Putin's skewed view of WWII threatens his neighbors and the West

Here's a key point from Lucian Kim's op-ed that most Russians and those who haven't spent time in Eastern Europe do not understand [emphasis mine]:

For most countries that emerged from the Soviet empire 25 years ago, independence from Moscow exposed messy, overlooked histories. The small nations of east central Europe had been pushed and pulled by the Nazi and Communist juggernauts surrounding them. From the Baltics to the Balkans, it was a story of collaboration and betrayal, resistance and subjugation. One and the same army could be viewed as liberator, conqueror and occupier. Loyalties were split, quartered and ground to pieces.

Complexity or inconvenient facts had no place in official Soviet historiography, where the Red Army was celebrated as the undisputed victor in the war against fascism. The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that carved up Poland and ceded the Baltic nations to the Soviet Union was forgotten; the Holocaust downplayed; and the role of the Western Allies diminished. World War Two was remembered as the “Great Patriotic War” and didn’t start until the Nazis’ genocidal invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. There was no mention that Hitler and Stalin were allies before the attack. The Pacific war was a sideshow that the Soviet Union didn’t enter until Japan’s defeat was imminent.

Kim said it: complexity. There's no place for it in Soviet hagiography, er, historiography. Take Ukraine in WWII, for instance. Today most Russians and many "liberals" in the West decry Ukraine's national freedom fighters in UIA-OUN as "Nazi collaborators." Their history was complex, and messy. UIA fought with Nazis and against them; they fought Soviet occupiers and Polish forces.  But it's important to keep in mind that the Soviet Union had just recently killed over 3 million Ukrainians in 1932-33!  Today's Russians and 20/20-hindsight historians ignore Soviet genocidal mass murder in Ukraine, and instead express indignation that some Ukrainians would ever have chosen to ally themselves with Nazi Germany in the (probably vain) hope of achieving eventual national liberation from Soviet mass-murderers. 

And indeed, Russians conveniently overlook that their WWII hero Josef Stalin was the first to collaborate with Hitler with terrible, tragic results for both Russia and Europe!  

Coldly rationalizing it, we can understand why Stalin sided with Hitler, for much the same reason those subsequent "collaborators" in E. Europe did: to buy time before eventually turning on an "ally"; because his side was relatively weaker; and because both had common enemies. These things happened -- but in the awful context of world war. If we're going to judge these "devil's pacts" post facto, then we should judge them realistically and equanimously.

Unmentioned in Kim's article are the Soviet Cossack paramilitary units -- the true patriotic ones who today wear St. George's ribbons and say that fight Ukrainian "fascists" and "Banderovtsy" -- who went over to the Nazi side by the thousands, including, ironically, in Crimea. They served in the Russian Liberation Army that was directly commanded by German Nazi officers. (To see more, Google translate this article in Russian: http://crime.in.ua/news/20140324/posobniki-nacystov ).  Germany officers never commanded guerrilla fighters in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. And yet Russians today view Cossack paramilitary units positively and UIA as worse than devils.

Kim also notes, as I and many others have, that today's Russians do not have much to look back at and take pride in. The Allied victory in WWII is one of the few events Russians in the 20th century that they can be proud of:

When Putin came to power in 2000, Russians were still reeling from a decade of nihilism that had followed the collapse of Communism. For a country that was beginning to pick itself up, the “Great Victory” against the Nazis presented itself as the ideal surrogate for a national idea to pull together Russia. Practically every family had suffered in the war, and the whole country knew the iconography from Soviet television and film. Putin couldn’t buy Russia a new identity for all the petrodollars in the world, but he could make Victory Day the de facto national holiday, celebrated with ever more gargantuan military parades.

Finally, I can echo the assertion that most Russians do not understand that there was a real war in the Pacific. To them, the war ended in Berlin when the Soviets seized it. (The Soviets' subsequent rape of Germany is another story....)  Regardless, it's important to Putin and his supporters today that WWII remains a Russian victory to defeat Fascism in Europe. 

How Vladimir Putin’s skewed view of World War Two threatens his neighbors and the West

By Lucian Kim

April 13, 2015 | Reuters

URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/13/idUS376956048920150413

Rachkevych: Ukraine's 'Praviy Sektor' is Russia's latest bogeyman

Way to go, Mark!  Хороша робота!

Praviy Sektor leader latest in long line

By Mark Rachkevych

May 22, 2014 | Kyiv Post

All dictators need an enemy, real or imagined. It’s the telltale sign of an authoritarian state and one that Russian President Vladimir Putin embraces to Orwellian proportions. Appropriately, his latest external enemy is Praviy Sektor, one of the most visible militant nationalist groups that provided security​during the EuroMaidan​ Revolution​ and defended it from police brutality.

The loosely-structured coalition has since registered as a political party, and its leader Dmytro Yarosh, a native of Russian-speaking Dniproderzhynsk in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, is running for president. 

At the Ukraine Crisis Media Center on May 22, Yarosh described Ukraine as a “neo-colonial” state that only started building an independent nation after EuroMaidan ousted the corrupt and criminal regime of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych in late February. His brand of nationalism is one of a positive, empowering aspiration akin to a liberationist movement. And he views the 100-day revolution as the final shattering of Russo-Soviet tendencies in Ukraine based on comrade capitalism instead of institutional state-building. 

Russia’s Kremlin-controlled media started demonizing the group in the early stages of EuroMaidan. Praviy Sektor became synonymous with neo-fascist, a term that Russia gratuitously uses for its enemies and those who pose a threat to its interests.

Rightfully so.

Moscow’s free public relations – its state-owned English-language Russia Today news channel alone has a $400 million yearly budget – elevated the nationalist group to such heights that it overshadowed the pluralistic fiber of EuroMaidan.

Today, millions of eastern Ukrainians who historically favor watching Russian TV channels, fear Praviy Sektor is at their doorstep getting ready to slit their throats. Many attacks on Ukrainian and pro-Russian separatists alike get attributed to Praviy Sektor in Russia’s propaganda campaign. Journalists months prior in Crimea also reported on the ominous Praviy Sektor scare among the local population as the Kremlin bloodlessly annexed the peninsula.

As Ukraine’s former ruler and oppressor, Russia historically vilifies any group or individual who has ever tried to break away from its grasp. The practice goes back centuries.

Starting in the 18th century, with czarist Russia’s increasing encroachment on Ukraine’s quasi-independent state, Cossack leader Hetman Ivan Mazepa forged an alliance with Swedish King Karl XII who was waging war against Peter the Great. Russia never forgave Mazepa’s “betrayal” and its history books say the act violated the two nations’ “fraternal brotherhood.”

By contrast, a pact that Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky signed with Russia a century earlier is viewed by mainstream Russian historians as the start of a beautiful relationship that re-united the two Slavic entities. To Ukrainian nationalists, the Pereyaslav Treaty marked the beginning of Russian domination over much of Ukraine that eventually devastated the Cossacks’ once flourishing lands and subjugated them to Moscow.

Next on Russia’s villification hit list was Semyon Petliura, who headed the Ukrainian People’s Republic Army and for a time the Directory government of the UNR when Ukraine briefly gained independence in the wake of World War I. Eventually Bolshevik Russia took over more than half of modern-day Ukraine’s territory while he emigrated to Paris in 1924 where he was assassinated. Again, mainstream Russia glosses over this period of Ukraine’s statehood and many Ukrainians believe their nation’s first capital was Kharkiv before it was moved to Kyiv – a purely Soviet historiography of events.

Incidentally, writer Mikhail Bulgakov who was a young adult living in Kyiv when Petliura came to power, hated the very idea of an independent Ukrainian state. He felt the same way about Petliura whom he called a “wonderful bookkeeper.” Towards the end of his short story “The City of Kyiv” he wrote: “May the memory of Petliura be damned.”

The Kremlin also lavished free publicity upon Stepan Bandera who headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists during and after World War II. The militant organization’s main goal was to attain Ukrainian independence. Many of its members fought with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), an underground resistance movement that fought Nazi Germany and Soviet forces until the mid-1950s. The USSR’s propaganda machine demonized Bandera to such an extent that his name still instills fear in many Russians today. Indeed, the term Banderivtsi is another Russian code word for an independent-minded Ukrainian.

In fact today, Putin doesn’t recognize the interim government in Kyiv and his media minions often refer to it as a “junta” or a “banderite regime.” These hollow labels will continue to be sputtered until a government appears in Kyiv that is either “friendlier” to Moscow, loyal, or willing to be controlled by it. Any other option means to be branded a “fascist” by the world’s most bona fide fascist state ruled by a former KGB lieutenant-colonel who constantly needs a phantom enemy to justify his criminal acts.  

Peninsula of Nazis: Russian Crimeans who served Hitler

This article is important enough to translate to English in order to put Crimea into its proper historical context vis-a-vis Russia's accusations of "nationalism" and "fascism" in certain regions of Ukraine. You are free to read or Google translate it yourself; the original is here. [Emphasis below mine].

Peninsula of Nazis. Russian Crimea in the service of Hitler

March 24, 2014 | CRIME.in.UA

Recently, thanks to the brilliant follower of Adolf Hitler, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian citizens who felt their homeland was Ukraine (not Russia or the Soviet Union) were automatically branded "Banderites" and "neo-Nazis."

For what purpose since the 2000's have our so-called "brothers" stamped all Ukrainian patriots and ordinary Ukrainians to whom is alien the "Russian world" with the stamps "Banderites" (banderovtsy), "Nazi collaborators" and the like?  Why does comrade Putin hate people who fought for the independence of their country against all comers: the Germans, the Red Army and Soviet partisans?  Probably because in the plans of that Nazi there is no place for an independent Ukraine, just as there was not in Hitler's plans.

Today we offer to lift the curtain and shed light on a number of facts that "Putin & Co." does not like to remember, preferring to pretend that it was not in Russia's history of betrayal of millions of Russians during World War II. That it did not exist in the great history of the great Russian millions, as if they just drowned in the endless pages of time.

The Russian media loves to make noise about the "complicity of banderovtsy with fascists," concealing the massive scale of collaboration in Crimea, including Sevastopol, in the period of the German-Romanian occupation. And today, this period of time is still a mystery of mysteries.

But not everything was so simple. If in the western regions of Ukraine, UPA [Ukrainian Resistance Army] protected its people from the Nazi aggressors, in the southeastern regions and in Crimea, it was more difficult -- on the contrary, legions became collaborators to help the invaders oppress native people. Since the middle of the summer of 1942 they went under the same banner under which now walks the Russian community, and wore the same uniform worn by the current Crimean Russian Cossacks.

And, by the way, they all spoke Russian. The absolute majority of Germany's supporters -- Russian Liberation Army (ROA) formations in the territory of Ukraine and Crimea -- were created mostly ​​of Russian-speaking collaborators.

And if Ukrainian battalions "Roland" and "Nachtigall" are a favorite topic of the Russian media, then it is time to tell you about homegrown Crimean Cossacks whose descendants today have lined up in the service of the Moscow as "fighters against fascism," but who in fact are fighting exclusively with the Ukrainian state. Even on the day of celebration of Victory over Nazism on May 9, under the flags of ROA they love to walk the streets of Sevastopol and demonstrate that "in the city of Russian glory" there is no limit to cynicism. The archives and statistics, and documentary research of many Russian writers are packed with dry eloquent facts.

So, Crimea put up "only" 45,000 (!) bayonets in the 11th German Army of Manstein who participated in the storming of Sevastopol.

In the 17th Army of the Wehrmacht were formed nine separate Russian companies.

Crimean "volunteers," unlike the UPA , who defended their land, took part in the siege of Leningrad. Crimean Tatars, by the way, did not take part in the "Wehrmacht," so any theses about "Crimean Tatar traitors" can find no basis in fact here.

Modern Crimean "fighters against fascism" are somehow not in a hurry to to tell Crimeans, how, and with whom, in Simferopol in February 1942 was formed the 5th Simferopol Cossack Squadron, Cossack Cavalry Regiment "Von Yungshultz" and the 1st Andrew Hundred near Simferopol.

In addition, Russian Hitlerites on the peninsula formed four Russian Cossack battalions, which became the basis of the Russian Cossack Security Division "Von Schulenburg." This Division was finally destroyed in battles with UPA in 1944.

In February 1942, in Simferopol, by the headquarters of the 11th Army of the Wehrmacht was formed the 5th Simferopol Rejtarskiy Cossack squadron, on the basis of which was established Cossack Rejtarskiy regiment under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel von Schulze's 1st Panzer Army.  In 1943 the regiment, as one of the best in the fight against the Red Army and the guerrillas, was included in the 1st Cossack Cavalry Division of the Waffen SS, and later expanded and was reorganized into the 15th Waffen SS Cossack Corps.

It should be noted that Hitler included Crimea in the Reikskomisariat "Ukraine". Therefore, it was the 15th SS Cossack Corps, formed in Crimea, not the SS Division "Galicia," that became the first collaborationist unit in Ukraine that was fully included in the Waffen-SS.

Corps-- not division, and still much more. Therefore, Lviv with its Division "Galicia" and two battalions that had not sworn allegiance to the Fuehrer and the Reich mostly went over to UPA, in great contrast to Crimean Cossacks.

In addition to the above facts, inhabitants of Crimea formed three Russian battalions marching in the Wehrmacht, 560th and 994th field battalions of the ROA. Besides the Cossack Corps, first in Sevastopol, and then in Simferopol were well-outfitted headquarters, command and two battalions of the 1st Grenadier Division of the SS "Russia" and initiated the formation of the 2nd Division.

Residents and prisoners of war in Sevastopol formed the 381st Sevastopol Educational Field Division of the Wehrmacht .

Coastal defenses from Sevastopol to Feodosiya in 1942-1944 were provided the team "Kringsmarine Black Sea," in which officers were Germans, and soldiers were Russian, exclusively recruited from the local population and prisoners of war. Although these "kringsmarintsy" at the approach of the Red Army shot their officers and went over to the partisans -- nevertheless, for two years they loyally served the invaders.

Separately, we should mention the Crimean police battalions -- the so-called "Hіwі" ("Volunteer helpers " -- helpers of the Nazis, of course).  In Sevastopol, a battalion was formed of 450 locals that guarded the seaport, and likewise in Crimea "helpers" blockaded Soviet partisans in the mountain forests.

If we compare the number of collaborators pf Crimea and Western Ukraine in their relation to the number of the local population in 1941, we obtain interesting results. In the western regions of Ukraine the number of collaborators that fell in the service of the occupiers (even including the general list of Ukrainian Division "Galicia" and battalions "Roland " and "Nachtigall") was about 2.5% of the total population of the region.  In Crimea -- it was almost 12%.

Today in the Crimea again operate the henchmen of a new Hitler -- from Moscow. Only now they are not fighting against the Soviet power, but against the Ukrainian government. And at the same time against Ukrainian citizens, who do not even really know how to speak Ukrainian .

And so that such "national traitors" would not stay on "native Russian land," Cossacks and FSB agents advise them "delicately" in Russian to leave their home and their Motherland. Because in Russia there is no place for Ukraine. In the twisted imagination of the Moscow Fuhrer there exists only "Little Russia" -- "a petty historical misunderstanding."

Section "Delta" group "IS ." Based primarily on research by Miroslav Mamchak.

Source: Flot2017.

All sides agree: Hilter was a bad guy (Atlantic)

At least they can all agree on something.

Good News From Ukraine: Everyone Still Hates Hitler

By Matt Ford

March 20, 2014 | The Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/good-news-from-ukraine-everyone-still-hates-hitler/284489/

Ukraine's Maidan activists are not 'fascists'

Disturbingly, some of the Western left wing and even some of the media have adopted the Russian propaganda meme that protesters and activists centered on Ukraine's Maidan are "nationalists" and "fascists."  

It is strange then that Ukraine's power structures and military have given themselves over so willingly, bloodlessly, to a group of fascists. Does that make Ukraine's military leadership fascistic?  Were they not fascist a month ago under President Yanukovych?  Absurd premises lead to absurd conclusions.

Only in Ukraine is it "nationalistic" to insist that in the one country on earth where people speak Ukrainian that Ukrainian should be the official state language, and receive other forms of protection.  Only in Ukraine is it "nationalistic," not patriotic, to proclaim, "Glory to Ukraine," (I myself was witness to an incident when these words provoked a fistfight), or to sing the national anthem.  

If Western liberals were to judge France by the same standard as they do Ukraine, then they must label them a bunch of "French nationalists" whose borders don't deserve sovereign protection.  Likewise, that makes American Republicans who rail against "press 2 for Spanish" or sing "The Star Spangled Banner" at ballgames a bunch of fascist nationalists.

And yet even those comparisons are not quite apt, since native French and English are spoken in other countries and on other continents. Not so with Ukrainian. If Ukrainian dies in Ukraine, it dies in the world. And with it would be lost the richness of Ukrainian culture. Ukrainian is worth fighting for, worth protecting.  Yet any casual visitor to Ukraine would get the impression that Russian, not Ukrainian, gets preferential treatment.  Most television shows, newspapers, magazines and books are in Russian only. Most films are shown in Russian, albeit with Ukrainian subtitles -- a modest victory for Ukrainian "nationalists." 

Indeed, outside Ukraine, the "great and powerful" Russian language has a huge country of 142 million people to protect it: Russia. Therefore, Russia doesn't need Ukraine for the Russian language to flourish. Anyhow, nobody from any Ukrainian political party has ever proposed legislating what language people speak in their everyday lives -- and yet the lumpen on the streets of the South and East of Ukraine firmly believe this lie.  In this lie, nurtured cynically by Russia, lies much of ethnic Russians' support for Russia's annexation of Crimea....

Next, there is the "nationalist" Svoboda (Freedom) party in Ukraine, whose leaders said that Jews in league with Russia have sought to keep Ukraine down. Granted, this was several years ago, but still it's cause for the West to be deeply concerned, right?  Well, not so much. Svoboda is still a small party and it doesn't stand a chance of winning many seats in Parliament or in the Cabinet of Ministers.  

Moreover, Jews were activists on Maidan.  Indeed, there was a Jewish brigade on Maidan including "four Israelis with combat experience."  I've heard of "self-hating Jews," but this would be a new extreme, if indeed Israeli Jews came to Ukraine to support anti-Semitic fascists!  

And Israel's Haaretz newspaper recently examined the level and anti-Semitism among pro-Maidan forces and concluded: no big deal.  Jews were among the pro-Maidan activists and at least four Jewish protesters were killed by Berkut special police.

So what other "evidence" does Putin's Russia and the deluded Western left offer of Ukrainian fascism? The fact that many Maidan activists revere Ukrainian nationalist freedom fighter Stepan Bandera. He is a controversial historical figure, to say the least. I won't go into the entire history of it now. It suffices to say the mere mention of his name is enough to cause spontaneous brawls in both Ukraine and Russia. You can make up your own mind about Bandera. 

Let me offer this: there are many times more statues of Lenin in Ukraine than of Bandera.  "Anti-Maidan" and "pro-Russian" activists in Ukraine have banded together to protect Maidan protesters from tearing down statues of Lenin as they did in Kyiv and other cities. Lenin is a symbol of Russian oppression and terror -- including two Soviet-imposed famines on Ukraine when millions died of hunger. It is now acknowledged by the U.S. and the West as genocide. (Russia, as the protector of the Soviet legacy, not surprisingly, disagrees). Thus reasonable people would cast suspicion on anybody, or any group, defending the legacy of Lenin. And yet it is not so.  And yet Bandera is called a "mass murderer" by many ethnic Russians in Ukraine. For them Bandera, not Lenin, is the bogeyman of Ukrainian history. Go figure.

(An epitaph on Bandera: two of his brothers died in the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz; his father was executed by the Soviets; and three of his sisters were sent to Soviet gulags in Siberia.)

But all the above-mentioned is academic. Anybody who bothered to go to Maidan could see that it was not decorated with swastikas, hidden fascist symbols, or echoing with anti-Semetic rhetoric. These were normal people. Scratch that -- better than normal. These were, and are, the most liberal, progressive people in Ukraine: doctors, teachers, artists, entrepreneurs, musicians, lawyers, journalists, students, and human rights activists. These are the dynamic people who make Ukraine go. And as the country's most honest and honorable, they were the most likely to suffer under President Yanukovych's corrupt and lawless regime.

Therefore it's painfully unfair of the West to dismiss Ukrainians' struggle -- which was peaceful and orderly until President Yanukovich tried to evict unarmed people with deadly force from Independence Square -- with terms like "fascist," "neo-Nazi," or "nationalist."  In our ignorance and haste to judgement, we should not throw out such loaded terms willy-nilly. 

I challenge anybody to find a report from a Western journalist on the ground on Maidan who corroborated Russia's fascist or nationalistic narrative of events there. It was perhaps the most well-covered revolution in history; beyond the Western media like BBC, it was YouTubed, Facebooked and Tweeted by thousands of people. If there were rampant fascist sentiments there -- not just a few neo-Nazi malcontents -- then we surely would have seen their faces and heard their voices. 

And finally, regarding neo-Nazis, Putin had best remove the beam from his own eye before remarking on the speck in Ukraine's (Matthew 7:5).  Putin tolerates an active and violent neo-Nazi movement within Russia. He finds them useful to conduct planned attacks and pogroms on gays and national minorities, mostly from the Caucasus. (For many graphic examples, go to YouTube and search "skinheads Russia.")

Putin should send his Black Sea Fleet out of Crimea to fight Russian fascists at home!

UPDATE 1 (05.03.2014):  My friend TK wanted to add something about Stepan Bandera. I haven't fact-checked it, only cleaned up the grammar & spelling:

Just FYI: about Nazi collaborators among Ukrainian nationalists. Many tend to forget during WWII only 14,689 Ukrainians collaborated with Hitler, but 1,150,000 Russians collaborated with Hitler and almost all European countries either collaborated as a whole or had their own collaborators with Hitler. Bandera spent one year in Berlin prison, received proposal to diversify (?) the rear of Red Army, refused to collaborate and then was confined for three years in a [Nazi] concentration camp Sachsenhausen. Bandera announced Ukraine was an independent country in 1941 when Hitler occupied Ukraine and he never collaborated with Hitler. The second person after Bandera was Lev Rebet, who spent three years in Auschwitz concentration camp (he was liberated in 1945), so all those insinuations about anti-Semitic Bandera are just Soviet propaganda. Both were killed by the same KGB officer.

There has been so much Russian propaganda on each and every possible social media, including many in English. What Russia is definitely great at is propaganda and plotting diversions internally and externally. But it is a devastating loss to the Ukrainian nation (as to any other as a matter of fact) not to know its own history. Seventy years of Soviet propaganda and 20 years of not paying attention to education, even worse the last four years of returning back to the distorted Soviet version of history led to absolute ignorance of own country and own identity that we observe now in the east-south and Crimea. Even if you ask people there who is Bandera and what he did, the only answer you will get is he is a fascist, but nothing else. Even more, most people in the rest of Ukraine will not be able to tell you much either with an exception they would not call him fascist. I strongly believe that making the population un-educated, illiterate and uninformed is the way for corruption, destruction and dictatorship. If you have sheep, not a nation, it is very easy to rule them. That relates to any country, but Russian rulers have mastered this tactic.

UPDATE 2 (05.03.2014):  This should ease the fears in the East and South of Ukraine that the new government is fascist: it's talking seriously about federalism, something the ousted Party of Regions never achieved (because they didn't want to). Reported Reuters today [emphasis mine]:

[Prime Minister] Yatseniuk has been gradually unveiling the outlines of the new government's plans for bringing the former Soviet republic's economy back from what he says is the edge of an abyss.

Earlier this week he announced plans to trim government spending by up to about 16 percent and said the government would meet any conditions set by the IMF to secure a new loan package. 

On Wednesday he said it was vital to give more authority to the regions, hungry for financial and, in some cases, for more political independence.

"One of the main things the new Ukrainian government must do is dismantle the centralized power created in the last four years," Yatseniuk said, referring to Yanukovich's rule.

Although this is part of a long-running debate and applies to all regions, it can be seen partly as a gesture to Russian speakers in the east at odds with the central government.  

UPDATE 3 (06.03.2014):  Here is yet more evidence that fascism and anti-Semitism aren't an issue on Maidan or Ukraine's new government: an "Open letter of Ukrainian Jews to Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin," dated March 4, 2014.