Stepan Bandera. He did not claim to be a Nazi, just a Ukrainian “nationalist”. From 1935, Bandera advocated political violence. He had about sixty personalities assassinated, including two Polish ministers. During the Second World War, he organized the extermination of Jewish and Slavic intellectuals. The new Ukrainian regime erected monuments to his glory, including one in Lviv, the city where he supervised a massacre.

*

Western public opinion is outraged by the war in Ukraine and is mobilizing to help Ukrainians in flight. For all, it is obvious: the dictator Putin does not support the new Ukrainian democracy. As in every conflict, we are told that the others are the bad guys, while we are the good guys.

Our reaction is that of people abused by war propaganda because they do not remember previous conflicts and do not know anything about Ukraine. Let’s start again.

Who started it?

Like in the playground when our classmates were fighting each other, we want to know who started it. There is no contest: eight years ago, the United States organized a regime change in Kiev with the help of armed groups. These people call themselves “nationalists”, but not at all in the sense that we understand it. They claim to be real Ukrainians of Scandinavian or proto-Germanic origin and not Slavs like the Russians. They claim to be Stepan Bandera [1], the leader of the Ukrainian collaborators of the Nazis, the equivalent of Philippe Pétain from a symbolic point of view for the French, but above all of Joseph Darnand and the soldiers of the French SS Division Charlemagne. Ukrainians, who until now considered themselves to be of Scandinavian and proto-Germanic origin on the one hand, and Slavic on the other, call them “neo-Nazis”.

Here in France, the word “Nazi” is an insult that is used for anything. Historically, it is a movement that advocated a racial vision of humanity to explain the colonial empires. According to it, men belong to different “races”, today we would say to different “species”. They cannot have offspring together, like mares and donkeys. In nature, these two species procreate mules, but these are usually sterile. This is why the Nazis forbade inter-racial mixing. If we are of different races, some are superior to others, hence the Western domination of colonized peoples.

In the 1930s, this ideology was considered a “science” and was taught in universities, especially in the United States, Scandinavia and Germany. Some very important scientists defended it. For example, Konrad Lorenz (Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1973) was an ardent Nazi. He wrote that in order to maintain the race, homosexuals had to be removed from the mass and eliminated like a surgeon removes a tumour because they mixed their genetic heritage with that of other races without being noticed.

These scientists were no more serious than those who announced the apocalypse during the Covid-19 epidemic. They had the title of “scientist”, but not the reasonable approach.

Modern Russia was built on the memory of what Russians call the “Great Patriotic War” and we call the “Second World War”. It does not have the same meaning for them as for us. Here in France, the war lasted only a few months; then we believed in the Nazi victory and entered into collaboration. We saw the Nazis and the Pétainists arrest, from 1940, 66,000 people, generally for “terrorism” (resistance). Then from 1942 onwards, 76,000 Jews were arrested for being of an “inferior race” and sent to the East, in reality to extermination camps. On the contrary, in the Soviet Union, the Nazis did not arrest anyone. They wanted to exterminate or enslave all Slavs within thirty years in order to free up a “living space” where they could build a colonial empire (Generalplan Ost). This is why the USSR suffered 27 million deaths. In Russian memory, the Nazis are an existential danger, not for us.

When these people came to power in Kiev, they did not declare themselves as “Nazis”, but as “nationalists” in the sense of Stepan Bandera, who also called himself a “nationalist” and not a “Nazi”, and even outdid him with regard to their genocidal intentions against Slavs and Jews. They called the former regime “pro-Russian”, which is factually wrong, and banned everything that evokes Russian culture. First of all, the Russian language. The majority of Ukrainians were bilingual, speaking both Russian and Ukrainian. All of a sudden, half of them were told that they would no longer be able to speak their language at school and in the administration.

The Donbass region, which is very Russian speaking, rose up. But also the Hungarian minority, who were taught in their own language and who were supported in their demand by Hungary. The Ukrainians of Donbass demanded that the districts of Donetsk and Lugansk be given autonomous status and that they regain their language. These prefectures (oblast in Russian) declared themselves republics. This did not mean that they aspired to independence, but only to autonomy, like the Republic of California in the United States or the former republics of the USSR.

In 2014, President Francois Hollande and Chancellor Angela Merkel put the people of Kiev at the same table as those of Donbass and negotiated the Minsk agreements. France, Germany and Russia are the guarantors.

Kiev has always refused to implement them even though it signed them. Instead, it has armed “nationalist” militias and sent them to the edge of the Donbass. All the Western extremists then came to fire the shot in Ukraine. These paramilitaries were last month, according to the Kiev government, 102,000. They form one-third of the Ukrainian army and are integrated into the Territorial Defense Forces. 66,000 new “nationalists” - albeit foreign - have just arrived as reinforcements, from all over the world, for the Russian attack.

In the eight years since the Minsk agreements, these paramilitaries have killed 14,000 people in Donbass, according to the Kiev government. This figure includes their own casualties, but they are not many. Russia has set up its own commission of inquiry. It did not only count the dead, but also the seriously injured. It found 22,000 victims. President Putin speaks of “genocide”, not in the etymological sense of destruction of a people, but in the legal sense of a crime committed by order of the authorities against an ethnic group.

This is where the problem lies: the Kiev government is not homogeneous and no one has clearly given the order for such a massacre. However, Russia holds President Petro Poroshenko and his successor Volodymyr Zelensky responsible. We are also responsible because we were the guarantors of the never implemented Minsk agreements. Yes, we are co-responsible for this hecatomb.

The worst is yet to come. On July 1, 2021, President Zelensky, who armed the “nationalist” paramilitaries and refused to implement the Minsk agreements, promulgated Law No. 38 “On Indigenous Peoples” [2]. This law guarantees the exercise of the rights of the Tatars and the Karaites (i.e. Jews who do not recognize the Talmud), including the right to speak their language, but not the rights of the Slavs. The latter do not exist. They are not protected by any law. They are Untermenschen, sub-human. It was the first time in 77 years that a racial law was passed on the European continent. You say to yourself that there are human rights organizations and that they must have protested. But nothing. A great silence. Worse: the applause of Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Why the recourse to war?

Our vision of events is distorted by our prejudices. This is even more pronounced in the Baltic States and countries formerly crushed by the “Brezhnev doctrine”. These peoples imagine a priori that the Russians are the heirs of the Soviets. However, the main Soviet leaders were not Russian. Joseph Stalin was Georgian, Nikita Khrushchev Ukrainian etc., and even Leonid Brezhnev was Ukrainian.

As long as the Donetsk and Lugansk republics were Ukrainian, the massacre of their inhabitants was an exclusively Ukrainian matter. No one was allowed to protect them. However, by signing the Minsk Agreements and having them endorsed by the UN Security Council, France and Germany took responsibility for putting an end to it. They did not do so.

The problem changed in nature when, on February 21, 2022, Russia recognized the independence of the two Donbass republics. The massacre of its inhabitants was no longer a domestic issue, but an international one. On February 23, the Security Council met again as the Russian army prepared to intervene. At the meeting, UN Secretary-General António Guterres did not question the legitimacy of Russia’s recognition of the Donbass republics, nor of Russia’s military intervention against the neo-Nazis. He just asked Russia to give peace another chance [3].

International law does not prohibit war, but tries to prevent it. Since this meeting of the Security Council was fruitless, Russia was entitled to come to the aid of the inhabitants of Donbass massacred by the neo-Nazis. This it did the next day, February 24.

President Vladimir Putin, who had already waited eight years, could no longer put it off. Not only because people are dying every day, not only because the Ukrainian army was preparing a huge massacre on March 8 [4], but because Russian law makes him personally responsible for the lives of his fellow citizens. In preparation for their eventual exodus, the vast majority of Donbass residents have acquired Russian citizenship in recent years.

(To be concluded…)

Notes

[1] After having participated in massacres of Jews with the SS, Stepan Bandera was arrested by the Nazis in 1941 and interned in a prison for VIP. Then he was released to participate actively with the SS in the fight against the Soviets. He was never an ideological opponent of the Nazis, but always collaborated with them against the USSR. See Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist, Fascism, Genocide, and Cult, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, Ibidem (2014).

[2] «??? ??????? ?????? ???????», ????????? ????????? ???? (???), 2021, ? 38, ??.319.

[3] Security Council, 8974th meeting, UN, 23 February 2022.

[4] Document: “Ukrainian secret attack plans” (source: Russian Ministry of Defense).

Courtesy Thierry Meyssan; Translation Roger Lagassé

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