelligence division).
A follow-up note dated June 20, 1990, confirms that the relationship between Ivan and “Stuart” was established. Alexander believes these contacts likely continued even after the collapse of the USSR, with Russian intelligence taking over where the KGB left off.
Criticism of Ukraine and the Canadian armed forces
During his address to Parliament, Chris Alexander bluntly critiqued Russian propaganda: “Its influence has been underestimated by Canadian officials.” In light of recent scandals involving Chinese interference and the expulsion of Indian diplomats, as well as the revelation of Tenet Media’s role in spreading Russian narratives on RT’s dime, an investigation into Russian disinformation in Canada seemed to be a natural next step.
But why was David Pugliese specifically targeted?
For over 30 years, Pugliese has specialized in military and security affairs, particularly examining processes in the Canadian Armed Forces, investigating military procurement, and exposing cases of harassment and misconduct. He is one of the most vocal critics of Canada’s Ministry of Defence.
Pugliese is also known for his articles about “fascists” in the Ukrainian diaspora and the Baltic communities.
Despite the 1985 Deschene Commission, which investigated accusations of war crimes by Ukrainian and Baltic representatives during World War II and exonerated the SS “Galicia” Division, Pugliese has persistently sought to resurrect these allegations. Just last September, he published three articles on the subject.
Notably, he was one of the first to report on Yaroslav Hunka, a veteran of the SS Galicia Division, and his participation in a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Canada’s Parliament last year.
If we examine the themes of Pugliese’s articles, we notice that around one in every ten will address “Ukrainian Nazis” in some form. However, he has no articles on the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the Russian threat to Canada in the Arctic.
“It seems that Pugliese uses the war in Ukraine as a pretext to continue criticizing the Canadian military, the government, and NGOs for their support of Ukraine. Distorting the facts with the effect of misleading the readers has hurt a lot of good people. There is no doubt that his work has targeted the Ukrainian-Canadian community and has undermined Ukraine more broadly,” says Lesya Granger, President of Mriya Aid, a Canadian organization created by management professionals, veterans and military specialists at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The “network” of academics
David Pugliese is not alone in his search for Ukrainian “fascists.” One of the academics who frequently promotes the same narratives is Ivan Katchanovski, a professor at the University of Ottawa. Since 2014, Katchanovski has regularly written about “Ukrainian Nazis” and the “state coup” in Ukraine.
Despite RT being sanctioned, Katchanovski has continued to be a regular commentator on the pro-Kremlin outlet. And Pugliese frequently references his work.
Another military researcher on “Ukrainian fascists” is Scott Taylor, who is unimpeded in his visits to Moscow and often spreads propaganda such as: “Crimea historically belongs to Russia,” “NATO must consider Russia’s interests,” and “Ukraine cannot win this war, so assistance to Ukraine should be reduced.”
Taylor and Pugliese are both seasoned Canadian journalists with exclusive rights to cover military affairs in Canada, published in influential outlets such as the Ottawa Citizen and The Hill Times.
Moreover, they not only share the same narratives, but they also support one another.
“The central narrative of these propagandists is the accusation that Ukraine and Ukrainians are Nazis, racists, and anti-Semites. This creates pressure on Western society to halt or slow down support for Ukraine, sows division between Ukrainians and Jews, and resurrects the myth of the peaceful, anti-fascist Soviet Union,” explains Canadian historian and Jewish-Ukrainian descendant Alik Gomelsky.
He is convinced that the Soviet KGB built one of the largest “networks” in Canada, which continues to push these anti-Ukrainian narratives.
“It’s a clear pattern: historians and professors create anti-Ukrainian works, using the law of academic freedom. Journalists then publish articles referencing these academic works, and propagandist activists take them to the masses,” Gomelsky explains.
Gomelsky has identified at least 20 “researchers of Ukrainian fascism” in Canada, many of whom are public figures, but others are marginal individuals who amplify anti-Ukrainian propaganda online.
Over the years, he has studied not only the narratives but also the cyclical pattern with which they are injected into Canadian society, usually tied to anniversaries of historical events (such as
the start of the Soviet-German War in 1941 or Babyn Yar) and critical decisions Canada must make about supporting Ukraine, or, as last year, when President Zelenskyy visited the country.
Not just Ukrainians
The “ecosystem” of Russian disinformation in Canada is not just aimed at Ukraine but also at Western values, NATO, the US, and democracy in general.
“The pro-Kremlin activist network in Canada is quite broad. Whenever I challenge one of them publicly, a wave of hate follows. This group also includes former diplomats, and they sit on the boards of Russian or pro-Russian organizations,” says Marcus Kolga, the founder of the project Disinfowatch. Kolga has been researching Russian disinformation for 15 years.
Kolga is a researcher with Estonian roots. He studied the history of the Soviet occupation in Estonia and also testified at the parliamentary committee. He, too, has been a target of Pugliese, who accused him of “whitewashing Nazis.”
“Historically, Baltic peoples in Canada have also been accused of fascism. The narrative is that anyone who fought against the Soviet Union is an enemy of democracy and Canada,” confirms historian Gomelsky.
These claims are repeated by Western professors who, using their lifetime academic status, spread conspiracy theories unchallenged.
The real problem is that even openly biased academics such as Ivan Katchanovski, Michel Chossudovsky, and Radhika Desai – a professor at the University of Manitoba who holds ultra-left, anti-capitalist, and pro-Moscow views – continue to be regarded as “respectable researchers.”
Last year, Desai participated in Putin’s Valdai Club and asked him about the appropriateness of Yaroslav Hunka’s participation in the Canadian parliamentary meeting. These academics maintain their status as “respected researchers” rather than Kremlin lackeys.
The public revelation of David Pugliese’s ties to Soviet-era intelligence networks proved to be more than just a scandal – it underscored the far-reaching scope of Russian influence operations and the sophisticated strategies used to recruit Western journalists.
What’s particularly striking, however, is the professional community’s reflexive defense of Pugliese. Much like the case with the controversial documentary Russians at War, the argument in his favor tends to follow a troubling pattern: “We trust him because we’ve always trusted him. He’s been working here for 30 years.”
The fact that Pugliese parrots Russian narratives, as though he’s tuned in nightly to Russia Today or the likes of Olga Skabeeva, is brushed aside. After all, a journalist is entitled to their own opinions. Yet the question lingers: why, after three decades in Canadian journalism, does Pugliese consistently rely on Russian talking points regarding Ukraine? Is he a Kremlin asset or simply a “useful idiot”? Only time – and a thorough investigation – will tell.
One thing is certain: to dismantle Russia’s influence network, the Canadian government and its Western counterparts have a lot of work to do.
By Anastasiya Ringis, Ukrainian journalist, temporary based in Toronto
UPDATED:
One of the featured individuals, Ivan Katchanovski, reached out to the editorial team after the publication of this article. In line with our duty to present all perspectives, we have added his response to the text.
Mr. Katchanovski states: “I have no ties to Russia and am not part of any Russian networks. Ringis’s claim that I am a ‘regular commentator on Ukrainian issues’ on Russia Today is patently null and void.”
NOTE: A Google search confirms active use of Kachanovsky’s comments on the Russian state propaganda platform, for example.
“The claim that I am associated with David Pugliese, a prominent Canadian journalist, is also untrue, as is the claim that he is a Soviet or Russian agent. Declassified KGB documents do not identify him as a Soviet agent,” Katchanovski adds.
He also cites his experience collaborating with Ukrainian media as proof of his impartiality.
NOTE: We verified this information with one editorial office that indeed had such experience. It turned out, however, that the colleagues stopped collaborating over 10 years ago after the author attempted to publish an article with an unacceptable distortion of facts about the Revolution of Dignity. Indeed, Kachanovsky has consistently promoted the narrative that Maidan activists were responsible for the shooting of the Heavenly Hundred.