By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 9/24/26

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski out did himself yesterday on the doom and gloom story, telling a reporter that he has been spending the weekends at the dacha laying in supplies of rice and making jam out of the garden fruits in preparation for the presumed nuclear winter that will follow Russia’s invasion.

The rhetoric is getting extreme, although to be fair he said this to a Polish journalist and there is a very long and much beloved tradition of making homemade jam (varenye) at this time of the year. It features in Chekov’s play, The Cherry Orchard I think, so it has serious cultural credits and will play well with a general audience; the Polish equivalent of: “I like a pint in the pub” for the Brits. Still, I don’t believe he made extra jam so he will have something to eat when the fighting starts, but of course comments like this just tick the tensions up a notch.

The main event yesterday were the speeches at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and Zelenskiy introduced a new meme: “patient zero,” referring to Putin. As in the index patient you need to find when a new epidemic breaks out so that you can make a vaccine more quickly.

I don’t think it will catch on, but a nice try and colourful image. The nuts and bolts of his meetings in New York didn’t go well at all. He looked nervous and twitchy in his meeting with Trump unlike the Ankara Nato summit on July 8 where he was brimming with confidence.

At that meeting Trump promised him a Patriot missile license, but at this meeting Trump has totally walked that back after the likes of Boeing refused to share their tech with Ukraine, afraid they would out produce, out innovate and undercut the US firms (which they probably would).

In fact, there was no talk of missiles at all. Previously, Trump was badgered into promising “some” missiles “every month.”

Zelenskiy was asking for 300. But even the “some” talk has disappeared.

What Zelenskiy did get was an order to stop hitting Russian refineries because of the growing diesel shortages. He refused.

And there was some vague talk about an “energy ceasefire” but that was pointless, as there were no Russians in the room. Any “plans” to stop targeting energy don’t mean anything without the Russians and presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov made it clear Russia is not going to stop calling the talk “rhetoric” – which is exactly what it is.

This was probably Bankova’s last chance to get some real help from the West before the winter started and Zelenskiy made no progress.

Even more damning than Trump’s rebuff – I think its fair to say that the US participation in this conflict is now definitely over – was the tongue lashing that Zelenskiy got from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen who told him “no more money until you pull your reform sock up” (but with whatever the German equivalent of that is: Sockenhochziehpflicht?)

This is a very serious problem indeed and is not getting enough attention. At his Independence Day speech in August, Zelenskiy said that there is a $27bn hole in the defence budget (and a $32bn hole in the overall budget) and with the US out of the game the only place MinFin can find this money is from the EU. VDL did send €6.1bn the day after Zelenskiy speech and this morning the Danes signed off on another €3bn to tide Ukraine over, but Finance Minister Serhiy Marchenko said that the government will be unable to pay wages as soon as next month.

Zelenskiy also met with IMF director Kristalina Georgieva, who promised a little help too, but that is after she cancelled the second tranche of the Extended Fund Facility (EFF) and wrapped it into the third tranche in December for the same problem – foot dragging on pushing through reforms.

Everyone has a long list of reforms that need to be made and aren’t (details in our story here) but the bottom line is both the IMF and EU are demanding real progress on anti-corruption reforms. The reason is obvious: the metastasizing Energoatom corruption scandal which has now implicated pretty much everyone who works in Bankova.

The funding issue has not been resolved. Indeed, no remedy has even been suggested. Bankova has asked for next year’s tranche of the €90bn to be brought forward but VDL said a definite “no” to that unless reforms are put through and soon. Even the €6.1bn she did send is almost the last bit of this year’s tranche and there is little left in the pipeline without remaking the whole support plan.

So, the headline on Zelenskiy’s trip to New York should be something like: “No new support for Zelenskiy as Ukraine faces economic collapse.”

Or something like that.

As we reported in April, Ukraine was facing a macroeconomic collapse in April before the €90bn deal was approved, and it is back there again. Plus it has no defence ammo. Plus Putin is clearly about to bomb the last of Ukraine’s power sector flat. Plus his own party looks increasingly rebellious as it won’t pass the needed reforms. However, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) Operation Vivaldi is looking good and making real progress in pushing the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) back from the Fortress Belt cities, so there is that.

But support for Ukraine seems to be fading fast. Another story to come out of the UNGA is 51 countries signed a statement condemning Russia’s war in Ukraine, presented by EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas (who else?) to show the world is “united” behind Zelenskiy and the Ukrainian people. Except no one in Africa signed it. No one from Latin America signed it. Even the US didn’t sign it. If you remember the first motion to condemn the war in Ukraine in March 2022 only five countries rejected it and the bulk of the other 193 countries went along with it.

Most of the Global South sat on the fence in that vote. In this vote most of the Global South have come down on Russia and China’s side. It’s only the Global North that is behind Ukraine, and even then only half heartedly. It’s telling that in the same week of the UNGA that France chose to cut a bargain with Baku to get two of their spies out of jail (because that is what they are) in exchange for lifting sanctions on Russian tycoon Alisher Usmanov. That turns the whole sanctions regime into a bargaining chip where national interests are more important than geopolitical principles. And Macron has been one of the most vocal and active of the EU’s Ukraine champions until now.

***

Russia Could Make An Energy Truce Conditional On Resuming Pipeline Exports To Europe

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 9/25/26

Zelensky recently proposed a partial truce with Russia that would include, among other things, eschewing attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure. The strategic context concerns Russia’s ramped-up systematic strike campaign against Ukrainian power plants, gas stations, ports, and most recently, locomotives, all of which aims to cripple its military logistics by winter for achieving a Russian breakthrough. The Kremlin therefore doesn’t have any interest in accepting this lopsided arrangement.

That could change, however, if Russia makes at least the energy dimension of Zelensky’s proposal conditional on resuming its pipeline exports to Europe. It’s not just Ukraine that’s poised to experience its must difficult winter in years but the EU as a whole too according to the European Commissioner for Energy and Housing in a recent interview with the Financial Times. This is due to the global fuel crisis brought about by the Third Gulf War and Ukraine’s spree of attacks against Russian refineries this year.

Ukraine desperately needs relief from Russia’s systematic strikes against its energy infrastructure this winter, the EU desperately needs more energy amidst the global fuel crisis during the same season, and Russia is unlikely to turn down the influx of revenue even if the windfall is only for several months. A deal could take the form of resuming gas exports to Germany via the one undamaged Nord Stream pipeline possibly together with oil and gas exports to Poland (and beyond) via the Druzhba and Yamal pipelines.

The resumption of Russian pipeline exports to Europe, even if only for the winter, would restore some of their pre-2022 complex mutual interdependence for raising the odds that the energy truce is respected. The EU will still survive the winter even without Russian pipeline imports, and Russia can continue funding its military operations even without pipeline exports to Europe, but Ukraine might not survive without relief from Russia’s systematic strikes against its energy infrastructure.

Accordingly, the EU could sever its imports from Russia if Russia violates the energy truce, while Russia could sever its exports to the EU if Ukraine does so instead. While skeptics might suspect that Russia has more to gain from violating the energy truce due to Ukraine’s increasingly desperate military-strategic situation, Russia has a greater interest in jointly building the new continental security architecture with European NATO (E-NATO), which it can’t do without a relative normalization of ties. All of this is sensible.

If an energy truce is agreed to on the condition of Russia resuming at least its Nord Stream exports to Europe, then the “snowdrop diplomacy” formula proposed here could be advanced, which might see the mutual drawdown of E-NATO forces from the Baltic States in parallel with Russian ones from Belarus. The US might then purchase Nord Stream from Russia as has been floated, and perhaps also the Belarusian parts of Druzhba and/or Yamal, for upholding this new order and facilitating a grand deal over Ukraine.

The resultant security architecture could have partial buffers in the Baltic States, Belarus, and Ukraine, while the western flank of the “cordon sanitaire” would have a US-backed Polish-led Intermarium counterbalance a German-dominated militarized EU. Poland would also still be the US’ LNG hub in Europe since the US would probably raise the price of the Russian pipeline gas under its control to keep its own gas competitive. This balance of interests is realistic and should thus be seriously considered.

By Ian Proud

In my latest conversation with Ambassador Chas Freeman, he describes what Ukraine is becoming, and what Europe will be left holding when the war ends. Ukraine will not be the keystone of a whole and free Europe. It will not be a buffer and a bridge between Russia and the rest of the continent. It will be a rump state: poorer, more corrupt, landlocked, unqualified for the EU, shut out of NATO, and dominated by western Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who will not accept defeat. Ukraine will be driven by a more virulent antagonism towards Russia than Britain, Poland and the Baltic States and feeling spurned by a Europe that egged it on to its destruction. Right now, there are no obvious upsides to Ukraine joining the EU and some restoration of relations with Russia may take a generation, if it happens at all.

In Freeman’s words, Ukraine will become “a cancer on both” Europe and Russia. I see no evidence of anyone in London or European capitals thinking about the monumental challenge of rehabilitating Ukraine after the war ends. The reason, I suspect, is that that would also require dialogue with Russia. Because the corrosiveness of Ukraine’s failed statehood is everyone’s problem.

Our conversation ranged more widely into Israel’s diplomatic escalation which has neutered Britain’s ability to engage with Palestinians through its diplomatic network. And, of course, to Iran, where no amount of huffing and puffing by Donal Trump will change the reality that he is failing badly and is trapped by virtue of his ego.

Across all three theatres, Ukraine, Palestine and Iran, the missing ingredient is diplomacy.

You can watch the conversation here:

By Andrew P. Napolitano, Consortium News, 8/7/26

The war in Iran is unlawful and unconstitutional, but in post-World War II America, it’s normal. 

Here’s the backstory.

When President Donald Trump decided to begin bombing Iran in June 2025, he did not state a coherent or lawful reason for doing so. His director of national intelligence and his own C.I.A. had publicly told him that Iran did not possess a nuclear weapon and had ceased building one in 2003.

His secretary of state told him that Iran and Israel had threatened each other, but he could not articulate how Iran imminently threatened the United States. Yet, since Israel planned to attack Iran, he wanted the U.S. to help Israel do so. This was not a lawful request as the U.S. has no treaty with Israel and, under treaties to which the U.S. is a party, the legal basis for all offensive wars can only be treaty compliance or prevention of an imminent attack.

When Trump addressed the nation, his helter-skelter rationale argued for replacing Iran’s government, destroying its civilian-use enriched uranium, destroying its ability to build a bomb it wasn’t building and neutralizing its offensive and defensive weaponry. None of these goals was lawful; nor was attacking a Minab school. There was no mention of an imminent attack on the U.S. or the economic effect of war on the vital international oil super-highway, the Strait of Hormuz.

No one in Trump’s inner circle registered disagreement, except his vice president and his director of counterterrorism. They told him there was no legal or constitutional basis for his war.

They were correct, but Trump had history on his side.

The Deadly Weakening Checks & Balances

With her brother on her back a war weary Korean girl passes a stalled M-26 tank in Haengju, Korea, June 9, 1951. (U.S. Army, Maj. R.V. Spencer)

For much of American history, presidents have steadily accumulated the power to wage war while Congress has gradually surrendered the constitutional authority that the Framers explicitly entrusted to it. This transformation has weakened constitutional checks and balances, expanded executive power beyond its constitutional limits, claimed millions of lives, cost trillions of dollars, and repeatedly drawn the United States into conflicts that had little or nothing to do with defending America.

The U.S. Constitution is remarkably clear on the question of war. Article I grants Congress — not the president — the power to declare war. The president, under Article II, wages war, but only after Congress has authorized it.

James Madison argued that the executive branch is the branch “most interested in war, and most prone to it,” which is precisely why the Constitution deliberately divided the war power.

The Framers believed that no single individual should possess the authority to plunge the nation into armed conflict, yet over the past eight decades, presidents of both political parties have steadily ignored these constitutional limits.

President Harry Truman committed hundreds of thousands of American troops to combat in Korea without obtaining a declaration of war from Congress because he said U.S. troops there constituted a “police action.”

The pattern only intensified during the Vietnam War. Although Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, it was based on a fraud and effectively delegated its congressional constitutional responsibility to the president. The result was years of escalating conflict that ultimately claimed the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese while achieving none of its stated objectives.

Post 9/11 Acceleration

U.S. Army tanks pose for a photo under the “Hands of Victory” in Baghdad, Iraq, Nov. 13, 2023. (U.S. Air Force, John L. Houghton, Jr., Public Domain)

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, fundamentally accelerated this trend. Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force and the Patriot Act — the former granting the president broad authority to pursue those responsible for the attacks, and the latter substantially impairing rights protected by the Fourth Amendment.

What was presented as a targeted war authorization evolved into legal justifications for military operations across multiple countries against groups that did not even exist in 2001.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq illustrate the costs of this expansive approach. The war in Afghanistan lasted two decades before ending with the return of the Taliban to power. Iraq was invaded based on fabricated or erroneous intelligence assessments regarding weapons of mass destruction.

The proper role of government — according to Thomas Jefferson, its only role — is to protect life, liberty and property, not to remake foreign societies through military force. Wars of choice generate unintended consequences, empower new enemies, create refugee crises and expand government power at home.

The economic and human consequences are equally profound. Massive defense expenditures have pushed the debt of the federal government to nearly $40 trillion. A government willing to kill millions and spend trillions on foreign wars while borrowing money to pay the interest on borrowed money will one day collapse of its own weight; as have all empires.

A genuinely constitutional foreign policy would look very different. Military force should be reserved for defending the United States against actual or truly imminent attacks, not speculative threats or ambitious nation-building projects, or favors for other countries. Congress should debate and vote openly before committing American forces to any combat.

Strong national defense does not require perpetual war. A capable military can deter aggression. Diplomacy, commerce and peaceful engagement generally serve American interests more effectively than military intervention.

George Washington’s warning against entangling foreign commitments and John Quincy Adams’s declaration that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy” remain relevant guides for a republic committed to liberty, rather than an empire committed to conquest. 

Of course, monsters abroad can follow you home.

The constitutional allocation of war powers exists not as a procedural rule but as a substantive safeguard for freedom itself. Every unnecessary war expands executive authority, enlarges government, consumes wealth, risks American lives without clear necessity and diminishes personal liberty.

The best protection against endless conflict is a less powerful presidency and a renewed commitment to the Constitution’s deliberate separation of powers and the principle that the United States should fight only when its own security imminently and genuinely requires it.

Is it any wonder that the U.S. is unwilling or unable to justify its recent killings of more than 150 Iranian school children and their teachers?

CORRECTIONS: C.I.A. assessment on Iranian nuclear program was in 2003, n0t 2005; the Iranian school struck by the U.S. is in Minab and not Tehran and is a co-ed school, not a girls school as an earlier version said.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, was the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel and hosts the podcast Judging Freedom. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit here. Published by permission of the author.

COPYRIGHT 2026 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO 

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

YouTube link here.

By Matt Bivens, Substack, 8/30/26

Part I. The humanitarian case demands urgent peace.
Part II. The nuclear war danger demands urgent peace.
Part III. The mindless growth and aggression of NATO, which provoked this war and threatens to widen it further, needs shut down in the service of urgent peace.

In the final days of World War II, top German Nazis were arrested and tried for crimes against humanity. But some — men like Reinhard Gehlen, who was Adolf Hitler’s intelligence chief — were rescued. With the Germans down, the victorious allies were about to turn upon each other. The CIA, thinking about “the next war” with the Soviet Union, coveted Nazi Germany’s abandoned spy and partisan networks behind Soviet lines, in particular those involving the bloody-minded nationalists of Ukraine.

So, instead of giving Hitler’s top spy the hangman’s noose or the firing squad, we set him up with a government salary and an expense account.

Western intelligence services were soon cooperating with legendary Ukrainian nationalists like Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed, both of whom had allied with Hitler’s armies. We have fascinating glimpses of this process, thanks in part to more than 8 million pages of U.S. government documents declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, passed into law by the U.S. Congress in 1998.

In their youths, Bandera and Lebed did time together for the assassination of a government official. The salute “slava Ukraini!,” or “Glory to Ukraine!”, was made famous by their defiant cries at their murder trial, and in later years would specifically come with a Heil Hitler!-inspired straight-arm salute and the ritual reply, “Heroiam slava!”, “Glory to the heroes!”

It’s one of the stranger aspects of modern life that a “Heil Hitler!” variant has ended up so normalized. People around the world will express disapproval of the Russian invasion and solidarity with the Ukrainian people by offering up this ritual greeting from a fascist organization hated across much of Ukraine itself — an organization best known for industrial-scale mass murder.

That would be the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Under the direction of leaders like Bandera and Lebed, OUN members engaged in the systematic killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. They did so at times independently of the occupying Nazi forces, at other times in collaboration with them. Either way, their goal was an ethnically pure Ukraine, free of Poles, Russians and Jews. As Bandera’s closest deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, put it in 1941, “I support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine.”

That same year, the OUN declared Ukrainian independence, in a document pledging to cooperate with Hitler.

Banners praising Hitler and Bandera were hoisted across Western Ukraine.

As it happens, Hitler did not like this idea. An independent Ukrainian state? Nein! To Hitler, Ukrainians were apparently just another species of untermenschen — Slavs — little better than Russians. Once the Nazi armies had successfully invaded, they promptly arrested Bandera and Stetsko, and forced Lebed into hiding.

Much is made today of this breech between Hitler and the OUN leaders. Fans of Bandera say: “See? He was just a patriot, fighting all of them at the same time.” Maybe so. But he was also a mass murderer, up to his bloody elbows in the Holocaust. Sometimes he and his men were mass murderers engaged in ethnic cleansing for Hitler, and sometimes for themselves.

Historian Yehuda Bauer, in The Death of the Shtetl, describes how two rival fascist Ukrainian groups, the Bulbovtsy and the Banderovtsy, “killed all the Jews they could find:”

A competition arose between the Bulbovtsy and units of the Bandera nationalists, who had also abandoned the Germans; they did so because they were disappointed by the German policy of not recognizing the right of the Ukrainians to self-government. Both groups were based in forests, and both now called themselves the Ukrainska Povstan’ska Armia (UPA). By 1942, there were 4,000 Bulbovtsy in northern Ukraine who fought against Soviet or quasi-Soviet partisans and killed all the Jews they could find. In late 1942, they began murdering Poles in local Polish villages. By March 1943, some 6,000 Ukrainians in German-controlled militias had abandoned their German masters and joined the two forest UPAs. This was the heyday of the murder of Jewish escapees in the forests and Jews hiding with Ukrainian and Polish peasants.

The Bulbovtsy took their name from a fictional character: Taras Bulba, the Ukrainian Cossack warrior and tragic hero dreamt up by Nikolai Gogol.

Gogol’s novel is about a Ukraine largely made up of war-crazed Cossacks, a military force on the edge of the Russian empire; and specifically about Taras Bulba himself, a man who rides to war against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 1800s, kills his own son rather than accept the son’s love of a Polish woman, watches his other son tortured to death by the Poles, and ultimately is himself burnt at the stake by the Poles. (There’s not a lot of historical love lost between Ukrainians and Poles.)

In firefights with Soviet partisans in mid-1943, [Bauer continues,] the Bulbovtsy sustained heavy losses and [were so weakened their remaining soldiers] were forced to join the Bandera units, the Banderovtsy. … The Banderovtsy worked the family lands during the daytime in the agricultural season and formed their units at night to roam the forests and attack opponents: Poles, Jews, pro-Soviet Ukrainians, and more moderate Ukrainians. If Jews escaping from ghettoes and shtetlach in these areas went into the forests, the Banderovtsy would kill them. … The Bulbovtsy and the Banderovtsy had killed many thousands of Jews — no one can say how many.

The OUN radicals were exceptionally enthusiastic about killing Poles. Lebed in 1943 advocated their mass extermination. Why kill all of the Poles on Ukrainian territory? The map of the world has changed a lot since those days. Territory Ukraine considers to be Ukrainian not so long ago belonged to Poland, right up until Hitler and Stalin divided that long-suffering nation between them as a pre-World War II snack.

As the Germans and Soviets fought to exhaustion in 1943, there was an analysis prevalent in Ukrainian nationalist circles that perhaps Poland would revive, and reassert control over places like Lviv. And so Lebed put forward his program “to cleanse the entire revolutionary territory (i.e., Ukraine) of the Polish population” — which was carried out viciously for the next two years.

Survivors of those grim days describe soldiers of the OUN’s military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA in the Ukrainian acronym), singing as they marched:

We slaughtered the Jews,
We’ll slaughter the Poles,
Old and young, every one,
We’ll slaughter the Poles,
We’ll build Ukraine …

“When the Bandera gangs seize a Jew, they consider it a prize catch,” wrote Moshe Maltz, a Holocaust survivor, in his diary. “They literally slash Jews to pieces with their machetes.

“Since there are hardly any Jews left to kill, the Bandera gangs have turned on the Poles. They are literally hacking Poles to pieces. Every day … you can see the bodies of Poles, with wires around their necks, floating down the River Bug.”

CIA: ‘You Did the Holocaust? We’d Love to Work With You!’

Many more horrible details could be offered, but for now consider just that none of it gave much pause to Western spy agencies.

The British MI6 for a time worked with Bandera, who was erratic but also more famous in Ukraine.

MI6 handlers described Bandera in a 1954 report as:

“a professional underground worker with a terrorist background and ruthless notions about the rules of the game … A bandit type if you like, with a burning patriotism, which provides an ethical background and a justification for his banditry. No better and no worse than others of his kind …”

That was how his British friends described him. (“Burning patriotism” provides the “ethical background” (?) for “banditry”. Bandera is “no worse than” those others involved in industrial-scale ethnic cleansing with whom MI6 or CIA might work — you know, “bandit-types,” when by “bandit” one means “race-based mass murderer”, “machétier of Jewish women and Polish children”, “monomaniac dedicated to an ethnically purified state”, etc.)

After Bandera was assassinated by the KGB in 1959, his deputy, Stetsko (he who favored “German methods of exterminating Jewry”), took over. Decades later, OUN chief Stetsko was honored with an Oval Office meeting with Ronald Reagan in 1983, to salute Ukraine’s struggle for freedom.

The CIA preferred Lebed over Bandera. True, the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps had warningly described Lebed as “a well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans.” But Lebed (unlike Bandera) at least talked about embracing the American way; and the CIA expressed admiration for his “cunning character” and his “Gestapo training” (the Nazis had literally sent Lebed to Gestapo school).

They moved him to New York and set him up in a CIA-backed publishing house. When U.S. immigration authorities moved to deport Lebed on grounds that they’d heard he was “one of the most important Bandera terrorists” and responsible for “the wholesale murder of Ukrainians, Poles and Jewish [sic],” the CIA overruled them. Instead, Lebed got U.S. citizenship.

Lebed died peacefully in the United States in 1998, at age 89, and is buried in New Jersey — having spent a lifetime churning out nationalist messaging the U.S. government delivered to Ukraine throughout the Cold War.

“The CIA … help[ed] [Ukrainian] nationalist veterans into positions of influence and authority, assisting their creation of semi-academic institutions and/or academic positions at established universities,” wrote the historian Per Anders Rudling.

“Lebed’s circle never condemned the crimes or the mass murders of the OUN, let alone admitted that they had taken place. On the contrary, it made denial, obfuscation, and white-washing of the wartime activities of the OUN and the UPA a central aspect of its intellectual activities.”

So, the CIA was helping some Ukrainian Nazi collaborators — men literally guilty of overseeing the Holocaust — to live comfortably in America, to rewrite history and in particular Ukrainian history, and to lead the academic discussions of the future.

And the CIA was helping other Ukrainian Nazi collaborators return to Ukraine, to keep killing. World War II was over, but fighting in Ukraine would go on for nearly a decade. Ukrainian partisans who hadn’t yet had enough violence were re-armed, re-trained, and dropped behind Soviet lines by the CIA.

Back in the 1950s, as today, the American justification for this expensive and immoral CIA-supported proxy war in Ukraine was “bleeding Russia, weakening Russia”, as a worthy goal in its own right.

Glory to the Heroes

Just a few years ago, there was much publicly expressed angst about the movement to rehabilitate Ukraine’s violent nationalists-fascists of the past, and the growing influence of Neo-Nazis in the present. When in 2016 Ukraine renamed the capital city’s main boulevard after Stepan Bandera, the leader of the World Jewish Congress objected publicly to this decision “to honor a man whose followers joined the German death squads in murdering the Jews of Ukraine during the Holocaust.” In 2018, a letter signed by 57 members of the U.S. House of Representatives complained about new Ukrainian laws “glorifying Nazi collaborators and making it a criminal offense to deny their ‘heroism’.”

Then came the Russian invasion. Suddenly, everyone in the West was offering up the Neo Nazi “Slava Ukraina” salute — which as Anne Applebaum lectured us in The New Republic, was once “controversial” but was now “adopted to a new context.” The Kremlin had stated one of its goals for the war was “de-Nazification,” so, we were told, to mention Ukraine’s Nazis would henceforth involve parroting “a Russian talking point.”

Actually, when it comes to the Neo Nazis of Ukraine, I would go further even than the Russians.

It’s not just that Ukraine has a gravely serious Neo-Nazi problem, one only made worse by the chaos and menace of recent years.

It’s that Ukraine has a gravely serious Neo-Nazi / CIA collaboration problem.

This is a World War II hangover which we’ve carried on unthinkingly straight through the Cold War and right up to the present day.

They aren’t just Ukraine’s Nazis, they’re ours.

Or at least the CIA’s.

And our government’s role in helping groups with overt Nazi ideologies and sympathies seize huge amounts of power in Ukraine is long past due for a major U.S. investigation.

Congress should convene major hearings, along the lines of those held after 9/11 or for the Iran-Contra scandal.

Again: 2 million young men have been killed or maimed, a country wrecked, the world economy damaged. We are nearer to nuclear war than ever before. Is this not worth investigating?

Or are we going to wait first for the inevitable blowback attack on America by Ukrainian Neo Nazis? After all, they will instantly hate us and channel their inner al-Qaeda once we inevitably “betray them” and try to end the war. (Bandera, Lebed and Hitler also all turned upon each other. It’s what they do.)

All relevant documentary evidence — all of it — should be declassified. The U.S. officials involved in Ukraine policy in these years, in the White House and CIA, should be subpoenaed to testify.

What would such an investigation expose?

Next time:
Part V: Nazis past and present