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