“We will become a big Israel”: inspired by Zionism, Zelensky aims to intensify Ukraine’s genocide

One of the many infamous details about the post-coup regime in Ukraine is that it’s taken arms shipments from Israel. Specifically, the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, a paramilitary that’s directly allied with the highest levels of the country’s government, has received Israeli weapons. This was shocking news for anyone not already aware that Israel has always been ideologically aligned with Nazism, given Zionism’s nature as a racist ideology which calls for the creation of an ethno-state built on genocidal land theft. And for Zionism’s opponents within the global anti-colonial movement, Israel’s aiding of Ukrainian Hitlerites has served as yet another damning angle to discredit the Zionist project. 

This last month, as Russia has successfully advanced its effort to kill off these neo-Nazi terrorists, Zelensky has reacted in a way which further exposes Israel’s racist nature—as well as the racist nature of his own regime. He said at a briefing for Ukrainian media that “We will become a ‘big Israel’ with its own face. We will not be surprised if we have representatives of the armed forces or the national guard in cinemas, supermarkets, and people with weapons. I am confident that the question of security will be issue number one for the next ten years. I am sure of it.”

In the mentality of Zionist doublethink, this statement is perfectly benign. When he promises to model Ukraine off of one of the most belligerent, dangerously militarized, and oppressive states on the planet, there’s no cause for alarm—because according to what the Zionists say, Israel isn’t any of these things. Supposedly its heavy presence of soldiers who publicly beat Palestinians with impunity is a necessary measure to prevent terrorism, or whatever the fascistic Israeli regime defines as “terrorism.” Supposedly all within Israel have equal rights, despite the dozens of discriminatory laws that mistreat Arabs and nonwhite Jews alike. Supposedly it’s been the natural order of things for Israel to isolate Gaza’s population to a tiny strip where no one leaves without Israel’s permission, and where civilians get deliberately bombed, shot, and starved.

Conversely, the Nazi collaborators in charge of Ukraine—who predictably are Zionists themselves—claim that their policies mirroring these Israeli apartheid atrocities are not atrocities at all. When investigators have uncovered mass graves in the Donbass filled with hundreds of residents killed by Kiev’s slaughter and collective punishment, the blame is all shifted onto Russia. When Zelensky has worked with the neo-Nazi militia members who are killing Jews, Romas, political dissidents, and ethnic Russians, it’s fine because Zelensky is Jewish. When the Ukrainian National Guard has committed numerous atrocities against civilians in partnership with the militias, it’s acceptable for Zelensky to name the National Guard as something that should be vastly expanded in its presence during the coming years. Surely the public won’t further be endangered by this. At least not the ethnically “Ukrainian” members of the public, who make up the social base for the racially hierarchical new nation that Kiev has invented.

There’s obviously a great deal of cognitive dissonance involved in the U.S. bloc’s support for what Zelensky has done, and plans to do. Everything is blamed on Putin, even though Putin’s hand was forced by the security threat that Washington had created by making Ukraine into a potential location for weapons of mass destruction. As we see Kiev expand its state violence by placing its own people under a militarized police state, we’ll be told it’s merely a proportionate response to Russia’s supposed war crimes. Which parallels the rationale for Israel’s abuses, in that “they’re at war” is used to excuse every human rights violation imaginable.

This is already the case when it comes to Ukraine, and has been the case since Obama’s team installed an ultra-nationalist regime in the country in 2014. When Crimeans overwhelmingly voted to join Russia due to the explicit threats of ethnic cleansing from the new Kiev officials, the imperialist media utterly omitted this indispensable piece of context so that they could demonize Putin. When the Kiev regime became indirectly scrutinized even by Western NGOs like Human Rights Watch for its complicity in atrocities, all we heard was a collection of Russiagate fairy tales which served to whitewash what the Ukrainian side was doing. When Kiev made it clear through these provocations that it intended to invade the newly independent DPR and LPR this year, this wasn’t mentioned either. All we’ve ever been informed about is what Russia has done in response to these threats, as well as atrocity stories that are as lacking in evidence as the Douma attack.

The consequence is a vast hole in our discourse, where the full scope of the Kiev regime’s evils is always concealed. Even when the pogroms, torture, shellings of civilians, beatings, and other horrors have gotten too severe for the Western media to not report on, these things are invariably presented in a way which lets the Zelensky government itself appear innocent. That’s how anyone is able to get away with the argument that Ukraine can’t be fascist because Zelensky is Jewish. Barack Obama was president of the United States for eight years, and under him, we saw the biggest loss of U.S. black wealth in history, the expansion of police militarization, and the cultivation of the conditions that allowed Trump to win. His skin color didn’t stop U.S. settler-colonialism’s genocide against Africans, and against other colonized peoples, from being continued and expanded. Nor did it stop the U.S. empire’s global violence, which is what brought about the Ukraine crisis. 

Identity politics is always the angle that liberals use when defending their token war criminal leaders, and it’s always dishonest for a simple reason: the violence hasn’t gone away. And according to the natural tendency of capitalist collapse, where fascism steps in to try to preserve the bourgeoisie’s threatened power, the violence keeps getting worse. It’s what we saw with Obama when Trump filled the liberal power vacuum, it’s what we’re seeing with Zelensky as the Ukrainian ultra-nationalists stoke further hatred, and it’s what we’ll see with Biden when a Republican fascist replaces his discredited administration.

Ukraine will come out of this conflict unable to attain its goal of a modern Lebensraum land grab within the Donbass region. Russia is simply doing too good of a job at destroying its military, and of eliminating the fascist militia members at the head of the atrocities. The regime—and the fascist movement adjacent to it—will react by turning inwards, directing its racist anger towards the people it can still hurt with impunity. That’s how Israel is reacting to the growing threats to the Zionist project, desperately trying to complete its genocide against Palestinians as U.S. hegemony wanes. And barring something unforeseen, fascist Ukraine will take the same path, ratcheting up the abuses several times over to compensate for its humiliation by Russia.

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