Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky promoted Colonel Andriy Biletsky to the rank of Brigadier General. Biletsky has said the purpose of the Ukrainian right is to fight the “Semitic-led untermenschen [subhumans].”
“To confer the military rank of brigadier general on Colonel Andriy Yevhenovych Biletsky, commander of the 3rd Army Corps of the ‘East’ Operational Command of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” the presidential decree signed Wednesday said.
Biletsky is the commander of the Third Separate Assault Brigade and the founder of the Azov regiment. He is an outright white supremacist. “Ukrainians are part (and one of the largest and highest quality) of the European White Race. Ras-Creator of great civilization, the highest human achievements. The historical mission of our Nation, in this turning point, to lead and lead the White peoples of the whole world into the last crusade for its existence against the Semitic-led untermenschen,” he said in a 2007 speech.
The Third Separate Assadly Brigade webpage says it maintains “the same principles on which the legendary ‘Azov’ and the entire Azov movement are based. The foundation worldview principles of the Azovian units are Ukrainian-centrism, traditionalism, hierarchy and responsibility.”
Additionally, Zelensky awarded the Hero of Ukraine posthumously to Andriy Parubiy. Parubiy was assassinated in August. In 1991, he founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine that used the Nazi Wolfsangel as its logo.
Neo-Nazis, like Biletsky and Parubiy, gained power in Ukraine following the US-backed coup in 2014. Following the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych, Parubiy rose to the position of speaker of the Parliament, and Biletsky founded the Azov Battalion.
The idea that Russia would defeat Ukraine in only three days—the so-called “three-day SMO”—has become a pervasive meme associated with the war. It’s a widespread misconception, but its origin is not in an official Russian statement.
To understand where this notion came from, we can look back to 2014, when an article reported Vladimir Putin boasting he could take Kyiv in two weeks. Considering the poor state of the Ukrainian army then, with mass defections in Crimea and struggles against separatist militias, this claim was perhaps plausible at the time.
The Russian Media and Cyber War Angle
The story picked up again in April 2021 when RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, stated in an interview that Russia would defeat Ukraine in two days in the event of a “hot war.” Crucially, she said this in the context of a cyber war that would target infrastructure, causing city blackouts and cutting gas supplies, not a conventional ground war. She even expressed skepticism about a conventional war being possible in the modern world.
Western Intelligence and Historical Precedents
When the February 2022 invasion began, many Western officials genuinely expected a swift conclusion. This expectation was informed by the quickness of previous Russian actions, such as the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the 2008 invasion of Georgia, where the bulk of the fighting lasted only about five days.
The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Report
A specific source for the “72 hours” claim appears on the Ukrainian version of the Wikipedia page for the Battle of Kyiv. It cited the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), which allegedly stated that Russian forces intended to capture and blockade Kyiv within 72 hours. Notably, this refers to blockading Kyiv, not invading the entire country.
However, a closer look at the RUSI report, “Preliminary Lessons in Conventional War Fighting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine February to July 2022,” presents a different timeline, stating that Russia planned to invade Ukraine over a 10-day period and occupy the country to enable annexation by August 2022. The report based much of its information on captured Russian documents, but stated the underlying source material could not be made public, which raises a significant red flag. Furthermore, those alleged documents from the 810th Russian Naval Infantry Brigade reportedly gave a 15-day timeline for seizing objectives like Melitopol, which was actually captured faster than that supposed expectation. Nowhere in these documents is a 72-hour national takeover mentioned.
The True Origin: US Officials
The reality is that the myth primarily originated from US sources. As Russia’s military buildup became undeniable in early 2022, on February 5, 2022, Fox News reported on a closed-door briefing where General Mark Milley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, allegedly told US lawmakers that a full-scale Russian invasion could result in the fall of Kyiv within 72 hours. He also predicted substantial casualties. Even Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko repeated a similar three-to-four-day timeframe for an entire war.
On the day of the invasion, February 24, 2022, Newsweek cited three US officials who expected Kyiv to fall within 96 hours and the Ukrainian leadership to follow in about a week. This is where the myth of the “3-day SMO” was born.
Newsweek itself later admitted that the story provided “ammunition for a decisively misleading meme” and that virtually no prominent Kremlin pundits were predicting the three-day fall. Reddit users have also admitted that the story was a simplification used to ridicule the expectation of a swift Russian victory. While Russia’s high command was almost certainly expecting a rapid victory to force negotiations and concessions, the specific three-day claim was not a Russian one; it was a foreign one that has been widely popularized as a meme.
A while back, I was in Washington DC, and I visited the new Victims of Communism museum. My interest in this was piqued by the saga of the Victims of Communism monument here in Ottawa, which caused a scandal once it became known that many of the names people had paid to have inscribed on the monument were those of Nazi collaborators. I thought it would be interesting to see how the US museum compared.
I’m pleased to say that it’s not anything like the Ottawa monument. On the whole it does a decent job. That said, the historian in me did find a few claims in the museum that I questioned, and there was, I feel, a certain national bias that popped up here and there, largely in the form of Polish nationalism and in a tendency to portray Russian and Chinese people solely as perpetrators of communist atrocities and not as victims. This despite the fact that probably more Russian and Chinese people have perished as a result of communism than people of any other nationalities.
So let’s take a look. I will focus on the Soviet-related materials, not on those relating to China and elsewhere, as the former are more my area of expertise.
The museum is fairly small. It is conveniently located in downtown Washington and has the advantage of being free of charge. The staff were friendly, and on the day I went, there were not many people there.
The museum has three parts: a permanent exhibition on the ground floor that walks you through the history of communism; a display of paintings by a former Soviet Gulag prisoner; and while I was there, what seemed to be a temporary exhibition on the second floor about Vietnam. I’ll concentrate on the first of these parts.
As you start your tour, you see the following. This pretty much sets the tone for what follows: a lot of big red panels with historical descriptions and photos, but relatively few exhibits.
The general descriptions are fine, but I did have a slight quibble with the display below which says that a Provisional Government ‘led by Alexander Kerensky replaced the Tsarist regime.’ This isn’t strictly true, as the government that replaced the Tsarist regime was initially led by Prince G.E. Lvov and Kerensky only took over a few months later. So Kerensky didn’t replace the Tsar but replaced Lvov. It’s a very minor point, but I think that one should aim for 100% accuracy.
I had a slightly more serious quibble with this display which says that the ‘Soviet Red Army invaded Poland.’ This indeed it did, but not until after the Polish army invaded Soviet territory. This display would probably make most readers think that the Soviets started the Polish-Soviet war by launching an unprovoked attack on Poland, which isn’t entirely accurate.
Poles pop up again in this discussion of the Great Terror. On the one hand, the museum has done a good job in not exaggerating the scope of the terror. Indeed, the quoted number of deaths – 700,000 – is on the lower end of what current scholars believe the death toll to have been. I was struck, though, by the claim that nearly a third of victims of the Great Terror (200,000 people) were Poles. It is indeed true that Poles were disproportionately targeted during the Terror. But the number more normally cited is around 120,000. I think that the museum should probably stick with the numbers that are most commonly recognized.
Likewise, there seems to be exaggeration in this display that claims that 70% of the population of Kazakhstan died in the famine of 1932-33. Sarah Cameron, author of a widely-acclaimed book on the topic, puts the total at about one-third of the population. Again, that’s terrible enough, but it’s also far removed from 70%. I don’t know where the museum got that number from and it may need revisiting.
And there’s this panel, which gives a long list of nationalities whose members were ‘sent to the Gulag or other forced settlement areas of the USSR’. Russians are notably absent from the list, though of course very many of them were sent to the Gulag too. Now, it’s true that Russians were not targeted for deportation in toto in the manner of Crimean Tatars or Chechens, but neither were many of the other nationalities mentioned here. Soviet nationality policy also can’t be reduced to efforts ‘to destroy culture and impose conformity’. The Soviets invested a lot of resources into supporting minority languages (in some cases, creating alphabets and providing the first ever schools and literature in that language). Periods of Russification alternated with periods of ‘indigenization’, in which minority cultures were actively promoted and members of minorities given preference in their own republics. Soviet nationalities policy was much more complex than shown here.
Then we come to a bit of historical revisionism about the start of the Second World War:
To my mind, it’s not accurate to say ‘a joint invasion of Poland in September [1939] started World War II.’ The British and French declared war on Germany on 3 September. The Soviets didn’t enter Poland until 17 September, two weeks later. Now, it’s true that they were already committed to doing so before then, but the British and French didn’t respond to a ‘joint invasion’ of Poland, but to a German one.
Then, we come to the naming of Russians, as in the two panels below. The first is a quote from a Hungarian priest calling for ‘Russian troops’ to leave Hungary in 1956. The second is a mention of the ‘Russian’ army leaving the Baltic states in 1994. The two panels are entirely accurate. But it strikes me that the language used could serve to conflate the Soviet Union and Russia in the mind of any visitor who didn’t know the subject well. It thus reinforces the idea of Russians as perpetrators not as victims.
Overall, I would say that it is an interesting place to visit and a younger generation of visitors who know nothing about communism will learn much from it. That said, I have my doubts about museums and monuments focusing entirely on the victims of communism. This isn’t because I am remotely sympathetic to communist theory or practice. Far from it. It’s very correct that people should be reminded of the horrific crimes committed by communist regimes (as they should be of the crimes committed by regimes of other types). But when all you look at is that, it becomes very hard to explain things such as modern-day Soviet nostalgia. It also makes one wonder why on earth anybody would have supported such an ideology. Thus, while the Museum of the Victims of Communism will teach you an important part of the history of communism, one should bear in mind that it is indeed only a part.
