No one deserves to die in a futile war fought for the profit of others.
In this series I will examine the terrible fate of Ukraine, and how its nation was led by a faction of war to become a graveyard of US Imperial ambition.
This is the story of how a nationalist movement, backed by the US for decades, was used to destroy a nation it rose to establish.
The war in Ukraine is a war of Empire.
It came as the result of a decades-long project to absorb Ukraine into the American Empire, helping it to destabilise and overextend Russia.
As with so many US imperial adventures, the opposite has happened.
How did this vast nation, with a large Russian-speaking population, come to war with its neighbour, with whom so many Ukrainians share a common heritage?
The answer lies with an obvious fact denied for obvious reasons. It is the dirty history of the project of Ukrainian Nationalism.
It is a story which begins with the Second World War, and shows how US-backed organisations to combat Communism - and undermine Soviet states - were inherited by the neoconservatives to promote “regime change” - after the fall of the Soviet Union.
One of the most notorious Ukrainian war criminals would partner with a young US-Ukrainian woman from the State Department, to foster a movement which would poison Ukraine against Russia.
The goal was to snatch the state of Ukraine from Russian influence. The instrument was Ukrainian nationalism. The result was the death of a nation.
The Tragedy of Ukrainian Nationalism
Most people have never heard of Katerina Chumachenko. If they had, perhaps the tragic recent history of Ukraine would have been different. Today, you will find out why.
The Just World fallacy is the idea that a thing cannot be true because the world is not that bad. Things like that just don’t happen.
The tragedy of Ukrainian nationalism is such a case. It is a story so awful, so contorted and bloody, that no sane person will accept it as true. And yet.
The world is not sane, and those who rule the affairs of men have little concern for atrocity. This is a side effect of power. The tragedy of Ukrainian nationalism is that for a time its actors believed the script that was written in the blood of its nation, to spend that of another.
What none of them can believe is it was intended to be a tragedy. For them.
We live in a strange world where the obvious cannot be true, and the official version however dubious represents the facts. In this alternate world, which we receive from our betters in the media and in politics, there are no nationalists in Ukraine.
As we have learned, when the state apparatus tells us something real is also not true, it means they are up to something.
The reason the existence of nationalists in Ukraine is denied is because they not only exist, but their numbers were increased and their movement was encouraged by the same regime who tell you they were never there at all.
Why is a Jewish US State Department official supporting an antisemitic nationalist, inspired by the Nazi party? A poll in December 2013 - and cited in an EU report - showed that Tyahnybok would win the presidential election, beating the pro-Russian Yanukovich.
Why did Svoboda become so popular in the first place? The US has directly encouraged parties such as this, in a process which accelerated in 2004.
Nationalism is the power behind the putsch which placed a US proxy in Ukraine.
And then to war.
The roots of Ukrainian Nationalism
With its roots in the 19th century rule of Western Ukraine (Galicia) by Poland, by 1940 the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement OUN split into two. Founded to promote a Ukrainian national state, its two factions organised behind two men: Andrii Melnyk (OUN-M) and Stepan Bandera )OUN-B)1.
It is this latter faction, also known as “Banderites”, whose influence would shape the modern state of Ukraine - and whose support by the US would see it mobilise for war against its own Russian speaking populations - and ultimately Russia itself.
Stepan Bandera’s deputy, Jaroslav Stetsko, formed a new army which he led to capture the Galician capital Lvov in Western Ukraine - now under Nazi occupation.
First Deputy to Stepan Bandera in the OUN-B, Stetsko reported the following in a June 25, 1941 letter to the commander:
"We are creating a militia which will help remove the Jews" – the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA.
Together with Theodore Oberländer, an Abwehr liaison officer with Ukrainian punitive detachments, Stetsko led the Nachtigall battalion in its attack on Lvov.
On June 30th 1941 at 8:00 PM, that is, a week into Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, Stetsko "on behalf of the Ukrainian people and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under the leadership of Stepan Bandera" issued the "The act of the Proclamation of the Ukrainian State" and appointed himself prime minister of the "Ukrainian Government."
Taken in defiance of Hitler, this led to Stepan Bandera’s imprisonment. Following his release, Bandera would settle in postwar West Germany. He would be assassinated by the KGB in Munich in 1959.
His deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, found his way to a new life in the United States, with a involvement in the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). He was welcomed as a hero by the Reagan administration, and is pictured here meeting then US Vice President HW Bush.
He was a regular attendee of the US Captive Nations Week, held since 1953. His visit to this US government anti-communist initiative in 1981 is recorded in the Washington Post here.
Two years later, at the same event, he would meet the young Katerina Chumachenko - now director of the ABN, and also of the Ukrainian National Information Service (UNIS).
This lobbying group, founded in 1977, exists to promote Ukrainian national interests as coterminous with those of the USA.
The daughter of Ukrainian emigrants to the US, she went on to play a key role in the US-backed 2004 “Orange Revolution” which toppled the Ukrainian President Yanukovych.
How did she achieve such influence?
U.S. administrations are peppered with American officials from ethnic communities who lobby for the Orange movements in their ethnic homelands, as the geopolitical aspirations of these movements largely coincide with U.S. national security interests.
This was evident during the Ukrainian crisis in late 2004, when officials of Ukrainian descent and their NGO allies lobbied a reluctant Bush administration.
These include Paula Dobriansky (daughter of the legendary activist Lev) at the State Department, Nadia Diuk at the National Endowment for Democracy, Taras Kuzio at George Washington University, and Adrian Karatnycky at Freedom House.
One of these key Ukrainian-American activists is Katherine Chumachenko, the current first lady of Ukraine.
Her career took her from the Anti-Bolshevik movement through the US State Department and USAID, and finally to the top of the Ukrainian government. A “chance” meeting with Viktor Yuschenko led to their marriage in 1993.
According to the Guardian, this “colour revolution” was indeed assisted by NGOs, partnered with US Deep State organisations3.
The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute.
The process is legimitised by US election experts.
US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organise focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy.
Following the “colour revolution” in Ukraine, her new husband Viktor Yuschenko became President . She would go on to foster a Ukrainian nationalism whose renascence was a key feature in the continuing project to destabilise Russia.
Her story is one which illustrates how the machinery of anti-communism was -and is - used to topple and subvert governments at home and abroad.
Anti-communism became the big business of regime change, whose wars, subterfuge and parallel economy would shape world affairs, and result in the complete corruption of American democracy at home.
The US Government Committee on Foreign Affairs discussed Chumachenko, and her husband’s administration, in a 2016 paper titled “Corruption - A Danger to Democracy”4.
In it, Dana Rohrabacher, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats, had this to say,
And let me just note that Cathy Chumachenko, who worked
with me in the Reagan White House, turned out to be first lady,
and she and her husband, who came into power after that, the
Orange Revolution, as has been indicated in the testimony,
their administration was so corrupt that the people of Ukraine
ended up voting for Yanukovych in the next election.
And Yanukovych, I might add, was democratically elected,
OSCE verified it. However, he didn't leave office in a
democratic election. He left office because there was a violent
revolution that started in Maidan...
Rohrabacher, who was present at the Maidan of the “Orange Revolution” in 2004, issued a solemn warning seven years ago on the fate of Ukraine.
Yanukovych deserved to be removed by his people, because he
was as corrupt as the people who he replaced, who were as
corrupt as the people they replaced.
And I am not sure how that bodes well in the future for Ukraine, because the information I am getting now is that the current government is also deeply
engaged in corrupt practices and the sending of large amounts
of money to European banks.
The Machinery of the Death of Nations
The corruption in Ukraine inherited the bureaucratic mechanisms of corruption under the Soviet Union. It has been fuelled - not reformed - by vast amounts of US and Western “aid”, creating a parallel system of government which displaces the visible structures of the state with a system of organised fraud and plunder.
The present day corruption of the American Empire is also a Cold War legacy. The machinery of anticommunism not only failed to destabilise Russia, it has transformed into an industry which has normalised the patronage of US politics with the financing of foreign wars.
This shadow foreign policy has captured the US State Department, and the mainstream media which conceals the facts from the populations who pay in blood and in treasure for its many adventures. This is the legacy of regime change whose fake news celebrates every foreign slaughter as a victory, in a series of wars it never wins.
Ukraine’s corruption continues to the present day. So does that of the United States and its Empire, whose politicians and media echo the Banderite call of “Slava Ukraini, heroyam slava”, as a nation is sent to its death.
“Heroes and Villains - Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine”, David R Marples, Central European University Press, 2007, Chapters 3-4
“Orange people: a brief history of transnational liberation networks in East Central Europe”, Fredo Arias-King, Demokratizatsiya - The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratisation, Vol 15, Issue 1 Winter 2007
“US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev”, Ian Traynor, The Guardian, 26 Nov 2004
Hearing before the subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and emerging threats of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, US House of Representatives, 114th Congress, Second Session, December 7th 2016 - linked here.
The hearing was witnessed by Mr. Charles Davidson, executive director of the remarkably named Kleptocracy Initiative of the Hudson Institute.
Thanks for this insightful article about Ukraine, Frank.
I read that the head of the British Army, General Patrick Sanders, has stated in a speech that, ‘the British people must start to mentally prepare themselves for war against Russia’. He also says he has ambitions and to double the size of the army.
And it isn’t even April 1st yet.