A residential block in the Petrovsky District in the west end of the city of Donetsk was recently hit by alleged Ukrainian military shelling / credit: Fergie Chambers
DONETSK, DONETSK PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC—The Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine reached its 90th day and the Western press continues to be inundated with unverified claims of war crimes Russian forces allegedly have committed. Accusations have been lodged against the Russian military for mass graves in Bucha, a narrative which has been widely accepted in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries. Despite requests from the Russian government and India, no independent inquiry has yet to take place.
Just four days ago, Newsweek published claims of Russian soldiers “targeting kids’ bedrooms” with explosives. Nestled far beneath the fiery headline is a soft disclaimer: “However, Newsweek has not independently verified any of the claims regarding children and explosives, which come from Ukrainian sources.” Such is the state of affairs in the U.S./EU/NATO aggression against Russia.
Perhaps these deluges of outrage would appear more sincere, if the well-documented plight of the civilians of the eastern Ukrainian breakaway region of Donbass had received passing mention in any mainstream Western outlets. In the Donbass region, two oblasts (provinces) known as Donetsk and Lugansk proclaimed their independence from Ukraine in 2015, shortly after the neo-Nazi-infected Ukrainian military began attacking their mostly Russian populations.
For eight years, war has raged in Donbass, and it has included an endless campaign involving shelling civilian areas, in violation of the Minsk Agreements between the Donbass republics, Ukraine and Russia. As of May 13, the Office of the Ombudsman in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), put the total civilian death toll in DPR at 7,321, including 105 children. More than 14,000 people have been killed in the Donbass region since 2014, according to the International Crisis Group. The Ukrainian military did not respond to Toward Freedom’s multiple attempts to ask about attacks on civilians in Donetsk.
One shell hit this storefront in the building supply area of the Sokol Market / credit: Fergie Chambers
‘We Used to Hide in the Basement… Now, We Don’t Bother’
Toward Freedom sent this reporter to Donbass for nearly a month, and it took less than one day in Donetsk to witness the effects of Ukrainian forces purposely shelling civilians. That first afternoon, April 28, a local Telegram channel devoted to “online information about the current shelling situations by Ukrainian Armed Forces” reported the Sokol Market in the western Kirovsky District had been shelled. At 11:40 a.m., among the market’s busiest hours, Ukrainian forces—just miles away in Krasnogor—fired 10 BM-21 Grad rockets, or Soviet rockets. Initial reports on the scene were two dead, including a local high school teacher, but this has since been updated to five. This reporter arrived at 1 p.m., at which point the wreckage was apparent and two bodies remained on the ground.
No military presence was seen in this neighborhood—no base, no embedded soldiers, no checkpoints. Gennady Andreevich, an employee of the neighborhood safety commission and administrator of the Sokol Market, called it a “sleepy” district, where there is only this market, a strip of shops, a park, and a number of Soviet-era residential buildings. The area, per Andreevich and numerous local residents, had sustained relentless strikes since 2014. Those hits have only intensified since February. One of the neighboring residential buildings had been hit as recently as two weeks prior.
These sorts of markets are the central point of social gathering, commerce, and employment for working-class people, who cannot afford to frolic in more luxurious, capitalist-developed urban centers. The eyes of bourgeois mass media are never fixed on the poor. As such, the regular targeting of Donbass civilians goes unmentioned.
A monument to the more than 200 dead civilians in the Petrovsky District / credit: Fergie Chambers
Even as cleanup efforts went on, artillery fire remained constant in the background.
The following day, April 29, the Donetsk News Agency reported the Petrovsky District, also in the west end of the city of Donetsk, had just been hit with nearly 80 Ukrainian shells, resulting in casualties.
Upon arrival at 8 p.m., this reporter first found a small grocery store, smoking from the roof, completely destroyed. A small clean-up crew was inside, and one elderly woman—the shopkeeper—stood alone and bewildered, and appeared not ready to speak to anyone. Behind the store was a large residential building, also apparently damaged by the shelling.
At the entrance to the building, a husband and wife were slowly cleaning up pieces of glass and wreckage at the main entrance. They were initially spooked seeing journalists, thinking anyone could have been Ukrainian operatives in plain clothes. But when they understood members of the press had arrived, they were eager to share their story of not just what had happened that night, but of the previous eight years. The woman, Elena, identified herself by first name only.
Elena, whose apartment balcony had been completely destroyed, said that this kind of attack was a daily occurrence for the residents of Donbass, many of whom—herself included—considered themselves Ukrainians. She said that U.S./EU arms shipments were the primary cause of the continued death and destruction, and wished to personally address the citizens of those countries, to ask that they might pressure their governments to cease the deliveries of weapons.
“In the beginning of the war, in 2014, all of us in the building used to hide out in the basement when the shells flew; now, we don’t bother,” said her husband. “We just have to go on with our lives.”
Their children had moved east to Russia, away from the front lines. But for them—like many others—old age, a lifetime of attachment to one community and lack of economic flexibility made relocation impossible.
This particular building, in its entirety, was made up of 60 units, and was attached to a school.
As we parted, the couple saw our delegation of foreign journalists off warmly, entreated us to share their stories with the West in any way possible, and wished us peace.
‘God Will Sort Them Out’
In the frontline city of Kirovsk, a mining town in the Lugansk People’s Republic, this reporter visited the home of a man whose home was hit April 26 by a “Hurricane” rocket—another Soviet-era weapon—capable of destroying entire floors of large apartment buildings. But it failed to detonate as it plugged into an outer wall, next to his garden. The home was situated on a long dirt road, with only a handful of similar homestead cottages within range. The man explained that he believed the attack had been targeted from what he called “Ukro-Nazi” positions in the nearby town of Pervomaisk. Victoria Ivanovna, the mayor of Kirovsk, described such shelling as “constant,” and often targeted at schools, or other non-military locations important to the community.
Russell “Texas” Bentley, 62, a U.S. expat who is now a fighter in the Donetsk People’s Republic Army / credit: Fergie Chambers
Back in Donetsk, on May 10, a now-notorious U.S. expat-turned-DPR-combat-veteran named Russell “Texas” Bentley gave this reporter a tour of the districts on the edge of no-man’s land. The Petrovsky district was clearly hit the hardest; in places, block after block contained not a single home untouched. In the center of the district, where a once-active market had since been abandoned, a monument stood for the civilian lives lost from 2014 to 2016. It listed more than 200 names.
Russell was no stranger to this kind of shelling. “They hit us out here, every (expletive) day. They always target schools, markets and grocery stores, never military. We never targeted any civilian areas; even aside from the ethical questions, it would just be (expletive) stupid. These are our people here. This is a fight for liberation. The last thing the DPR or [Russian President Vladimir] Putin want is to piss off the residents of places, which we believe will become liberated parts of the Republics.”
Russell, 62, who served in the explicitly Marxist “Sut Vremeni (Essence of Time)” unit of the DPR army—as well as in the DPR special forces until 2017—lives with his wife, Lyudmila, in the Petrovsky district. Their home has not been hit to date, but a family of six just a few doors down had not been so lucky. The mother of the family showed this reporter the impact point of a shelling from the week before; it had destroyed their front wall, killing their dogs and barely missing the family room behind.
A “Hurricane” rocket shell in a Kirovsk backyard / credit: Fergie Chambers
Katya ladnova, 25, a member of Donetsk-based Marxist feminist collective Aurora, said shelling is no longer news.
“We walk right past it,” she said. “Our complaint to Putin is not that he sent Russian troops into Ukraine, but that he sent them eight years too late.”
The house of Russell “Texas” Bentley’s neighbors in Kirovsk that was damaged by a “Hurricane” rocket / credit: Fergie Chambers
In spite of 8 years of attacks, and now endless constraints from isolation and sanctions, including a limit on running water to a few hours in the evening, the city of Donetsk, like all of Donbass around it, continues to move on with life; shops remain open, public transport runs, children go to school every day.
“There is absolutely no military reason to strike places like this. They do this to strike fear in our hearts,” said Andreevich, the Sokol Market administrator. “But it does not work.”
Andreevich’s own administrative office had been hit this past March. Two of his co-workers were killed in that attack. At the end of our exchange, he looked sternly and said, “Sooner or later, God will sort them out, the people who are doing this.”
Fergie Chambers is a freelance writer and socialist organizer from New York, reporting from eastern Europe for Toward Freedom. He can be found on Twitter, Instagram and Substack.
Tens of thousands of Czech people protested October 28, demanding the current government resign and sanctions against Russia end / credit: Screenshot from video
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on Antiwar.com.
Amid ever escalating tensions over the West’s proxy war in Ukraine and the devastating inflation ripping Europe apart, Czech protesters gathered October 28 in Prague demanding the coalition government’s resignation, the Associated Press reports.
The rally saw tens of thousands of citizens condemning their government’s support for Kiev, including the provision of heavy weapons, as well as sanctions on Russia. A smaller, similar rally was held in Brno, the country’s second-largest city.
The demonstrators’ slogan was “Czech Republic First.” As with other recent protests throughout the continent, the left and right are uniting in their opposition to the West’s economic and proxy warfare against Russia.
One speaker said “Russia’s not our enemy, the government of warmongers is the enemy,” according to the AP.
Protesters “repeatedly condemned the government for its support of Ukraine and the European Union sanctions against Russia, opposed Czech membership in the EU, NATO and other international organizations,” the report said.
Leaders in Prague dismissed the protests. Interior Minister Vit Rakusan tweeted “[w]e know who’s our friend and who’s bleeding for our freedom,” adding “we also know who’s our enemy.”
The Washington-led sanctions blitz has cut Europe off from cheap Russian gas upon which it has long relied. In the Czech Republic, energy, housing, and food prices soaring. The inflation rate is 17.8 percent.
Similar protests are occurring in Italy, Germany, and France. “Strikes and protests over the rising cost of living proliferate, ushering in a period of social and labor unrest not seen since at least the 1970s,” the New York Times reported earlier this month.
In September, Prague saw massive demonstrations of 70,000 people, again from the left and right, protesting against NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine and rising energy prices caused by the sanctions campaign. Those protesters also called for the resignation of Prime Minister Petr Fiala’s center-right coalition government. “We intensively support the justified fight of the Ukrainian people,” Fiala has declared.
Wow. Absolutely massive protest in Prague, Czech Republic today demanding an end to anti-Russia sanctions. pic.twitter.com/GtjHWdEhl4
Connor Freeman is the assistant editor and a writer at the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on the “Conflicts of Interest” podcast. His writing has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com, Counterpunch, and the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. He has also appeared on “Liberty Weekly,” “Around the Empire” and “Parallax Views.” You can follow him on Twitter at @FreemansMind96.
Editor’s Note: This is based on a presentation the author gave during a February 6 webinar, “U.S./NATO Aggression at the Russian Border. No War with Russia.”The event was a conversation between Russian, Ukrainian and U.S. activists the United National Antiwar Coalition had organized.
We have serious concerns that the accelerated drive to militarization and war by the United States and its allies dramatically unfolding with the crisis in Ukraine might very easily escalate to the point that it could threaten global humanity.
In their mad drive to advance their geostrategic interests to the detriment of everyone else—the Democratic Party version of “America First”—the Biden administration willfully violates all of the core principles of international relations and law. The respect for national sovereignty, the prohibition against threatening other members of the United Nations with military actions, non-intervention and adherence to international law are not recognized by the United States, which sees itself as an exception to the rule of law.
The manufactured crisis in Ukraine is just the latest episode of the reckless and delusional drama that the United States is involved in to attempt to maintain hegemony in conditions that have fundamentally changed. That is why contextualizing Ukraine as another example of why a global anti-war and anti-imperialist movement is so vitally important.
As long as the commitment to “Full Spectrum Dominance” remains bipartisan policy, today, it’s Ukraine. But tomorrow, it is certain to be another nation, another issue that will require a response from the peoples of the world.
As stated in the final declaration of the Fourth Canada-United States-Mexico Trilateral Peace Conference in Moca, Dominican Republic, held in September 2018, there must be a firm and principled commitment on the part of peace and anti-imperialist organizations that “peace must be based on the principles of non-intervention and full respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity, self-determination and independence of all states, as stipulated in the United Nations Charter and covenants of international law enacted since the end of the second imperialist war known as World War II.”
Yet, the web of global U.S. command structures—with over eight hundred military bases—NATO as the largest military alliance in the world; illegal, draconian sanctions; and political subversion through coups makes national sovereignty impossible. The illegal and unilateral actions by the United States and its allies represents a constant threat to international peace and perpetuates a lawless, international Hobbesian state of nature.
So, while it is quite clear how we got to this moment with the situation in Ukraine, the challenge for the anti-war, pro-peace movement—and more specifically for the anti-imperialist organizations and movements in the United States and Europe—is to ground our understanding of the driving force and objective interests responsible for where the international community is at this moment.
For the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) the common enemy is the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination. We argue that we must center our analysis within the context of the global class struggle—a struggle sharpened by the ongoing and irreconcilable contradictions of the global colonial-capitalist system.
That is important because if we do not identify the real, concrete material forces, we can find ourselves struggling against shadows, instead of against the corporeal reality of an alliance of states dedicated to advancing their interests to the detriment of everyone else.
It is imperialism, led by the United States, that is the culprit. Its parasitic imperialist domination would be impossible without its core instrument of enforcement and control: State violence. That is why we are discussing Ukraine today.
Imperialism: That is framework. Today, it is Ukraine. Tomorrow, it might be China. Why? Because with the seemingly sudden and spontaneous crisis that emerged with Ukraine, the steady, violent, oppressive and repressive relations of power between the United States and Western capital and the rest of humanity continues. Objective reality bears this out. While we are focused on Ukraine as the most immediate danger, the people of Afghanistan are starving, bombs are still dropping in Yemen, coups are unfolding in Africa, the United States is still pivoting to Asia, and the peoples and nations of Latin America and the Caribbean are still suffocating from the predatory weight of the U.S. hegemon.
When we remind ourselves that the doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance animates U.S. foreign policies, we can disabuse ourselves of any illusions on what our historic task must be.
The drive for dominance has always been fueled by one objective: To position U.S. capitalist interests to be able to more effectively plunder the labor and resources of the peoples and nations of the world.
Is that not what is in play in eastern Europe? Is it not capitalist competition and its geostrategic implications that is driving events? Can we understand Ukraine, the role of NATO and the United States, without understanding the economic interests involved with Nord Stream 2 and the Eurasian Economic Union and even the Belt and Road Initiative? Was it a surprise that after being pushed out of Afghanistan, a crisis would emerge in Kazakhstan as the United States desperately tries to re-position itself in central Asia? That is why nothing short of the defeat of imperialism must be seen as our task.
There are significant points of resistance emerging from popular struggles that are moving us toward that task of building powerful international peoples’ movements:
Prohibition against nuclear weapons. January represented the one-year anniversary of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The TPNW came out of UN General Assembly resolution in July 2017. It represents the first legally binding agreement that comprehensively prohibits nuclear weapons with ultimate goal of total elimination. The treaty came into force January 22, 2021, after reaching the goal of fifty instruments of ratification or accessions. The Black Alliance for Peace was one of the first organizations to take up the work of publicizing the treaty as soon as it emerged from UN General Assembly in July of 2017.
We must work to abolish NATO. In a 1997 essay published by the New York Times, Kennan said, “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era… Such a decision may be expected… to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” But our concerns on NATO extend beyond the contradictions that NATO poses in Europe. For African peoples and other colonized peoples, NATO is correctly seen as an instrument of U.S. and European military domination. BAP actively campaigns to dismantle NATO and considers it an integral part of the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination. The international campaign to close U.S. and NATO bases and shut down the U.S. global command structures represents much needed international cooperation and coordination to bring attention to and build opposition to the global U.S. and NATO network of military bases and structures
Support movements for Zones of Peace. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) declared the Caribbean and Latin America to be a “Zone of Peace.” BAP is leading an effort to revive the civil society element of this state-centered declaration by popularizing the declaration and building popular support across the region.
Campaign against sanctions. There is a growing awareness of the devastating consequences of economic sanctions on the general population in those more than 30 nations that are under the illegal sanction regime of the United States and Europe. Coalitions like Sanctions Kill have been organizing to bring attention to this issue in the United States and globally.
The white supremacist, colonial-capitalist, patriarchal ruling classes of the United States and Europe are clear—even if we are not—that war and repression will be used with maximum efficiency to maintain their hegemony. Therefore, we can have no illusions: We must fight back, and we must win!
Every mobilization against illegal sanctions; subversion in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba; the global U.S. command structures and bases; mass incarceration in the United States; police killings; the murder of Palestinians; and the continued capitalist assault on Mother Earth have to be seen as part of our efforts to defeat the colonial-capitalist order—to fight imperialism, and the way we do that is to turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism!
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president of the United States on the Green Party ticket. Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and was awarded the U.S. Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.
Ukrainian soldiers / credit: Ministry of Defense of Ukraine
Editor’s Note: The article was originally published by Multipolarista.
I am a Ukrainian-American. I grew up and spent over half of my life in Ukraine, although now I live in the United States. I wanted to explain my thoughts on the ongoing crisis with Russia, because mainstream corporate media outlets don’t ever share perspectives like mine.
It is definitely a stressful time, for obvious reasons. Fortunately, my family and friends in the country are alive and are doing well enough under the circumstances. Unfortunately, in the past decade this isn’t the first time I have had to check in on my loved ones there, and for basically the same reasons. This is what I wanted to talk about.
You see, the U.S. government has meddled in Ukraine for decades. And the Ukrainian people have suffered because of this.
The overwhelming support that Western governments and media outlets have poured out for Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24 is not actually motivated by concern for the Ukrainian people. They are using us to advance their political and economic interests.
We know this because Washington overthrew our government twice in a decade, imposed neoliberal economic policies that made our country the poorest in Europe, and has fueled a devastating civil war that in the past eight years took the lives of 14,000 Ukrainians and wounded and displaced many more.
The following facts don’t get mentioned by the media, as they contradict the foreign-policy goals of the U.S. government. So unless you are actively engaged in the anti-war movement, the info below is probably new to you. That is why I wanted to write this article.
The first U.S.-backed soft coup in Ukraine occurred in 2004, when Western-backed presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko lost the election.
The winner of the November 2004 vote, Viktor Yanukovych, was portrayed as being pro-Russian, so Western governments refused to recognize his victory and declared electoral fraud.
Western-backed forces in Ukraine then mobilized and carried out a textbook color revolution, called the “Orange Revolution.” They forced another run-off vote that December, in which their candidate Yushchenko was declared president.
In a shockingly honest 2004 report titled “U.S. campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev,” Britain’s establishment newspaper The Guardian admitted that the “Orange Revolution” was “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing,” bankrolled with at least $14 million.
“Funded and organised by the U.S. government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and U.S. non-government organisations, the campaign” attempted to topple governments “in four countries in four years,” The Guardian boasted, targeting Serbia, Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine.
Much like in the United States, Ukrainian presidents are appointed and govern in the interest of wealthy oligarchs, so no Ukrainian president ends his tenure with a particularly high rating. The U.S.-backed Yushchenko, however, set a new record for the lowest popular support in history.
In the next presidential election, in 2010, Yushchenko got just 5% of the vote, which should give you an insight into how popular he actually was.
During his first term Yushchenko implemented a program of austerity, reduced social spending, bailed out large banks, deregulated agriculture, advocated for NATO membership, and repressed the rights of language minorities like Russian speakers.
The second U.S.-backed coup d’etat in Ukraine was launched in late 2013 and consolidated power in 2014, just a decade after the first one.
Viktor Yanukovych, who was frequently called pro-Russian by Western media but in reality was just neutral, won the 2010 presidential election fair and square.
But in 2013, Yanukovych refused to sign a European Union Association Agreement that would have been a step toward integrating Ukraine with the EU. In order to be part of this program, Brussels had demanded that Kiev impose neoliberal structural adjustment, selling off government assets and giving the Washington-led International Monetary Fund (IMF) even more control over Ukrainian state spending.
Yanukovych rejected this for a more favorable offer from Russia. So, once again, Western-backed organizations brought out their supporters into the Maidan Square in Kiev to overthrow the government.
As was the case during the “Orange Revolution” in 2004, the United States sent politicians to meet with the leaders of the demonstrations, and later coup leaders, in late 2013 and early 2014. U.S. Senators John McCain, Chris Murphy, and others spoke in front of large crowds in Maidan.
At some point the control of the stage and leadership of the protests was overtaken by far-right forces. Leaders of such organizations as Svoboda (a neo-Nazi party) and Right Sector (a coalition of fascist organizations) spoke to the protesters, sometimes standing side-by-side with their American backers like McCain.
Later their organizations acted as the spear of attack against the Ukrainian police in the violent February 2014 coup d’etat, and they were the first to storm government buildings.
With the success of the U.S.-backed forces and fascists, President Yanukovich fled the country to Russia.
U.S. government officials met with coup leaders and appointed a right-wing neoliberal, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, to lead the new regime, because they recognized they couldn’t appoint the fascists and maintain legitimacy.
A leaked recording of a phone call between Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, showed that Washington chose who the leaders of the new coup regime would be.
Nuland referred to Yatsenyuk affectionately as “Yats,” saying, “Yats is the guy.”
The first actions of the post-2014 coup government were to ban left-wing parties in the country and reduce language-minority rights even further. Then Ukrainian fascists attacked anti-coup demonstrations in the streets all over the country.
As the anti-coup protests were being violently broken up by the far-right, two areas in the east of the country, Donetsk and Luhansk, rose up and declared independence from Ukraine.
The people of Crimea also voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia. Crimea has a Russian military base, and under their protection they were able to vote safely.
The people in Donetsk and Luhansk were less lucky. The coup government dispatched the military to suppress their insurrections.
At first many Ukrainian soldiers refused to shoot at their own countrymen, in this civil war that their U.S.-backed government started.
Seeing the hesitation of the Ukrainian military, far-right groups (and the oligarchs that were backing them) formed so-called “territorial defense battalions,” with names like Azov, Aidar, Dnipro, Tornado, etc.
Much like in Latin America, where U.S.-backed death-squads kill left-wing politicians, socialists, and labor organizers, these Ukrainian fascist battalions were deployed to lead the offensive against the militias of Donetsk and Luhansk, killing Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
In May 2014, neo-Nazis and other far-right forces assaulted an anti-coup demonstration in the major city of Odessa. 48 people were burned alive in a labor union building.
This massacre added more fuel to the civil war. The Ukrainian government promised to investigate what happened, but never really did.
My point: Without understanding the Maidan massacre and bringing to justice its perpetrators, it is impossible to understand and resolve peacefully the internal and international conflicts involving Ukraine and the dangerously escalating war in the Donbas. https://t.co/Hxyq0L4sA8
After the 2014 coup, Ukraine held an election without any serious opposition candidates, and Western-backed billionaire Petro Poroshenko won.
Poroshenko was seen as the most “moderate” of the right-wing coup coalition. But that didn’t mean much, considering many opposition parties were banned or assaulted by the far-right when they tried to organize.
Additionally, the areas that would have heavier support for the voices who wanted peace with Russia, such as Crimea and the Donbas, had seceded from Ukraine.
The new president had the impossible task of trying to appear sufficiently patriotic for the far-right while at the same time sufficiently “respectable” for the West to continue backing him publicly.
To appease the far-right, Poroshenko gave out awards to World War Two veterans “on both sides,” including the ones that fought in Nazi Germany-aligned militias like the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
The Ukrainian government officially honored the leaders of these organizations, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukevych, who organized massacres of many thousands of Poles, Jews, Russians, and other minorities during World War Two, and who willingly participated in the Holocaust.
The holiday Defenders of Ukraine Day, or Day of Ukrainian Armed Forces, was changed to October 14, to match the date of founding of the Nazi-backed Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
This is why you sometimes see red-and-black badges on Ukrainian soldiers. This symbol shows support for the fascist Ukrainian forces during World War Two.
Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, shared of photo of herself holding a fascist symbol at a rally where the same fascist flag was everywhere. And yet, Canadian media has ignored it completely.
(Also I have to make a separate but important point here: Ukraine was previously part of the Soviet Union, and the majority of the Ukrainian population during World War Two supported the Red Army and actively resisted Nazi occupation of their country. The Ukrainian fascist collaborationists and parties did not have as broad support as the anti-fascist resistance did, and were mostly active during the period of Nazi occupation.)
A large portion of the civil war that broke out in Ukraine after the 2014 coup was waged under Poroshenko.
From 2014 to 2019, in five years of civil war in Donbas, the geographic region that encompasses the Luhansk and Donetsk republics, more than 13,000 people were killed, and at least 28,000 were wounded, according to official Ukrainian government statistics. This was years before Russia invaded.
The Ukrainian army and its far-right paramilitary allies were responsible for the vast majority of civilian casualties, with the United Nations reporting in January 2022 that, between 2018 and 2021, 81.4% of all civilian casualties caused by active hostilities were in Donetsk and Luhansk.
These are Russian-speaking Ukrainians being killed their own government. They are not secret Russian forces.
Researchers at the U.S. government-sponsored RAND Corporation acknowledged in a January 2022 report in Foreign Policy magazine that, “even by Kyiv’s own estimates, the vast majority of rebel forces consist of locals—not soldiers of the regular Russian military.”
Meanwhile, millions of Ukrainians fled the country due to the conflict, especially from the eastern regions that saw most of the fighting.
The United States strongly supported Poroshenko and the Ukrainian government as it was waging this brutal war that killed thousands, injured tens of thousands, and displaced millions.
This is why I say the U.S. government doesn’t actually care about Ukraine.
In 2019, the Ukrainian people clearly showed that they opposed this war by overwhelmingly voting against Poroshenko at the ballot box. Current Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky got 73% of the vote, compared to just 24% for Poroshenko.
Zelensky ran on a platform of peace. He even addressed the Russian-speaking eastern parts of the country in Russian.
Very quickly after entering office, however, Zelensky changed his tone. Much like the supposedly “moderate” Poroshenko, Zelensky was told that he was risking losing Western backing, and the loyalty of the far-right, which could threaten to kill him.
So Zelensky did a 180 on his peaceful rhetoric, and he continued to support the civil war.
Here it is important to address another important point: The Ukrainian government is not directly run by fascists, but in Ukraine fascist forces do have significant influence in the state.
After the 2014 U.S.-backed coup, neo-Nazis were absorbed by Ukraine’s military, police, and security apparatus.
So while the parliamentary representation of fascist parties is not large (they often get just a few percentage points of the vote in elections), these extremists continue to be supported by taxpayers’ money through unelected state institutions.
Additionally, these neo-Nazis have the street muscle to terrorize political opponents. They can quickly mobilize dozens or hundreds of people on a moment’s notice to attack opponents.
Moreover, these fascists are highly motivated combatants that ensure the loyalty of the Ukrainian military. They represent a powerful faction of the Ukrainian political spectrum, and one of the forces in Ukrainian society that pushes for escalating war with the separatist regions and Russia.
I sometimes see people try to reject this fact by saying, “How can Ukraine have all these Nazis if their president is Jewish?” Here is the answer: the Nazis are not appointed by Zelensky.
These fascists have a major influence in the unelected state security apparatus. The have systematically infiltrated the military and police. And they even enjoy support and training from Western governments and NATO.
NATO is sending weapons and trainers to help neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s white-supremacist Azov movement fight Russia, as the US floods the country with weapons.
This follows numerous reports of Western government support for Ukrainian far-right extremists.https://t.co/5gYgmU8PFo
The position of fascists grew substantially stronger in Ukraine in the eight years of the civil war, from 2014 to 2022.
For those reasons Ukrainian presidents (Jewish or not) have to take the position of the far-right into consideration. (Not to mention the possibility that far-right gangs could threaten to kill the president or other politicians if they defy them.)
Furthermore, all forces that normally oppose fascism or would oppose the civil war have not existed en masse for eight years in Ukraine: following the 2014 coup, many left-wing parties and socialists got banned by the Ukrainian government, and were assaulted in the streets by the fascists.
Any Ukrainian president, especially since the coup, is highly dependent on the support of the U.S. government as well. So Zelensky is very much a hostage of the situation.
When Washington tells Zelensky he must continue the civil war in Ukraine against his own electoral promises, support NATO membership, ignore the Minsk II agreement of 2015, or even ask for nuclear weapons, he does everything he is told.
Like any other U.S. puppet regime, Ukraine doesn’t have any real independence. Kiev has been actively pushed to confront Russia by every U.S. administration, against the will of the majority of Ukrainian people.
The fact that most Ukrainians wanted peace with Russia was reflected by the fact that they voted for the peace candidate Zelensky in such overwhelming numbers, 73%. And the fact that Zelensky did a total 180 on that promise shows how little political power he actually has.
Now to circle back to the present moment and what to do now. I don’t support the invasion Russia is carrying out. But the only government I can influence by the virtue of living in the United States is the U.S. government.
Luckily, that is extremely relevant, because Washington is one of the root causes of what is happening in Ukraine now.
For the past eight years, I spoke out against the coup and the civil war in Ukraine that the United States supported, promoted, and funded.
While I never thought a war with Russia was possible, I and many other Ukrainians are against Ukraine joining NATO and escalating tensions with the separatist republics and Moscow.
Any further escalation by the U.S. right now can only lead to a larger war.
I even hear some U.S. politicians playing around with the idea of a “no-fly zone,” which means they are calling for NATO to shoot down Russian planes. This is the quickest way to World War Three.
The support for Ukraine that fills the Western media now is not out of real solidarity with the people of Ukraine. If that were the case, the U.S. wouldn’t have overthrown our government twice in a decade; it wouldn’t have supported the policies that made us the poorest country in Europe; it wouldn’t have fueled a brutal civil war for the past eight years.
The reason U.S. media outlets and politicians are all backing Ukraine now is because they want to use the Ukrainian military and civilian population as cannon fodder in a proxy war with a political adversary.
Washington is willing to fight until the last Ukrainian to weaken Russia.
For that reason, I am absolutely against U.S. sanctions in general, and this round of U.S. sanctions against Russia in particular.
The harsh Western sanctions imposed on Russia target the civilian population.
Sanctions don’t affect ruling elites, and all U.S. sanctions ever do is collectively punish working-class people of a country where Washington doesn’t like their government.
Devaluing the Russian currency, the ruble, is effectively a form of shrinking workers’ wages, cutting the pensions of retirees, and preventing regular people from being able to access food or medicine.
This isn’t to mention the cost that these sanctions are now also having on the people in the United States itself, with gas prices as high as $6 a gallon and even $7 in parts of California.
The skyrocketing oil prices caused by this crisis will lead to more inflation. And while the official U.S. inflation figure is 7.5%, the real number is probably in the double digits.
All of this makes life harder for average working people, in Ukraine, Russia, the U.S., and around the world.
Another factor in the Ukraine crisis is the rampant surge of russophobia.
Since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, Democrats have blamed Donald Trump’s victory on Russian hacking without any solid proof. All of the supposed evidence they presented fell apart when investigated.
Many U.S. politicians demonized Russia as much as they could, just to push the blame for their candidate losing on someone else.
Now Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine has made it okay to be openly xenophobic. I have even seen some people call for killing all Russians, boycotting all Russian businesses, revoking student visas for Russians, etc.
Even in the more “respectable” media, you see talking heads speaking about Russian people as if they’re not human.
Under Donald Trump, many of these same people demonized China, and then acted surprised when there was a wave of hate crimes in the U.S. against East Asians.
During the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the press demonized Arabs and Muslims, leading to hate crimes against their communities.
My point is that demonizing nationalities is never acceptable, and people can see through the flimsy excuses of hiding one’s own xenophobia behind the declarations of “solidarity” with my country.
In conclusion, I wanted to say that, if you live in the United States, the only government you can actually influence through demonstrations and other forms of protest is our own.
I absolutely think it is a crime right now to support the U.S. government’s drive for war, sanctions, or further escalation of tensions in Ukraine.
The U.S. government has been stoking this conflict for decades. Washington has funded coups and fueled a civil war in Ukraine.
Now, U.S. corporations stand to greatly benefit from what is happening.
The government doesn’t care about the people here in the U.S., and the only reason it says it cares about people abroad is so it can justify further military spending and advance its foreign-policy goals – which aren’t good for anyone except for a handful of rich American oligarchs.
