Ivan Katchanovski Faces 'Stalinist' Smear Campaign To Silence His Work On Ukraine.

A Smear Campaign Is Attempting To Silence The Academic Who Exposed The Maidan Massacre False Flag And Western Role In The Ukraine Proxy War.

Ivan Katchanovski, the Ukrainian-Canadian professor of political science and conflict studies at the University of Ottawa, has done extensive research factually debunking the Western narrative around the proxy war in Ukraine and painting an objective, nuanced picture of the war.

Among his most consequential works has been proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the Western-funded and supported coup against Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 was based on a lie.

Western leaders justified supporting the coup based on claims that Yanukovych’s forces were behind a massacre of protestors in Ukraine’s Maidan Square.

But Katchanovski has collected a significant body of evidence, including witness testimony, Ukranian ballistic examinations, and forensic medical examinations done by the Ukrainian government, which all show that the massacre was carried out by Western-backed militants opposed to Yanukovych, who were occupying a Hotel in the Maidan square.

More recently, Katchanovski has written the book “The Russia-Ukraine War: Its Nature, Origins, and Outcome,” which extensively documents the Western policies that provoked the war in Ukraine, including the Maidan coup, NATO expansion, and the Western blocking of the Istanbul peace accords in April of 2022.

For his factual work, Katchanovski now faces what he describes as a “Stalinist-like” smear campaign in the form of an open letter signed by a number of pro- Ukraine government and pro war academics, including Andreas Umland who Katchanovski notes, “backed a call for total mobilization in Ukraine by a neo-Nazi admirer of Hitler” and “Anton Shekhovtsov, who headed the Dugin’s organization in Crimea”.

He documented that Shekhovtsov has previously used openly genocidal rhetoric towards Russians, writing, “Anton Shekhovtsov compared the mass killing of people by a fire in the Trade Union building in Odesa to his killing of Colorado potato beetles by collecting them in a box and then burning them”.

The open letter does not challenge a single fact that Katchanovski has documented in any of his books and instead resorts to McCarthyite smears and guilt by association.

These include claims that Katchanovski’s book is somehow discredited based on the claim that tech billionaires Elon Musk and David Sacks donated money to the GoFundMe for the book to be published. Katchanovski clarified that “Elon Musk did not fund my book but helped on Twitter/X to stop an attempt to block my GoFundMe. I publicly thanked Elon Musk and all contributors”.

In an even more absurd guilt-by-association attack, the letter tried to connect Katchanovski to Russian state media because two contributors to RT, Tarik Cyril Amar and Lenka White, said positive things about the book.

The letter also claims that “Katchanovski’s narrative about the causes and escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War is often congruent to the Kremlin’s propaganda” and that it could “lead to a reduction of Western help for Ukraine” again, without a challenging a single fact in Katchanovski’s work.

As the Ukranian academic Marta Havryshko put it, “In other words: certain arguments are not wrong because they are false, but because readers might find them (in)convenient and stop sponsor corrupt regime that sends its people to the kill zone against their will.”

Katchanovski in a responce to the smear campaign, noted that its intention was “not only to censor my book but also to go after my university job and subject me to criminal persecution and sanctions by the Zelensky regime because they are incapable of challenging my evidence-based analysis”.

The Zelensky regime has previously sanctioned a long list of its domestic critics for criticizing the Ukraine proxy war, from the well-known Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko to the former advisor to the Zelensky government, Oleksiy Arestovych.

He added that, “Umland, Shekhovtsov, and their ilk try to force scholars to parrot the Zelensky government propaganda and propagate fake narratives that they propagate themselves, such as false flag Nord Stream bombing by Russia, genocide in Ukraine, Ukraine as democracy, and no neo-Nazis in Ukraine. They falsely claim that the blocking of the nearly finalized Istanbul peace deal by the Western governments is Russian propaganda and denounce my book for this even though this was stated or de facto admitted by the head and members of the Ukrainian delegation, ex-prime minister of Israel, president and foreign minister of Turkey, Victoria Nuland and several other such top officials … They falsely equate the Zelensky regime with Ukraine and Ukrainians and their support for the violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government, mutual killings of Ukrainians in civil war in Donbas, and the proxy war to the last Ukrainian with supporting Ukraine and Ukrainians. They choose to attack and defame one of a few Ukrainian political scientists in the Western academy specializing primarily in conflicts in Ukraine.”

Katchanovski, who had previously had his property seized by the Ukrainian regime, noted that the smear campaign was an attempt to get him to face further repression from the regime, writing:

The denunciation of me and my scholarly book by Umland, Shekhovtsov, and their ilk is not only an open attack on academic freedom but also an attempt to censor my book and subject me to criminal prosecution or sanctions by the undemocratic Zelensky regime for my academic research. They falsely link my book to Russian propaganda, Russian media, and “apologetics” of the Russian invasion, which are all criminal offensives in Ukraine. There were many such cases of political persecution in Ukraine.

My house, land, and all other property in my native Western Ukraine were illegally seized in retaliation of my scholarly studies of the Maidan massacre in Ukraine. I was blacklisted on the Ukrainian government-linked Myrotvorets hit list for “crimes” of showing involvement of radical nationalists and neo-Nazis in this massacre of the Maidan protesters and the police and for exposing the SS Galicia division veteran, who was given standing ovations in the Canadian parliament by the Canadian government, parliament, Zelensky, and his delegation. The Ukrainian government agency, headed by the leader of the OUN, which collaborated with Nazi Germany and was involved in organizing the SS Galicia Division, threatened me with criminal prosecution for exposing involvement of neo-Nazis in the Maidan massacre.

Supporters of the Ukraine proxy war have no answer to the facts documented by Katchanovski in his book, so they are now engaging in a smear campaign, in an attempt to get him fired, censored, and repressed as retribution for his inconvenient facts.

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