In Kiev, an Israeli army vet led a street-fighting unit

15th ANNIVERSARY OF NATO AGGRESSION AGAINST YUGOSLAVIA (SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO)

Ukraine: Neo-Nazi Criminal State Looming

“There are many who do not know they are fascists
but will find it out when the time comes.”
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

After signing a void agreement on “crisis settlement” on Friday, the situation in Ukraine has rapidly got out of control of its signatories and “witnesses”. No provisions of this document were fulfilled. The legitimate authorities fled (or tried to flee) the country, the governmental buildings in Kiev are taken by the revolutionary mob. The radicals are dictating the new rules to façade opposition “leaders” who desperately try to bridle theMaidan.

What happened to Ukraine on February 21, 2014 is essentially a criminal coup committed by the radical armed anarchists and Ukrainian Nazis who have been enjoying a comprehensive financial, military, diplomatic and even religious support and instigation from the Western power groups for the last two decades. Many of Ukraine’s cities are now falling into the chaos of lootings, unprovoked violence, lynch law and political repressions.

The first signs of upcoming chaos were clearly seen as the Ukrainian authorities wavered at the three-month siege of the centre of Kiev by the radical guerrilla elements from Galicia and local criminal gangs. They watched silently when furious fanatics were burning unarmed riot police Berkut officers alive, lynching them and pulling out their eyes. They did nothing to stop frantic “freedom fighters” from storming regional administrations, humiliating the officials and looting police and military arsenals in the West Ukraine. They were paralyzed when unidentified snipers were cool-bloodily killing militia personnel, protesters and casual passer-bys from the roofs of Kiev’s buildings. They even declared amnesty (twice!) to those guilty of the brutal crimes against policemen and public order. Thus Yanukovych’s regime itself paved the way for a sinister ghost of the war-torn Libya to come to Ukraine.

Is the guerrilla side a self-organized and self-indoctrinated popular movement tired of a corrupt and inefficient state? That is hardly the case.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the international power groups have invested billions of the Federal Reserve notes (aka US$) into Ukrainian “pro-democratic” NGOs and politicians. While preaching “Ukrainian commitment to the European choice and democratic values” in the meantime they clearly saw that there is no short-term historical perspective for making Ukraine a state hostile to Russia, which is evidently the final goal of the globalist Eastern policy. The stakes were placed on the ultranationalist elements in the Western Ukraine and in the Uniate Church, a minority religious Greek-Catholic community of the Eastern rite, created by the Holy See in XVI century in a desperate attempt to weaken close ties of Rzeczpospolita’s Orthodox with Moscow. Since the early 1990s the Uniates enjoyed silent support of the newly-independent central authorities in Kiev. Theit tactic was to aggressively occupy Orthodox cathedrals on the canonic territory of the Moscow Patriarchate. The last thing the Uniate clergy used to preach in the occupied churches for all these years was the Christian call for repentance and peace. Instead they propagated a new crusade against the Orthodox and directly instigated and justified race-motivated prosecutions and even killings, acting exactly like radical jihadist preachers of the militant pseudo-Islamic sects. Suffice to watch a “Sunday sermon” by Mykhailo Arsenych, the clergyman from a local Uniate church in Ivano-Frankovsk region, Ukraine saying: “Today we are really ready for a revolution.The only effective methods of combat are assassination and terror! We want to be sure that no Chinese, Negro, Jew or Muscovite will try to come and grab our land tomorrow!”

The products of such indoctrination were not long in coming. A number of NATO-sponsored training centers for the Ukrainian ultranationalist militants were opened on the territory of the Baltic states immediately after they joined NATO in 2004. The detailed photo report on a Ukrainian group taking a course of subversive activities at a NATO training center in Estonia in 2006 is available here (texts in Russian).

Abundant financial and human resources were directed to bolster the paramilitary units of the radical UNA-UNSO, Svoboda and other ultranationalist organizations in the Ukraine. Since 1990s these thugs were participating in the Chechen and Balkan wars on the side of radical Wahhabi (!) militants and committing war crimes against captured Russian and Serbian soldiers and civilian population. One of the notorious guerilla fighters of the Ukrainian origin in Chechnya, Olexander Muzychko (aka criminal leader Sasha Biliy) today is heading a brigade of “Pravyi Sector”, the radical militant driving force of the ongoing coup d’état in Kiev. According to his “official” biography (linkin Russian), in 1994 he was awarded by the then top commander of terroristIchkeria enclave Dzhohar Dudayev with the order “Hero of Nation” for “outstanding military successes against Russian troops”. His “military skills” were quite specific: he used to lure the Russian units operating in remote Chechen locations to guerilla ambushes. Then he personally participated in tortures and beheadings of the captured Russian soldiers. After returning to the Ukraine in 1995, he led a criminal gang in Rovno. Eventually he was prosecuted and sentences for 8 years term for kidnapping for ransom and attempted assassination of a Ukrainian businessman. He entered politics after release from prison in late 2000s.

After the end of Chechen and Balkan wars the British and American private military contractors were routinely recruiting Ukrainian mercenaries for operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.The Britam Defense scandal revealed the way and scale of how the Ukrainian personnel of the private military contractors were used in provocative clandestine actions to meet Western political goals in the Middle East. Many of them were sent to Kiev to make the job they are paid for – to target both policemen and protesters on “Euromaidan” from the roofs of surrounding buildings.

The real leaders of the protest have already clearly expressed their radical views to the European press (read e.g. the interview with the Pravyi Sector leader Dmitro Yarosh and several recent Guardian’s publications here and here).

That is the sort of people the half-hearted European politicians are about to deal with in the Ukraine. These fanatics are the real authority in today’s Kiev seized by the marauding mobs. They have torn the Friday’s agreement signed by four Ukrainian “leaders” and three European officials before the ink was dry on this paper. Their treatment of Yulia Timoshenko after her emotional speech on the Maidan Saturday night has clearly shown that her nomination de facto head of failing Ukrainian state would be their decision. Latest Western advice to financially support Ukraine with the IMF and the EU funds suggest that they have chosen to buy the loyalty of the ultranationalists for the transition period. Therefore, the ongoing Western policy of appeasement towards the radical insurgents in Kiev very much resembles the Anglo-American connivance in Hitler’s accession to power in Germany in 1933 and the rise of the Third Reich. But if the Western elitist groups suppose that the Neo-Nazi project that they have carefully cherished and supported in Ukraine for decades, would be controlled by political means and set against Russia, they are deadly wrong.After facing furious resistance and blowback at the East and South of the Ukraine, the radical Nazi ideological avalanche encouraged by the illusion of success in Kiev would inevitably enter the degrading European political landscape where the neo-Nazi and hooligan outbreaks are already a notable destabilizing factor. Their established links with the Islamist underground in Europe add another sinister dimension to the murky European future.

Is it the price the Europeans are ready to pay for bringing its eastern neighbors into the “family of civilized nations”?

The geopolitical dimensions of the coup in Ukraine

By Peter Schwarz 
27 February 2014

“When the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world,” wrote former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in his recently published memoirs. Gates was referring to the then-Secretary of Defense, and later US Vice President, Dick Cheney.

The statement sheds light on the geopolitical dimensions of the recent putsch in Ukraine. What is at stake is not so much domestic issues—and not at all the fight against corruption and democracy—but rather an international struggle for power and influence that stretches back a quarter of a century.

The Financial Times places the recent events in Ukraine in the same light. In an editorial on February 23, it wrote: “For a quarter of a century this huge territory perched precariously between the EU and Russia has been the object of a geopolitical contest between the Kremlin and the west.” In 2008, a clumsy attempt by President George W. Bush failed to draw the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, “But the Maidan revolution now offers a second chance for all parties to reconsider the status of Ukraine on the fault line of Europe.”

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 was an unexpected gift to the imperialist powers. The October Revolution in 1917 had removed a considerable part of the world’s surface from the sphere of capitalist exploitation. This was regarded as a threat by the international bourgeoisie, even long after the Stalinist bureaucracy betrayed the goal of world socialist revolution and murdered an entire generation of Marxist revolutionaries. In addition, the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union presented an obstacle to US world hegemony.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the introduction of the capitalist market created conditions for the social wealth created by generations of workers to be plundered by a handful of oligarchs and international finance. The social gains made in the field of education, health care, culture and infrastructure were smashed and left to decline.

This was not enough, however, for the US and the major European powers. They were intent on ensuring that Russia could never again threaten their global hegemony, as is made clear in the above cited statement of Dick Cheney.

By 2009 the US-dominated NATO military alliance had absorbed into its ranks almost all of the East European countries that had once belonged to the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. But attempts to incorporate former Soviet republics into NATO failed—with the exception of the three Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—due to resistance from Moscow. Ukraine, with its 46 million inhabitants and its strategic location situated between Russia, Europe, the Black Sea and the Caucasus, invariably was at the centre of these attempts.

As far back as 1997, former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that without Ukraine, any attempt by Moscow to rebuild its influence on the territory of the former Soviet Union was doomed to fail. The core thesis of his book The Grand Chessboard is that America’s capacity to exercise global primacy depends on whether America can prevent the emergence of a dominant and antagonistic power on the Eurasian landmass. (See: “The power struggle in Ukraine and America's strategy of domination”)

In 2004 the US and the European powers supported and financed the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine that brought a pro-western government to power. The regime rapidly broke apart, however, due to internal strife. The attempt in 2008 to draw Georgia into NATO by provoking a military confrontation with Russia also failed.

Now the US and its European allies are intent to use the putsch in Ukraine to once again destabilize other former Soviet republics as well and draw them into their own sphere of influence. In so doing they risk an open armed conflict with Russia.

Under the headline “After Ukraine, the West Makes Its Move for the Russian Periphery,” the Stratfor think tank, which has close links to the US secret services, writes: “The West wants to parlay the success of supporting Ukraine’s anti-government protesters into a broader, region-wide campaign.”

“A Georgian delegation is currently visiting Washington, and the country’s prime minister, Irakli Garibashvili, is scheduled to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry this week,” Stratfor reports. Moldovan Prime Minister Iurie Leanca is also scheduled to visit the White House for a meeting with US Vice President Joe Biden on March 3. “High on the agenda of both visits are the countries’ prospects for Western integration—in other words, how to bring them closer to the United States and the European Union and further from Russia.”

Lilia Shetsova from the US foundation Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (sic) in Moscow, also argues that the coup in Ukraine be extended to other countries and Russia itself. “Ukraine has become the weakest link in the post-Soviet chain,” she writes in a comment for the Süddeutsche Zeitung. “We should keep in mind that similar upheavals in other countries are possible.”

Shetsova stresses a feature of the Ukrainian revolution that she wants to retain at all costs: the mobilization of militant fascist forces. “Yanukovych’s downfall is essentially due to the ‘radical elements’ on the Maidan, including among others, the Right Sector, which have become a serious political force.” She continues: “Ukraine’s future will depend on whether the Ukrainians can maintain the Maidan.”

The “radical elements” which Shetsova wants to retain at all costs are armed fascist militias, which base themselves on the vilest traditions of Ukrainian history: the pogroms and mass murder of Jews and Communists carried out during the Second World War. The future role of these fascist militias will be to terrorize and intimidate the working class.

It took just a few hours for the reactionary social content of the upheaval in Ukraine to become clear. The “European values ” allegedly brought to the country by overthrow of the old regime consist of massive attacks on the already impoverished working class. As a condition for loans the country urgently needs to prevent impending bankruptcy, the IMF is demanding the floating of the exchange rate of the hryvna, a brutal austerity program and a six-fold increase in the price of household gas prices.

The floating of the country’s currency will lead to raging inflation, a corresponding increase in the cost of living, and the destruction of any remaining savings by ordinary Ukrainians. The austerity program will be primarily directed against pensions and social spending and the increase in gas prices will mean that many families cannot heat their homes.

Ukraine is to be reduced to a country where well-trained workers and professionals earn wages far below those currently paid in China. This is of especial interest for Germany, Ukraine’s second largest trading partner (after Russia) and, with a volume of $7.4 billion, the second largest investor in the country.

While for the United States the isolation of Russia stands in the foreground, Germany is interested in the economic benefits of Ukraine, which it has already militarily occupied twice, in 1918 and 1941. It wants to exploit the country as a cheap labor platform and use it to drive down wages in Eastern Europe and Germany even further.

According to statistics compiled by the German Economic Institute, labor costs in Ukraine are at the low end of the international scale. At €2.50 per hour worked, average labor costs (gross wages plus other costs) for workers and clerical employees are already well below those of China (€3.17), Poland (€6.46) and Spain (€21.88). In Germany, an hour of labor costs €35.66, i.e 14 times as much.

The Ukrainian Statistical Office estimates the average monthly wage at 3,073 hryvna (€220). Academics are also very poorly paid.

Former President Yanukovych himself was a representative of Ukrainian oligarchs. He only turned down the Association Agreement with the EU because he feared he would not politically survive the social consequences. Now his downfall serves as a pretext to introduce a level of poverty and exploitation totally incompatible with democratic norms and will lead to new social uprisings. It is precisely in order to suppress future social unrest that the fascist militias are to be retained.