By Harrison Berger, The American Conservative, 8/29/25

As a negotiated settlement of the Russia–Ukraine war becomes more likely, President Volodymyr Zelensky faces a major obstacle to peace that comes not from Moscow, but from ultranationalist and neo-Nazi forces inside his own country.

In a recent interview with the Sunday Times, Serhii Sternenko—a leader of the paramilitary group Right Sector, which was founded by neo-Nazis—warned Zelensky that if he ceded any territory to Russia in a peace deal, “he would be a corpse—politically, and then for real.”

Though the Times presents him merely as a “civil activist,” Sternenko served as the head of Right Sector’s Odessa branch, where he oversaw the extremist group’s 2014 crime spree that culminated in the Odessa trade union hall massacre in which militants used Molotov cocktails to burn alive more than 40 antigovernment protestors.

The Times characterizes the Odessa trade union hall massacre as mere “clashes” and fails to attribute the violence to any one particular side, despite the fact that the Right Sector proudly claimed responsibility for it.

Whitewashing Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist right is neither new nor accidental. As the late Stephen Cohen, an eminent scholar of U.S.–Russia relations, warned nearly a decade ago, Western journalists and officials, by downplaying Ukraine’s right-wing militant groups and parroting Kiev’s official claims about them, empowered violent extremists.

The resurgence of Ukraine’s right-wing extremist forces is inseparable from U.S. policy since 2014, when the U.S. facilitated the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Kiev. While Ukrainian liberals participated in the “Maidan Revolution,” the muscle was provided by right-wing extremist groups, which the West bestowed with legitimacy and, eventually, access to arms and funding. What began as the whitewashing of neo-Nazi vigilantes became the normalization of neo-Nazi battalions, which are now embedded in Ukraine’s security elite.

That those same right-wing extremist forces, nurtured by the United States and NATO, now threaten to sabotage a peace deal and overthrow the Zelensky government reveals a bizarre paradox at the heart of our involvement in Ukraine that has yet to be confronted:

Washington interfered in Ukrainian domestic politics and helped finance a proxy war with Russia ostensibly to save Ukrainian democracy from tyranny. But under U.S. tutelage—and in service of proxy war aims—Ukraine has rapidly descended into a more authoritarian state.

Western whitewashing of Ukrainian Nazis is not an aberration of the past decade. Rather, it is consistent with a U.S. strategy that began during the Cold War of recruiting, laundering, and weaponizing extremist forces.

One of the earliest and clearest cases of this strategy was the CIA’s decision to protect rather than prosecute Ukraine’s wartime nationalists, who had openly collaborated with Nazi Germany and perpetrated the mass murder of Jews and Poles. Among them was Stepan Bandera and his OUN-B militant group, which aligned itself with Ukraine’s Nazi “liberators” within the first days of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa in 1941, when the Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union. 

America’s nascent post-war national security state, despite its awareness of Bandera’s Nazi crimes and his organization’s status as “primarily a terrorist organization,” protected Bandera from extradition to the Soviet Union, recruiting him and other known OUN-B Nazi collaborators through programs like the CIA’s Project AERODYNAMIC, aimed at “exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance for cold war and hot war purposes.”

Rather than being a source of national shame for Ukraine, its Nazi collaborators are the core icons of Ukrainian nationalism and a source of pride.

Along with Bandera, historical war criminals like Roman Shukhevych—the commander of the OUN-B’s paramilitary wing—have been posthumously venerated by various Ukrainian governments. Both figures were awarded the official title “Hero of Ukraine” in 2007 and 2010, respectively. Bandera’s birthday continues to be celebrated with annual torchlight marches across the country.

During the Maidan uprising in 2014, neo-Nazi militias inspired by Stepan Bandera and associated with Ukraine’s right-wing extremist Svoboda party used sniper rifles to massacre protestors—both pro- and antigovernment—as well as police. 

Though the Maidan massacre trials would later pin responsibility for the violence on neo-Nazi paramilitaries from the Right Sector and the political party Svoboda, the chaos was immediately seized upon by the Obama administration to demand the removal of Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Victor Yanykovych, who was instantly blamed for it all.

A leaked U.S. State Department call arguably reveals how career diplomat Victoria Nuland arranged for Svododa leader Oleh Tyahnybok to have a position of influence in Kiev’s post-revolution government, saying her handpicked Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk should “be on the phone” with the Svoboda leader “four times a week.” The notorious call, along with other evidence of U.S. support for anti-Yanykovych forces, has led many to conclude the “Maidan Revolution” was in fact a U.S.-backed coup.

Washington’s decision in 2014 to protect and empower the extremist groups which perpetrated the Maidan massacre would entrench an ultranationalist and neo-Nazi element within Ukrainian politics that would later sabotage efforts for peace with Russia.

When Zelensky came to power on a promise to resolve the conflict with Russia in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, Cohen predicted that the new president’s peace efforts would likely face heavy and possibly violent resistance from the ultranationalist factions that Washington had recently empowered. “His life is being threatened by a quasi-fascist movement,” Cohen warned. 

The Biden administration did not look the other way in the face of those extremist forces threatening Zelensky—it looked directly at them and in June 2024 decided to remove State Department restrictions on funding the Azov Battalion, allowing the U.S. government to lavish the neo-Nazi group with weapons. 

Under the patronage of President Joe Biden and NATO, Azov—whose members often openly wore Nazi insignia—metastasized from a battalion into an entire brigade integrated into Ukraine’s National Guard.

Biden’s policy was at least consistent, conforming with a decades-long policy of protecting, retooling, and empowering violent extremist groups whenever they served the interests of unelected national security state elites, in this case, anti-Russian neocons.

Earlier this year, Azov further consolidated its influence within Ukraine’s national security apparatus by expanding into multiple corps. Its political reach grew in parallel, with members appointed to key government positions, including Oleksandr Alferov as Director of the Institute of National Memory, giving the neo-Nazi group direct influence over both security policy and the framing of Ukraine’s historical narrative.

Violent Ukrainian nationalist forces like Right Sector, Azov, and Sternenko’s militants have become indispensable foot soldiers in Washington’s project, and therefore their lengthy record of violence and terrorism has been obscured. Even as Zelensky now faces threats to his life from these same forces, they are still celebrated in Western media as heroes of democracy.

The paradox is revealing: The very groups hailed as Ukraine’s “defenders of democracy” are also those eroding it from within, threatening to assassinate the president if he pursues peace. Though an unintended consequence, this perilous dynamic flows from U.S. policy and reveals its true aims.

The U.S. strategy in Ukraine was never about protecting Ukrainian democracy. It was—as Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin admitted—about sustaining a proxy war to “weaken Russia.” The emergence of violent antidemocratic forces in Kiev has not been a casualty of that strategy, but its central instrument.

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 9/2/25

The recent SCO Leaders’ Summit in Tianjin drew renewed attention to this organization, which began as a means for settling border disputes between China and some former Soviet Republics but then evolved into a hybrid security-economic group. Around two dozen leaders attended the latest event, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who paid his first visit to China in seven years. Non-Western media heralded the summit as an inflection point in the global systemic transition to multipolarity.

While the SCO is more invigorated than ever given the nascent Sino-Indo rapprochement that the US was inadvertently responsible for, and BRICS is nowadays a household name across the world, both organizations will only gradually transform global governance instead of abruptly like some expect. For starters, they’re comprised of very diverse members who can only realistically agree on broad points of cooperation, which are in any case strictly voluntary since nothing that they declare is legally binding.

What brings SCO and BRICS countries together, and there’s a growing overlap between them (both in terms of members and partners), is their shared goal of breaking the West’s de facto monopoly over global governance so that everything becomes fairer for the World Majority. To that end, they seek to accelerate financial multipolarity processes via BRICS so as to acquire the tangible influence required for implementing reforms, but this also requires averting future domestic instability scenarios via the SCO.

Nevertheless, the BRICS Bank complies with the West’s anti-Russian sanctions due to most members’ complex economic interdependence with it, and there’s also reluctance to hasten de-dollarization for precisely that reason. As for the SCO, its intelligence-sharing mechanisms only concern unconventional threats (i.e. terrorism, separatism, and extremism) and are hamstrung to a large degree by the Indo-Pak rivalry, while sovereignty-related concerns prevent the group from becoming another “Warsaw Pact”.

Despite these limitations, the World Majority is still working more closely together than ever in pursuit of their goal of gradually transforming global governance, which has become especially urgent due to Trump 2.0’s casual use of force (against Iran and as threatened against Venezuela) and tariff wars. China is at the center of these efforts, but that doesn’t mean that it’ll dominate them, otherwise proudly sovereign India and Russia wouldn’t have gone along with this if they expected that to be the case.

The processes that are unfolding will take a lot of time to complete, perhaps even a generation or longer, due in no small part to leading countries like China’s and India’s complex economic interdependence with the West that can’t abruptly be ended without dealing immense damage to their own interests. Observers should therefore temper any wishful thinking hopes of a swift transition to full-blown multipolarity in order to avoid being deeply disappointed and possibly becoming despondent as a result.

Looking forward, the future of global governance will be shaped by the struggle between the West and the World Majority, which respectively want to retain their de facto monopoly and gradually reform this system so that it returns to its UN-centric roots (albeit with some changes). Neither maximalist scenario might ultimately enter into force, however, so alternative institutions centered on specific regions like the SCO vis-à-vis Eurasia and the AU vis-à-vis Africa might gradually replace the UN in some regards.

By Brian McDonald, Substack, 8/24/25

You may not know of Yevgeny Primakov. But he really should be a household name: because his shadow still tilts across the table whenever the Kremlin weighs its hand. To make sense of the way Russia now speaks, you have to look back to the man who first inscribed those habits into the bones of its statecraft during the devastating 1990s.

The current talks with the United States won’t lead to Obama-era resets or Reagan-esque grand bargains. What Moscow wants is simpler: a) time, b) leverage, and c) a spread of options. It’s a style of diplomacy Primakov would have recognised instantly.

Back in the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin was raising toasts in Washington and ending his address to the US Congress with “God bless America,” Primakov kept his distance. A trained Arabist, journalist and intelligence man who rose to become foreign minister and then prime minister, he had spent too long in Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus to buy into the mood music of “partnership.”

He grasped, far quicker than most of his peers, what the so-called post-Cold War order really had in store for Russia. Essentially it boiled down to servitude with a smile: a junior chair at the grand table, with a polite grin for the cameras and a signature scrawled on whatever demands the West thought fit to slide across. His answer was to repurpose Karl Deutsch and J. David Singer’s 1960s concept of multipolarity: better to court many princes than bend the knee to one.

At the heart of his politics lay a set of instincts honed by hard experience: never get boxed into someone else’s binaries and guard sovereignty the way a poor man guards his last coin. You should reach out, yes, and build ties with any power that offers the chance, but don’t ever shackle yourself. And as for ideology; use it if you must, but never repeat the Soviet mistake of letting it dictate everything. For Primakov, the only philosophy worth carrying was the blunt survival of the national interest.

His name reached Western headlines in March 1999. On his way to Washington as prime minister, he learned that NATO had begun bombing Serbia and responded by ordering his plane to turn around mid-Atlantic and fly back to Moscow. The gesture announced that the gig was up and Russia wouldn’t be nodding along politely as the West dismantled Yugoslavia. For many Russians, it was the first sign in a decade of collapse that at least one of their leaders still had a spine. However, in a host of Western capitals, it was the moment Primakov was marked as a spoiler.

That same year, he was briefly spoken of as Yeltsin’s possible successor. Many in a Russia battered by economic collapse and humiliated abroad seemed to yearn for his steadiness and dignity. Yet his political star dimmed quickly, outmanoeuvred by the oligarchic Kremlin clan that would ultimately place the much younger Vladimir Putin in power.

Primakov never wore the crown of the presidency, but his way of seeing the world seeped into the bloodstream of the man who did. Putin came out of the shadows at the millennium with the instincts of a security official rather than a statesman. It was Primakov’s frame that gave those instincts shape and turned watchman’s reflexes into a doctrine of state.

Of course, the critics keep their ledger handy. They point at the 1998 financial crash on his watch as prime minister, and say he was no wizard of economics. They recall his unbending hand in Chechnya. Both fair charges, maybe. But whenever the talk turns to foreign policy, the tone completely changes. Here the clarity still lingers because he saw with cruel precision that Russia could never be folded into a Western-centred order without shrinking itself to fit. As a result, he sketched an alternative.

You can still trace his hand in Moscow’s conduct. Talks with Washington are stripped of both the begging bowl and the sabre-rattle. What you find instead is a patience that borders on the obstinate; we can call it strategic waiting. The bet is simple: unpopular governments in Paris, Berlin and London (just look at current polls) will fall with the seasons, but Putin’s Russia will outlast them. In the meantime it probes at the seams of Western unity, leaving a door ajar for any thaw that might drift in with a change of weather.

Even the scaffolding of BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation shows Primakov’s imprint. These aren’t anti-Western clubs so much as post-Western stages; built to shrink the US-led bloc from lead actor to one among many in a larger cast.

This sets him apart from other Russian visionaries. Vladislav Surkov’s notion of a “Great North,” uniting Russia with Western Europe, collapsed almost as soon as it was uttered. Mikhail Gorbachev’s “Common European Home” dissolved into smoke. Primakov had seen the futility long before. He never believed Russia could be integrated into Western structures on anything other than subservient terms.

So the moves you see out of Moscow today are part of a strategy long-aged, like spirits resting in a dark barrel and waiting for the moment to be poured. In essence, Russia won’t barter away its red lines in Eastern Europe for a scrap of sanctions relief. Nor will it march dutifully in the slipstream of a US–China collision. Instead, it will manoeuvre always under its own steam.

Primakov was born in Kiev in 1929, grew up in Tbilisi, and was educated in Moscow. As mentioned at the outset, he worked as a reporter and analyst of the Arab world before becoming a trusted envoy, then rose to head the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. Yeltsin made him chief diplomat in 1996 and prime minister in 1998. He died in 2015 at the age of 85, honoured with a state funeral. Both Putin and Dmitry Medvedev paid tribute to him as a man who had kept Russia’s dignity intact in its hardest modern decade.

Once upon a time, he was whispered about as Yeltsin’s natural heir. However, in the end, his fate was not to rule, but to leave his doctrine behind; to shape Russia’s course long after his physical life had come to an end. That, ultimately, is Primakov’s bequest: it’s why the men in Washington no longer face the pliant Russia of the 1990s, but a state seasoned by the humiliation of those years. Once burned, it now carries the scars. And this time, whatever else happens, it will not come cap in hand.

Euronews, 9/5/25

Moscow will consider any foreign troop deployment on Ukrainian soil as “legitimate targets for destruction”, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday.

“If any troops appear there, especially now, during the fighting, we assume that they will be legitimate targets for destruction,” Putin emphasised in his keynote speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.

“And if decisions are reached that will lead to peace, to long-term peace, then I simply see no point in their presence on Ukrainian territory.”

“If these agreements are reached, no one doubts that Russia will implement them in full.”

Putin’s comments came after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, accompanied by his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, shared on Thursday that 26 European states, part of the so-called Coalition of the Willing, were prepared to offer security guarantees to Ukraine in a post-war capacity following any potential peace settlement.

Ukraine’s European partners have not suggested sending combat troops to Ukraine during the ongoing war, but instead deploying a type of international peacekeepers only after a possible ceasefire or a peace deal. 

These forces would not engage in fighting but would only be tasked with monitoring and maintaining peace after the agreement is reached. 

The Russian president voiced doubts about this possibility, though, saying it will be “practically impossible” to reach an agreement on key issues with Ukraine to end the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion, currently in its fourth year.

Putin also said that Russia wants to get security guarantees as well, without specifying what these measures could be and how they would protect Russia in its all-out war against Ukraine.  

“Peace guarantees must be for both, Russia and Ukraine,” stressed Putin.

Putin reiterated Moscow’s resolute rejection of Ukrainian membership in the NATO defence alliance. At the same time, the Kremlin is not opposed to Ukraine’s desire to join the European Union, according to him.

He claimed that “Ukraine’s decision on NATO cannot be considered without looking at Russia’s (security) interests”, but Kyiv’s EU aspirations are a “legitimate choice”.

“I repeat, (Ukraine’s EU bid) is Ukraine’s legitimate choice, how to build its international relations, how to ensure its interests in the economic sphere, with whom to enter into alliances.”

The Cradle, 9/15/25

On 15 September, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski called on NATO countries to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine following a reported Russian drone incursion into Poland last week.

In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeiner newspaper, Sikorski stated that Warsaw would need the support of other European allies to implement the plan.

“We as NATO and the EU could be capable of doing this, but it is not a decision that Poland can make alone; it can only be made with its allies,” he said.

“Protection for our population — for example, from falling debris — would naturally be greater if we could combat drones and other flying objects beyond our national territory … If Ukraine were to ask us to shoot them down over its territory, that would be advantageous for us. If you ask me personally, we should consider it,” he added.

Last week, multiple Russian drones crossed into Poland, prompting NATO to scramble fighter jets to shoot them down.

Russia said it did not target Poland. Belarus, Russia’s ally, said the drones entered Polish airspace by accident after they were jammed.

European leaders claim the drone incursions are a deliberate provocation by Russia.

Following the incursion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged his allies to build a “joint air defense system and create an effective air shield over Europe.”

The US and its partners in NATO have previously rejected requests by Ukraine for a no-fly zone, citing the risk of a direct military encounter with nuclear-armed Russia.

“The incident raised serious questions about the alliance’s readiness to counter the relatively cheap, highly maneuverable but devastatingly destructive unmanned aerial vehicles that have redefined modern warfare since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022,” the Washington Post wrote on Monday.

Officials in Warsaw said that Russian drones had penetrated Polish airspace 19 times, most likely as decoys to distract air defenses.

On Saturday, Romania scrambled fighter jets after a Russian drone breached its airspace during an attack on neighboring Ukraine.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday that European nations are determined to block political and diplomatic efforts to end the war.

“NATO is de facto at war with Russia. This is obvious and needs no proof. NATO provides direct and indirect support to the Kyiv regime,” Peskov added.

To agree to a peace deal, Moscow has demanded that Kiev relinquish territory in eastern Ukraine now occupied by Russia. The Kremlin insists that limits be imposed on Ukraine’s military and assurances that Ukraine will not gain membership in NATO.

One former Ukrainian official told the Washington Post on 12 September that the Russian drone incursion into Poland could cause Europe to limit support for Ukraine, rather than expand it.

Air defense batteries and missiles are already in short supply, and European countries may feel they need to keep these items for their own defense, rather than transfer them to Ukraine.

The former official said the first thought as drones entered Polish airspace was, “They will not even give us what they already promised.”

Russian drone and missile attacks have not only increased in number in recent months, but they have also become more sophisticated.

Russia now launches swarms of several hundred drones at once, with some being armed and others serving as decoys. Some are equipped with jet engines to allow them to fly faster and follow ballistic missile trajectories.