May 2014

British Imperial Project in Ukraine: Violent Coup, Fascist Axioms, Neo-Nazis

by an EIR Research Team

[Print version of this article]

Editor’s Note: This article was first published in EIR Vol. 41, No. 20, May 16, 2014, pp. 21-38

April 24, 2022—It is imperative, if you wish to understand the current crisis in Ukraine and the extreme danger of war between NATO and Russia, to read the following document, written by an EIR team in May of 2014. It traces the neo-Nazi beast-man elements in Ukraine today and the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), as well as the direct role of these fascist elements in the “Maidan” coup of 2013-4, led by the European Union and the Obama Administration.

Nine years ago, the authors of this dossier published another one, under the title “Dick Cheney: Permanent Revolution/Permanent War.” The maniacal face of the then-Vice President of the United States looked out from the cover of EIR,[fn_1] flanked by two early-20th-Century personalities: Leon Trotsky and Alexander Helphand Parvus. The doctrine of “permanent revolution,” we demonstrated, originally adopted by Trotsky from the less famous but very influential British agent Parvus, had been reincarnated by Cheney’s neoconservative clique—not only because of the neocon war party’s own Trotskyist roots, but to serve the purpose of the modern British Empire, the globalized financial oligarchy, of fanning and manipulating an array of geopolitical conflicts to destabilize any existing or potential opposition. We warned that the “permanent revolution/permanent war” arsenal includes detonators for world war, as was the case 100 years before.

We wrote about the alarm with which London viewed the worldwide spread of the dirigist industrial development policies of the American System, after President Abraham Lincoln led the Union to victory in the U.S. Civil War: “The British response, over the course of the next 40 years, would be to spread perpetual warfare across Eurasia, through an array of manipulations, playing one nationality off against another, assassinating key republican political leaders, fostering the growth of deeply flawed pseudo-political movements and ideologies, conducting each-against-all diplomatic maneuvers, and fomenting ‘regime change,’ ultimately leading to two successive World Wars. In every instance, British agents, often operating under the cover of official diplomatic postings, forged alliances with the most backward feudalist and fundamentalist factions within the targeted nations, . . . created phony ‘liberation’ movements, and recruited and deployed key agents.”

In related Cheney-era studies, we demonstrated that the fascist movements of the 20th Century stemmed from those pre-World War I British operations, especially under the banner of the project known as the Synarchy, and also termed “universal fascism.” We exposed the Synarchist “beast-man” phenomenon: the cruel brutality, cultivated by the architects and controllers of such movements.[fn_2]

All of those investigations are crucial to understanding the crisis in and around Ukraine, now becoming, by the day, more horrific inside the country and dangerous on a world scale. Barack Obama’s foreign policy has continued Dick Cheney’s. Washington’s point-person on Ukraine, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, was Cheney’s foreign policy aide and then, U.S. Ambassador to NATO during the Bush-Cheney administrations of 2001-09.

The United States and the European Union are in bed with the unconstitutionally installed Acting President Alexander Turchynov and Nuland’s hand-picked Prime Minister Arseni “Yats” Yatsenyuk, who have incorporated into the new regime the Svoboda Party, which got its start as a neo-Nazi youth organization in 1991, and other overtly fascist Ukrainian movements. Not only a radical fringe, but also key leaders of the Euromaidan insurgency, who made the coup of February 2014, follow and promote the specific fascist ideology developed by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) from its founding in 1929, but rooted in the earlier, World War I-era Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (ULU)—a project of none other than Alexander Helphand Parvus himself. Parvus’s aim, with the ULU that was funded by the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburgs in 1914 (while British Intelligence and a rotten section of the German General Staff funded his other projects, such as the Bolshevik Revolution), was to destabilize and fragment the Russian Empire and help bring on the world war. It was run from the Austrian province of Galicia (Ukrainian: Halyshchyna), whose capital was Lviv (Lvov, Lwow, Lemberg).

The stakes are world war once again, today, as the London Economist dramatized in its March 17, 2007 issue. The Economist published a scenario set in 2057, in which the European Union would be a leading institution in a future world empire, thanks to EU officials having persuaded U.S. President Barack Obama (not yet in office at the time of this publication) to threaten Russia with massive nuclear strikes over a crisis in Ukraine, back in the middle of the 2011-20 decade—that is, right now.

Will the USA fulfill such British imperial scenarios by going to a global showdown with Russia? American patriots should say no to such a war of worldwide annihilation, and inclusively to promoting the fascist groups setting the stage for it.

The Present Dossier

This article is the latest in EIR’s series of publications on the orchestrated crisis around Ukraine. In Part 1 of the investigation, “Western Powers Back Neo-Nazi Coup in Ukraine,” we looked at the history of Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN(b)),[fn_3] during and after World War II. We summarized the OUN’s collaboration with the Nazis, as well as atrocities committed by the OUN in the name of its own radical ideas about ethnic purity, particularly the mass murder of Jews and Poles.[fn_4] EIR subsequently reported on the documented history of the protection of OUN leaders by Western intelligence services in the postwar period—Bandera by Britain’s MI6 and OUN security chief Mykola Lebed by U.S. CIA chief Allen Dulles.[fn_5]

The Maidan Self-Defense Forces and the radical groups called Right Sector flew the OUN(b) black-and-red flag throughout the uprising in Kiev, November 2013-February 2014. A giant banner with a portrait of Bandera hung in the seized Trade Union building that was their headquarters. As we shall document here, both their ideology and essential elements of their organizational structure flowed directly from the sponsorship of the Bandera legacy by MI6 and the CIA, throughout the Cold War and to this day.

EIR’s archive also offers reports on the other crucial background to the crisis in Ukraine: the country’s economic devastation under the radical free-market policies of the past 23 years, adopted on the demand of the IMF, the USA, and the EU. The results include the flourishing of a criminalized financial oligarchy and the creation of a large number of labor migrants to both the EU and Russia, as well as a pool of unemployed youth, especially after the 2008 escalation of the global financial crisis.[fn_6] Both of these ruinous economic effects have fueled the proliferation of neo-fascist groups in Ukraine.

In this issue, we expand the dossier with the following sections.

1. Fascist Axioms. The followers of Bandera were fascist not only by dint of their ready collaboration with the Nazis against the Soviet Union. They adopted as their “nationalism,” the views of Dmytro Dontsov, a veteran of Parvus’s ULU. Dontsov’s radically exclusionist ethnic definition of a nation and his extreme Social Darwinism, according to which war is the inevitable and permanent state of mankind, are consistent with the ideologies of Italian and German fascism and other Synarchist movements of the past 100 years. Not only are these beliefs replicated in the programs of Ukraine’s far right-wing groups, but key concepts, especially the strong enemy-image of Russia, have become more widely accepted axioms.

2. The Post-Coup Ukrainian Government. The roster of Svoboda Party members, as well as figures from other radical nationalist groups now in charge of Ukraine’s government institutions, gives the lie to claims that the new government is free of neo-Nazis. Statements by Svoboda and other coalition MPs express their fascist outlook.

3. Right Sector: Not a Radical Fringe. A look at the origins of the three main components of the Right Sector paramilitary group, acknowledged by Euromaidan leaders as its driving force, reveals not only their fascist, bellicose ideology, but also a history of direct sponsorship by the same British, U.S., and NATO agencies that saved, protected, and patronized the OUN during the Cold War.

4. Who’s Spinning “False Narratives”? It is virtually impossible to raise questions in Washington, D.C., about the Nazi symbols or racist outlooks of the new Kiev regime’s officials or its paramilitaries, without being accused of spreading Russian-inspired “false narratives.” Even the suggestion that a free-trade integration agreement with the European Union would have harmed the people of Ukraine (just as EU austerity measures have made death rates soar in EU member countries such as Greece and Spain), gets a similar response. Victoria Nuland tells Congress, “We will work with the EU to support their efforts to disseminate reliable information on what European integration really means to the Ukrainian public, especially in the East, and to counter false narratives and fear-mongering.”[fn_7] National Endowment for Democracy Vice President Nadia Diuk complains, “I think there’s a narrative going out now that, oh, well, maybe we shouldn’t be looking to these [May 25] elections as being genuine, because, after all, some of the people who will be running have some shady backgrounds in terms of extremism, radicalism and anti-Semitism. This is a narrative—this is also another sort of instrument in the toolbox of the Kremlin to try and promote that destabilization.”[fn_8] The influential Diuk’s claims that the Maidan coup was a grassroots, democratic upsurge, can be refuted and shown to be deliberate lies, without citing a single Russian source, but only the words of the Maidan’s key figures and eyewitness testimony.

The box accompanying this article sheds light on how deeply ingrained the OUN legacy is in U.S. policy circles.

1. The Fascist Axioms of the OUN

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was founded in 1929. It was sponsored during the 1930s by both British MI6 and German military intelligence, the Abwehr. British intelligence and political circles, up to and including Winston Churchill, also had designs during that decade for Ukrainian participation in projects such as Intermarium (a projected confederation of nations located between the Baltic, Black, Aegean, and Adriatic seas) and the Promethean League of ethnic minorities from regions within the USSR. Several of these organizations were jointly sponsored by British and German operatives, as long as leading British circles remained openly supportive of the Nazis; thus the postwar relationship of MI6 with the Ukrainian nationalist underground involved not only picking up Nazi assets, but also retaking custody of projects in whose creation MI6 had been instrumental in the first place.[fn_9] [Box: Heirs of the OUN, Grandchildren of MI6]

The beliefs and platform of the OUN(b) were promoted abroad for 50 years after the war, by successor organizations such as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) and the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA). The UCCA celebrates OUN leader Stepan Bandera as “one of Ukraine’s most devoted heroes and patriots.”[fn_10] Kateryna Chumachenko, the American-born wife of former Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko, worked in the Washington offices of the UCCA and the National Captive Nations Committee in the 1980s, before moving on to the State Department Bureau for Human Rights. During Yushchenko’s time in office (2005-10), big strides were taken toward the rehabilitation of Bandera and the OUN. Ukraine’s former KGB archives, now under the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), were put under the charge of historian Volodymyr Vyatrovych, whose task was to develop “national heroes” as images for the new Ukraine. Vyatrovych painted all the main OUN figures in glowing tones.[fn_11]

In another instance of the OUN legacy, NED Vice President Diuk often sounds like a 1950s Cold War polemicist with a later-vintage Project Democracy veneer, not only thanks to her Oxford University education, but because in the 1980s, she cut her political teeth working for an extension of the CIA-funded Prolog Research Corporation, headed by former OUN assassin Lebed.

Through this kind of political and institutional continuity, an unquestioning acceptance of OUN assumptions (not necessarily so identified) viewed as normal, healthy Ukrainian nationalism, has become the norm among the Maidan movement and its foreign backers.

The Euromaidan adopted OUN slogans and practices. The most frequent crowd-participation chant at the Euromaidan, after the hourly singing of the national anthem, was a call-and-response routine of the type made famous by 20th-Century Italian fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio. A speaker shouts “Slava Ukrainy!” (“Glory to Ukraine!”), the crowd responds “Heroyam slava!” (To the heroes, glory!”). These are old OUN slogans, now de rigueur in Ukraine. They are heard every day. For example, ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko arrives in Kiev Feb. 22 after release from prison and is challenged by young Maidan Self-Defense patrollers, telling her, “We made this revolution, not you!” A shocked Tymoshenko tries to win them over by yelling out her limousine window, “Slava Ukrainy!” On May 5, three days after the grisly deaths of scores of people in the Trade Union building fire in Odessa, newly appointed Internal Affairs police chief for the Odessa Region Gen. Ivan Katerinchuk greets a public gathering in the shaken city: “Slava Ukrainy!” Some of the Odessa victims had heard the same shout from the frenzied crowd of so-called “nationalists” in the street below, as they fell or jumped from the burning building to their deaths.

The collaboration of Bandera, the OUN, and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) with the Nazis, both in the 1930s and during the Nazi invasion of Ukraine, as well as the OUN and UPA atrocities against the Jewish, Polish, and pro-Soviet Russian and Ukrainian populations during and after World War II, have been the subject of voluminous documentation, as well as whitewashing, and were summarized in our previous dossier.[fn_12] Here, we emphasize the fascist qualities of the OUN’s own ideology.

OUN publications and rhetoric, from 1929 to its present-day heirs, bear the imprint of such fascists as Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973). In his best-known book, Nationalism (1926), and in postwar writings for Canada-based publications of Bandera’s faction of the OUN, Dontsov expounded an ethnically defined nationalism and radical social Darwinism.

Dontsov viewed a “nation” as a biological species, and wrote in Nationalism that only one such ethnic “nation” could ever inhabit the same land.

He who views peoples as definite species, which, as in the organic world, are doomed to eternal competition between them—that person sees clearly that even two of them cannot be accommodated on one patch of ground under the Sun. . . . The weaker must yield to the stronger. . . . Nature does not know humanism or justice.

The striving for life and power is transformed into the striving for war. . . . The striving toward war between nations is eternal. War is eternal. . . . International life is built upon struggle, upon constant motion, which brings the world to war and war to the world. . . . War exists between species, and therefore between people, peoples, nations, and so forth. Be aggressors and occupiers, before you can become rulers and possessors. . . . No common human truth exists.

According to Dontsov, the leading force in society should be an “aristocracy” or “order”—an initiative-taking minority. The nation should have a vozhd, a concept close to the German Führer. Dontsov emerged as a major figure in the 1920s, in the wake of three failed attempts to form an independent Ukrainian state during World War I, and the 1918-22 Civil War in the former Russian Empire. His career is summarized by British academic researcher Andrew Wilson:

Dontsov, like Mussolini, had originally been a socialist but joined the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine in 1914 and moved quickly to the right. Dontsov also took much of his political philosophy from Italian fascism, but developed his own uniquely Ukrainian brand of extremist nationalism, which he dubbed “forceful,” “action” or (after Maurras) “integral” nationalism (chynnyi natsionalizm), borrowing eclectically from the likes of Nietzsche, Fichte, Pareto and Sorel. . . . Dontsov’s starting point was a violent critique of the alleged provincialism, inferiority complex and Little Russian mentality of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, . . . whose failure to liberate themselves from Russian culture and the illusory hope of cooperation with non-existent Russian “democrats” left Ukraine adrift and leaderless in 1917-20. . . .

Dontsov’s vision of the Ukrainian nation . . . was essentially ethnicist. A pure and inspiring “national idea” could only exist as the representation of the spirit of a homogeneous ethnic nation, free from all internal “impurity” and disunity (Dontsov here borrowed from the populist myth of a homogeneous Ukrainian peasantry). Ukraine therefore had to be purged of all Jewish, Polish and above all Russian influence. Moreover, the homogeneous ethnic nation would in Dontsov’s vision be run as a corporate state, with the nationalist political party providing its “ruling caste.” This would be the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.[fn_13]

It is easy to see the “beast-man” Synarchist or Nazi, woven into Dontsov’s vision of permanent struggle, inevitable war, and the purging of alien ethnic groups.

Dontsov’s belief-structure had not been the sole or even the main tendency in the Ukrainian independence movement earlier.

During and after the 1848 revolutions in continental Europe, the Ukrainian Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, led by historian Mykola Kostomarov (1817-1885) and influenced by Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), did not espouse such an exclusionary line. Kostomarov’s work The Two Peoples of Rus (1861) continued to be influential into the 20th Century, and was attacked by Dontsov and the OUN as representing so-called Little Russianism—the idea that Ukrainians and Russians are culturally distinct, but nonetheless branches of one people.

Academician Vladimir Vernadsky, born in Russia of a Ukrainian family, wrote to his daughter in 1923:

I do not divide Russians and Ukrainians, and I believe that if Russia doesn’t perish, . . . this question can be handled correctly. . . . The culture of Russia and Ukraine manifests a single, greater whole. . . . I would like to write to you about the Ukrainian question, . . . which is in the hands of people who are narrow-minded, fanatical opponents of Russian culture. Some of them are crazy, some merely backward. . . . Ukraine exists, and will continue to exist. The important thing is that Dontsov and Co. not be in charge.

Thus, the great scientist and patriot of Ukraine Vernadsky believed that the country’s relationship with Russia could be discussed rationally, as long as the crazed Donstov were out of the picture. Yet Dontsov became the mentor of the OUN, and it was his notions of ethnic purity and the needed dominance of what today is termed the “titular nation” within any national state, that were incorporated into OUN manifestos and—under the decades-long patronage of British MI6 and the Anglophile Dulles wing of U.S. intelligence, in particular—became the stock in trade of Ukrainian nationalists. Andrew Wilson, writing in 1997, observed that the “clash between militant [Dontsov] and democratic nationalism . . . has continued to be a feature of Ukrainian politics to this day.”

The programs of numerous organizations in modern Ukraine are full of Dontsov’s brand of vituperation. The Declaration of National Principles of the Bandera Trident (Tryzub) organization, with which Minister of Education Serhiy Kvyt and head of the Ukraine Security Service (SBU) Valentyn Nalyvaychenko are associated, states:

Almighty God created us Ukrainian, as the Ukrainian nation. . . . And the servants of Satan for centuries have tried to resist the will of God and either destroy us on our own land, or turn us into Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and others, into the imperial-“international” herd of the “Soviet people,” or into the faceless, meaningless and degenerate cosmopolitan cattle called a “political nation.” Ukrainians can only survive as Ukrainians and Christians, and Ukraine survive as Ukraine, in their own national state. Therefore Ukraine for us is above all else!

The program of the Svoboda (Freedom) Party, now part of the government coalition, calls for making “Ukrainophobia” a criminal offense. The popularized definition of Ukrainophobia says that any disagreement with the Dontsov-OUN ethnic definition of the Ukrainian nation is Ukrainophobic. Views such as those expressed by Vernadsky in his 1923 letter would be Little Russian, Ukrainophobic, and criminal under this definition.

The axiomatic hostility to Russia, inherited directly from the OUN, is audible in Nadia Diuk’s insistence that Russia under President Vladimir Putin pursues an imperial policy:

[T]he purpose of the Kremlin ideology . . . is to have a sort of belt of destabilized territories around Russia.[fn_14]

There has never been a Russian national identity that was anything other than imperial in its substance and ambition.[fn_15]

2. The Post-Coup Ukrainian Government

European Parliament Resolution 2012/2889, dated Dec. 13, 2012, on the situation following Ukraine’s Parliamentary elections, stated in point 8:

[The European Parliament] is concerned about the rising nationalistic sentiment in Ukraine, expressed in support for the Svoboda Party, which, as a result, is one of the two new parties to enter the Verkhovna Rada [Supreme Rada, the parliament]; recalls that racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views go against the EU’s fundamental values and principles and therefore appeals to pro-democratic parties in the Verkhovna Rada not to associate with, endorse or form coalitions with this party [emphasis added].

Look at the Ukrainian government approved by the Supreme Rada on Feb. 26, 2014, in the wake of the Feb. 18-22 coup. The Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) Party, of Speaker of the Rada and unconstitutionally installed Acting President Alexander Turchynov and Prime Minister Arseni Yatsenyuk, is in a government coalition with this same Svoboda Party, which received 10% of the 2012 vote and is headed by Oleh Tyahnybok.

Three out of 20 ministerial portfolios are held by members of Svoboda, as well as the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Deputy Speaker’s chair in the Supreme Rada. Svoboda Deputy Chairman Oleksandr Sych is one of three deputy prime ministers under Yatsenyuk. Party ideologist Sych, a historian, specializes on the work of Stepan Lenkavsky (1904-97), a deputy and immediate successor to Bandera as head of the OUN. Lenkavsky wrote the OUN’s “Ten Commandments of the Ukrainian Nationalist.” This Decalogue begins in heroic-style language—“I am the spirit of the eternal element that has guarded you from the Tatar flood and set you upon the edge of two worlds to create a new life”—and includes such instructions as:

8. Fight the enemies of your nation with hatred, and without second thoughts; . . .

10. Do all you can to spread the power, fame, wealth and expanse of the Ukrainian state [emphasis added].

Minister of Food and Agriculture Ihor Shvayka and Minister of Environment and National Resources Andriy Mokhnyk are Svoboda members. Ukraine’s current Prosecutor General, Oleh Makhnytsky, is Svoboda’s leading jurist. He is the lawyer who saved Tyahnybok from criminal prosecution for an infamous speech, given in 2004 at the grave of UPA fighters:

They were not afraid and we should not be afraid. They took their automatic weapons on their necks and went into the woods, and fought against the Muscovites, Germans, Jews and other scum who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state.

In this speech, Tyahnybok railed against “the Muscovite-Jewish mafia ruling Ukraine” and declared, “It’s time to give back Ukraine to Ukrainians.”[fn_16]

The U.S. State Department, reporting on matters of concern in Ukraine during 2005, noted:

In July 2004 the then-main opposition bloc in parliament, Our Ukraine, expelled Oleh Tyahnybok, a member of parliament who made an anti-Semitic speech during a 2004 campaign rally in Ivano-Frankivsk Region. A regional court ordered that charges of inciting ethnic hatred against Tyahnybok be dropped because of a lack of sufficient legal grounds to open a criminal case. In a March 29 [2005] national television interview, Tyahnybok refused to apologize for his campaign speech.[fn_17]

As recently as 2012, Tyahnybok commented, “All that I said then, I can also repeat now. Moreover, this speech is relevant even today.”[fn_18]

Another deputy chairman of Svoboda, Ruslan Koshulynsky, is deputy speaker of the Supreme Rada.

The powerful head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council (RNBO) since Feb. 26, Commandant of the Maidan Andriy Paruby, shares a background with Svoboda, though today he is a member of Batkivshchyna. Paruby co-founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine (Svoboda) with Tyahnybok. The SNPU came out of a youth guard called Varta Rukhu (Guard of the Movement), formed to protect the famous Soviet-era dissident and Ukrainian independence leader Vyacheslav Chornovil, who in later interviews described his wariness of the Guard, which he had ordered be abolished upon independence in 1991. By the Autumn of that year, the Varta youth, regrouped as the SNPU, won seats on the Lviv City Council. For their inauguration, they wore black outfits and their party insignia—the Wolfsangel, a symbol resembling the swastika and also used by the Nazis, which the SNPU interpreted as the letters “IN,” or “idea of the nation.” In 1999, Paruby founded another youth organization, Ukrainian Patriot, as an arm of the SNPU. Today Ukrainian Patriot is a component of the Right Sector paramilitary group.

The fascist ideology within current Kiev ruling circles is further illustrated by the recent statements and behavior of Members of Parliament. Videos from March 19, 2014 show Svoboda MP Ihor Myroshnychenko’s physical assault on NTKU-TV director Alexander Panteleymonov in the latter’s office, for broadcasting the Moscow signing ceremony of Crimea’s accession to Russia. On April 8, 2014, two young, black-shirted Svoboda MPs rushed down the aisle of the Supreme Rada and bodily pushed Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko (whose party received 13% of the vote in 2012, more than Svoboda’s 10%) from the rostrum as the latter denounced the new regime for “waging war against dissent.” One of the attackers was Svoboda MP Yuri Mykhalchyshyn, who possibly learned this method of political dialogue while working on his 2009 dissertation for an advanced degree in political science; it was a historical comparison of party-building by the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists, titled “Transformation of a Political Movement into a Mass Political Party of a New Type.”

Svoboda MP Iryna Farion, who chairs a Supreme Rada subcommittee on higher education, was already infamous for the 2010 video of her visit to a kindergarten, where she told five-year-olds that if they persisted in using Russian-derived nicknames, they and their families should pack their bags and move to Russia. In 2012, as the Supreme Rada debated and passed a language law that allowed for regional official languages in areas where languages other than Ukrainian are spoken (such as Russian, throughout southeast Ukraine and elsewhere), Farion’s party comrades repeatedly halted or delayed the legislative process by storming the podium and starting fistfights.

Interviewed April 8, 2014 outside the Rada chamber, after Ukrainian National Guard units had been sent to arrest anti-coup demonstrators occupying a building in Kharkiv and had forcibly dismantled a protest tent city in Mikolayiv, Farion said that such actions were not enough:

I would have been much tougher. I would have simply shot them, excuse me. Listen, the enemy is ruling on our land. What are we talking about here? They [the Russians] should have been driven out of here back in 1654.[fn_19] So the reaction today is absolutely appropriate. But the measures should be much tougher. Because these creatures who are coming here deserve only one thing: death [emphasis added].

Farion is not the only Ukrainian official to echo the Nazis in calling their political opponents and hate-objects sub-human. In the latest fascistic slang in vogue in Ukrainian nationalist circles, fellow Ukrainians who don the orange-and-black St. George’s ribbon, to honor the defeat of fascism in 1945, or to express preference for an alliance with Russia over a Banderite regime in Kiev, are called “Colorados,” after the markings of the Colorado potato beetle. When scores died in the Odessa street clashes and Trade Union building fire of May 2, as frenzied “nationalist” soccer fans and provocateurs cheered “Glory to Ukraine!” outside, Members of Parliament made these Facebook posts:

Bravo, Odessa. Pearl of the Ukrainian Spirit. . . . May the devils burn in hell. Soccer fans are the best insurgents. Bravo (Iryna Farion, Svoboda MP, May 3, 2014).

This is a historic day. Odessans, despite the treachery of at least a section of the police, defended Odessa and showed everybody that Odessa is Ukraine. At the price of the lives of patriots, this is an outstanding victory. A swarm of Colorados has been stamped out (Lesya Orobets, independent MP elected on the Batkivshchyna slate, May 2, 2014).

3. Right Sector: Not a Radical Fringe

The paramilitary grouping known as Right Sector is by no means a fringe of the Euromaidan, which played a certain role and then went away. Right Sector was publicly recognized by former Internal Affairs Minister and key Maidan organizer Yuri Lutsenko, now an advisor to Acting President Turchynov, for its crucial role in finally ousting President Victor Yanukovych, and it has sponsors at the highest level of the new regime. Right Sector cadre have been incorporated, along with the Maidan Self-Defense Forces, into a new National Guard, formed under the supervision of Paruby.

Right Sector was first called by that name in November 2013. It has three main components: the Stepan Bandera Trident (Tryzub) organization, Ukrainian Patriot, and the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO). They emerged directly out of the old MI6-, Abwehr-, and CIA-sponsored OUN(b), often without even skipping a generation between that movement’s World War II-era institutions and its reconstitution in new forms after Ukraine gained independence in 1991. Especially with the addition of their members’ training in East European NATO member countries, these groups are thus analogous to the Dulles-NATO postwar “stay-behind” networks called Gladio, which ran the period of coup plots and terrorism known as the strategy of tension, in 1970s Italy.[fn_20]

The Stepan Bandera Trident (Tryzub)

Tryzub was launched in October 1993 as a fitness-oriented youth organization, attached to the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (KUN). This party had been established in Ukraine directly by the OUN(b), whose leader, Slava Stetsko, returned to the country from the OUN(b)’s Munich headquarters in 1991, as the USSR broke up. She was the widow of Bandera’s deputy Yaroslav Stetsko, Prime Minister of the Ukrainian State proclaimed by the OUN(b) on June 30, 1941. The proclamation provided that, “The newly formed Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler, which is forming a new order in Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian People to free itself from Muscovite occupation.”

From 1948, Yaroslav Stetsko headed the initially MI6-sponsored Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, a British project to consolidate its operations in East European emigré circles.[fn_21] Later, he was one of Bandera’s successors as OUN(b) leader. While the primary British patronage of the Munich-based OUN(b) and ABN continued, they later received funding from Taiwan sources, and the Stetskos made forays to the United States. In a 1983 incident, the aged Mr. Stetsko’s wheelchair was pushed into the vicinity of President Ronald Reagan at a White House Captive Nations Week function, just long enough for a photographer to snap a picture of their handshake for publication in the ABN bulletin. Slava Stetsko succeeded her husband as head of the OUN(b) at his death in 1986, also inheriting his chairmanship of the ABN and his position as an officer of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL).

Back in Ukraine, Slava Stetsko chaired the KUN until her death in 2003, during which time the party won seats in the Supreme Rada. She personally sponsored Tryzub, whose guiding light was Vasyl Ivanyshyn, a second-tier KUN leader and professor at the Drohobych Pedagogical Institute in the Lviv Region. He began to crank out tracts such as Nation. Power. Nationalism (1992), The Ukrainian Idea and the Prospects for a Nationalist Movement (2000), and The Nation Choice (2002), in which Bandera and Dontsov were lauded. Tryzub was conceived as a “national-patriotic, social and sports organization on the model of an order.”[fn_22] Together with other nationalist youth organizations, it held Summer training camps, often in the village of Zarvanytsia in Ternopil Region, site of a famous icon of the Virgin Mary.

Tryzub has been dogged for many years by rumors of high-level political-establishment patronage, especially from the Ukraine Security Service (SBU). Radio Free Europe and NATO expert Taras Kuzio, himself a veteran of CIA-backed Banderite organizations in exile (see box), wrote in 2003: “Acting as agents provocateurs, Tryzub was behind Ukraine’s worst riots [to date] in March 2001.”[fn_23]

In May 2007, Tryzub held a conference in Ternopil to set up an International Anti-Imperialist Front. This Front was joined by the International Movement for Decolonization of the Caucasus (IMDC), headed by one Ahmad Sardali, who in 1999 had been part of terrorist Shamil Basayev’s Islamic Shura of Dagestan—the project to invade Russia’s North Caucasus republic of Dagestan from Chechnya, which touched off the Second Chechen War (1999-2009).

Ivanyshyn died in 2007 and was succeeded by his student Dmytro Yarosh. In 2010, Yarosh and 15 other Tryzub members were arrested for a plot to blow up a monument to Stalin in the city of Zaporozhye. Tryzub continued to hold its Summer recruitment and training camps.

On July 17, 2013, during that year’s camp, Yarosh video-recorded a speech that circulated widely online. It contained three summary points: 1) There is an “internal occupation” regime in Ukraine; 2) No liberation of the Ukrainian people and no Ukrainian statehood is possible without a national revolution; 3) Russia is the age-old enemy of Ukraine and “as long as the Russian Empire exists in any form, true, real national independence of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people is impossible.” Then Yarosh made a forecast:

The times are coming, when we will not only be talking and conducting various propaganda actions about the national revolution, but the times are coming that will forge history and fix the footprint of our people in the existence of the Ukrainian nation. . . . We must show not only in words, but with our deeds, that the Bandera cause is not yesterday, but it is the present and the future. . . . The times are approaching that we may have been only dreaming about for these 20 years. Therefore, power to you and may the Virgin of Zarvanytsia help us all in our struggle. Because we can win, we want to win, and we shall win.

On Nov. 21, 2013, when President Yanukovych and the Mykola Azarov government announced a halt to negotiations with the EU for an Association Agreement, Yarosh posted on the Tryzub website a declaration of war against the Ukrainian government. Earlier, in an 2008 interview to the Kavkaz-Center website, Yarosh had declared that war with Russia was inevitable: “Sooner or later, we are fated to do battle with the Muscovite Empire.”

The Tryzub website identifies Minister of Education Serhiy Kyvt as a former member of the group. A literary expert specializing in hermeneutics, he wrote his doctoral thesis on Dontsov.

Current SBU head Valentyn Nalyvaychenko is close to Tryzub. In a 2009 Ukrainska Pravda interview, he called himself “the last Ukrainian to be trained” at the Soviet Union’s Andropov KGB Institute. He previously headed the SBU (2006-10) and is now a member of Vitali Klitschko’s Udar Party. Yarosh spoke in 2014 interviews about his friendship with Nalyvaychenko, while the latter’s spokesman has confirmed to Ukrainian and Russian media that Yarosh worked as an aide to Nalyvaychenko in the Supreme Rada in 2013-14.

A video of Nalyvaychenko’s address to the Tryzub Summer camp at Zarvanytsia in July 2012 reveals a close relationship. Yarosh welcomed Nalyvaychenko as someone “who has already been working with our organization for a long time.” Nalyvaychenko spoke in classic Banderite language:

I want to express sincere gratitude for what you do. We are living through dark hours, when lack of faith and the de facto occupation of Ukraine only make us stronger. Stronger, in that we understand that we must and can oppose the occupiers. . . . We realize that the regime is playing with the Language Law, like a monkey with a hand grenade. We realize that this can only be opposed through organized action, Ukrainian action, because for us, patriotism means action. . . . I call on you to be true to what we are doing and saying together. It’s ours! This is our land and our values. We are fighting for Ukraine, for free Ukrainians, and for our faith. We are on our land and we’ll restore order in our own house!

Rather than cite Russian sources that routinely name Nalyvaychenko as an out-and-out “CIA agent,” here it is more relevant to cite the long-time Tryzub supporter’s own remarks during an April 22, 2014 Atlantic Council telebriefing, when he was already back in charge of the SBU after the February coup: “Information and intelligence sharing, and even cooperation, with our colleagues from the United States are really well organized. We’re satisfied with the level of cooperation. It is very intensive. It is very professional.”

Ukrainian Patriot

The SNPU youth wing, Ukrainian Patriot (UP), and its founder, Andriy Paruby, both split with the party when it cleaned up its image and renamed itself Svoboda in 2004. UP gained infamy in October 2008, when Kiev police broke up their attempted march in honor of the OUN and UPA. Later exploits of UP included attempts in 2011 to drive Vietnamese guest workers out of their dormitories. UP boasts of its military training, photos of which are archived on its website, www.patriot.ukr.ua; the site indicates that they continued paramilitary training until December 2013, when UP members headed for the Maidan.

In August 2011, three members of UP in Vasylkiv, Kiev Region, were arrested for readying explosives to blow up a Lenin monument in Boryspil, where the international airport is. UP’s ideologist (with a doctorate in history), Oleh Odnorozhenko, was formerly head of the Kharkov branch of Svoboda. He, too, left the party in 2004, but remained in UP. He was arrested in July 2012 for an armed attack on a political foe. Although Paruby himself had left UP as well as the SNPU/Svoboda in 2004, later joining Victor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine bloc and then Batkivshchyna, observers of the Ukrainian right-wing scene report that he showed up to vouch for Odnorozhenko at a November 2012 bail hearing. The latter was arrested during clashes at the Maidan and today is a member of the Right Sector Political Council.

UNA-UNSO

UNA-UNSO and its youth arm, Bily Molot (White Hammer), both entered the Right Sector coalition. The organization dates back to the August 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, when an alliance of right-wing grouplets called the Ukrainian Inter-Party Assembly (UMA) began to organize self-defense units in western Ukraine. These were called the Ukrainian National Self-Defense (UNSO). There were military veterans among the recruits, including some officers who had fought in Afghanistan (the afgantsy). At independence, the UMA was renamed the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA).

The UNA-UNSO sought a new leader and found him in the retired son of UPA commander Roman Shukhevych, named Yuri Shukhevych, though he was in poor health because of years in Soviet prisons. Initially his deputy and the de facto leader of the group was Mykola Karpyuk, who is active in Right Sector today. Shukhevych, now in his eighties, still gives interviews about the coming guerrilla warfare to be waged against Russia.

UNA-UNSO cadre travelled widely in the 1990s. They fought in the Transdniestria conflict against Moldova, and they turned up on the side of the Georgians in the Georgia-Abkhazia War of Autumn 1993. In April 1996, seven UNA-UNSO people were arrested in Belarus for inciting youth to rise up against President Alexander Lukashenka.

In 1994-95, some units and individual volunteers from the UNSO joined Jokhar Dudayev’s insurgents against Russia in the First Chechen War. One of them, Alexander Muzychko (“Sashko Bily”), for a time headed up Dudayev’s security detail. The UNA-UNSO’s involvement with Chechen separatism should be seen in the context of the radical nationalists’ belief that Ukrainian lands should extend eastward to the Don River. In other words, the whole area of southern Russia north of the Caucasus, including the breadbasket Stavropol and Krasnodar Territories, along with the Belgorod and Bryansk Regions, should become Ukrainian.

At its peak in the late 1990s, the UNA-UNSO claimed to have 10,000 members. It was banned in 1997, during Leonid Kuchma’s presidency, but persisted nevertheless. The group became very active in the Ukraine Without Kuchma movement, launched in 2000 after the murder of journalist Georgi Gongadze. Clashes with police and an attempted takeover of the Presidential Administration building in March 2001 led to mass arrests of UNSO people.

Videos and still photos, posted on a Ukrainian website in 2006, show young people wearing UNA-UNSO insignia at a Summer training camp. They practice bomb techniques, breaking and entering buildings, and shooting. The people who posted the video call the instructors NATO officers and identify the location as a base in NATO member Estonia, a statement supported by the video’s ending, in which the same youngsters gather at a monument to Estonians who fought against the Red Army in World War II. Although such reports of NATO training of UNA-UNSO and other groups are difficult to verify individually, there are many of them, citing Lithuania and Poland as other training venues.

Two important figures in the Euromaidan and the new government are former members of the UNA-UNSO. One is Dmytro Bulatov, the Automaidan leader who claimed to have been kidnapped and tortured for a week and is now Minister for Youth and Sports. The investigative journalist Tetyana Chornovol, whose kidnapping and beating in late December 2013 was an important incident in keeping the Maidan going, was a volunteer press secretary for UNA-UNSO in the 1990s, having become active in the group at age 17. She handled UNA-UNSO liaison with Chechen rebels, before quitting in the early 2000s to concentrate on journalism. On March 5, 2014, she was named as the government’s Authorized Representative for Anti-Corruption Investigations.

4. Who’s Spinning ‘False Narratives’?

In a glowing account in the March-April 2014 World Affairs, Nadia Diuk tells the story of “Euromaidan: Ukraine’s Self-Organizing Revolution” like a fairy tale:

An assembly of students on the Euromaidan, started a few days [before Nov. 21] to support the idea of Ukraine as a part of Europe, suddenly bloomed into a full-fledged movement not only of protest but of opposition. . . . Even though the opposition political leaders put themselves at the head of the movement, there was a distinct sense that they had not planned for such an uprising and were catching up with the people already on the streets. . . . The coordination between the political party elements and the civic groups led to the realization that the achievements of the Euromaidan should be consolidated and advanced in the form of a new nationwide movement that would expand the liberated zone, as they put it, to all of Ukraine.

Diuk’s depiction of the Euromaidan movement as a spontaneous embodiment of healthy Ukrainian nationalism, is parroted by other U.S. officials.

Secretary of State John Kerry, March 4: “[W]e’ve watched with extraordinary awe the power of individuals unarmed except with ideas, people with beliefs and principles and values who have reached for freedom, for equality, for opportunity.”

Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, Jan. 15: “[T]he movement that started as a demand for a European future grew into a protest for basic human dignity and justice, clean and accountable government, and economic and political independence of Ukraine.”

Look at November 2013—February 2014 through the lens of the Maidan organizers’ own statements[fn_24] about what they were doing, from beforehand and as the coup unfolded, punctuated by Right Sector’s escalation of street violence against the police at key moments.

In addition to the words of Paruby and Yarosh, statements by Yuri Lutsenko give the lie to Diuk’s myth of a spontaneous process. Lutsenko was a key organizer of the Orange Revolution (2004). He was Minister of Internal Affairs in two subsequent governments, allied himself with Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine bloc, then was arrested on abuse-of-office charges and jailed in 2011 after Yanukovych won the Presidency.

While Western media coverage focussed on the Parliamentary opposition trio of Yatsenyuk, Klitschko, and Tyahnybok, it was not they who were driving the Maidan coup process on the ground. Diuk’s “people already on the streets” were hardly idealistic students, but rather Bandera-worshipping nationalists who had been preparing for two decades. Yes, the crowds were swelled by thousands of people who truly hoped that EU membership might bring economic improvements or were angry at the Yanukovych Administration’s corrupt ties with post-Soviet business “oligarchs.” But at the same time, people from the OUN’s old base of Halyshchyna and other western regions were disproportionately represented: A late-January poll by the Fund for Democratic Initiatives, an NGO, found that 55% percent of the Maidan demonstrators were from western Ukraine, although the eight regions traditionally comprising that area account for less than 20% of Ukraine’s population. Eighty-eight percent of those camped out in the Maidan were men.[fn_25]

A Planned, Organized Escalation

April 2013: Pardoned by Yanukovych and released from prison, Yuri Lutsenko founded a movement called Third Ukrainian Republic (TUR; the first two republics were the Ukrainian People’s Republic of 1917 and the Bandera-Stetsko Ukrainian State of 1941). He announced plans for “a movement of those who . . . realize that it will be necessary to dump the ruling mafia not only by voting, but through a peaceful mass uprising.”

July 2013: Yarosh delivered his “the times are approaching” speech at the Tryzub camp.

Nov. 13, 2013: A full week before the government halted the EU Association negotiations, Lutsenko’s spokesman said he was in talks with Parliamentary opposition leaders to organize protests against any move away from Eurointegration. If that happened, he said, “the people of Ukraine would have no other option than to take to the streets.”

Nov. 14: Lutsenko called for a “Euromaidan,” using that term.

Nov. 21: When the government announced the halt in the EU negotiations, a few hundred people gathered in Independence Square. Among them were Lutsenko, Svoboda MPs Iryna Farion and Andriy Ilyenko, and Andriy Paruby.

Nov. 24: Lutsenko called on people to stay in the Maidan through Nov. 29, the day of the EU Eastern Partnership summit, where Yanukovych had been slated to sign the Association Agreement. He said that Ukraine needed not merely a new government or President, but to change its very foundations.

First escalation, Nov. 29-Dec. 1: The Maidan demonstration wound down on the night of Nov. 29, with only a few hundred people left in the square. Suddenly, a thousand Berkut police showed up and, just as suddenly, unidentified persons rushed the Berkut and attacked them with chains. The brutal police retaliation, with beatings of young people, was filmed and broadcast on TV. On Dec. 1, the Euromaidan resumed, with a much larger turnout to protest the police brutality. Not only peaceful protesters came. This was the day of Right Sector’s first high-profile attack, aimed at police lines around the Presidential Administration building.

Nov. 30: Lutsenko called for blockading central Kiev until Yanukovych would step down.

Dec. 1: Lutsenko told the rally, “Our plan is clear: This is no longer a rally or a protest action. This is a revolution.” Tyahnybok said, “Starting now, we stay in the Maidan.”

Dec. 2: Lutsenko announced that Maidan Self-Defense Forces were operational. “We have units who will be able to defend the people,” he said. Asked how many, he replied, “As many as we need. Do you want to know all our plans already? . . . [T]here are well-prepared, specially trained people, who are taking responsibility for physical defense against possible attack.”

Dec. 8: Paruby declared, “Neither the government, nor Yanukovych, nor anybody else will be able to work, until our demands are met. We are standing here till victory.”

Dec. 12: Paruby was already referred to in the media as Commandant of the Maidan. He announced plans to expand its tent city and reinforce the barricades.

Dec. 22: Tyahnybok announced the creation of “Maidan” as a formal organization. He said, “Next we’ll do guerrilla operations to blockade government buildings and make it impossible for the scoundrels now in power to live or sleep.” Lutsenko called for spreading the “territory of the Maidan” to central Ukraine by Spring, reaching Crimea during the Summer. Lutsenko and Kvyt, the former Tryzub member and president of the Kyiv-Mohilya Academy, were named co-chairmen of the Maidan.

Jan. 4, 2014: Paruby, warning of coming attempts to break up the Maidan, said that “right after the holidays . . . will be a good period for our switchover to the offensive.”

Second escalation, Jan. 1: Three days after Yanukovych’s Party of Regions rammed through laws to outlaw many Maidan practices, Right Sector attacked the Berkut forces around the government quarter. This action on Hrushevsky Street began several days of violence, bringing the first deaths. Shocking images of policemen set on fire by napalm-like molotov cocktails date from Jan. 22. Kiev was swathed in black smoke from burning piles of tires, ignited by the Maidan fighters.

Jan. 25: Paruby told Deutsche Welle that the revolution was approaching “its victorious conclusion.” He described the Maidan Self-Defense Forces as organized in a sotnya structure (hundred-man units) and combat-ready.

Jan. 28: Amid demands for the demonstrators to relinquish the government buildings they had occupied, Paruby declared that Yanukovych had better release his office on Bankovaya Street—the offices of the Presidency. “They release Bankovaya, and we’ll release the October Palace,” said Paruby. “I think those are good starting points for negotiations.”

Jan. 29: Formation of a National Guard was announced at the Maidan. It comprised the Maidan Self-Defense Forces, Right Sector, and unspecified Cossacks.

Feb. 7: Paruby stated that the Maidan Self-Defense, now numbering 12,000, would become a nationwide organization. Since their activity was illegal under current law, he said, they did not seek legalization, but to change the regime.

Feb. 11: Paruby signed Order #1, “On the Fundamental Organizational Principles of the Maidan Self-Defense,” and posted it on Facebook. Its objectives included “to resist the current criminal regime until its complete elimination.”

Third escalation, Feb. 1:. The Supreme Rada was slated to convene. With Parliamentary opposition figures Yatsenyuk and Klitschko away in Germany, the Maidan leaders and Tyahnybok of Svoboda announced a “peaceful march” to the Rada to make sure it adopted the “correct” decisions, namely to return to the Constitution of 2004 (curtailing presidential powers). As they approached the police lines around the Parliament, again along Hrushevsky Street, the “peaceful marchers” went on the attack. This began a day of street-fighting in which 25 people were killed.

Feb. 19-20: A truce was announced after negotiations between the Parliamentary opposition trio (Yatsenyuk, Klitschko, Tyahnybok) and Yanukovych late on Feb. 19. Overnight, Yarosh and Paruby rejected it. Yarosh wrote on Facebook, “In the event that the internal occupation forces of the Ministry of Internal Affairs cease fire and the Supreme Rada of Ukraine immediately cancels the dictatorial powers of Yanukovych, we shall apply maximum efforts to bring the bloodshed to a halt and guarantee their safety.” Toward morning, shots were fired from the Conservatory building, where Paruby and Maidan commanders had relocated after the Trade Union building burned. The shots reportedly hit both police and demonstrators. An all-day gun battle began, in which another 70 people died amid unidentified sniper fire.

Feb. 21: The opposition trio and Yanukovych signed an agreement, witnessed by the foreign ministers of Germany, France, and Poland, committing to constitutional reform by September, Presidential elections late in the year, and turning in of weapons. This document was taken to the Maidan. When it was read out, there were boos. Then Volodymyr Parasyuk of Lviv, the young commander of a Maidan Self-Defense sotnya, grabbed the microphone to say that the deal was unacceptable, that they hadn’t stood for three months, and fought, and lost men dead, just to have Yanukovych remain in office all year.[fn_26] If Yanukovych did not resign by 10:00 a.m. the next morning, he cried, his sotnya was prepared to go on full attack against the regime. The deal was off. Yanukovych left Kiev during the night and the Rada unconstitutionally installed Turchynov as Acting President on Feb. 22.

Feb. 26: The opposition leaders brought their list of ministers for a new government, under Yatsenyuk, to the Maidan for approval (by shouting) and only then back to the Rada for a vote the next day. In addition to the portfolios listed above, Deputy Commandant of the Maidan Stepan Kubiv, a banker from Lviv, now heads the Bank of Ukraine; Minister of Culture Yevhen Nyshchuk, also from western Ukraine, is the actor recruited by Lutsenko as the Maidan’s chief emcee; Minister of Health Oleh Musy was the Maidan medical services coordinator. For a moment, it appeared that Yarosh would receive a high post in the National Security and Defense Council (RNBO), which was now to be headed by Paruby, but at that moment in the reading, a person rushed up and told the speaker, “Don’t name Yarosh!” Simon Shuster, in Time magazine of March 1, cited a Maidan Council member involved in the government-formation talks, who said that Yarosh had been offered the post of RNBO deputy secretary, but rejected it, wanting the deputy premiership for security matters. He has now declared his Presidential candidacy.

Turchynov, having come to power on calls to shut down “the criminal regime,” quickly appointed a different set of billionaire businessmen as governors of southeastern regions.

The new National Guard was instituted by law on March 12, 2014. In May, Paruby announced that the Maidan Self-Defense Forces had been fully incorporated into the Guard. They are deployed against militias and townspeople in eastern Ukraine.

Right Sector, Sine Qua Non

On Jan. 26, after the Hrushevsky Street escalation, but before the final February street battles, the Euromaidan PR website posted an appreciation of Right Sector from a liberal Maidan-supporter’s perspective.[fn_27] Author Alya Shandra, and other bloggers she cited, express typically Synarchist awe and admiration of violent action.

[Citing another blogger:] My dear friends in Europe and US! If you trust me, please, forget about this “Ukrainian right radicals” crap some Western media provide! That’s so irrelevant now, when people are killed, kidnapped, and tortured, and we face the terror on the Kyiv streets.

[Shandra’s own comment:] The Right Sector of Maidan has initiated violence with the police on Kyiv’s streets, bringing the Euromaidan protests out of a tedious and ineffective carousel of two-month-long People’s Gatherings (Viches) and encampments on Kyiv’s main square fighting off the regime’s assaults, Europe’s lack of action, and the government’s scornful deafness and cynical repressions, which culminated in the unconstitutional “adoption” of the “dictatorship laws” on January 16th, signifying a total breakdown of democracy. . . . The Far-right, demonized by all those in the West, . . . thus did what the peaceful, democratic people of Ukraine were dreaming of but were too scared to admit, not mention realize—to revolt against an oppressive, corrupt government.

[Citing another blogger:] Whether we like it or not, the Right Sector, as well as other radically inclined citizens, have changed the course of events in Ukraine’s political crisis to the protesters’ favor. The authorities have backed down. The price for this turnaround are Molotov cocktails, the wounded, arrested, kidnapped, and killed. Of course, those of us that adhere to nonviolent resistance and oppose such radical measures of struggling for justice will have to agree that, if the regime will fall, God’s hand must have guided these people. . . .

On the evening of Feb. 23, Yuri Lutsenko took the microphone on the Maidan stage and thanked a long list of those who had made possible the ouster of the elected President of Ukraine (without the impeachment procedure defined in the Constitution). Lutsenko offered special gratitude to “Right Sector and its leader, Dmytro Yarosh.” The crowd roared, and called for Yarosh.

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Heirs of the OUN, Grandchildren of MI6

One wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera (OUN(b)) was headquartered in Munich after World War II and ran British MI6-backed operations into Ukraine well beyond the end of the western Ukraine civil war between Soviet authorities and the remnants of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1954. The 1991 return to Ukraine of that faction’s leader, Slava Stetsko, and her co-founding of what became the Tryzub component of Right Sector, is related in the body of this article.

The OUN(b)’s wartime security police chief, Mykola Lebed, parted ways with Stepan Bandera after the war. EIR reported in previous issues (see Notes 4 and 5) on CIA chief Allen Dulles’s keeping Lebed from being turned away from the United States as “a well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans,” in the words of an Army Counterintelligence report. The CIA funded the Prolog Research Corporation, led by Lebed, for intelligence-gathering and the distribution of nationalist and other literature inside the USSR.

Taras Kuzio’s “U.S. support for Ukraine’s liberation during the Cold War: A study of Prolog Research and Publishing Corporation”[fn_1] drew on recently declassified CIA documents and his own experience, for a review of Prolog’s publications and network-building operations. He shed light on the ingrained influence of the OUN within the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

One of Lebed’s Prolog deputies, Anatole Kaminsky, moved to Radio Liberty in Munich in 1978. As the termination of Prolog’s funding approached in 1990, its then-President Roman Kupchinsky followed suit. These two, plus Prolog freelancer Bohdan Nahaylo, headed Radio Liberty’s Ukrainian service, Radio Svoboda, until 2003—12 years after the break-up of the USSR.

After the Church Committee’s findings led to restrictions on CIA activities in the mid-1970s, Prolog shifted its publishing activities to London. By 1985, the Society for Soviet Nationality Studies (U.K.) and the opening of Ukrainian Press Agency, for collecting information through “unofficial offices” in Warsaw, Moscow, and Kiev, enabled Prolog to resume publishing. The Society for Soviet Nationality Studies (SSNS), located in London, was already being funded by Prolog. It was directed by two young Britons of Ukrainian extraction, one of them Kuzio himself.

In 1984, the SSNS launched Soviet Nationality Survey, edited by two young Ukrainian emigrés having “close contacts with Prolog”—Alexander Motyl and Nadia Diuk, “who was completing her doctorate at Oxford University.” A Ukrainian-American in the orbit of Prolog was Adrian Karatnycky, then working in the international department of the AFL-CIO. He helped get literature for Ukraine printed for Prolog, through trade union contacts in Poland.

Nadia Diuk, quoted in this dossier, is the U.S. NED’s Vice President for Programs—Africa, Central Europe, Eurasia. She has been at the NED since 1990 and is a frequent co-author with her husband, Karatnycky, who headed Freedom House for 12 years and is now at the Atlantic Council. Kuzio cites Diuk’s eulogy of Kupchinsky at his funeral in 2010, including her recollections of Lebed and Kupchinsky at work in the New York offices of Prolog in the 1980s. Taras Kuzio has written scores, if not hundreds, of RFE/RL intelligence reports on Ukraine. He also is a Ukraine expert for NATO, which opened a NATO Information and Documentation Center in Kiev in 1997. These three graduates of the Prolog kindergarten are among the most influential Ukraine experts in the United States. [back to text]

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