Ready for Nuclear War over Ukraine?

A senior Ukrainian official is urging the West to risk a nuclear conflagration in support of a "full-scale war" with Russia that he says authorities in Kiev are now seeking, another sign of the extremism that pervades the year-old, U.S.-backed regime in Kiev.

During a recent visit to Canada, Ukraine's Deputy Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko told CBC Radio that "Everybody is afraid of fighting with a nuclear state. We are not anymore, in Ukraine -- we've lost so many people of ours, we've lost so much of our territory."

"What we expect from the world is that the world will stiffen up in the spine a little," Prystaiko said.

Yet, what is perhaps most remarkable about Prystaiko's "Dr. Strangelove" moment is that it produced almost no reaction in the West. You have a senior Ukrainian official saying that the world should risk nuclear war over a civil conflict in Ukraine between its west, which favors closer ties to Europe, and its east, which wants to maintain its historic relationship with Russia.

Why should such a pedestrian dispute justify the possibility of vaporizing millions of human beings and conceivably ending life on the planet? Yet, instead of working out a plan for a federalized structure in Ukraine or even allowing people in the east to vote on whether they want to remain under the control of the Kiev regime, the world is supposed to risk nuclear annihilation.

But therein lies one of the under-reported stories of the Ukraine crisis: There is a madness to the Kiev regime that the West doesn't want to recognize because to do so would upend the dominant narrative of "our" good guys vs. Russia's bad guys. If we begin to notice that the right-wing regime in Kiev is crazy and brutal, we might also start questioning the "Russian aggression" mantra.

According to the Western "group think," the post-coup Ukrainian government "shares our values" by favoring democracy and modernity, while the rebellious ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine are "Moscow's minions" representing dark forces of backwardness and violence, personified by Russia's "irrational" President Putin. In this view, the conflict is a clash between the forces of good and evil where there is no space for compromise.

Yet, there is a craziness to this "group think" that is highlighted by Prystaiko's comments. Not only does the Kiev regime display a cavalier attitude about dragging the world into a nuclear catastrophe but it also has deployed armed neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists to wage a dirty war in the east that has involved torture and death-squad activities.

Not Since Adolf Hitler

No European government, since Adolf Hitler's Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has, and has done so knowingly. Yet, across the West's media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality, even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established.

The New York Times and the Washington Post have spearheaded this journalistic malfeasance by putting on blinders so as not to see Ukraine's neo-Nazis, such as when describing the key role played by the Azov battalion in the war against ethnic Russians in the east.

On Feb. 20, in a report from Mariupol, the Post cited the Azov battalion's importance in defending the port city against a possible rebel offensive. Correspondent Karoun Demirjian wrote:

"Petro Guk, the commander of the Azov battalion's reinforcement operations in Mariupol, said in an interview that the battalion is 'getting ready for' street-to-street combat in the city. The Azov battalion, now a regiment in the Ukrainian army, is known as one of the fiercest fighting forces in the pro-Kiev operation.

"But ... it has pulled away from the front lines on a scheduled rest-and-retraining rotation, Guk said, leaving the Ukrainian army -- a less capable force, in his opinion -- in its place. His advice to residents of Mariupol is to get ready for the worst.

"'If it is your home, you should be ready to fight for it, and accept that if the fight is for your home, you must defend it,' he said, when asked whether residents should prepare to leave. Some are ready to heed that call, as a matter of patriotic duty."

The Post's stirring words fit with the Western media's insistent narrative and its refusal to include meaningful background about the Azov battalion, which is known for marching under Nazi banners, displaying the Swastika and painting SS symbols on its helmets.