Stepan Bandera d. 1959. Nazi collaborator and Ukrainian national hero
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: author unknown) Details Source DMCA
In a 1997 op-ed, George F. Kennan sent a harsh warning to President Clinton. Kennan was the author of the famous Long Telegram (1946) that shaped American policy towards the Soviet Union for the next 25 years. He lived long enough (1914-2005) to be deeply disturbed when he learned that Clinton had decided to expand NATO by giving full membership to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. NATO had been a Western European military alliance formed in 1949 to contain aggression by the Soviet Union. But the communist regime of the Soviet Union, along with its military alliance (the Warsaw Pact), had been dissolved many years before. The eastward expansion of NATO now looked like unprovoked aggression against a Russia that had become a capitalist Christian state defended by a nuclear arsenal roughly equal to that of the U.S.
Kennan called Clinton's decision "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era." As he explained in a 1998 interview with Thomas Friedman:
There was no reason for this [expansion] whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.... Don't people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people [the Russians] who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.
During the Bush administration, seven more countries became members of NATO, including the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. These three countries border Russia and were once part of the Soviet Union. At its 2008 summit, NATO affirmed that it "welcomes Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO." Georgia and Ukraine border Russia, and (like the Baltic countries) gained independence when the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. William J. Burns, then American ambassador to Moscow, warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: "Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin)."
One would think that the U.S. and its Western European allies, in the interest of peace in this volatile part of Europe, would respect Russia's security concerns in Ukraine. Think of how we would react to an anti-U.S. military alliance hosted by the government of Mexico. Nevertheless, as I have described elsewhere, the Obama administration openly supported a Ukrainian coup d'e'tat (AKA the Maidan Revolution) in 2014. It overthrew the democratically elected pro-Russian President Yanukovych, and installed a new pro-Western and pro-NATO government under President Petro Poroshenko.
This American intervention was the true beginning of the war that now rages in Ukraine. The immediate result of the Maidan Revolution was Russia's annexation of Crimea, and a Russian-supported separatist rebellion in southeastern Ukraine (the Donbass region). Crimea is the site of the base for Russia's Black Sea Fleet, and two-thirds of its population is ethnically Russian. Gallup and other polls record overwhelming approval of Russian annexation by Crimeans. The return of Crimea to Ukraine should be dropped from EU and NATO demands for a peace agreement.
The government and media caricature of the Maidan Revolution saw it as an explosion of resentment against Russian influence by the freedom-loving Ukrainian people who yearned for closer ties with the democratic West. This led to a distorted picture of the ongoing civil war in the Donbass and the current Russian invasion. The authoritative KIIS And SOCIS institutes conducted a sociological survey throughout Ukraine from Jan. 24 to Feb. 1, 2014. "Opinions of Ukrainians about the protests were almost equally divided" [47% to 46%]. Among all respondents, 44.5% "would vote for accession to the European Union," while a surprisingly large 36.1% "would vote for joining the Customs Union with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan."
Ethno-linguistic map of Ukraine
(Image by commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ethnolingusitic map of ukraine.png) Details DMCA
There were thuggish ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi ingredients in the Maidan uprising, and these remain strong in the vulnerable democracy it created. Consider what happened recently in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, as reported by Joe Lauria in Consortium News: authorities "have set a 24-hour curfew from May 1-3 to prevent protests commemorating the burning on May 2, 2014 of 48 people who had rejected the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev earlier that year." As Robert Parry wrote on the day of the massacre: "Right-wing toughs in Odessa attacked an encampment of ethnic Russian protesters, driving them into a trade union building which was then set on fire with Molotov cocktails. As the fire worsened, those dying inside were serenaded with the taunting singing of the Ukrainian national anthem." Every year since, on the anniversary of the massacre, residents demonstrate in front of the trade union building and are attacked by right-wing groups.
Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) is a prominent symbol of Ukrainian nationalism and of the country's political and ethnic divisions. He and his ultra-nationalist, antisemitic Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) cooperated with the German Nazi invasion of Soviet-controlled Ukraine in WWII. The OUN hoped that Germany would help them create a purely ethnic Ukrainian state. Bandera was assassinated by the KGB in 1959. On Jan. 1 of 2014, even as anti-Yanukovych and anti-Russian demonstrations were erupting in Lviv and Kyiv in the lead-up to the February Maidan Revolution, 15,000 took part in the annual torchlight parade commemorating Bandera's birthday. As Daniel Lazare describes it, Bandera's "black-and-white image was seemingly everywhere - on barricades, over the entrance to Kiev's city hall, and on the placards held by demonstrators calling for the overthrow of then-president Viktor Yanukovych." In 2018, the Ukrainian Parliament designated January 1 as a national holiday. The annual parade went on even as large Russian military formations were massing at Ukraine's eastern borders on Jan. 1 of 2022.
These two annual events--the Bandera parade on Jan. 1 and the May 2 commemoration of the Odessa massacre--symbolize the cultural and political divisions that threaten the viability of the Ukrainian state. These divisions reflect the geographic location of Ukraine between the boundaries of a Russian super-state and western European powers now bundled into an American-dominated anti-Russian NATO.
World powers such as China, Russia and the United States are not, and cannot be, indifferent to developments in nearby smaller countries. They have, in this sense, 'spheres of influence.' The U.S sphere of influence has long been the largest of these three, including (1) the entire western hemisphere over which it has unfurled the Monroe Doctrine, and (2) western Europe. Expanding NATO to the border of Russia is tantamount to denying Russia any sphere of influence at its western border. This humiliating message will be even clearer if Finland joins NATO, adding 830 miles to their common border.
The simple-minded narrative peddled by our government and mainstream media is that the war in Ukraine is a climactic struggle between Democracy and Authoritarianism--the enlightened West against a brutish power from the Eurasian hinterland. But Ukraine is no poster child for democracy. The current President Volodymyr Zelensky regularly appears on TV as described by Natylie Baldwin: a "khaki-clad, tireless hero governing over a scrappy little democracy and single-handedly staving off the barbarians of autocracy from the east." This image is carefully crafted by the veteran comedic actor to hide the off-stage reality of his government.
Zelensky was elected in a 2019 landslide as a peace candidate. He explained in his inaugural speech that he would be willing to sacrifice his popularity to end the civil war in Donbass that had by then taken 13,000 lives. The pushback from the right was immediate. For instance, Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh, co-founder of Right Sector, warned the new president: "Zelensky said in his inaugural speech that he was ready to lose ratings, popularity, position... No, he would lose his life. He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk [Kyiv's main street] - if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the [Maidan] Revolution and the [Donbass] War." As the Christian Science Monitor reported in 2019, the Right Sector is
a militant ultra-nationalist group that played a very prominent role during the Maidan uprising, has since consolidated itself as a political party with an armed wing and a youth movement.... The Right Sector, and other militant street groups such as C-14 and the newly created National Corps, already pose a real and present danger to vulnerable groups of the population, such as gay and transgender people, women's activists, Roma, as well as any dissidents who might, rightly or wrongly, be viewed as "pro-Russian."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
