YouTube link here.
YouTube link to Redacted report here. This video was posted on 6/1/25.
Euronews, 6/1/25
An operation by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) on Sunday hit 41 miltary aircraft, among them various types of strategic bombers that were lined up at four airfields inside Russia.
“Enemy strategic bombers are burning en masse in Russia,” an official with the SBU said, adding that Ukraine was conducting “a large scale special operation aimed at destroying enemy bomber aircraft.”
The operation, dubbed Spiderweb (“Pavutyna”), targeted four airfields: Dyagilevo in Riazan region, Ivanovo in Ivanovo region, Belaya air base in Russia’s Irkutsk region, which is located in south-eastern Siberia over 4,000km east of the frontline, and Olenya air base in Russia’s Murmansk region, some 2,000km away from Ukraine’s border.
It included the clandestine smuggling of drones deep into Russian territory, hiding them and finally launching them remotely.
Russia’s Defence Ministry confirmed the attacks in a statement, as did the governors of Murmansk and Irkutsk. Murmansk Governor Andrei Chibis said “security measures have been strengthened.”
In March, Ukraine announced it had developed a new type of drone that can reach a range of up to 3,000 kilometres, but gave no details about its type or the size of its warhead.
Recent satellite images show various Russian strategic bombers at the four bases that were allegedly hit during the operation, including Tu-95, Tu-22M3, Tu-160 and A-50.
Tu-95, Tu-22 and Tu-160 are Russian heavy bombers regularly used by Moscow to launch missiles at Ukraine.
The Tu-22M3 is capable of carrying Kh-22 and Kh-32 cruise missiles, travelling at a speed of 4,000 km/h, exceeding Mach 4.
Tu-95 — the oldest among them — is a Soviet-era plane, originally used to carry nuclear bombs but since modified to launch cruise missiles.
A-50 is a radar detection aircraft, which can detect air defence systems, guided missiles, and coordinate targets for Russian fighter jets.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday that he was meeting with the Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs, as well as the General Staff and the SBU.
“We are doing everything to protect our independence, our state and our people,” Zelenskyy said.
He would be outlining “tasks for the near term” and will “define our positions ahead of the meeting in Istanbul on Monday,” Zelenskyy added.
Ukrainian and Russian officials are scheduled to meet in Istanbul on Monday for the second round of talks between the two sides.
Zelenskyy said Kyiv’s utmost priority is an unconditional ceasefire, followed by the release of prisoners and the return of Ukrainian children who Russia forcefully deported.
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Zelensky salutes drone attack on Russia: ‘Absolutely brilliant result’
The Hill, 6/1/25
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday touted the “absolutely brilliant result” of a large-scale drone attack on Russian strategic bombers.
“Head of the Security Service of Ukraine Vasyl Maliuk delivered a report regarding today’s operation. An absolutely brilliant result,” Zelensky said in an afternoon post on the social platform X.
“A result achieved solely by Ukraine. One year, six months, and nine days from the start of planning to effective execution. Our most long-range operation,” he continued.
A military official told The Associated Press that the drones hit 41 planes stationed at military airfields on Sunday afternoon, including A-50, Tu-95 and Tu-22M aircraft….
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Lavrov and Rubio discuss Ukrainian attacks on Russia
RT, 6/1/25
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the phone on Sunday. The two sides discussed the upcoming Moscow-Kiev talks in Istanbul and recent Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory.
Just a day before the talks scheduled in Türkiye, two bridges collapsed in Russia’s Bryansk and Kursk border regions, leading to at least seven deaths and dozens of injuries. The incidents were caused by sabotage, according to Russia’s Investigative Committee.
Later that same day, drones targeted military airfields in Murmansk Region in the country’s north, Ivanovo and Ryazan regions in western Russia, Irkutsk Region in Siberia, and Amur Region in the Far East.
According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, Rubio “expressed sincere condolences on the civilian casualties resulting from the bombings of railway infrastructure in the Bryansk and Kursk regions on June 1.”
Lavrov said the attacks would be thoroughly investigated and “the results will be published in the very near future.”
“The guilty parties will be identified and will inevitably face deserved punishment.”
Lavrov and Rubio also “exchanged views on various initiatives concerning the political resolution of the Ukrainian crisis,” including the upcoming Russia-Ukraine negotiations in Istanbul scheduled for June 2.
In response to the Ukrainian raids, Russia launched several retaliatory strikes targeting Ukraine’s defense industry facilities, as well as military assembly points and warehouses. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, most of the strikes were successfully repelled, with some resulting in material damage.
Ukrainian media claims that the strikes were part of what they called a “historic” operation codenamed Spiderweb. According to the reports, the strikes were prepared for more a year and a half and targeted Russia’s “strategic aviation.”
By Diana Johnstone, Consortium News, 5/27/25
Serbia is a small country which used to be a favorite of Western Allied powers like France and Britain for its heroic resistance to Austrian and German invasion in two world wars.
They liked it so much that in redrawing European boundaries at Versailles in 1918, they enlarged it into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes which later became Yugoslavia.
Some Serb leaders at the time felt that this was too much, but at the time, Croat and Slovene leaders were glad to leave the Austro-Hungarian Empire and join the winning side.
All this changed abruptly in the 1990s. Germany had been reunited and began to drop its humble post-World War II foreign policy. With German support and encouragement, the Yugoslav republics (states) of Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence, with the intention of joining the club of the rich: the European Union.
This shift enabled the two richest Yugoslav states to stop paying development funds for poorer regions such as Kosovo and to receive development funds from the EU. The debt crisis of the 1970s had strained relations among the republics.
But according to the secessionists, their sole motivation was to escape from “Serbian nationalism.” A great champion of this interpretation was the late Otto von Habsburg, an influential member of the European Parliament. As heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, dismantled as a result of World War I, he naturally held a personal grudge against Serbia.
As the Yugoslav disintegration grew confused and violent, Western media and government enthusiastically echoed the Habsburg line, not as such, but as defense of Western values and self-determination.
Western media put all the blame for everything on the Serbs, evoking the inevitable Hitler analogy to describe Serbia’s besieged leader, Slobodan Milosevic, as a “dictator” and to liken his failing efforts to keep Yugoslavia together with the Third Reich’s massive invasion of the rest of Europe.
“Heroic little Serbia” was transformed into the Pariah of the Western World.
A Nation in Limbo
The concrete result of the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia was to transform the “defensive” alliance into an aggressive force; to deliver the historic Serbian province of Kosovo to armed ethnic Albanians; and to build an enormous U.S. military base in the province.
But NATO nations framed it as conspiratorial to say that such were the aims of the NATO bombing. No, the official purpose was “the right to intervene” on grounds of human rights, to “save the Kosovars” from a “genocide” that was never a real possibility. That’s what everyone in the West has been told, over and over.
NATOland and “Western values” do not — not any longer — dominate the whole world. But Serbia is situated, geographically and psychologically, in the West.
Serbia was part of Yugoslavia, an independent, nonaligned socialist country, not part of the Soviet bloc. But Serbs have an historic friendship with Russia, as fellow Orthodox Christians, dating back to Serbia’s struggle to free itself from the Ottoman Empire. Serbs are in fact torn between, or attached to, both East and West.
They are in a perfect situation to be friends with everyone, which is what the current government in Belgrade of President Alexander Vucic is trying to do.
From its history and natural inclinations, Serbia should be a bridge between East and West.
Vucic with journalists during the 2018 European People’s Party Congress in Helsinki. (European People’s Party /Wikimedia Commons /CC BY 2.0)
Vucic was elected president of Serbia in 2017 and he and his Serbian Progressive Party have won a number of elections since by wide majorities. His economic development policies have made a bad situation better.
After Western companies took over Serbian industries only to shut them down, Vucic has welcomed Chinese investments which are reviving Serbian industrial production and mining. The economic growth rate accelerated to a comfortable 3.9 percent in 2024. Higher education for students who pass entrance exams is free, and Serbian universities enjoy high international ratings.
In contrast to its neighbors, Serbs are staying in their native land, while others are leaving. (Bosnia Herzegovina has lost half of its population to emigration, relatively prosperous Montenegro 24.4 percent, North Macedonia 31.6 percent and Serbia only 7 percent, indicating that life prospects there are relatively promising.)
Serbia’s relations with China have long been friendly and profitable. Vucic’s foreign policy tries to balance between East and West, but the rise in hostility between the EU and Russia makes this difficult.
But the same Western supremacists who destroyed the natural “bridge” function of Ukraine by insisting on its “NATO destiny” are working to subvert all potential bridges to Russia — distant Georgia, Moldova and nearby Serbia.
As an applicant to join the European Union, Serbia is kept under constant observation to see whether it is adapting to EU standards, economic and political. To satisfy Brussels, Vucic has supplied weapons to Ukraine but refuses to enforce sanctions against Russia, which provides Serbia with gas.
He has rejected EU demands to recognize the independence of Kosovo, as any Serbian leader must do to remain in office until tomorrow. But his domestic critics consider him not tough enough.
EU Parliament on Jan. 19, 2011, the day members approved a reform package, the EU-Serbia Stabilisation and Association Agreement, designed to move the country toward EU membership. (European Parliament/Flickr/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Vucic defied EU threats by flying to Moscow to attend the May 9 ceremonies celebrating the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany’s war of conquest. Otherwise, he would have been hotly condemned at home for slavish subservience to the EU. Instead, his enemies can cry “Putin’s puppet.”
Josip Tito’s policy of nonalignment was a great success and Vucic appears to emulate the former Yugoslavian leader’s approach. But his balancing act exposes him to criticism from both sides.
Protests Against…Whatever
Strangely, for months Serbia has been rocked by massive student protests and blockades, not over foreign policy or over any specific government policies, but primarily in response to tragic events with no obvious political significance.
In Belgrade on May 3, 2023, a 13-year-old boy armed with pistols and Molotov cocktails attacked his school, killing eight children and a security guard. The under-age shooter was eventually sent to a psychiatric hospital and the parents were charged.
On the evening of the very next day a 20-year-old man drove through two villages in central Serbia firing an automatic assault rifle, killing nine people and wounding 12 others. He fled but was caught and eventually sentenced to 20 years.
This was shocking in a country where gun ownership is high but shooting incidents rare. Large protest demonstrations were held in major cities for several months. Opposition leaders created a protest movement “Serbia Against Violence” which blamed Vucic for creating “an atmosphere” responsible for the killings.
This is surely an exaggeration. In fact, police repression in Serbia is relatively mild, and Vucic can hardly be blamed for the mood of violence that prevails in the world today. Former Prime Minister Ana Brnabic also risked exaggeration by claiming that the protests were “fueled by foreign intelligence services.”
Candidates for “Serbia Against Violence” won 24 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections on Dec. 17, 2023, just half the 48 percent won by the coalition supported by Vucic.
Serbia Against Violence, or SPN, coalition representatives in front of the National Assembly of Serbia on Nov. 3, 2023. (Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 3.0)
In February 2024, a delegation headed by Marinika Tepic of “Serbia Against Violence” and Radomir Lazovic of the “Serbian Green-Left Front” went to Strasbourg to complain to the European Parliament that the elections had been stolen.
Enjoying minimal legislative power, the European Parliament asserts itself mainly by adopting virtuous resolutions condemning human rights violations in foreign countries on the basis of often unverified complaints.
As was to be expected, by an overwhelming vote of 461 to 52 the European Parliament promptly adopted a strong resolution calling for an international investigation into “election irregularities” and threatening to stop EU funding. The main complaint was that by campaigning, President Vucic had unfairly influenced voters.
Marinika Tepic declared to Politico that “if something doesn’t change now, we will completely slide into a dictatorship.”
EU’s Missionary Work
Protests against recognizing the December 2023 elections reached such proportions that many feared a replay of the 2014 Maidan demonstrations that led to war in Ukraine.
Pavle Cicvaric, who had learned organizing skills in numerous programs and workshops funded by Western foundations, led the student protests in Belgrade. The young leader’s parents are both deeply involved in the work of NGOs.
His mother, Dr. Jelena Žunic Cicvaric, is project coordinator of the NGO “Regional EU Resource Center for Civil Society in Serbia,” a key channel for the redistribution of European Union funds, allocated only to those actively working on raising awareness of “European values.”
His father, Radovan Cicvaric, a long-time politician campaigning for Euro-integration, is also promoting “European values” as director of the NGO Užice Center for Child Rights (UCPD) founded in 1998.
While the UCPD focuses on children, another influential NGO, the Belgrade Open School (BOS), founded in 1993, sponsors programs for students and young professionals, including “training of social change agents.”
Both are part of the “Youth Umbrella Organization of Serbia” which receives significant funds from international donors such as USAID, the Soros’ Open Society Foundation, and various European Union programs.
They organize workshops, training sessions, and projects aimed at strengthening the capacities of local NGOs and promoting European values. “Transition” countries applying for EU membership must listen to instructions on how to be worthy Europeans.
This educational task is undertaken by the European Fund for the Balkans (EFB), a joint initiative of European foundations that envisions, runs and supports initiatives aimed at strengthening democracy and fostering European integration.
Significantly, the EFB is sponsoring a “Joint History Project” to produce and spread a unified version of regional history, with the kind support of the German Foreign Office.
The Balkan Trust for Democracy (BTD) is a foundation based in Belgrade. It was founded in March 2003 by the German Marshall Fund, USAID, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Other donors include the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Tipping Point Foundation, Robert Bosch Foundation, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and the foreign affairs ministries of Denmark and Greece. The BTD supports grant donation, policy dialogue, and leadership development.
If you want to be a leader, you know where to go.
It is hard to imagine that these Western-financed organizations have not contributed to the zeal and skill of Serbian student protesters.
A Deadly Collapse
Novi Sad is Serbia’s second-largest city, a major stop on the new high speed railway route between Belgrade and Budapest being rebuilt with Chinese aid.
As part of this project, Novi Sad’s 60-year old modernistic railroad station was recently renovated, leaving in place a long concrete canopy across its entrance side. On the morning of Nov. 1, 2024, the concrete canopy suddenly collapsed, killing a total of 16 people.
The Serbian government declared a nation-wide day of mourning, a number of officials resigned, including the Serbian construction minister and the mayor of Novi Sad. Investigations of the causes are continuing.
Portion of the canopy of the main railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia, that collapsed onto people walking and sitting underneath on Nov. 1, 2024. (Mishyac /Wikimedia Commons/ CC0)
For the student activists, the collapse was seen as clear proof of corruption, not only in construction work on the station but throughout society. Declaring that what happened in Novi Sad is proof that Serbia is overwhelmed by crime, violence, corruption and despair, the students have given themselves the task of changing this “unbearable social reality” to build a new Serbia.
An apparently leaderless movement organizes student plenums which privately decide by consensus what to do next. They have shut down university faculties and schools, preventing students from attending classes for months.
Students who want to attend classes are treated like traitors. Even hospitals have been blockaded. It has been observed that the activist students tend to come from well-to-do families and are not joined by working class youth. It is an elite revolt calling for equality.
Students blocking traffic are protected by police. The government clearly suspects provocation and has been avoiding the sort of violent repression used by the French government of Emmanuel Macron to put down the Yellow Vests movement.
Transition to What?
March during the general strike in Belgrade on Jan, 24, 2025. The banner in the foreground says “Only Student Save the Serbs,” a play on the national slogan “Only Unity Saves the Serbs.” (SergioOren / Wikimedia Commons /CC BY 4.0)
Serbian students under 26 were not born when NATO bombed Serbia.
Serbian youth has grown up torn between the scars of the NATO bombing and the persistent dominant Western view of Serbs as the guilty party for the destruction of Yugoslavia. No wonder that this creates some confusion.
It is understandable that a portion of middle class Serbian, urban youth find it unbearable to be excluded from “the West” by Serbia’s imposed Pariah status.
Youth can be very conformist in their rebelliousness, seeking to join together in defiance of their elders. However confused the West may be, it still excels most in selling itself as something marvelous.
A significant way it does this is through its massive web of non-governmental organizations.
In April, EU auditors issued a report noting a “lack of transparency” in granting some 4.8 billion euros to some 5,000 NGOs during the 2021-2023 period, in addition to Member State grants of some 2.6 billion euros to around 7,500 NGOs from EU funding sources.
It is not clear which countries benefited, but Marta Kos, the Slovenian EU commissioner for enlargement, has mentioned Serbia.
Kos during confirmation hearings as European commissioner for enlargement, Nov. 7, 2024. (CC-BY-4.0: © European Union 2024– Source: EP)
In a March 28 interview with Slovenian RTV, Kos rejected as “unacceptable” suggestions by President Vucic that EU-funded NGOs are encouraging student protests aimed to overthrow him. Kos nevertheless noted that she was “much more in contact with the NGOs I met in Brussels than with the Serbian government or its president.”
She said:
“Many NGOs in Serbia would not survive without our support, and it is precisely because of the exceptional importance of NGOs that I have decided to allocate an additional €16 million to them for the period from this year until the end of 2027.”
“Without the participation of civil society, there can be no enlargement process,” Kos said, adding that she trusts the Serbian people to “guide their politicians so that Serbia can become a member of the European Union.” Kos feels qualified to provide guidance.
Aleksander Vulin is a prominent Socialist who has held various ministerial posts. But no more. “I hope that Mr. Vulin will not be a member of the new government, because those who act in an anti-European manner cannot lead Serbia into the EU,” said Kos. She got her way.
Among his sins, Vulin favors joining BRICS and had called for a law revealing NGO financing by foreign governments. (When Georgia adopted such a law, EU leaders mobilized to stop it, but failed.)
On the other hand, Vucic defied dire threats by the EU against daring to attend the May 9 celebrations of the Allied Victory over Nazi Germany. He flew around Baltic States blocking his flight and showed up in Moscow, along with the courageous Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico.
Vucic in Moscow on May 9, on his way to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Ramil Sitdikov, RIA Novosti, Presidet of Russia)
Such is the Vucic balancing act. As a result, Vucic is denounced as “pro-Putin” in Brussels while his domestic adversaries denounce him for weakly giving in to EU demands.
The student protesters are still more ambiguous.
They clearly don’t want to give credence to government accusations that they are manipulated by EU NGOs. The EU flag has been tacitly banned from the huge student demonstrations, with only Serbian flags being waved, as if to demonstrate national independence.
However, this spring a contingent of student protesters created a spectacle by setting out to take their grievances to EU institutions, ostensibly on bicycles. They were warmly welcomed as they complained that everything in Serbia was absolutely awful.
On May 6, Serbia’s leading newspaper Politika reported that visiting Serbian blockaders in the European Parliament gallery listened meekly as they were lectured by a Croatian nationalist, Steven Nikola Bartulica, who told them that “European values mean also a confession of guilt for everything Serbia did to Croatia.”
(In the summer of 1995, Croatia expelled about 200,000 Serbs from their homes in the Krajina region of Croatia, in the largest ethnic cleansing of the Yugoslav wars.)
Bartulica claimed Serbia was not a European-style liberal democracy and would not be normalized until it accepted paying reparations to Croatia.
Members of the European Parliament expressed satisfaction that the students had chosen “Europe” against Russia, and called for overthrowing Vucic and Fico for having gone to Moscow.
At home, however, the protest demonstrations seem to be losing momentum, to the extent that students have stopped demanding everything! now! and are retreating to the demand for elections.
Boosted by his trip to Moscow, where his delegation held serious talks with President Vladimir Putin, Vucic held a patriotic rally in the city of Nis where he declared that the students’ demands are over and do not interest him any more. He dismissed the blockaders as a very loud minority of mobbing bullies terrorizing the majority of citizens who want peace, work and unity.
By suddenly demanding snap elections, he assumed that they were simply seeking another opportunity for violent outbursts, since elections will always be declared stolen by the opposition. Elections will be held normally in a year or so, he said.
On May 22, Belgrade received a visit from Kaja Kallas, an Estonian chosen by Ursula von der Leyen to be high representative of the EU for foreign affairs. Having no diplomatic experience, Kallas’ most visible qualifications are being a young woman with an unsurpassed hatred of Russia.
Kallas, center, EU high representative and vice president of the European Commission, at a NATO meeting in Brussels on April 4. (NATO /Flickr/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
While in Belgrade, the EU’s top diplomat met, in a strange twist, with the president and the prime minister to tell them what to do. But she met with representatives of student protesters to listen to what they had to say.
She praised her meetings with “civil society” and youth activists. “I heard their call and their aspirations – for fairness, for accountability so that Serbia can fulfill its full potential,” she said. “Their energy is needed to find a way forward.”
In contrast, Kallas scolded Vucic for meeting Putin in Moscow. Serbia’s future acceptance into the EU, she stressed, depends on the country’s “strategic choice” between East and West.
Putin, by contrast, accepts Vucic’s balancing act and has no objection to Serbia joining the EU. Variety is consistent with a multipolar world. But for the West, “you are with us or against us.” Between East and West, there are no bridges allowed.
Perplexity & Fear
In Belgrade, some people think the protests are petering out. Perhaps, but in the past they have died down only to revive over some incident. Since the causes are unclear, so are the solutions.
The difficulty, Dragan Pavlovic, a Serbian commentator, told me is that the protests are expressed in “very general demands for a ‘better life,’ which obviously does not offer any concrete basis for understanding what is essentially wanted or what should be done to calm the protests.” Such demands can go on forever.
“It is probably an orchestrated, mass hysteria, caused by the nuclear threat, the genocide in Gaza, the prolongation of the crisis in Kosovo and the actions of non-governmental organizations,” he suggests.
Journalist and writer Mara Knezevic Kern considers it impossible to understand these incredible events. “I do not believe that it is possible to describe this new variant of an attack on the state — it has not happened anywhere else yet.” In the 1990s, Yugoslavia served as an experimental laboratory for regime change. Many fear that this is happening again, in Serbia.
Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
By Clara Weiss, World Socialist Website, 9/13/24
Moss Robeson is a young independent researcher in New York City who has run a prominent blog, “Bandera Lobby,” about the history and contemporary political role of the movement associated with the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. He has documented the ties of both the Republican and Democratic parties to the Ukrainian Banderites and neo-Nazis and their role in the Ukrainian state apparatus and military. The WSWS recently spoke with him about his research.
Clara Weiss: Your blog, “Bandera Lobby,” has been covering extensively the role of neo-Nazis within the Ukrainian state and armies, as well as their ties to the political establishment in the US and other NATO countries and the Ukrainian far right. What motivated you to initiate this blog and conduct this research?
Moss Robeson: I first got interested in this issue of Ukrainian Nazis back in 2014. That eventually led me down this rabbit hole, which became more of a historical research project about the history of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in the United States. It wasn’t until 2019 that I realized that the OUN and, in particular the Banderite faction, the OUN-B, still exists.
Funny enough, I was living in New Paltz, New York, and as it turned out, the oldest Bandera monument in the world that I know of was located on the other side of the mountains outside my window in Ellenville, New York, which is where they have their main summer camp in the United States. That realization led me to go from being an amateur historian to an amateur journalist overnight. They largely use the same front groups, so having researched this network as it existed during the Cold War it was pretty simple to connect the dots to what is going on today.
I started the blog in 2020. Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s biography of Bandera which came out in 2014 does mention that the OUN-B still exists. But given the fact that no one else was covering this I felt an obligation that I couldn’t let go of it once I started writing about it. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I’ve started to pay more attention to the neo-Nazis in Ukraine, especially the Azov movement.
I don’t have any professional training as a historian, journalist or academic. It’s kind of scandalous that I should be the person doing this. But journalists will not touch the subject. There has been a lot of groundbreaking work on the history of the OUN and their role in the Holocaust in the past decade or so. A lot of the leading historians on that issue Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, John-Paul Himka and Per Anders Rudling, all discovered that the OUN still exists, if only because when they published their research, these Banderites came after them. To those who doubt this is real and think that this is some kind of conspiracy theory cooked up in the Kremlin—there are a number of top historians who can testify to the fact that the OUN-B still exists and remains a force to be reckoned with.
CW: When Rossoliński-Liebe tried to present his biography in Ukraine back in 2012, he was attacked by the OUN and had to hold his event, barricaded behind the German embassy. To his credit, he still publicly speaks about the crimes of Bandera. However, I think what we are confronted with now is that this layer of academics, including many who have done very important work, have adapted themselves to the war propaganda. That explains your own position.
MR: Yes, I don’t have a job to lose. I think they’re all to some extent concerned about being labeled as responsible for giving validity to Russian propaganda. John-Paul Himka’s book on the OUN and the Holocaust, the first scholarly book of its kind, came out in 2021, just a few months before the invasion, which is really awkward timing. And Rossoliński-Liebe’s book came out in 2014. The ones who were outside the German embassy in 2012 when he presented his book were from the Svoboda party, a straight-up neo-fascist party with its fair share of neo-Nazis.
I came across some evidence that the international OUN-B played a role in mobilizing Ukrainian nationalists against Rossoliński-Liebe that year. In Germany too they tried to organize a boycott. They had an international OUN-B conference in Munich that year and organized a new umbrella organization, the Association of Ukrainian Organizations in Germany. I’m sure this was high up on their agenda—to put pressure on Rossoliński-Liebe. In 2012, their “commandment” of the year (from the OUN’s “Decalogue of Ukrainian Nationalists”) was to “Remember the great days of our struggle for liberation.” This meant to fight for “historical truth” but really to repress it. In Sweden, they wrote letters to Per Anders Rudling’s university [Lund University], accusing him of inciting hatred against Ukrainians. That came from the Canadian Conference in Support of Ukraine, which is literally a coalition of OUN-B front groups in Canada. Also, in 2012, Himka was disinvited from a conference by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter in Canada. The chairman of this organization is a Ukrainian-Canadian philanthropist, James Temerty, who personally disinvited Himka after the Ukrainian nationalists pressured him to do so. They’ve waged a war on this small group of historians doing this important work, and I think it’s had a chilling effect.
CW: I agree that there is fear of the fascists. But it is not only that. The New York Times now regularly cites Ukrainian neo-Nazis as “sources of information.” If it was just a bunch of Nazis going after you as a historian, that’s one thing, but this is the official line at this point. But this only makes it all the more important to speak up. You cannot oppose this war or the Putin regime from a principled standpoint without an understanding of that history. We have been opponents of the Russian invasion from the beginning, and we completely reject the lie that Putin is supposedly fighting against neo-Nazis in Ukraine. There’s no way to oppose this war or the Putin regime, for that matter, if you celebrate as heroes people who are actually mass murderers. So it’s a very troubling tendency among historians. I’m convinced that if historians would actually speak up and turn to the public to educate it, they would find an audience.
MR: I spoke at a conference in Berlin last year that was organized by Junge Welt, and we had hoped to get one of these historians or someone else of their caliber for the first presentation. We could not find anybody, so I had to do it myself. It was fine, but I am not a historian. It would have been a lot more powerful if we had had a credentialed scholar.
CW: Can you speak more about the glorification of Bandera in the US? How does it play into the way the war in Ukraine is being covered?
MR: It is ironic that, historically, the CIA did not want to work with Bandera. At first they chose to work with this faction of Banderites who had abandoned Bandera after the war and claimed to have been “reformed” and “seen the light of Western democracy” and so forth. In the 1950s the CIA engineered a coup within the OUN-B. By the late 1950s, they had had some success in marginalizing Bandera. Then, the KGB assassinated him to make it look like a suicide, but they messed up and instead turned him into this martyr. On the other hand, while they found Bandera troublesome and internally labeled him a fascist, the CIA whitewashed the OUN and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) to justify its collaboration with “former” Banderites. So, of course, he and his legacy benefitted from that. By the end of the Cold War, the glorification of Bandera was really normalized in the Ukrainian diaspora.
The OUN-B itself took over much of the organized Ukrainian diaspora. For example, at the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America they staged a coup in 1980, just before the Reagan administration came in. That’s when I think the glorification of Bandera in the US probably reached its peak. In 1981, Yaroslav Stetsko, at that time the leader of the OUN-B, was invited to come to Washington to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the so-called renewal of Ukrainian statehood on June 30, 1941, when Stetsko himself declared this pro-Nazi government in Western Ukraine. After that, the OUN-B spearheaded a massive series of pogroms in Western Ukraine. A Senator, Alfonse D’Amato from New York, sponsored a resolution calling on the United States to officially recognize this anniversary. Stetsko and his wife, Slava Stetsko, were welcomed to Capitol Hill. Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House at the time, was there with them. They had more allies among the Republicans, but there was a bipartisan group that welcomed them to Washington D.C. In 1982, there was an anniversary at Capitol Hill to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (although it was really created in 1943). And then in 1983, to celebrate the 25th annual Captive Nations’ Week, the Stetskos once again came back to Washington to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. For that, Stetsko got to shake hands with Ronald Reagan, George Bush and the UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. This was a huge PR victory for them. The normalization of this [in the US] was a very important prerequisite for the normalization of neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
I’d like to make a distinction between the Banderites and Ukrainian Nationalists more generally and the hard-core neo-Nazis in Ukraine. For example, the Banderites tend to come from Western Ukraine, and the Azov movement comes from Kharkiv and consists largely of Russian speakers. While the Banderites are Christian nationalists, Azov has a lot of neo-Pagans. A big part of their Pagan beliefs is that Ukraine is the real Aryan homeland. But when the Nazis are put on the spot, they say, “Oh, we’re just Nationalists.” The Banderites won that fight for them. To glorify the Nazi collaborators from the OUN and UPA was normalized so the Nazis in a way stand on the shoulders of the Banderites. The OUN-B itself, their most important contribution to the ongoing conflict was ideological, whereas the neo-Nazis play very important roles in the military. The Banderites aren’t on the front lines of the real war, but they’re on the front lines of the memory war/information war. They infiltrated, in particular, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, infiltrated the Ukrainian Ministry of Education, and they took over the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). They have a very specific agenda, and they’re kind of doing their own thing, whereas Azov is doing its own thing. But you probably couldn’t have one without the other.
I see 2014 as ushering in an era of what you might call the “Banderization of Ukraine” and 2022, contrary to what Putin said about “de-Nazifying Ukraine,” was the start of the Nazification of Ukraine. Azov and Bandera reached a point where you cannot question their status as heroes of Ukraine.
CW: Can you be more specific about the role that the Banderites and neo-Nazis are now playing in the Ukrainian state apparatus?
MR: I don’t think Ukraine is a Nazi state, but I do think that looking back, it will be clear that 2022 was the start of this process or at least a critical stage. The Nazis have reached really important roles in the military. A lot of the most elite units are neo-Nazi units or completely infested with these individuals. The OUN-B are mostly memory warriors. Since 2019, the OUN-B spearheaded the “Capitulation Resistance movement,” which was just one group of the “No capitulation movement” led by Azov. But the “Capitulation Resistance movement” was essentially an OUN-B front. One of its leaders, Andriy Yusov, is now a spokesperson for the chief of Ukraine’s military intelligence, Kirill Budanov. There’s actually a video of Yusov, the day of the Odessa Massacre in 2014, giving orders to people to march on the anti-Maidan camp.
There’s something called “UNITED 24 media,” which was created by the Ministry of Digital Transformation. The head of that ministry is Mykhailo Fedorov, who’s a very important person in Zelensky’s inner circle. They made a video about the military’s “top five super units”—three of them were from Azov, and one of the others was the “Da Vinci Wolves,” which is now closely linked to another splinter group from Azov, “Honor.” That’s coming from the Ukrainian government itself, that the Nazis are the elite of the military. That will obviously have consequences. People will often point to the fact that the Nazis and Azov, in particular, don’t do well in elections. I think that could change when and if Ukraine ever does have an election again. This war is the best thing that’s ever happened to the Nazis in Ukraine, for sure.
CW: Azov already ran summer camps for children before the war began. I don’t think that you can really discuss the problem of Ukrainian fascism outside the question of the crimes of Stalinism which have led to an immense disorientation in the working class. At the same time, I certainly don’t think that the working class is the principal base of the Nazis. Our Comrade Bogdan Syrotiuk, who is now imprisoned, wrote a very interesting article about how the OUN terrorized the Ukrainian civilian population in the civil war that followed the defeat of the Nazis in 1945. They went after everyone they considered their political enemy, and they’re doing the same thing today. There’s also a parallel here to what is happening internationally: This promotion of fascism is coming from the top. We’re not talking about an organic movement of Brownshirts from below. They’re being armed with NATO weapons and promoted at the highest level of the government. And that is extremely dangerous.
MR: Neo-Nazis around the world will, of course, benefit from the normalization of Azov’s Nazi symbols. I remember there was a video released by the Ron DeSantis campaign where there was a Sonnenrad [Sun Wheel] spinning in the background. There was rightfully outrage about that, but what do you expect if we’re arming units in Ukraine that use the same symbol? It’s going to blow back on us. I know there are some connections between American and Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Maybe not as much as people feared there would be. But in the long term, they’ll all benefit from this, for sure.
CW: Can you speak about the ties of the Democratic Party to these tendencies?
MR: During the DNC, the “United ethnic women for Harris,” a group within the DNC, had a party at this Ukrainian Cultural Center in Chicago which at least used to have a Bandera portrait in the conference room. In the Illinois division of that group, the Banderites play a very important role. Their leader in Chicago, Pavlo Bandriwsky, is the local vice president for the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, and he’s responsible for government relations. In January 2023, Antony Blinken paid a visit to the Ukrainian community in Chicago at this same Cultural Center, and there’s a picture where he’s sitting right next to Bandriwsky, whose code name in the OUN-B is allegedly “The Strategist.” In any case, there’s no doubt that he’s an important OUN-B member in the United States.
Historically, the Ukrainian nationalists were much more closely linked to the Republican Party. But they’ve long had allies in the Democratic Party as well. For example, the Levin family dynasty in Michigan. There was Andy Levin, until recently a congressman, and so was his father, Sandy Levin, and Carl Levin, who was in the Senate. They’ve all had close relationships with the Banderites, personal friendships. Andy Levin, the youngest, around the time that Russia invaded Ukraine, said that Borys Potapenko taught him everything he knows about Ukraine. Well, Potapenko is literally the head of the international coordinating body of OUN-B front groups.
I think the ties with the Republican Party are probably still more direct. In 2020, there was a Ukrainian Americans for Biden, affiliated with the DNC, and there was a Ukrainians for Trump, affiliated with the RNC. Ukrainian Americans for Biden had at least two or three Banderites involved. One of the advisers was a very important OUN-B member, Askold Lozynskyj, who engineered this coup that the Banderites did of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America in 1980. On the other hand, Ukrainians for Trump was essentially an OUN-B front. The group behind it was called the Suburban Council for Voters in Illinois, which was tied to the hip of the local branch of an OUN-B front group. The Banderites are split—some vote Republican, some Democrat—but they tend to feel more at home in the Republican Party.
CW: The Democrats are not a fascist party, but they’re playing a critical role in legitimizing the fascists, both in the United States and in Ukraine. In the US, the legitimization of Ukrainian fascism has been historically closely linked to the rehabilitation of fascism and fascist conceptions more broadly. As you noted, the 1980s were a turning point. That was also when the “Holodomor,” a narrative of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, was accepted. At the same time, during the Historikerstreit in Germany, Ernst Nolte sought to justify the crimes of the Nazi regime.
MR: The Banderites have played a very important role in pushing this narrative of the Holodomor, not just as a genocide, but one that was worse than the Holocaust. They push that it had 7-10 million if not more victims. Stefan Romaniw, who just died this summer in Australia, was the leader of the OUN-B worldwide, from 2009 to 2022, and since the mid-2000s he was the international coordinator for Holodomor awareness for the Ukrainian World Congress. In that capacity, he worked very closely with the Yushchenko government and the foreign ministry and security services of Ukraine to push this propaganda. That’s another example of their role on the front lines of the memory wars.
CW: This raises the question of the strategy pursued by the Ukrainian government and the US in the war against Russia. They advocate now, as they did in the Cold War, the carve-up of the former Soviet Union. Russia today is of course not the Soviet Union any more, but there is a continuity in terms of the objectives being pursued by the imperialist powers and the fascists. In a recent piece on your blog about the campaign to “decolonize Russia”—a buzzword among academics—you document how the dismemberment of Russia has been central to the plans of the Ukrainian far right for a “Greater Ukraine.” Can you speak more about this?
MR: The Banderites tend not to be as open about their ambitions for a greater Ukraine as they are about breaking up Russia. But, of course, they hope that this would be to the benefit of Ukraine expanding its territory. The Banderites have always co-opted the language of decolonization and anti-imperialism when they talk about this. I mentioned earlier that they had this organization, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), which was created in 1946. I’d like to quote the description of this from Scott and John Lee Anderson from Inside the League, their book about the World Anti-Communist League. They described it as “the largest and most important umbrella for former Nazi collaborators in the world.” It had its roots in 1943 in a conference in Ukraine, but when the OUN-B had its first conference in 1941 they already outlined this whole vision, including what became the slogan of the ABN, “Freedom for the nation and individual”—sounds nice, but … It’s been alleged that Alfred Rosenberg, an ideologue of Nazi Germany and the head of the Reich Ministry for Occupied Territories, played a role in this conference. I’m not so sure about that, but an official from his Ministry, Gerhard Von Mende, did play an important role in the expansion of the ABN. By 1950, there were components of the ABN which stemmed from the so-called national committees that were set up within Alfred Rosenberg’s ministry. Rosenberg wasn’t a fan of the OUN, but they essentially had the same vision of breaking up Russia, and the Banderites have never let go of this extreme dream.
You could say that the grandfather of this vision was Mykola Mikhnovsky, who also coined the slogan “Ukraine for Ukrainians.” So this idea of expanding Ukraine went hand in hand with purging it of Poles and Jews and others. Today, a lot of the contemporary leaders of the OUN-B network in the Ukrainian diaspora are maybe 70 years old and a lot of them cut their teeth politically in an organization called the “Ukrainian Student Association of Mikhnovsky.” That’s one way in which they helped keep alive this fascistic fantasy of theirs. When Yaroslav Stetsko died, they had on paper a government-in-exile, stemming from this declaration he had made in 1941. Stetsko’s successor as the head of this “Ukrainian state board” was a guy from Michigan, Bohdan Fedorak, a mentor to Borys Potapenko. Fedorak had to resign from the Ukrainians for Bush campaign after it came out that he was an important OUN-B member. He himself wrote in the 1990s about this “Greater Ukraine” project.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, one of the priorities for the OUN has been to re-activate the ABN, which was dissolved in 1996. They recreated it as the Anti-Imperial Bloc of Nations. Through this project, they have been much more explicit about the goal of breaking up Russia and in the process potentially expanding Ukraine’s borders. The idea of Greater Ukraine is so improbable that they don’t talk about it so much, but there has been a broader movement of promoting this goal of breaking up Russia, and the Banderites have been quite involved in that. There’s something called the “Post-Russia Forum.” One of the coordinators of that is from an organization called “Free Idel-Ural,” this landlocked region in Russia. The “Free Idel-Ural” organization has ties to the OUN-B which I’ve written about. The “Idel Ural” committee within the ABN was an example of a group that stemmed from Alfred Rosenberg’s ministry. So there is a straight line you can draw from this idea back to Nazi Germany. That shared vision is one of the reasons why the Banderites wanted to fight alongside the Nazis.
CW: The NATO-backed Russian oppositionist Ilya Ponomaryov has also been involved in that Forum. They have a map of a broken-up Russia on their website.
MR: Yes. Alongside these Russian units fighting for Ukraine, there’s also a lesser known unit called the “Siberian Battalion,” which allegedly has taken in a bunch of anarchists. The OUN-B has done some fundraising for that unit. They are trying to support that project which seems to be overseen by the Ukrainian military intelligence. The Ukrainian military intelligence has its own international legion. That includes a lot of these far-right units that were doing these incursions into Russia, and Budanov, of course, had that map of a partitioned Russia [hanging in his office]. It seems clear to me that he is the one at the top of this project. If I’m not mistaken, Budanov gave his first interview when he became intelligence chief to an outfit of OUN-B members. There are various signs to me that the OUN-B has a relationship with Budanov’s office, which seems to be the most involved in pushing these maximalist goals about breaking up Russia.
CW: You have endorsed the campaign to free our Comrade Bogdan Syrotiuk, noting on Twitter/X, that for his views “you get canceled” in the US, “but at least I don’t have to worry about the FBI and Nazis breaking down my door…!” How do you view the attack on free speech and the political climate in the US, especially since the beginning of the war in Ukraine?
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MR: I personally have no fear that I’m going to be jailed or assaulted by Ukrainian nationalists. I do worry about the future if the situation in Ukraine deteriorates, and history starts to repeat itself and the Nazis end up fleeing to America. If we have a bunch of Azov guys relocating to the US, I would be a lot more scared. We’re seeing the beginning of a new McCarthy era on this subject. The second “red scare” was largely triggered by this fearmongering over the “loss of China,” and the “loss of Ukraine” could spark a similar hysteria. The worse the situation is for Ukraine once the war ends, the greater the witch-hunt will be to scapegoat people allegedly responsible in the US. Ukrainian nationalists might go after people like us, accuse us of being Russian propagandists. Maybe the US government might even start to crack down on us as Russian propagandists. But I think it’s much less serious than the repression of free speech when it comes to opposing the genocide in Gaza. Maybe one day there will be more of a parity, but I feel more comfortable speaking about the climate around Ukraine.
CW: I wouldn’t put it that way. The repression over Gaza has been more overt because the political and ideological confusion over Ukraine has been so intense. With the invasion of Ukraine, the Putin regime made a tremendous gift to the imperialist powers. They had provoked it, they wanted it, and then it created a lot of confusion, certainly in Ukraine and Russia, but also in the US and Europe. Obviously, most people are opposed to the invasion, but then the question is from what standpoint do you oppose it and how do you understand the history of this war?
There actually has been a real witch-hunt in the arts. Anna Netrebko, for instance, was fired from the Met even though she opposed the invasion, simply for not caving in to the political demands that she condemn Putin. The climate created in academia and the media has been extremely difficult, and there’s been a complete silence on what is really happening. With the Gaza genocide, more people understand more clearly what is happening. The Israeli government openly says “we’re perpetrating genocide,” and the US government is openly backing it. What has changed is that we’ve seen the beginnings of a mass anti-war movement, which we did not have over the war in Ukraine. There simply were no mass protests then. And the ruling class is so terrified that the protests against the Gaza genocide could spread to the working class and raise other issues, such as the war in Ukraine, that they feel compelled to respond with an extremely aggressive crackdown on democratic rights. But both the war in Ukraine and the genocide are part of an emerging world war. They cannot really be separated.
MR: These are very good points. The Banderites throughout the Cold War were very explicit that, in their view, World War III was an inevitability. They’re not necessarily the ones dragging us into World War III today, but they have played a very important role in getting us this far. I guess I feel that if only people did speak up more, especially in academia, about these subjects, it would be a very different situation. The war in Ukraine is like a house of cards. There are all these Nazis; a Ukrainian military victory is a complete fantasy. But once they did speak up, yes, there probably would be much more repression. I don’t feel any fear in this regard, but perhaps that’s because I’m not in academia.
CW: That certainly helps explain why you are doing this work, which has been extremely important. Thank you very much for the interview.
MR: Thank you. I first came across the WSWS in college about 10 years ago, and I’ve seen a lot of really great stuff there, and I know I probably should read more.