CIA’s portrait of the Ukrainian nationalist movement doesn’t look any better either. In concordance with almost everything Western media published on them prior to 2022.
Basically, mass-mediots are now whitewashing Nazis and sociopaths like they are George Floyds. How many layers of irony can you count here?

I first got intrigued by “Target: Patton. The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton”, Robert K. Wilcox’s book on general Patton’s death, suspected by many to be an assassination.
Stepan Bandera is involved and mentioned there over 30 times.

“General George S. Patton was assassinated to silence his criticism of allied war leaders, claims Wilcox
The newly unearthed diaries of a colourful assassin for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, reveal that American spy chiefs wanted Patton dead because he was threatening to expose allied collusion with the Russians that cost American lives.”

The Telegraph review of “Target: Patton”

Among those who tipped US intelligence of a plot to assassinate Patton was Bandera. He was pointing fingers at the Soviets, of course.
But given Patton’s fading political influence, weak to none, and his old age, combined with the high risks involved in such operation, I find Wilcox’s proposition simply dumb. I have a much more plausible one:
Bandera attempted again what he has been doing all his life: recruiting allies in his war against Russia. And let me add some insult to injury: Everything we know about them suggest that Bandera’s people would have no issues with killing Patton with their bare hands if they knew they can switch the blame on Russia. Patton was quasi-inoffensive to Russia alive. Only dead he could push US against Russians. And the documents below support this concept better than any other.

But I digress.
Knowing that MI6 has been supporting his organization since the 1930’s, same way they support the Azov Battalion today, I figured a while ago there’s no way in Heaven or Hell that American intelligence didn’t attempt to recruit Bandera too. And this book signaled me they’ve been in touch, indeed.

So I started digging and asking around and it didn’t take long until I obtained some CIA files on him released under FOIA for research on other topics.

But first…

INTRODUCTION: MEET STEPAN BANDERA, THE MAN AND THE AZOV BATTALION SPIRITUAL LEADER

Who Was Stepan Bandera?

BY DANIEL LAZARE, Jacobin Mag 09.24.2015

Lionized as a nationalist hero in Ukraine, Stepan Bandera was a Nazi sympathizer who left behind a horrific legacy.

When Western journalists traveled to Kiev in late 2013 to cover the Euromaidan protests, they encountered a historical figure few recognized. It was Stepan Bandera, whose youthful black-and-white image was seemingly everywhere — on barricades, over the entrance to Kiev’s city hall, and on the placards held by demonstrators calling for the overthrow of then-president Viktor Yanukovych.

Bandera was evidently a nationalist of some sort and highly controversial, but why? The Russians said he was a fascist and an antisemite, but Western media were quick to disregard that as Moscow propaganda. So they hedged.

The Washington Post wrote that Bandera had entered into a “tactical relationship with Nazi Germany” and that his followers “were accused of committing atrocities against Poles and Jews,” while the New York Times wrote that he had been “vilified by Moscow as a pro-Nazi traitor,” a charge seen as unfair “in the eyes of many historians and certainly to western Ukrainians.” Foreign Policy dismissed Bandera as “Moscow’s favorite bogeyman . . . a metonym for all bad Ukrainian things.”

Whoever Bandera was, all were in agreement that he couldn’t have been as nasty as Putin said he was. But thanks to Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist, it now seems clear: those terrible Russians were right.

Bandera was indeed as noxious as any personality thrown up by the hellish 1930s and ’40s. The son of a nationalist-minded Greek Catholic priest, Bandera was the sort of self-punishing fanatic who sticks pins under his fingernails to prepare himself for torture at the hands of his enemies. As a university student in Lviv, he is said to have moved on to burning himself with an oil lamp, slamming a door on his fingers, and whipping himself with a belt. “Admit, Stepan!” he would cry out. “No, I don’t admit!”

A priest who heard his confession described him as “an übermensch . . . who placed Ukraine above all,” while a follower said he was the sort of person who “could hypnotize a man. Everything that he said was interesting. You could not stop listening to him.”

Enlisting in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) at age twenty, he used his growing influence to steer an already-violent group in an even more extreme direction. In 1933, he organized an attack on the Soviet consul in Lviv, which only managed to kill an office secretary. A year later, he directed the assassination of the Polish minister of the interior. He ordered the execution of a pair of alleged informers and was responsible for other deaths as well as the OUN took to robbing banks, post offices, police stations, and private households in search of funds.

What sent Bandera off in such a violent direction? Rossoliński-Liebe’s massive new study takes us through the times and the politics that captured Bandera’s imagination. Galicia had been part of Austro-Hungary prior to the war. But whereas the Polish-controlled western half was incorporated into the newly established Republic of Poland in 1918, the Ukrainian-dominated eastern portion, where Bandera was born in 1909, was not absorbed until 1921, following the Polish–Soviet War and a brief period of independence.

It was a poor fit from the start. Bitter at being deprived of a state of their own, Ukrainian nationalists refused to recognize the takeover and, in 1922, responded with a campaign of arson attacks on some 2,200 Polish-owned farms. The government in Warsaw replied with repression and cultural warfare. It brought in Polish farmers, many of them war veterans, to settle the district and radically change the demographics of the countryside. It closed down Ukrainian schools and even tried to ban the term “Ukrainian,” insisting that students employ the somewhat more vague “Ruthenian” instead.

When the OUN launched another arson and sabotage campaign in summer 1930, Warsaw resorted to mass arrest. By late 1938, as many as 30,000 Ukrainians were languishing in Polish jails. Soon, Polish politicians were talking about the “extermination” of the Ukrainians while a German journalist who traveled through eastern Galicia in early 1939 reported that local Ukrainians were calling for “Uncle Führer” to step in and impose a solution of his own on the Poles.

The conflict in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands exemplified the ugly ethnic wars that were erupting throughout eastern Europe as a new world war approached. Conceivably, Bandera might have responded to the growing disorder by moving to the political left. Previously, liberal Bolshevik cultural policies in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, had caused a surge in pro-Communist sentiment in the neighboring Polish province of Volhynia.

But a number of factors got in the way: his father’s position in the church, the fact that Galicia, unlike formerly Russian Volhynia, was an ex-Habsburg possession and hence oriented toward Austria and Germany, and, of course, Stalin’s disastrous collectivization policies, which, by the early ’30s, had completely destroyed the Soviet Ukraine as any sort of model worth emulating.

Consequently, Bandera responded by moving ever farther to the right. In high school, he read Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi, a militant nationalist who had died in 1924 and preached a united Ukraine stretching “from the Carpathian Mountains to the Caucasus,” one that would be free of “Russians, Poles, Magyars, Romanians, and Jews.” Entry into the OUN a few years later exposed him to the teachings of Dmytro Dontsov, the group’s “spiritual father,” another ultra-rightist who translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Mussolini’s La Dottrina Del Fascismo and taught that ethics should be subordinate to the national struggle.

Entry into the OUN also plunged him into a milieu marked by growing antisemitism. Anti-Jewish hatred had been deeply bound up with the concept of Ukrainian nationhood since at least the seventeenth century when thousands of Ukrainian peasants, maddened by the exactions of the Polish landlords and their Jewish estate managers, engaged in a vicious bloodletting under the leadership of a minor nobleman named Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

Ukraine was the scene of even more gruesome pogroms during the Russian Civil War. But antisemitic passions rose a further notch in 1926 when a Jewish anarchist named Sholom Schwartzbard assassinated the exiled Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura in Paris.

“I have killed a great assassin,” declared Schwartzbard, who had lost fourteen family members in the pogroms that swept through the Ukraine when Petliura headed up a short-lived anti-Bolshevik republic in 1919–1920, on surrendering to the police. But after hearing testimony from survivors about impaled babies, children cast into flames, and other anti-Jewish atrocities, a French jury acquitted him in just thirty-five minutes.

The verdict caused a sensation, not least on the Ukrainian right. Dontsov denounced Schwartzbard as “an agent of Russian imperialism,” declaring:

Jews are guilty, terribly guilty, because they helped consolidate Russian rule in Ukraine, but “the Jew is not guilty of everything.” Russian imperialism is guilty of everything. Only when Russia falls in Ukraine will we be able to settle the Jewish question in our country in a way that suits the interest of the Ukrainian people.

While the Bolsheviks were the main enemy, Jews were their forward striking force, so the most effective way of countering one was by thoroughly eliminating the other. In 1935, OUN members smashed windows in Jewish houses and then, a year later, burned around a hundred Jewish families out of their homes in the town of Kostopil in what is now western Ukraine. They marked the tenth anniversary of Petliura’s assassination by distributing leaflets with the message: “Attention, kill and beat the Jews for our Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura, the Jews should be removed from Ukraine, long live the Ukrainian state.”

By this point, Bandera was already in jail serving a life sentence following a pair of highly publicized murder trials in which he taunted the court by giving the fascist salute and crying out, Slava Ukraïni – “Glory to Ukraine.” But he was able to escape following the German takeover of western Poland beginning on September 1, 1939 and make his way to Lviv, the capital of eastern Galicia.

But the Soviet incursion on September 17 sent him fleeing in the opposite direction. Eventually, he and the rest of the OUN leadership settled in German-controlled Cracow, about two hundred miles to the west, where they set about preparing the organization for further battles still to come.

The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, which the OUN leadership seems to have gotten wind of months ahead of time, was the moment they had been waiting for. Not only did it promise to free the Ukraine from Soviet control, but it also held out the prospect of unifying all Ukrainians in a single state. The dream of a greater Ukraine would thus be realized.

A month earlier, Bandera and his chief lieutenants — Stepan Lenkavs’kyi, Stepan Shukhevych, and Iaroslav Stets’ko — had put the finishing touches on an internal party document entitled “The Struggle and Activities of the OUN in Wartime,” a to-do list for when the Wehrmacht crossed the Soviet border.

It called on members to take advantage of the “favorable situation” posed by a “war between Moscow and other states” to create a national revolution that would draw up all Ukraine in its vortex. It conceived of revolution as a great purification process in which “Muscovites, Poles, and Jews” would be “destroyed . . . in particular those who protect the [Soviet] regime.” Although the OUN regarded the Nazis as allies, the document stressed that OUN activists should commence the revolution as soon as possible so as present the Wehrmacht with a fait accompli:

We treat the coming German army as the army of allies. We try before their coming to put life in order, on our own as it should be. We inform them that the Ukrainian authority is already established, it is under the control of the OUN under the leadership of Stepan Bandera; all matters are regulated by the OUN and the local authorities are ready to establish friendly relations with the army, in order to fight together against Moscow.

The document continued that “it is permissible to liquidate undesirable Poles . . . NKVD people, informers, provocateurs . . . all important Ukrainians who, in the critical time, would try to make ‘their politics’ and thereby threaten the decisive mind-set of the Ukrainian nation,” adding that only one party would be permitted under the new order — the OUN.

Although Bandera and his followers would later try to paint the alliance with the Third Reich as no more than “tactical,” an attempt to pit one totalitarian state against another, it was in fact deep-rooted and ideological. Bandera envisioned the Ukraine as a classic one-party state with himself in the role of führer, or providnyk, and expected that a new Ukraine would take its place under the Nazi umbrella, much as Jozef Tiso’s new fascist regime had in Slovakia or Ante Pavelić’s in Croatia.

Certain high-ranking Nazis thought along similar lines, most notably Alfred Rosenberg, the newly appointed Reich minister for the occupied eastern territories. But Hitler was obviously of a different mind. He saw Slavs as “an inferior race,” incapable of organizing a state, and viewed Ukrainians in particular as “just as lazy, disorganized, and nihilistic-Asiatic as the Greater Russians.”

Instead of a partner, he saw them as an obstacle. Obsessed with the British naval blockade of World War I, which had caused as many as 750,000 deaths from starvation and disease, he was determined to block any similar effort by the Allies by expropriating eastern grain supplies on an unprecedented scale. Hence the importance of the Ukraine, the great granary on the Black Sea. “I need the Ukraine in order that no one is able to starve us again like in the last war,” he declared in August 1939. Grain seizures on such a scale would mean condemning vast numbers to starvation, twenty-five million or more in all.

Yet not only did the Nazis not care, but annihilation on such a scale accorded perfectly with their plans for a racial makeover of what they viewed as the eastern frontier. The result was the famous Generalplan Ost, the great Nazi blueprint that called for killing or expelling up to 80 percent of the Slavic population and its replacement by Volksdeutsche, settlers from old Germany, and Waffen-SS veterans.

Plainly, there was no room in such a scheme for a self-governing Ukraine. When Stets’ko announced the formation of a Ukrainian state “under the leadership of Stepan Bandera” in Lviv just eight days after the Nazi invasion, a couple of German officers warned him that the question of Ukrainian independence was up to Hitler alone. Nazi officials gave Bandera the same message a few days later at a meeting in Cracow.

Subsequently, they escorted both Bandera and Stets’ko to Berlin and placed them under house arrest. When Hitler decided on July 19, 1941 to partition the Ukraine by incorporating eastern Galicia into the “General Government,” as Nazi-ruled Poland was known, OUN members were stunned.

Instead of unifying the Ukraine, the Nazis were dismembering it. When graffiti appeared declaring, “Away with foreign authority! Long live Stepan Bandera,” the Nazis responded by shooting a number of OUN members and, by December 1941, placing some 1,500 under arrest.

Still, as Rossoliński-Liebe shows, Bandera and his followers continued to long for an Axis victory. As strained as relations with the Nazis might be, there could be no talk of neutrality in the epic struggle between Moscow and Berlin.

In a letter to Alfred Rosenberg in August 1941, Bandera offered to meet German objections by reconsidering the question of Ukrainian independence. On December 9, he sent him another letter pleading for reconciliation: “German and Ukrainian interests in Eastern Europe are identical. For both sides, it is a vital necessity to consolidate (normalize) Ukraine in the best and fastest way and to include it in the European spiritual, economic, and political system.”

Ukrainian nationalism, he went on, had taken shape “in a spirit similar to the National Socialist ideas” and was needed to “spiritually cure the Ukrainian youth” who had been poisoned by their upbringing under the Soviets. Although the Germans were in no mood to listen, their attitude changed once their fortunes began to shift. Desperate for manpower following their defeat at Stalingrad, they agreed to the formation of a Ukrainian division in the Waffen-SS, known the Galizien, which would eventually grow to 14,000 members.

Rather than disbanding the OUN, the Nazis had meanwhile revamped it as a German-run police force. The OUN had played a leading role in the anti-Jewish pogroms that broke out in Lviv and dozens of other Ukrainian cities on the heels of the German invasion, and now they served the Nazis by patrolling the ghettoes and assisting in deportations, raids, and shootings.

But beginning in early 1943, OUN members deserted the police en masse in order to form a militia of their own that would eventually call itself the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukraïns’ka Povstans’ka Armiia, or UPA). Taking advantage of the chaos behind German lines, their first major act was an ethnic cleansing campaign aimed at driving Poles out of eastern Galicia and Volhynia. “When it comes to the Polish question, this is not a military but a minority question,” a Polish underground source quoted a UPA leader as saying. “We will solve it as Hitler solved the Jewish question.”

Citing the Polish historian Grezegorz Motyka, Rossoliński-Liebe says that the UPA killed close to 100,000 Poles between 1943 and 1945 and that Orthodox priests blessed the axes, pitchforks, scythes, sickles, knives, and sticks that the peasants it mobilized used to finish them off.

Simultaneously, UPA attacks on Jews continued at such a ferocious level that Jews actually sought the protection of the Germans. “The Banderite bands and the local nationalists raided every night, decimating the Jews,” a survivor testified in 1948. “Jews sheltered in the camps where Germans were stationed, fearing an attack by Banderites. Some German soldiers were brought to protect the camps and thereby also the Jews.”

Rossoliński-Liebe carries the story of Bandera and his movement through the Nazi defeat when the Galizien division fought alongside the retreating Wehrmacht and then into the postwar period when those left behind in the Ukraine mounted a desperate rearguard resistance against the encroaching Soviets.

This war-after-the-war was a deadly serious affair in which OUN fighters killed not only informers, collaborators, and eastern Ukrainians transferred to Galicia and Volhynia to work as teachers or administrators, but their families as well. “Soon the Bolsheviks will conduct the grain levy,” they warned on one occasion. “Anyone among you who brings grain to the collection points will be killed like a dog, and your entire family butchered.”

Mutilated corpses appeared with signs proclaiming, “For collaboration with the NKVD.” According to a 1973 KGB report, more than 30,000 people fell victim to the OUN before the Soviets managed to wipe out resistance in 1950, including some 15,000 peasants and collective-farm workers and more than 8,000 soldiers, militia members, and security personnel.

Even given the barbarity of the times, the group’s actions stood out.

Stepan Bandera is an important book that combines biography and sociology as it lays out the story of an important radical nationalist and the organization he led. But what makes it so relevant, of course, is the OUN’s powerful resurgence since the 1991.

Although Western intelligence eagerly embraced Bandera and his supporters as the Cold War began to stir — “Ukrainian emigration in the territory of Germany, Austria, France, Italy, in the greatest majority is a healthy, uncompromising element in the fight against the Bolsheviks,” a US Army intelligence agent noted in 1947 — the movement’s long-term prospects did not seem to be very promising, especially after a Soviet agent managed to slip through Bandera’s security ring in Munich in 1959 and kill him with a blast from a cyanide spray gun.

With that, the Banderites seemed to be going the way of all other “captive nations,” far-right exiles who gathered from time to time to sing the old songs but who otherwise seemed to be relics from a bygone era.

What saved them, of course, was the Soviet collapse. OUN veterans hastened back at the first opportunity. Stets’ko had died in Munich in 1986, but his widow, Iaroslava, returned in his place, according to Rossoliński-Liebe, founding a far-right party called the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists and winning a spot in parliament. Iurii Shukhevych, the son of the exiled UPA leader Roman Shukhevych, established another ultra-right group calling itself the Ukrainian National Assembly. Even Bandera’s grandson, Stephen, made an appearance, touring Ukraine as he unveiled monuments, attended rallies, and praised his grandfather as the “symbol of the Ukrainian nation.”

A homegrown group of Banderites meanwhile formed the Social-National Party of Ukraine, later known as Svoboda. In a 2004 speech, their leader, the charismatic Oleh Tiahnybok, paid tribute to the fighters of the UPA:

The enemy came and took their Ukraine. But they were not afraid; likewise we must not be afraid. They hung their machine guns on their necks and went into the woods. They fought against the Russians, Germans, Jews, and other scum who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state! And therefore our task — for every one of you, the young, the old, the gray-headed and the youthful — is to defend our native land!

Except for the omission of the Poles, the speech was an indication of how little things had changed. The movement was as xenophobic, antisemitic, and obsessed with violence as ever, except that now, for the first time in half a century, thousands of people were listening to what it had to say.

One might think that the liberal West would want nothing to do with such elements, but the response was no less unscrupulous than it was during the opening years of the Cold War. Because the banderivtsi were anti-Russian, they had to be democratic. Because they were democratic, their ultra-right trappings had to be inconsequential.

The Bandera portraits that were increasingly prominent as the Euromaidan protests turned more and more violent, the wolfsangel that was formerly a symbol of the SS but was now taken up by the Azov Battalion and other militias, the old OUN war cry of “Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes” that was now ubiquitous among anti-Yanukovych protesters — all had to be ignored, discounted, or whitewashed.

Citing unnamed “academic commentators,” the Guardian announced in March 2014 that Svoboda “appears to have mellowed” and was now “eschewing xenophobia.” US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt said that Svoboda members “have demonstrated their democratic bona fides,” while the historian Anne Applebaum announced in the New Republic that nationalism was a good thing and that what Ukrainians needed was more of it: “They need more occasions when they can shout, ‘Slava Ukraini – Heroyam Slava’ – ‘Glory to Ukraine, Glory to its Heroes,’ which was, yes, the slogan of the controversial Ukrainian Revolutionary Army [sic] in the 1940s, but has been adopted to a new context.”

Many, like Alina Polyakova at the Atlantic Council, voiced similar defenses: “The Russian government and its proxies in eastern Ukraine have consistently branded Kyiv’s government a fascist junta and accused it of having Nazi sympathizers. Moscow’s propaganda is outrageous and wrong.” Given Ukraine’s deepening economic woes, she continued, “should Ukraine watchers be concerned about the potential growth of extreme right-wing parties?” Her answer: “Absolutely not.”

That was on June 9. A few weeks later, Polyakova executed a 180-degree turn. “Ukraine’s government,” she declared on July 24, “has a problem on its hands: A far-right group has tapped into growing frustration among Ukrainians over the declining economy and tepid support from the West.”

As a result, Right Sector was now a “dangerous” force, “a thorn in Kyiv’s side,” one of a number of right-wing groups “taking advantage of public frustration to ratchet up support for their misguided agenda.” The international community would have to step up economic aid and political support, she warned, if it didn’t want Ukraine to fall into the hands of the radical right.

What had happened? On July 11, a bloody shootout had erupted in the western town of Mukacheve between heavily armed members of the neo-Nazi Right Sector and supporters of a local politician named Mykhailo Lanio.

The details are murky, and it is unclear whether the Right Sector was attempting to put a stop to highly lucrative cigarette smuggling in the border province of Zakarpattia or was trying to muscle in on the trade. One thing, however, was obvious: given the disarray in its own military, the Ukrainian government had grown increasingly dependent on private Banderite militias like Right Sector to battle pro-Russian separatists in the east and, as a consequence, was increasingly at the mercy of rampaging ultra-rightists whom it was unable to control.

Thanks to the military support that had flown their way, groups like the Right Sector and the neo-Nazi Azov Brigade were bigger than ever, battle-hardened and heavily armed, and fed up with rich politicians who made peace with the Russians and continued to rake in profits while the economy sank to new depths. Yet there was little the government in Kiev could do in response.

A few weeks later, on August 31, hundreds of Right Sector supporters battled with police in Kiev as the Ukrainian parliament voted in favor of the Minsk II accords aimed at defusing the crisis in the east. Three people were killed when a Right Sector supporter lobbed a grenade in the middle of the fracas and more than a hundred injured as the country hurtled toward civil war.

Polyakova’s nervousness was justified. Given Ukraine’s desperate economic straits — economic output is expected to fall 10 percent this year after dropping 7.5 percent in 2014, inflation is running at 57 percent due to the collapse of the hryvnia, while external debt now stands at 158 percent of GDP — there was a distinct whiff of Weimar in the air.

Although Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko labeled the attack “a stab in the back,” this was the same leader who in May signed a law making it a crime to “publicly exhibit a disrespectful attitude” toward the OUN or UPA. Once again, centrists who began by placating the fascists have wound up at their mercy.

Stepan Bandera—The Most Hated Man Who Ever Lived

Uncommon Thought, June 15, 2021

[Photo: 100th-anniversary Ukrainian stamp honoring Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) wikipedia..]

Gaither Stewart

Editor’s Note

It is clear that there is a resurgence of movement towards nationalism, fascism, and dictatorial rule across the globe. I say resurgence because this is not the first time we have seen far-right populism rise and strike fear into the hearts of democracies. While the world has seen this before, it does not mean that it is the same each time. It is clear that it is combining with (or driven by) the monopoly capitalism of our time and the almost record level of income inequality. This makes a close look at figures like Stepan Bander, and the insightful historical discussion by Gaither Stewart particularly timely.

I also appreciate tying the history of Eastern Europe, Nazism, and Russian influence particularly important as I think that many Americans are still scratching their heads over events in Ukraine; events that reverberate even today.

The U.S.’ role in Ukraine under the Obama administration is an excellent example with the problems with U.S. foreign policy and intervention. We have followed a policy of doing what we think is in our own best interests – even if that means supporting dictators, or even fascist governments. It has been said that it is actually easier for the U.S. to pursue its interests with dictators rather than with democracies. Democracies are both cumbersome and messy – particularly if the people’s interests are captured and they apply pressure that may counter U.S. “influence”.

The case study of both Ukraine and Bandera are pertinent not only to the environment with Ukraine, but with Russia, P{oland, and the EU. We are at least as deep into this convoluted situation as any other nation involved.

Gaither Stewart
There was no sun, no shadows. The star Wormwood had fallen from the heavens and polluted the earth’s waters and after diminishing the shadows, had erased them. The falling of the stars had darkened the earth until all shadows vanished. And in the darkness the seventh seal of judgment loosed from the bottomless pit Abaddon the Destroyer together with the plague of Nazism that swooped down on earth to kill the third part of men and then to hover over the shadowless fields, writing its messages in the earth. (My adaptation of the revelations of the Seventh seal)

Adolf Hitler left a deadly legacy behind him. He must have thought that Abaddon himself had scripted his great historical role: to decimate mankind. As history continues to show us his suicide in the bunker in a Berlin overrun by Red Army soldiers was not the end of Nazism that he constructed in his own image: he was the Destroyer, risen from the fire of the bottomless depths to destroy mankind. An irony of history is that his Nazism—in power in Germany for only twelve years (1933-1945)—was to sweep over the earth, one might think as per the biblical Revelations. We have seen that continuity in postwar Germany and in the USA, in Operation Condor in Chile and Argentina which wiped out the best of the youth of both countries, and in Mexico under the “revolutionary” Fascist dictatorship. And today in Ukraine we witness in action Nazism in its crudest form. The diaspora of Nazism and Nazis and of the children they have spawned and continue to spawn recalls the falling star of Wormwood still spreading darkness over the Earth.

The spirit of Ukrainian Nazi, Stepan Bandera, assassinated in Munich in 1959, defines and infects the U.S.-constructed, assembled, and managed Nazi-inspired government in Kiev brought about by the Maidan coup and the overthrow of the legally elected government of Ukraine. The Nazi spirit of Stepan Bandera, a disgusting and hated man, thrives and spawns its own children.

Western journalists covering the Euromaidan riots and murders in Kiev in late February of 2014 encountered an historical image that few recognized. The black-and-white image of pasty-faced Stepan Bandera was plastered everywhere in the Ukraine capital— on barricades, over the entrance to Kiev’s city hall, and on placards held by demonstrators calling for the overthrow of the Russian-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych. So who in the hell is this Bandera, the journalists thought.

People like Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland defined Bandera as a Ukrainian nationalist. The U.S. State Department spokeswoman accepted only praise and support for a Nazi regime in Kiev … come hell or high water and fuck European Union objections or warnings not to disturb the Russian bear on the border. Russians said he was a Nazi and an anti-Semite but Western media obediently labeled such words as Moscow propaganda. As a result of U.S. involvement foreign journalists quickly hedged in their reports from the Kiev Maidan. The Washington Post reported that Bandera had had only a “tactical relationship’ with Nazi Germany and that his followers “were only accused of committing atrocities against Poles and Jews.” According to the New York Times Bandera had been slandered by Moscow as a pro-Nazi traitor. Foreign Policy dismissed Bandera as “Moscow’s favorite bogeyman and metonym for all bad Ukrainian things.” Whoever Bandera was, he couldn’t have been as nasty as Putin claimed.

(Picture of Independence Square (Majdan Nezalezhnosti) in Kiev, often known simply as “Maidan”, where the U.S. coup gave birth to the Nazi-led Ukraine, of which Stefan Bandera was one of the most illustrious forefathers Maidan is a proto-Indo-European word probably of Persian origin and used in Turkish, Pakistani, Indian languages for a large space, meeting place, parade grounds. I encountered the word in Tehran where on a famous Meydan the Shah’s soldiers killed hundreds or thousands of protesters during the Iranian Islamic Revolution. Though not used in Russian, it somehow seeped into the Ukrainian language.)

Especially in Central Europe historical figures flash across the horizon and then quickly fade away into the gossamer past and oblivion. But this man Bandera? Who was he? The name of Stepan Bandera (b, 1909 in West Ukraine, d. Munich1959) is today the symbol of Ukrainian Nazism, the symbol of the ideology and practice of the big, new-old nation of Ukraine, vassal of the USA, and a former Republic of the Soviet Union. But in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv—better known as Kiev—once one of Russia’s major cities, the name Stepan Bandera lives again. To his memory are dedicated streets, squares and monuments in Nazi Ukraine, especially in his native West Ukraine. Today, Nazis of all nationalities pay homage to his memory. In 2010, the pro-West President Victor Yushchenko issued a decree naming Bandera “Hero of the Ukraine”. This decree was annulled that same year by his pro-Russian successor Victor Yanukovich. Then again, in 2015, a year after the Maidan coup and the overthrow of the democratic government, a great majority of the new Nazi-infested government run by the sons of Bandera and his Svoboda and the Right Sektor parties voted unanimously to proclaim Bandera a national hero. Men of the infamous Nachtigall (Nightingale) battalion that fought side by side with the Nazi Wehrmacht, exterminating Jews and Ukrainians alike; at the same time the people of the apparatus of Ukrainian Nazism were also termed national heroes … and they were in power. I will note here that in those days Ukraine invited members of the Association of Foreign Journalists in Rome of which I was a member to visit Bandera’s native Lviv. One still wonders that the European Union did not protest against the coup, against a Nazi-led government in the middle of Europe, the question that prompted the famous response of Victoria Nuland, the real organizer of the Maidan: “Fuck the EU.” That is, official America told official Europe to fuck off. America ordered Europe to fall in line and obey orders. Real history is ugly, brutal and vulgar. Real history is real people doing ugly or beautiful things that seldom reach the pages of written history.

But informed people know better. Informed people know who Stepan Bandera and his followers are. Those terrible Russians were of course right all the time. For the vast majority of Russians, the term Banderovtsy or Banderite is today even worse than Liberal applied to that small minority who worship Western things, yearn for America, the European Union and NATO and detest Putin and Russian nationalists. Much, much worse than Alex Navalny about whose pitiful existence many are unaware; but everybody knows what a Banderite is.

Already in his lifetime the little Bandera—he stood 5 feet and 2 inches—a Russian-hating, West Ukrainian Nazi—was detested literally by everybody: his political opponents within the Ukrainian independence movement hated him, as did many of his own allies and followers; Jews and Russian-speaking ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine hate and revile him as a fascist traitor to his country and a terrorist who collaborated with the Nazis and whose followers murdered thousands of Ukrainians; even his German Nazi masters considered him despicable because he betrayed and murdered his own people; the masses of displaced Ukrainians living in West Germany after World War II hated him for his crimes against other Ukrainians; elements of the post-war German government and many of Germany’s American occupiers hated him… even those he served; Poles hated him for his crimes against the Polish people; Russians hated him in a special way because Bandera, in his German SS uniform, was responsible for the elimination of hundreds of thousands of Russians, soldiers, prisoners of war and civilians alike; today his figure is hated by all Russians because of everything he stood for; Ukrainian immigrants in Russia hate him and dislike being called Banderites because they are Ukrainian.

Yet, nationalists in western Ukraine today revere him as a patriotic freedom-fighter, a martyr who led the struggle for independence from the Soviet Union: Bandera remains a hero in the eyes of the growing number of extreme rightists and Nazis in today’s nationalist, jingoistic Ukraine, among Ukrainian nationalists abroad and right-wing extremists elsewhere. To the joy of re-flowering Nazi-Fascist organizations and parties across Europe, the Nazi- Banderite Svoboda (Freedom) and Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) parties run things in today’s Ukraine. Bandera’s image is honored on a postage stamp while his memory has assumed founder-of-Ukrainian-nationalism proportions. Moscow Avenue in the Ukraine capital of Kyiv was changed to Bandera Avenue. Still, on the other hand, articles galore have emerged in the international press of the life of an ugly and justifiably hated man, especially in Polish, German and English writings which can be seen on the Internet.

Bandera was the son of a nationalist-minded Greek Catholic priest in Western Ukraine, formally known as Eastern Galicia-Volhynia. Stepan grew up as a self-punishing fanatic who is said to have stuck pins under his fingernails to prepare himself for torture at the hands of enemies. And that as a university student in Lviv (Lvov), he whipped himself with a belt. “Admit, Stepan!” he would cry out. “No, I don’t admit!” Yet, his followers found Bandera hypnotic: “You couldn’t stop listening to him.”

Stepan enlisted in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) at age twenty where he steered an already violent faction into more extreme directions. In 1933, he organized an attack on the Soviet consul in Lviv, killing an office secretary. A year later, he directed the assassination of the Polish Interior Minister. He ordered the execution of two alleged informers and was responsible for other deaths as well when the OUN took to robbing banks, post offices, police stations, and private households in search of funds.

A study by the German writer Rossoliński-Liebe of what drove Bandera’s violence takes us through the times and the politics that captured Bandera’s imagination. Galicia—more or less Western Ukraine —had been part of Austro-Hungary prior to WWI. The Polish-controlled western half of Galicia was incorporated into the newly established Republic of Poland in 1918; the Ukrainian-dominated eastern portion (of West Ukraine) where Bandera was born was absorbed also by Poland in 1921 following the Polish-Soviet War and in that period enjoyed a brief period of independence. Bitter at being deprived of a state of their own, Ukrainian nationalists there refused to recognize the Polish takeover and in 1922 responded with arson attacks on thousands of Polish-owned farms. Warsaw resorted to mass arrests. By late 1938, some 30,000 Ukrainian-Poles languished in Polish jails. Polish politicians spoke of the “extermination” of the Ukrainians while a German journalist who traveled through eastern Galicia in early 1939 reported that local Ukrainians were calling for Hitler to intervene and impose a solution of his own on the Poles. The conflict in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands of mixed peoples, languages and cultures exemplified the ethnic wars that erupted throughout Eastern Europe as the legions of Adolf Hitler and Nazism approached in WW Two.

Bandera meanwhile moved ever farther to the right, reading the works of militant nationalists who dreamed of a united Ukraine stretching “from the Carpathian Mountains to the Caucasus, a Ukraine free of Russians, Poles, Magyars, Romanians, and Jews. He studied the works of Dmytro Dontsov, the ultra-rightist spiritual father who translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Mussolini’s La Dottrina Del Fascismo, and taught that ethics should be subordinate to the national struggle.

I have included a brief excursion into the lands of North Central Europe—Poland and Ukraine (including former Galicia)—because precisely these lands were the Lebensraum (Living Space) Hitler pinpointed for German expansion, the main reason for Germany’s quiet and rapid rearmament. Lebensraum was one of the pillars of Nazi Germany’s foreign policy. One small problem was that like Palestine these lands were inhabited by other peoples. So according to Hitler’s Aryan ideology the peoples of those lands had to be eliminated and peopled by German settlers. Here in a nutshell we have German Nazism in action: rearmament, anti-Semitism against the massive Jewry, the Ostjuden, and racism concerning the non-Aryan Slavic untermenschen.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was marked by extreme anti-Semitism, a message which far overshadowed the spread of socialist ideas spreading in these borderlands since the beginning of the twentieth century. Historically, however, anti-Jewish hatred had branded Ukrainian nationhood since the seventeenth century when Ukrainian peasants, maddened by the exactions of the Polish landlords and their putative Jewish estate managers, engaged in vicious pogroms. Nevertheless, while the influence of the OUN spread in Ukraine, Socialism was also taking firm hold. The gruesome pogroms during the Russian Civil War resulted in waves of Jewish emigration to Israel and accelerated the early acquisition of Palestinian lands by legal Jewish emigrants, the subject of a Spanish novel, Dispara, yo ya estoy Muerto (Shoot, I’m Already Dead), by Julia Navarro. A curiosity in the novelist’s presentation was that many of the early Jewish settlers who bought their lands near Jerusalem legally were Socialists/Communists and their small farms and orchards were organized as communist collectives. Still, in Ukraine anti-Semitic passions intensified in 1926 when a Jewish anarchist named Sholom Schwartzbard assassinated the exiled right-wing extremist Ukrainian political leader, Symon Petliura, in Paris. Such events spurred on the Jewish flight from East Europe to Palestine in the years following the Balfour Declaration in 1917 pertaining to the British commitment to the creation of a state of Israel in Palestine.

POLISH-UKRAINIAN-RUSSIAN RELATIONS

Exactly where Russia’s real western border lies—or should lie—is one of the most contentious circumstances in Eastern Europe today. Some understanding of social-political currents in the huge area between Germany and Russia—that is, Poland and Ukraine—can shed light on the significance of the US fascist coup in Kiev of 2014 and the emergence of a fake country under US/NATO dominance. Ukraine with its 233,000 square miles is approximately the size of France with 248,000 square miles.

Stretching back centuries, the memory of the centuries-long confusion of past East Europe appeared like an open invitation to Hitler and Nazi Germany in the quest for Lebensraum and continues to influence EU/German policies of the present. So that the era beginning from World War II provides a useful starting point in understanding the current political role of Nazi Ukraine. Since Ukraine was part of the USSR, the Soviet Union’s western border was its (of the Ukrainian Socialst Republic) frontier with Poland. Today’s Russia borders with a NATO-controlled and occupied Ukraine. Not the same thing at all.

Western Ukraine, particularly the city of Lviv-Lvov, occupies a special part of the Polish psyche—something like Kosovo for Serbs which NATO stole, and where the USA built a huge military base, Camp Bondsteel. Therefore the separation of the former western portion of Ukraine, former Galicia, from the Polish state after WWII was hard for Poles to accept despite the socialist ideology in East Europe at the time when nationalism was not supposed to take on emotional significance. Socialist solidarity between peoples counted more than nationalism; emphasis was on economics, not nationality. Nonetheless, the border changes proved to be a strategic miscalculation caused by blindness to the ever-present nationalism. At the time there was little that Poland could do about what it felt was the unfair dislocation of its eastern provinces (with its many Ukrainians and peoples of complex and uncertain feelings of nationality).

Contemporary Poland has believed that the influence of the EU can re-establish its cultural and historical hegemony in its eastern regions. Poland also believes it can rival Russia in terms of influence in those now western regions of Ukraine: whereas Russia’s influence is dominant in East Ukraine. Thus the German-dominated European Union, via Poland, has a strong influence in West Ukraine. On the other hand, the EU is also concerned about the quasi Fascist government of Poland: it worries that an unpredictable super-nationalistic Poland could consider a Polexit from the European Union, a defection that could topple an already shaky union. Moreover, such fears and hopes create confusion over both Polish and Ukrainian state identity.

Polish nationalists dream of their former great state. A kind of Polish Exceptionalism emerged from the influence of Polish Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) and Solidarity’s historical victory over the communist government in 1989. Aided by God via the Polish Pope, Poles successfully defied Soviet power. Today Poles feel they have a future historical role because of their Exceptionalism. Poles believe their historical legacy entitles them to a major presence in Eastern Europe. And it wants its eastern lands back. Therefore Poland’s special opposition to Russia and its historical legacy. In order to pursue this destiny, after the end of the Cold War Poland decided on its pro-Western course of political and military development. Poland exploits concepts of putative Exceptionalism also within the institutions of the EU and NATO in order to advance its national interests at Russia’s expense. Poland uses what it subjectively considers Russian Guilt to justify Polish Exceptionalism, thereby damaging Russia’s soft power potential. (See: Russian Guilt and Polish Exceptionalism by Andrew Korybko, August 1, 2017 for more on the above)

Stepan Bandera In the Post-War

In such confusion, nationalism and Nazism flourished and men like Stepan Bandera and Adolf Hitler played their particular roles. During the postwar of the late 1940s and early 50s, Stepan Bandera was an immigrant in West Germany. He worked for the BND, the German Intelligence Service, and its forerunner, the Gehlen Org, a top secret organization established in a Munich suburb run by Hitler’s former intelligence chief in East Europe, General Reinhard Gehlen. Financed by the USA, the Gehlen Org specialized in espionage and training of spies to be infiltrated into the Soviet Union. Bandera and his wife, Yaroslava, and their three children had also settled in Munich. While the Germans and Americans used Bandera only sparingly and for many he seemed forgotten, the Soviet Union had not forgotten him. Repeated attempts were reportedly made on his life. Yet Bandera remained in Munich, living under the name of Stepan Popel, still a thorn in the side of his many enemies.

On October 15th of 1959, Bandera was killed at his apartment on Kreittmayrstrasse 7 in downtown Munich near the Main Rail Station, allegedly by the KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinsky. According to the police report Bandera had let his bodyguards off that day. When Stashinsky produced his cyanide gun inside a rolled-up newspaper, Bandera didn’t even draw his own gun. Shot in the face, the fifty-year-old Bandera died on a third-floor landing before the ambulance arrived. A medical examination established that the cause of his death was poison by cyanide gas. Stepan Bandera was buried in the Waldfriedhof Cemetery in Munich.

Bandera’s murder was one of the most publicized assassinations of the Cold War. In the sensational show trial in 1962 in the Federal Constitutional Court in the city of Karlsruhe, the 30-year old alleged assassin, Bogdan Stashinsky, a self-declared Soviet citizen, was both defendant as well as star witness about the “nefarious” KGB. He allegedly defected to Germany together with his wife in 1961 and after spilling the beans to the CIA was handed over to German authorities. The young man was presented as a KGB killer and spy; he confessed to having assassinated another Ukrainian émigré in the 1950s. After weeks of testimony, Stashinsky (in reality, a patsy) was condemned to only eight years in prison — for at least two assassinations! The whole affair stank to high heaven. It smelled of false flag operation.

Some reports claimed that the Bandera faction of the OUN had been backed by British MI6 since the 1930s. In any case, Banderites were associated with the CIA in the post-war for espionage in the Soviet Union. Yet American intelligence organizations too described Bandera as “extremely dangerous”, traveling around in disguise, killer, counterfeiter and political abductor. When the Bavarian government cracked down, Bandera promptly offered his services to the German BND intelligence despite the CIA’s growing mistrust of him.

I fictionalized the Bandera-Stashinsky story in the political novel, The Trojan Spy, from which the following excerpts:

Truth is elusive, many-sided. In any case, a young Ukrainian KGB agent by the name of Stashinsky was later tried in Karlsruhe and convicted for the murder of Bandera with a poison spray concocted in Moscow. They said he was an agent of “Smersh”.… A Russian acronym for Death To Spies. Once a top secret NKVD organization for its wet work. For the assassination of enemies. Killers all. Maybe they wanted to enlist him. But I doubt it. One said that during the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine, Stashinsky learned enough German to pass for a German and that he was hired by the KGB already at the age of nineteen after he was caught on a train without a ticket. All unlikely. Not KGB style. He admitted he worked in Germany…. He traveled around Germany…. He had a supervisor in Berlin…. But it’s a long jump from that to Smersh. I’ve always suspected Ukrainian émigré political opponents of Bandera’s murder. Western Ukrainian émigrés were always killing Eastern Ukrainians. With German and American help. That is, if Bandera was even murdered. He might have had a heart attack. As in a fairytale the cold-blooded assassin Stashinsky allegedly repented after he saw a newsreel in an East Berlin theater of poor Bandera lying in his coffin and his wife and children weeping. Can you imagine that touching scene? Oh, the soft heart of a KGB killer! ….Unimaginable….It’s a ridiculous story from beginning to end. Not even the stuff of mythology. Who knows what really happened? Once he got back to East Berlin after killing Bandera, the handsome young Ukrainian fell head over heels in love with a German woman … who hated the Soviet Union….When she learned Stashinsky was a KGB agent, she convinced him of the perfidy of Communism and they escaped to West Germany the day before the Wall was built. Soap opera stuff. An American story, the whole Stashinsky affair. A Reader’s Digest story. The naiveté is disgusting….

Two feature films have been made about Stepan Bandera – Assassination: An October Murder in Munich (1995) and The Undefeated (2000), both directed by Oles Yanchuk—plus a number of documentary films.

A veteran journalist, essayist, and internationally recognized novelist. His latest novel is Time of Exile (Punto Press), the third volume in his Europe Trilogy, of which the first two volumes (The Trojan Spy, Lily Pad Roll) have also been published by Punto Press. These are thrillers that have been compared to the best of John le Carré, focusing on the work of Western intelligence services, the stealthy strategy of tension, and the gradual encirclement of Russia, a topic of compelling relevance in our time. His newest novella, Words Unspoken, is available in multiple formats. 

The CIA reports show that U.S. officials knew they were subsidizing numerous Third Reich veterans who had committed horrible crimes against humanity, but these atrocities were overlooked as the anti-Communist crusade acquired its own momentum. For Nazis who would otherwise have been charged with war crimes, signing on with American intelligence enabled them to avoid a prison term.
“The real winners of the cold war were Nazi war criminals, many of whom were able to escape justice because the East and West became so rapidly focused after the war on challenging each other,” says Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations and America’s chief Nazi hunter. Rosenbaum serves on a Clinton-appointed Interagency Working Group (IWG) committee of U.S. scholars, public officials, and former intelligence officers who helped prepare the CIA records for declassification.
Many Nazi criminals “received light punishment, no punishment at all, or received compensation because Western spy agencies considered them useful assets in the cold war,” the IWG team stated after releasing 18,000 pages of redacted CIA material. (More installments are pending.)
…
The decision to recruit Nazi operatives had a negative impact on U.S.-Soviet relations and set the stage for Washington’s tolerance of human rights abuses and other criminal acts in the name of anti-Communism. With that fateful sub-rosa embrace, the die was cast for a litany of antidemocratic CIA interventions around the world.

IPS

THE PAPERS

1946: RECRUIT OR ARREST

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1948: TERRORIST

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1951: HITLER’S SPY

1952: tOTALITARIAN

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1959: REFORMED ASSET APPLIES FOR US VISA

1959: DEAD. SOURCES POINTING AT MOSCOW REEK OF INTOXICATION

Bandera’s death was most likely a romantic soap-opera turned spy thriller by politicians:

As CIA describes it, Ukrainian Nationalism used to look more like a pirate boat, but with masons. As I see it, it still does.

“However, the ‘strength of these movements such as the Bandera, Melnik, and “Taras Bulba” groups were partly dissipated by righting among themselves. Their attitude towards the Soviet ‘partisans was largely hostile, although the Ukrainians did in some cases propose to the Soviet partisans neutrality so both sides would be free to fight the Germans, A, German report of August 9th, 1943, states “Fortunately, no agreement has thus far been effected between the Ukrainian nationalist and Soviet bands, On the contrary, these groups are bitter enemies, and only recently engaged in a three-day battle at Ostrog about twenty-five miles southeast of Rovno, with both sides suffering several hundred casualties.” The more important Ukrainian groups were committed to a struggle against the Germans as well as against the Soviets. The same German report states that “the Ukrainians directed their efforts exclusively against the German civil administration with the avowed purpose of bringing as much Ukrainian territory as possible under their control, They freely admitted that they had no interest whatsoever in attacking the German military and German supply lines, since before any independent Ukraine could be established the German and Soviet armies would have to destroy each other.” 

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“Despite the fact that the OUN (Bandera) was more aggressively chauvinistic and (in this sense) less pro-German than the OUN (Melnik), the SD concluded that the Bandera faction rep- resented less potential danger to German objectives than did the Melnik faction.’ 14. As they played with Arab nationalists, so the Germans toyed with the nationalists of the Eastern territories. By maintaining a discreet silence about what the future held in store, they permitted the leaders to believe that independence was just around the corner. At the time of the report, the SD had been told that OUN (Melnik) was British oriented and anything but sympathetic to the anti-Jewish campaign. While this policy of devious procrastination did not make for solid friendships, it did avoid stirring up dangerous enmities.* In 1942 the SD reported that the OUN (Bandera) and OUN (Melnik) were rivals which contributed greatly to the German cause.”

CIA – “STUDY OF INTELLIGENCE AND COUNTERINTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES ON THE EASTERN FRONT AND IN ADJACENT AREAS DURING WW II”

The above quote taken from:

THEY REACHED DETROIT

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Transcripts from the above document:

ORGANIZATIONS PERSONALITIES OF UKRAINIAN LIBERATION MOVEMENT Organizations

UVO (Ukraine’ka Viys’kova Organizatsiya, Ukrainian Military Organization) (Ukraine) Ukrain’skyy Natsional’nyy Soyuz, Ukrainian National Union (Paris). OUN (Organizatsiya Ukrain’skikh Natsionalistyy, Organization of Ukrainiin Nationalists) (Ukraine). SB (Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, Security Service of the OUN) (Ukraine). Bandera Group (Ukraine). Melnik Group (Ukraine). “Taras Bulba” (Borovets) Partisan Unit (Galicia). UPA ,(Ukrainska Povstancheska Armiya, Ukrainian Revolutionary Army) (Western Ukraine and Galicia). UNS (Ukrain’ska Natsional’na Samookhorona, Ukrainian National Self- defense) (Western Ukraine). UNRA (Ukrain’ska Natsionalna Revolutsiyna Armiya, Ukrainian National Revolutionary Army) (Eastern Ukraine). OUNRP (Organizatsiya Ulraintskoy Revolutsyynoy Partii, Organization of,Zhe Ukrainian National Revolutionary Party) (Ukraine). Hetman Movement (Ukraine). Union or the Liberation of the Ukraine (Paris). UNANKOR (Ukrainian National Cossack Movement) (Berlin). KNOD (Cozatsko Natsionalne Oposytsiyne Dvizheniye, Cossack National Opposition Movement) (Prague). UNAKOTO (Ukrainske Natsionalne Kozatske Tovarishchestvo, Ukrainian National Cossack Association) (Rumania). UKO (Ukrainska Kulturna Organizatsiya, Ukrainian Cultural Organi- zation) (Bulgaria). Ukrain’ska Sel’skokhosyayska Ob’yednannya, Ukrainian Agricultural Association (Bulgaria).

Leading Personalities of the Ukrainian Liberation Movement

Alekseyev, Konstantin — Cossack general; member, Ukrainian National Cossack Association (UNAKOTO).

Bandera, Stefan — Leading nationalist and cofounDer of OUN. Sentenced to 8 years in prison in Poland because of illegal political activities. After death of Colonel Konovalets, assumed leadership of entire OUN. Course of action taken by him within the Ukrainian liberation movement is known under the name of “Bandera Movement”; pursued his aims ruthlessly and fought simultaneously against the Soviets, Poles, and Germans. At present in protective custody.

Boroshchenko — Ukrainian writer; leading member of UPA. Borovets — Undercover name: Taras Bulba. In 194] formed a Ukrainian militia in Galicia and Volhynia to combat Bolshevist partisans and dispersed parts of the Red Army; organized the Ukrainian units into the so-called “Sich” units which were outlawed in 1943. Fled with some of his partisans into the woods and continued his fight against Bolshevists and Poles.

Galyp, Jacob — Engineer; lived in Paris and acted as liaison man between the Cossack liberation movements (KNOD) in Prague and England. Belonged to a masonic lodge.

Gulay, Diomid — Leader of Ukrainian National Cossack Association (UNAKOTO). Kapustyanskiy, Mikola — General; one of the oldest Ukrainian nationalists; belonged to the Petlyura Army after World War I; subsequently emigrated to Paris and entered Ukrainian National Union in 1921; as a good speaker and journalist propagandized nationalism among Ukrainian emigrants in Europe and the USA; cofounder of OUN.

Konovalets — Colonel; was one of the oldest and best known leaders of Ukrainian liberation movement and Ukrainian National Self- Defense (UNS); was founder and, together with Melnik, leader of OUN. Was shot in Amsterdam in 1938.

Kosenko — Leading member of “Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine” in Paris.

Lebed’, Stefan — Cover name: Vilnyy; political leader of UPA; had illegally taken active part in politics earlier and has been known as extremely radical. Attempted to gain military control of the UPA, but did not succeed. Consequent split between Lebed’ and Sukhevich was aggravated by the fact that Lebed’ got in touch with Communist partisan leader K)lpakov in order to cooperate with the Bolshevists.

Lebeda, Daria — Wife of Stefan Lebed’; had also worked politically in earlier years; was imprisoned for 5 years for illegal political activity during the Polish period.

Markotun — Ukrainian emigrant in Paris; freemason. Known as liaison man between Cossack liberation movement and England.

Milnik, Andreas — Engineer; one of the oldest members of Ukrainian resistance movement; took part in Ukrainian war of independence in 1918-20. Emigrated later to Paris and there founded, together with other famous Ukrainian nationalists, the Ukrainian National Union. Took part in unification of various groups in OUN in 1929. After death of Colonel Konovalets, was defeated by Itefan Bandera in struggle for leadership of OUN. His followers left OUN under his leadership and formed the so-called Melnik group.

Orlov, Y. N. — Ukrainian emigrant in Bulgaria, representing there the interests of national Ukrainian organization, “Khleboroby.” Main task to observe the treatment of Ukrainians shipped to Germany for forced labor.

Parashchuk, Michael — Leading member of Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine in Paris.

Proshivskiy, .0. — Ukrainian emigrant; leader of Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine in Bulgaria, and liaison man between the latter in Paris and Bulgaria.

Poltavets-Ostranitsa — Colonel; real leader of UNANKOR (Ukrainian National Cossack Movement). In spite of his pro-German attitude is known as the spokesman of British politics among Ukrainian emigrants.

Salskiy — General; leading member of Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine in Paris.

Small-Strotskiy — Leading member of Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine in Paris.

Sokolovskiy, Yuriy — Leading member of Milnik group and OUN. Was shot by followers of Bandera group in 1943.

Sukhevich, Stefan — Military leader of UPA; has taken active part in Polish politics and is suspected of participating in assassination of Pierratskis, Polish Minister of Interior. In 1939-40 stayed in training camps of German army and police in Cracow, Neuhammer, Brandenburg, and Frankfurt-Oder; later assigned in the east for partisan warfare. Was to be arrested with other Ukrainian officers because of illegal participation in the Bandera group, but succeeded in escaping at the Lemberg station and in getting in touch with Lebed’.

Sushko, Roman -? Colonel; one of the cofounders and leading members of OUN; was assassinated by members of Bandera group at the end of 1943. Was to be follower and friend of Melnik.

Udovich, Alexander — General; leading member of Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine in Paris.

Volkov — General; leading member of National-Ukrainian organization, “Khleboroby.

10+ REASONS FOR CIA TO DOUBT THE OFFICIAL NARRATIVE ON BANDERA’S DEATH

What happened after World War II in Ukraine? There was a resistance movement by Ukrainian nationalists, supported by a certain organization I know, and it lasted for years. In the ’50s, what were the Soviets doing? They were killing Ukrainian resistance leaders in West Germany, the ‘wet affairs.’ During my time there they killed two. One was Stepan Bandera.”

Burton Gerber, former chief of the CIA’s Soviet section, New Lines Magazine February 22, 202

That’s the version for the press. And this is the version for internal use:

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BONUS: GUESS WHO BECAME a prosperous US CITIZEN, INSTEAD OF BANDERA

Note to self: find out if Kissinger had to do with this too.

The CIA and “Uncle Louie”

How alleged Ukrainian war criminal Mykola Lebed ended up publishing Agency-funded propaganda in the US

Mykola Lebed was sentenced to death in Poland in 1934. He died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1998.
By various accounts, he was an assassin, a freedom fighter, a terrorist, a hero, a villain, a prisoner, a refugee, a Nazi collaborator, a Nazi target, a writer, and a war criminal. To the Central Intelligence Agency, which bankrolled his activities for close to half a century, he was known as “Uncle Louie.”

Christine Lytwynec for Muckrock

And by “prosperous” I mean CIA agent.

This last couple of documents were dug out by The Last American Vagabond, who, about same time as I, was doing parallel diggings on the same topic, and now we can beautifully complete each other.

ORGANIZATIONS, PERSONALITIES OF UKRAINIAN LIBERATION MOVEMENT

Document Type: CREST [1]
Collection: General CIA Records [2]Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80-00809A000600330323-6
Source

It started with a Marshall Plan, it ends with a Marshall Plan…

COMING SOON: THE NAZI SKELETONS IN TRUDEAU’S CABINET SPEAK UKRAINIAN

To be continued?
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