How America Has Supported And Whitewashed Real Fascists In Ukraine Since 2014.

The word "fascist" is often overused in American pollical discourse, but here are the real fascists that have been backed by the US government since 2014.

It seems like everyone and everything can be called “fascist” today. Like many other terms that used to have important and distinct meanings, it has become an overused word often weaponized in American political discourse. Often in political arguments, people on both sides use the word “fascist” as interchangeable with “person I disagree with”. This growing trend is the perfect opportunity to discuss how the US government and media have whitewashed and supported real fascists in Ukraine since 2014.

The U.S. Government Has Supported Fascists In Ukraine Since 2014

Going back to 2014 the U.S. government has had deep connections to the far-right in Ukraine.

The U.S. government funded think tanks that helped organize the 2014 protests against then Ukrainian president Viktor Yannakovitch which eventually led to him being deposed in a violent coup.

Many of the protestors came out over genuine anger about the corruption in the Yanukovich government, however, they were eventually overtaken and led by far-right extremists.

Branko Marcetic reported in Jacobin magazine that the violent leaders of the protests eventually consisted of the “far-right Svoboda party — whose leader once complained Ukraine was run by a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” and which includes a politician who admires Joseph Goebbels” and “Right Sector, a collection of far-right activists that traces its lineage to genocidal Nazi collaborators.”

These far-right forces who eventually led Yannakovitch to flee from power, were supported by the United States.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy and Republican Senator John Mcain even went so far as to stand alongside Oleh Tyahnybook, the leader of the aforementioned neo-nazi Svoboda party.

After Yannakovitch was overthrown by these far-right forces, Chris Murphy went on C-Span and admitted that “it was our role including sanctions and threat of sanctions that forced, in part, Yanukovych from office”.

He went on to admit that

With respect to Ukraine, we (the United States) have not sat on the sidelines, we have been very much involved, members of the Senate have been there, members of the State Department have been on the (Maidan) square, the administration passed sanctions, the Senate was prepared to pass it’s own set of sanctions, and as I said I really think the clear position of the United States, has in part been what has helped lead to this change in regime.

In the same clip, Murphy justified the United States’ backing of the coup by referring to a massacre committed against protestors in Maidan Square, which he blamed on Yannakovitches’ forces.

Obama similarly justified backing the coup over the massacre. However, subsequent research has proven that the massacre was actually a false flag carried out by the neo-nazi group Right Sector. Ukrainian-Canadian Political Science professor Ivan Katchanovski reviewed the footage of a trial in Ukraine on this massacre and found that the majority of witness testimony and forensic investigations showed the bullets came from the “Hotel Ukraina” a building that was then under the control of Right Sector as they were trying to overthrow Yanukovych.

Unsurprisingly, after the United States backed a far-right-led coup in Ukraine based on a false flag massacre carried out by a neo-nazi group, the far-right began gaining influence in Ukraine. Foreign Policy magazine wrote at the time that “The uncomfortable truth is that a sizable portion of Kyiv’s current government — and the protesters who brought it to power — are, indeed, fascists”.

The UK’s Channel 4 news reported at the time that “the far-right took top posts in Ukraine’s power vacuum”.

They went on to report that “The man facing down Putin’s aggression as secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council is Andriy Parubiy” who was “the founder of the Social-National Party of Ukraine (later Svoboda), a fascist party styled on Hitler’s Nazis, with membership restricted to ethnic Ukrainians.”

They also reported that

Overseeing the armed forces alongside Parubiy as the Deputy Secretary of National Security is Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of the Right Sector – a group of hardline nationalist streetfighters, who previously boasted they were ready for armed struggle to free Ukraine

and that

The new Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych is a member of the far-right Svoboda party, which the World Jewish Congress called on the EU to consider banning last year along with Greece’s Golden Dawn.

This far-right influence also led to the rise of the Azov Battalion, a far-right neo-nazi group that took part in the 2014-2022 civil war in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

The U.S. since 2014, sent arms and aid to the Azov Battalion which they were supporting while they were fighting Russian-backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine.

Before 2018, the United States refused to prevent aid from going to the Azov battalion. According to the Hill “ The House-passed spending bills for the past three years have included a ban on U.S. aid to Ukraine from going to the Azov Battalion, but the provision was stripped out before final passage each year”.

The Hill went on to report that

The Azov Battalion was founded in 2014, and its first commander was Andriy Biletsky, who previously headed the neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine. Several members of the militia, which has been integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard, are self-avowed neo-Nazis.

Finally, in 2018 the House spending bill included a provision that “none of the funds made available by this act may be used to provide arms, training or other assistance to the Azov Battalion”, a provision that California Democratic representative Ro Khanna supported by saying that “White supremacy and neo-Nazism are unacceptable and have no place in our world”.

But as the late scholar of Russian studies Stephen F. Cohen noted in The Nation:

Congressional legislation recently banned Azov from receiving any US military aid, but it is likely to obtain some of the new weapons recently sent to Kiev by the Trump Administration due to the country’s rampant network of corruption and black markets.

When Zelensky was elected in 2019 he campaigned on a platform that included implementing the Minsk Accords, a peace proposal that would end the conflict in Eastern Ukraine.

Stephen F Cohen revealed that once he was elected, Zelensky had his life threatened by “quasi-fascists” (ie Azov, Right Sector, etc.) to not implement the Minsk Accords and the U.S government, then led by the Trump administration, sided with the fascists over Zelensky. This prevented him from ending the war, which Trump had approved a 39 million dollar arms package in support of.

How The Biden Administration White Washed And Eventually Armed Neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

When the Ukraine war started, the Biden administration and its loyal stenographers in mainstream media insisted that any notion that neo-nazis existed in Ukraine was “Russian propaganda”.

There is no doubt that Russia had over-exaggerated its influence by claiming the entire Ukrainian government was Nazis to justify its illegal invasion of Ukraine.

There is also no doubt that there is massive hypocrisy on the Russian side given the fact that the Russian military has ties to far-right groups such as the “Wagner” group and has itself supported far-right neo-Nazi linked fighters in the Donbas conflict.

However, there is no doubt that the prevalence of Neo-Nazis in Ukraine is a problem, especially since the US-backed 2014 coup. This was so obvious before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that even U.S. government-funded propaganda outlets such as the Atlantic Council and Bellingcat acknowledged it.

When the Biden administration temporarily created a “disinformation governance board” (a.k.a. minister of truth) as a subdivision of the DHS, its leader Nina Jankowitz had a long history of white-washing neo-nazis in Ukraine.

Ukrainian-American journalist Lev Golinkin exposed in The Nation that Jankowitz previously worked in Ukraine for “Stop Fake” “a US government-funded anti-disinformation organization” which was known for “aggressively whitewashing two Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups with a long track record of violence, including war crimes”.

Golinkin found a video of Jankowitz where she whitewashed and defended the Ukrainian paramilitary groups “Aidar, Dnipro-1, Donbas, and Azov.” He reported that “All four have a documented record of war crimes, while Azov is an outright neo-Nazi group.”

Golinkin also reported that “Stop Fake” had defended “C-14” a Ukrainian neo-nazi group which had “conducted horrific pogroms of Ukraine’s Roma” an ethnic group that was targeted in the Nazi Holocaust.

For their part, the Western Mainstream media did their part to deny the Neo-Nazi views of Azov’s members. The aforementioned Lev Golinkin reported in The Nation that The Guardian, BBC, and DW all ran articles denying Azov’s neo-nazi links.

The same is true of the American mainstream media. In 2015 the New York Times described Azov as “openly neo-Nazi” and in 2019 similarly described the group as “a Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization”. However in 2022 once the Ukraine war began, the New York Times described the group as “Ukraine’s celebrated Azov Battalion” neglecting to mention the fact that they were neo-nazis.

Hawks in the Republican party similarly whitewashed the Azov battalion. Independent researcher Moss Robeson found that Republican members of Congress Pete Sessions, Todd Young, and Rick Scott met with an Azov delegation that traveled to Washington.

Paul Massaro, the U.S. government’s Staff Director of the Helsinki Commission took the whitewashing of Azov even further posting a picture of himself holding up an Azov flag and posting a picture of himself sporting a patch featuring Stepan Bandera, one of Azov’s historical heroes who the History Network describes as “a Nazi collaborator” who “shared a key obsession, (with the Nazis) namely the notion that the Jews in Ukraine were behind Communism and Stalinist imperialism and must be destroyed” and was “deeply involved in the Holocaust”.

This whitewashing propaganda campaign eventually allowed Joe Biden to lift the ban on American weapons going to the Azov battalion in June of last year.

Because of this whitewashing campaign, America was now openly able to arm the paramilitary group that they stopped in 2018 over its neo-nazi beliefs.

The Biden administration even lifted a ban on training the battalion. As CBS News reported:

The U.S. State Department confirmed Monday that the unit, which has played a significant role in Ukraine's effort to repel the ongoing invasion launched by Russia in February 2022, could now be trained by U.S. military personnel and use U.S.-provided weapons.

The US state department ignored the group’s neo-nazi links and justified the ban lifting by saying that there is “no evidence of Gross Violation of Human Rights committed by the 12th Azov Brigade”.

In 2015 Human Rights Watch found that “Credible allegations emerged of torture and other egregious abuses by Ukraine’s so-called volunteer battalions Aidar and Azov”.

They’re our Bastards

The US backing of Azov is nothing new. America bombed the Middle East endlessly in the name of fighting “terrorism” only for them to back Jihadists in Libya, Syria and Yemen when they served their geopolitical goals.

The U.S. supports 73 percent of the world's dictatorships militarily.

America supporting fascists in Ukraine fits a long pattern of America backing any government or group, no matter how unsavory if they align with their geopolitical goals.

However, the mainstream media and politicians' fear-mongering over fascism falls flat to anyone who has paid attention to the Ukraine war, knowing that they have been whitewashing some of the more extreme far-right groups on earth for years.