NATO and its fascist partnered regimes are facilitating a process in Ukraine that can be compared to the rise of Nazi Germany. The difference being that Ukraine’s fascist regime isn’t going to start invading European imperialist powers, which in the long term will make this regime more sustainable than the Third Reich; whereas the Nazis went rogue and brought the wrath of the other imperialist powers, Ukraine’s Nazis have the reliable backing of the United States and its imperial collaborators.
The parallels between the two regimes are apparent as soon as one looks beyond the layer of Western propaganda about how Ukraine needs to be supported to deter Russian “aggression,” and discovers the truly Hitleresque horrors that have been committed by the Ukrainian leadership that Washington installed in the 2014 coup.
In an analysis from last week by Christelle Néant of Donbass Insider, titled Worse than the Nazis: two women from the DPR [Donetsk People’s Republic] and the LPR [Luhansk People’s Republic] tell how they were tortured in captivity in Ukraine, these atrocities have been reported on in excruciating detail:
When beatings, simulated drowning and asphyxiation are not enough to break the arrested person, Ukrainian neo-Nazis, like SBU agents, do not hesitate to threaten to attack his or her relatives to make him or her confess to anything and everything. The same method was used against Darya Mastikasheva and one of the organisers of the LPR referendum, Olga Maximova. Olga was an opponent of the Maidan, who did not support the imposition of the values of “Ukrainian nationalism” (i.e. neo-Nazism) following the coup. She was among those who organised the LPR referendum in 2014. But the town of Chchastye, where she lives, found itself on the Ukrainian side of the contact line when it finally became fixed. Despite the danger, Olga did not want to leave her house, hoping that the situation would change. It was a neighbour who denounced Olga in writing to the Ukrainian security services.
All the acts of state violence that the imperialists accuse north Korea of — and that are based on consistently unreliable testimonies from highly paid defectors — are frequently committed by the Ukrainian regime which the imperialists back to the fullest extent possible. As Néant‘s analysis also describes:
DPR resident Anna Orlova is 70 years old, but that hasn’t stopped her, her daughter and granddaughter from being arrested and tortured in Ukraine. On 23 May 2014, less than two weeks after the independence referendum, Ukrainian punishers arrested Anna, her daughter Svetlana, then 38, and her granddaughter Anna, not yet 17. The latter was the daughter of the commander of a DPR rapid intervention group. A filiation that will be used against the young girl. The men who came to arrest the three women wore uniforms without badges, black masks and did not introduce themselves. But their western Ukrainian accent betrayed that they are not locals.
These atrocities aren’t even the sins of a past form of government that NATO is no longer backing. They can’t be construed as merely being unfortunate anomalies that arose during a tense transitional period in Ukraine’s governance. They were integral and deliberately engineered aspects of the regime that the U.S. government — with the direct involvement of our current president — installed through a series of hidden backroom deals. Ukraine has had the cosmetic appearance of “democracy” since then, but it continues to have a government that openly glorifies Ukraine’s Nazi collaborators who assisted Hitler with the Holocaust.
And Washington backs the regime so hard that this year, when hundreds of government-adjacent Nazis marched through Kyiv carrying SS insignias, Washington’s close imperial partners Israel and Germany condemned the march while U.S. officials mentioned nothing about it.
Just like how global capitalists and imperialists helped with Hitler’s rise, the colonial powers have all assisted the fascist regime, even if some of them have claimed to oppose its genocidal agenda. Israel has sent arms to Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, the neo-Nazi militia that’s been tasked with carrying out the regime’s ethnic cleansing against Jews, Romas, and ethnic Russians. This month, Ukraine held military exercises alongside the U.S., Lithuania, and Poland. Poland’s involvement is especially notable, given that the country’s fascist government seeks to declare the Polish communist party illegal; Ukraine’s regime has taken this anti-communist repressive campaign that’s been sweeping across Europe a step further. It’s outlawed the country’s communist party while making it illegal to question the “heroism” of the Nazi collaborators, who are glorified for fighting against the Soviets.
The regime has also persecuted journalists and the LGBT community, carried out pogroms as part of the ethnic cleansing, banned books, and utilized paramilitaries like Azov for the torture and murder of dissidents. Ukraine has become a laboratory for the atrocities that fascists across the rest of Europe intend to perpetrate. Such practices are also sure to be adopted by U.S. fascists, since U.S. white supremacists have been major recruits for Ukraine’s military and paramilitary forces.
More broadly, every NATO member state — soon to include Pacific hemisphere imperialist powers like Australia and Japan under the “NATO 2030” plan — is involved in the arms buildup that Ukraine’s regime is using to terrorize its own people and stoke Russia into potential world war. As columnist Marina Kharkova assessed this week, NATO is “now more involved in the militarisation of Ukraine than ever before,” with the result being a mass fascist war indoctrination that resembles the Hitler youth:
The militarisation of Ukraine is proceeding at an accelerated pace and at all levels, starting with mass training in military-patriotic camps for children and adolescents, who in tens of thousands in several shifts learn to shoot from machine guns and make night marches, ending with the modernization of the Ukrainian army, the creation of joint battalions with foreigners and the transition to the NATO standard. The Ukrainian Armed Forces are participating in an unprecedented number of exercises in 2021 compared to previous years. Financing of expenses related to the preparation and conduct of multinational exercises in the territory of Ukraine in the amount of 38.5 million hryvnias is provided in the direction of the budget program “Training of troops, operations and international exercises.”
The buildup towards world war, larger-scale murders of dissidents, and expanded genocide within Ukraine and its western neighbors is far from over. Russia’s foreign ministry warned this week that “We are worried over the prospects of growing US military presence in Poland. There are plans for considerably increasing the overall strength of US troops in addition to the already stationed 4,500 men. The infrastructure being created will allow for promptly building up the US military group in that country to 20,000.” As well that “Even against the backdrop of the pandemic the alliance has been holding exercises on the eastern flank, including some under a scenario of what they describe as resistance to a ‘comparable enemy’, which naturally implies Russia. We believe that such exercises are provocative and, in the current situation, at least shortsighted.”
As Russia also takes note of the fact that the Kyiv regime has decided against a peaceful solution, the U.S. empire’s propagandists are eager to inflame these tensions. The neoconservative think tank the Atlantic Council claimed this month that “For Ukrainians, the struggle to end the Russian occupation of Crimea is not just a matter of sovereignty, human rights, or national security. It is also a quest to defend international law and restore historical justice.” This statement couldn’t be more hypocritical. Crimeans overwhelmingly voted to break away from the control of Kyiv because Kyiv had recently come under Nazi control, putting the human rights of Crimeans and all other Ukrainians in their worst peril since the Holocaust. The U.S. empire’s loss of Crimea was its own fault, just as whatever catastrophic conflict that emerges from this will be its fault.
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