We know that the vast majority of Ukrainians do not hold far-right political views.
In the 2019 parliamentary elections, the country’s main far-right party, Svoboda, took only a single seat in the Rada. And the picture was not dramatically different in 2014, when Svoboda and Right Sector, another far-right party, took only seven seats. (There are 450 in total.) Although Svoboda did gain 37 seats in the 2012 elections, more people voted for the Communist Party.
Which makes America’s history of courting far-right Ukrainian politicians somewhat peculiar.
In December of 2013, while the Maidan protests were going on, U.S. Senator John McCain flew to Kiev to express his support for the protestors. “The free world is with you. America is with you. I am with you”, he assured them. But aside from delivering this speech, he also dined with ‘opposition leaders’, including a man named Oleh Tyahnybok – the leader of Svoboda.
Tyahnybok is an unsavoury character. In 2004, he was expelled from the ‘Our Ukraine’ parliamentary block after giving a speech at the gravesite of a Ukrainian Insurgent Army commander. (The UPA was a WWII-era paramilitary organisation involved in anti-Jewish pogroms). In the speech, he denounced the “the Moscow-Jewish mafia ruling Ukraine”, and referred to “Muscovites, Germans, Jews and other scum”.
In 2005, Tyahnybok co-signed an open letter to the president of Ukraine calling for a parliamentary investigation into the “criminal activities of organized Jewry”. And in 2012, he declared in reference to his 2004 speech, “All I said then, I can also repeat now,” adding “this speech is relevant even today”. That same year, the EU passed a resolution calling on “pro-Democratic parties” in the Rada not to “associate with, endorse or form coalitions with” Svoboda.
In January of 2014 – just one month after the dinner with McCain – Svoboda held a torch-lit march through Kiev to mark the 105th birthday of Stepan Bandera (a Ukrainian nationalist and Nazi collaborator during World War II). Tyahnybok has also been photographed doing a Nazi salute.
Following the ‘Revolution of Dignity’, Svoboda was given almost a quarter of the cabinet positions in the interim government. And as the French journalist Paul Moreira notes, it’s leader suddenly became “very hand-shakeable”. Tyahnybok was pictured with Joe Biden, John Kerry, Victoria Nuland, and was even seen embracing his old friend McCain.
However, he didn’t manage to stay out of trouble. In 2015, he was blamed by Ukraine’s interior minister when a Svoboda rally outside parliament turned violent, leaving three police officers dead. (One of the protestors set off a grenade.) Tyahnybok was filmed shouting obscenities and tussling with law enforcement during the clashes.
Another far-right Ukrainian politician who has been treated surprisingly warmly by the U.S. is Andriy Parubiy.
In 1991, Parubiy co-founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine with Tyahnybok – which later became Svoboda. Its official symbol was the Wolfsangel (notoriously used by the Nazi SS) and membership was restricted to ethnic Ukrainians. Then between 1998 and 2004, Parubiy led the party’s paramilitary organisation, Patriot of Ukraine. He even wrote a book titled View from the Right on whose cover he appears wearing a Nazi-style uniform.
In 2004, Parubiy left both organisations to join the ‘Our Ukraine’ parliamentary block. Yet as Ukraine-scholar Ivan Katchanovski notes, he “never publicly renounced his neo-Nazi background”. In fact, he told a newpspaer in 2008 that his “political orientation and ideological foundations” had not changed since leaving the Social National Party.
After commanding the ‘Maidan Self-defence volunteers’ during the Maidan protests, Parubiy landed a job as secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council in 2014. Two years later, he was elected Chairman of the Rada – a position he retained until 2019. During his tenure, Parubiy was granted an invite to Washington, where he met with Senators John McCain and Paul Ryan. The latter said he was “proud” to join Parubiy for the meeting.
Parubiy has not only expressed unsavoury political views; he is alleged to be among the organisers of the Maidan massacre. Five Georgian snipers testified that they had received “weapons, payments, and orders from specific Maidan and Georgian politicians, in particular, Parubiy, to massacre both police and protesters”. Various sources have claimed these men were actors. Yet as Katchanovski notes, “their identities and presence in Ukraine, and their Georgian military services were corroborated by supporting evidence and personal information that they provided”.
Another reason it’s odd to see men like McCain cosying up to far-right politicians in Ukraine is that they’ve dealt very differently with the American far-right.
Following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, McCain declared that “white supremacists and neo-Nazis are, by definition, opposed to American patriotism”. He also admonished Trump for supposedly drawing a “moral equivalency” between “racists” and “Americans standing up to defy hate and bigotry”.
Joe Biden described Trump’s remarks about Charlottesville as the “moment I knew I had to run” for president. This is despite the fact that, three years earlier, he had given a warm smile and handshake to Oleh Tyahnybok – whose party the EU denounced as “racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic”.
Why such double standards with respect to the U.S. and Ukraine? The answer is simple: disavowing far-right Ukrainian politicians would have interfered with the more important goal of antagonising Russia.
In the famous leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, Nuland acknowledges that Tyahnybok is going to be “the problem”. However, she explains that her preferred candidate, “Yats” (pictured above), needs “Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside”, adding “he needs to be talking to them four times a week”. So despite being entirely aware of Tyahnybok’s views, she still saw a role for him “on the outside”.
The U.S. got involved in Ukraine for geostrategic reasons. And just as ‘defending national sovereignty’ goes out the window when it’s not in U.S. interests, so too does ‘opposing the far-right’.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
“We know that the vast majority of Ukrainians do not hold far-right political views. In the 2019 parliamentary elections, the country’s main far-right party, Svoboda, took only a single seat in the Rada.”
I hope your not planning to visit Russia soon, because this comment would probably be deemed to contravene the early March 2022 Duma law making it an offence with fines or imprisonment for up to 15 years for spreading ‘fake information’ about the Russian invasion (sorry ‘special military operation’) in Ukraine.
One of whose main justifications was the ‘denazification’ of Ukraine.
Not going to comment on the substantive points in the article then? Didn’t you read far enough?
The opening two sentences contained the only substantive points in the article relevant to the current situation, ie the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its (completely fake) excuses such as ‘denazification’.
A falsehood which Karl Noah just underlined, putting himself at legal (as well as unofficial) risk in Russia.
The rest was just historical musings.
I think everyone who reads this article and your comments can work out for themselves what constitutes relevance.
Just noticed author’s name is Noah Carl, sorry for the mistake.
Which substantive points? That Mr Carl still didn’t even manage to read the Wikipedia page on Wolfsangel and thus, happily continues to spread the nonsense about that the ADL publishes on the internet?
Ultra-condensed version: Traditional, european heraldic symbol dating back to the middle ages which has been widely used ever since.
One could as well argue that the German state is secretly controlled by neonazis as evidenced by the fact that the German armed forces use the ‘Nazi’ iron cross symbol.
This was not an article about the Wolfsangel. Please.
Its official symbol was the Wolfsangel (notoriously used by the Nazi SS)
It’s also, as Wikipedia would tell the author, notoriously part of the coat of arms of the town of Idar-Oberstein close to the place I was born in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idar-Oberstein
I can’t judge the quality of most of what’s claimed in the article but that’s a striking example of something which isn’t outright wrong but very misleading and very likely, intentionally so.
I found the photograph of a torchlit march in modern day Europe quite compelling and also the photograph of a serving US Senator 5,000 miles away from his home country meeting with a prospective puppet government. Regardless of Carl’s words, those images were pretty striking, no?
“People with torches marching” is void of content beyond this fact. And US senator on tour through foreign country meeting with local politicians seems pretty benign, too. That’s – after all – usually the very point of such a tour. It also seems probable that said US senator was unaware of whom he’d exactly meet before going to the meeting and didn’t know anything about the political parties represented by the people he was going to meet beyond them being “opposition leaders” because that was scheduled for this day.
My 1906 encyclopaedia describes the Fylfot as a “pre-Christian form of cross, found on very ancient remains in Southern Europe.It has an immense range in both hemispheres, and is the swastika of the Buddhists”
However, it was later to be adopted by the National Socialist party of Germany (and other central European countries) in the 1930’s, who became notorious for their complicity in some horrendous crimes against humanity. Now it is no longer used by people who do not wish to be associated with that party and their atrocities and ideology.
I would suggest that the same might possibly apply to the Wolfsangel.
Absolutely. People who do not want to be associated (as in guilty by association) with Nazi by US left-wing dunderheads are well-advised to avoid it. But that’s completely besides the point: In this case, said dunderheads are simply wrong.
PS
US foreign policy is to use terrorist groups, however extreme or unsavoury, as a Swiss Army knife depending on the circumstances and context. Need to topple a government in the ME? Easy – whip up, fund, train and arm the local Islamist crazies. Can’t find any? No problem – just ship some in. Need to topple a government in a non-Muslim region? Tricky. Try the local Nazis.
But of course that becomes difficult when you’re also trying to suppress political dissent in your own (non-Muslim) country.
Now we’ve got good Nazis and bad Nazis. What a wonderful contribution the criminals calling themselves the United States government have made to the world.
Too bad McCain didn’t live to see the fruits of his labours in Ukraine. And we were spared what would have been the amazing spectacle of him praising and denouncing Nazis in the same breath. He was so odious, dishonest and diabolical, he could actually have pulled this off!
At last!
That took a long time, without guidance, to get to the comments box.
I guess the USA parleyed with these people in Ukraine for the same reason they parleyed with the nIRA. They thought it was in their national interest. They might have ben right in Ukraine where the “far riht” might be brought around to normal behaviour and thinking and could help save the nation – as they are doing, I believe.
In the case of the IRA I hope the USA remembers you should not treat with terrorists.
Nazis:
Irish Nationalists:
Is this seriously what I’m to make from your comment?
Comment unrelated to the article: The idea to turn commenting into a paid subscription seems to have backfired soundly. It wiped out a pretty vibrant community and probably doesn’t generate much revenue.
If I may use myself as example: I had found the term lockdown sceptic somehwere on the internet and on some pretty dismal lockdown day, I typed that into a Google search box. In this way, I found the original site an started reading the articles. Somewhat later, I also started looking at the comments. Yet a few weeks later, I created an account so that I’d be able to comment myself. That was also the time when I started to donate regularly. In all likeliness, this would never have happened without the community whose demise I hereby bemourn.
There were effectively 2 separate communities of commentators, Swedenborg, Kate & a pile of others who seemed only to comment on the Daily Update & mainly a separate group who commented on the various articles.
It’s a great pity if they’ve been lost. It’s perfectly understandable that the site needs to be self funding but maybe some more warning would have been a good idea.
The daily news roundup?
I understand that part of the problem is that people have had to sign in again to comment. If they have mislaid their password, this may be a little tricky. However, I always sign in anyway and have long since learnt my password, and even come to like it, so am unaffected.
” In the speech, [Tyahnybok] denounced the “the Moscow-Jewish mafia ruling Ukraine”, and referred to “Muscovites, Germans, Jews and other scum”.”
Worth repeating the story I heard, that during the “War Against Aggression” (ww2), the Jews in Romania and Bulgaria were rounded up and taken to a concentration camp near Odessa. Iasi, a city in Romania, used to be over 50% Jewish, but now there are no more than a few hundred Jews there.
And McCain meets the man who apparently supports someone who was involved in these atrocities. And yet McCain (who was a good friend of Obama) had a chip on his shoulder about Trump for being too extreme? And now how many more people are dying as a result of the determination of people like him to antagonise Russia?
A mad, bad world…
And McCain meets the man who apparently supports someone who was involved in these atrocities. And yet McCain (who was a good friend of Obama) had a chip on his shoulder about Trump for being too extreme?
There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about this. Trump was a US politician and McCain was commenting on US domestic politics. But the other guys were Ukrainian politicans supposedly representing someone in Ukraine. That’s a foreign, souvereign country and McCain is not involved with people in foreign countries selecting their representatives. He just has to deal with them professionally. All of this Nazi!-stuff is also more than a bit dated by now. A lot of political leaders have committed a lot of atrocities since then. Nevertheless, international diplomacy continues to work. Eg, if this was all about idealistic pursuits, no so-called western politicians should ever meet with the Chinese president in order to do anything but condemn him in the harshest tones.
It’s also worth mentioning that “All of Ukraine is full of evil nazis, hence, I must invade the country and kill them all!” is exactly Putin’s public reasoning, at least Putin’s public reasoning for an US audience. But Putin is certainly not driven by some abstract zeal for some good cause but pursuing a policy he believes to be in the best interest of Russia, ie, ultimatively acting because of selfish (as seen from the persective of the Russian state) reasons.
All of this high-flying moralizing about foreign politics, especially, foreign politics involving wars, is really completely misplaced. The world isn’t being run by Sunday school teachers in order to accomplish morally good causes in ethical ways.
So far as I am concerned, it is a disgrace that we continue to trade with China (and by the way deny our own miners, aluminium processers etc. jobs whilst buying in bulk from a regime with many coal mines).
As for Putin, I understand the denazification thing plays well with Russians. Their casus belli has always been, so far as I can see, the 2014 coup in Kiev (apparently encouraged by outside interests) and subsequent civil war in the Donbass. No doubt Putin would argue strongly that there was a moral case for his intervention. Whether disingenuous or not, I’m not sure that he is particularly more so than some Western governments whose actions have also resulted in suffering and death, including in the last two years.
From our point of view, the Nazi crimes are particularly heinous and we should never forget (though of course there have been some terrible atrocities by Communist regimes too).
But how does any of this provide a justification for Putin’s actions?
It doesn’t alone. But ethnic Russians have been killed by Ukrainian forces for eight years on Russia’s border. Heard of Right to Protect (R2P)? i.e the justification for NATO bombing of Kosovo, Libya etc. The same applies here, or the collective West is guilty of the worst kind of hypocrisy. Most of the world can see this clearly.
“Heard of Right to Protect (R2P)? i.e the justification for NATO bombing of Kosovo, Libya etc. The same applies here”
Far from condoning it as this implies the Russia government opposed the NATO campaign in Serbia (its ally) in 1999 so strongly that it threatened a military response.
Interesting to hear that the Kremlin has since reversed this position to now point to the NATO bombing of Serbia as a perfectly legitimate ‘Right to Protect (R2P)’ action, and as such a precedent for their own intervention in Ukraine.
In reality, of course, the Russia government hasn’t dropped any of its vehement criticisms of NATO’s Serbian intervention (indeed it is usually put forward as ‘proof’ of NATO’s inherently malign and aggressive nature), and the fact that at the very same time it seeks to use it as a justification for its invasion of Ukraine is yet another clear example of the Orwellian nature of the current Russian propagandist campaign.
Ukraine had become a NATO playground, utterly corrupt, full of weaponry, bioweapons labs, and could have been used as staging post to attack Russia. I don’t ‘approve’ of the war; I’m not cheering the Russians on, but I think they are justified in demilitarising Ukraine and are behaving no differently than any other country would. It took them eight years to reach a decision during which time they tried very hard at diplomacy, but the puppet regime in Kiev wasn’t interested, or rather their handlers weren’t.
And I think eliminating/arresting Nazi battalions is a good thing for Europe. Not for the US war machine as they’ve lost one of their little Swiss army knives, but good for Europe.
Hunter Biden’s
I wasn’t mainly referring to your own use of this justification for the Russian invasion of Ukraine but the fact that it is one of the standard Kremlin propagandist memes.
See eg
President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is shocking, violent and brutal. But time and again when he has conquered territory, he has tried to justify it by pointing to similar actions by the West…Putin remembers what NATO did in Yugoslavia, and he is clearly angry about it. Putin even attacked Ukraine in a way that deliberately connected it with NATO’s actions in Yugoslavia. One of his first targets in Kyiv was a television tower—a deliberate copy of NATO, which attacked Belgrade’s television tower during its bombing campaign in 1999.
When Russian officials appeared before the UN Security Council, they used the same justification: We’re just doing in Ukraine what NATO did in Yugoslavia.
https://www.thetrumpet.com/25403-putin-remembers-yugoslavia
It is obviously nonsensical to point to a set of actions with condemnatory anger (NATO bombing of Serbia) whilst at exactly the same time using them as a justification and precedent for your own allegedly copycat version.
In that sense it is the same as Russia’s attempted use of UN Article 51 – designed to protect UN Members from invasion – to justify their invasion of a UN Member (Ukraine).
As I have said before all these very obviously contradictory propagandist excuses seem like some form of twisted black humour or mockery.
‘It is obviously nonsensical to point to a set of actions with condemnatory anger (NATO bombing of Serbia) whilst at exactly the same time using them as a justification and precedent for your own allegedly copycat version.’
Russia’s case is much stronger because it’s their own people and their own border. Can you imagine how the US (or any other country for that matter) would respond if they suspected that a hostile power had overthrown a government on their border, banned English speaking and then started indiscriminately shelling Americans?!
Can you imagine how the US (or any other country for that matter) would respond if they suspected that a hostile power had overthrown a government on their border, banned English speaking and then started indiscriminately shelling Americans?!
But none of these claims about Ukraine are accurate:
A) President Yanukovich was not overthrown in 2014 by a foreign regime (directly or indirectly) but rather a vote of 328 to 0 in the Ukrainian Parliament for his removal from office after he had reneged on electoral promises then brutally suppressed (at least originally) entirely peaceful protests.
In encouraging Yanukovich to unilaterally go back on his manifesto commitment to an EU trade deal, one backed by the overwhelming majority of the similarly democratically elected members of parliament, it was the Russian regime that was trying to undermine and effectively overthrow the Ukrainian multi-party liberal democratic constitution.
B) Whilst since 2015 there have been admittedly excessive restrictions on the use of Russian in public life in Ukraine it has not been banned in private. Furthermore to some extent all nations, including the UK, have both legal and de facto near monopolistic public use language policies.
In an case as nearly all Russian speakers in Ukraine also speak the native language the whole thing is a relatively minor inconvenience at worst.
Finally there is no evidence of indiscriminate shelling in Donbass by the Ukrainian military (except in the sense that a percentage of firing in all warfare by all sides involved could in some way be termed ‘indiscriminate’).
Beyond that the civil conflict in the region (obviously involving Russian separatists as well as the Ukrainian army) had settled down so much that by 2021, just as President Putin was amassing his invasion force on the borders of Ukraine using the same conflict as one of his main excuses, only 7 civilians died of direct military action (ie by both sides) in the whole year.
Doesn’t matter what the Russians think about Serbia. the point is they have a justification which is at least as strong as the NATO justification for that campaign, and more recently Libya.
(replied to myself in error, see below)
McCain has been the biggest war monger in the US Senate for years. The State he represents is full of weapons manufacturing. Any war is good for the state to increase prosperity and garner votes without any risks to inhabitants. The money the US pours into the military has increased 3 fold or more since 9/11. Their is nothing noble about McCain, he cared nothing for the people or ideals.
He was revolting and the world is safer without him.