Six on History: Russian Invasion of Ukraine (not available on MSNBC)
panaritisp
Welcome back to Six on History
If you like what you find on the "Six on History" blog, please share w/your contacts.
Click here for Detailed Search Help h/t John Elfrank
The past few days have witnessed a phone conversation between President Joe Biden and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky and a similar exchange between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his, Defense Minister Andrii Taran. In both instances the American officials assured their Ukrainian allies of American support not only in their steadily mounting conflict with the Donetsk and Lugansk republics in the Donbass in what was formerly Eastern Ukraine, but with its war of words, and veiled words of war, with Russia which borders the two republics.
Ukraine reports a government soldier being killed in an explosion and Donetsk states a child was killed and a woman wounded in an attack in its territory by a Ukrainian drone strike.
The deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, Konstantin Kosachev, evoked the death of the child to warn the NATO and European Union nations in Europe that their silence on the Ukrainian government’s resumption of shelling in the Donbass is providing the Kiev government carte blanche to continue and to escalate the current conflict into a prelude to all-our war. A war, moreover, on the Russian border, one that it’s difficult to imagine Moscow being able to stand aloof from for long. His words included, “Yesterday, for the first time since July 2020 a Ukrainian shelling of the DPR [Donetsk People’s Republic] was conducted and a six-year-old child died,” and he bemoaned the fact that “there is no word about this” from Ukraine’s and Russia’s partners in the Normandy Contact Group, France and Germany. (The Normandy Format was established in 2014 when fighting in the Donbass erupted in order to deescalate the conflict and reach a peaceful settlement between its participants.)
Instead the French-German statement emphasized “support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders,” a reference to Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea, and added: “We are closely monitoring the situation and in particular Russian troop movements, and call on all sides to show restraint and to work towards the immediate de-escalation of tensions.” A more partisan appraisal is hard to imagine, and is yet more disturbing as it casts Russia in the role of potential aggressor against Ukraine as well as siding with Kiev in its armed conflict with the Donbass republics.
The Ukrainian government is proving increasingly successful in its endeavors to recruit the U.S. and NATO into the conflict on its side and to direct their attention toward Russia as an adversary.
The government press agency TASS paraphrased the above-Russian senator reflecting that the catastrophe in Eastern Ukraine could have been prevented at its inception in 2014 “if Europe had refused to accept the coup d’état in Ukraine or had demanded the new authorities ‘fully observe common European values in regard to its citizens.’”
The same source cited the speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament – the Russian State Duma – Vyacheslav Volodin, who in the same tone of urgency and condemnation his colleague in the upper house adopted toward France and Germany, wrote this about Ukrainian authorities’ current behavior:
“The Ukrainian leaders’ rhetoric has gone too far, adding to the tensions and aggravating the conflict. It is fraught with the most serious consequences. What are Ukrainian officials saying? Do they call for the settlement of the situation? No. Their actions are geared to intimidate people, to fan tensions in the region.”
The two Russian parliamentarians doubtlessly reflect the position of the government as a whole; one which reveals the highest degree of alarm over prospects of the war near Russia’s border affecting its national security as well.
In equally blunt language the lawmaker added, “one should bear in mind that not everything that is advantageous for the United States is in Europe’s interests.” President Joe Biden’s relation to Ukraine before but particularly since the coup and resulting war of 2014 was sufficient indication of what to expect from Washington once he entered the White House. Such apprehensions have not proven unwarranted. The Russian speaker extended his indictment of U.S. responsibility for the current crisis by accusing the U.S. of doing nothing in the seven years since the American-backed coup there to assist the nation’s economy. “The country has lost its sovereignty in practically all areas,” he added, emphasizing that not even a single batch of the coronavirus vaccine has been sent to Ukraine: “If the United States charges even its NATO partners for protection, it will demand trice as much from Ukraine.”
Shifting his attention to Kiev, he said: “Before it is too late, Ukrainian leaders must spare no effort to implement the Minsk accords. Stop escalating the situation in Donbass if you don’t want to finish your political careers in the Hague.”
While the Russian legislator lambasted Washington, a major Ukrainian official appealed to it to enter the fray. The country’s deputy prime minister and the head of the ominous-sounding Ministry of Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine – that means of course not only Donetsk and Lugansk but Crimea, now part of Russia, as well – Oleksiy Reznikov, recently advocated that the U.S. join the Normandy Format and the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, the latter currently consisting of Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, also created seven years ago. He said: “A discussion – at the level of Ukraine – [with the] participation of the United States [regarding the Donbass] is absolutely possible and acceptable at different levels….[The] United States…can begin to work both in the Normandy format and at the level of ambassadors and coordinators of the Trilateral Contact Group.”
The U.S. joining the Normandy Contact Group would stack it four to one against Russia, with three members of the NATO Quad allied with Kiev against it.
On the occasion of the 72nd anniversary of NATO on April 4, while the Russian foreign ministry accused NATO’s increased arms spending of fueling a global arms race, Ukrainian President Zelensky called on the military bloc to grant his country a Membership Action Plan, the final stage to full NATO membership, one used by the sixteen countries that have joined the alliance since 1999. To highlight Ukraine’s value to Washington and NATO, Zelensky boasted of the fact that Ukraine this year will engage in fifteen multinational military exercises abroad and host nine at home. The latter will include this year’s iteration of Rapid Trident, Sea Breeze, Cossack Mace, Warrior Watcher, Riverine, Three Swords and Silver Sabre.
The Sea Breeze multinational naval drills will be the twenty-first iteration of the exercise, one which includes the participation of U.S. anti-missile Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers and is employed to integrate U.S. and NATO military forces in the Black Sea for operations in the region. Until 2014 they were based in Crimea. In 2006 the theme of the war games was to “simulate the defence of a peninsula caught between a totalitarian state and a democratic one.” It was cancelled by the Ukrainian government of pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko because of local anti-NATO protests.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Colonel-General Ruslan Khomchak, made this offer to NATO:
“We effectively utilize NATO partnership tools and mechanisms to support…engagement with the Alliance, that has progressed even further with Ukraine’s recognition as an Enhanced Opportunities Partner. Ukraine is now one of six Enhanced Opportunities Partners, alongside Australia, Finland, Georgia, Jordan and Sweden. And we work on particular practical measures to add practical value to such cooperation format.”
He reminded NATO that Ukraine has supplied the military bloc with troops for Kosovo and Afghanistan (he didn’t mention to the U.S. in Iraq as well) and pledged to contribute to the NATO Mission in Iraq and NATO Operation Sea Guardian in the Mediterranean Sea, such efforts contributing to “reaching military criteria of a full-fledged NATO membership.” The quid pro quo will be NATO getting more involved in Ukraine.
Roman Mashovets, Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine on National Security and Defense and the Defense Industry, recently met with the head of the NATO Representation to Ukraine, Alexander Vinnikov, and advocated that NATO hold joint air patrols in Ukrainian air space. The Ukrainian press reported that “Ukraine has offered NATO to hold joint military exercises in response to Russia’s moves to amass troops near the Ukrainian border.” That is as direct a call for NATO air and ground forces to be deployed against Russia as can be made.
Efforts of the sort detailed above indicate a clear intent to involve the U.S. and NATO in Ukraine’s worsening confrontation with not only the Donbass but Russia as well. They may herald as direct a clash between the first two and the last as the world has yet seen."
Members of the Azov Battalion take part in a march in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Oct. 14, 2020
"WHILE SENATE DEMOCRATS consider a way forward to send Ukraine hundreds of millions of dollars so it can buy new weapons, some of the most influential advocates are neglecting measures to make sure they don’t wind up with the country’s notorious neo-Nazis.
Last month, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., introduced legislation to give Ukraine $500 million for arms purchases and impose what he’s called the “mother of all sanctions” on Russia if it invades. The bill mandates a number of reports on U.S. defense equipment transfers and Russian intelligence threats as well as the expansion of American news propaganda. But it makes no mention of reports to oversee whether U.S weapons go to white supremacists like the Azov Battalion, a unit in the Ukrainian National Guard with ties to the country’s far-right, ultranationalist National Corps party and Azov movement. Last year, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., called on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to label the Azov Battalion a foreign terrorist organization, saying it “uses the internet to recruit new members and then radicalizes them to use violence to pursue its white identity political agenda.”
And Menendez isn’t the only member of Congress who appears unconcerned that U.S.-funded weapons could fall into the wrong hands. “I’m not considering any of that right now,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Europe and regional security cooperation.
Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, told The Intercept that the U.S. “should certainly monitor and scrutinize the way those arms or weapons are used.” However, “our main goal is to aid the Ukrainians in their defense.”
Past reporting shows that the U.S. doesn’t have sufficient procedures in place to track where its arms are going and prevent them from ending up with extremists. What’s known as the “Leahy vetting” process is supposed to certify whether foreign forces have committed “gross human rights violations” before greenlighting U.S. government support. But that proved ineffective in making sure that neo-Nazis in the Azov Battalion weren’t receiving U.S. training, the Daily Beast reported in 2015.
Oleksiy Kuzmenko on how the far right group Centuria penetrated Ukraine's main military academy
Menendez and Shaheen appeared unaware of past failures to enforce the law against funding the Azov Battalion.
“I think that any of our arms sales always have conditions, or even our arms transfers have conditions, and so I’m sure the [Defense Department] would have conditions to make sure that they are headed to Ukrainian armed forces, not to others,” Menendez said.
“But there’s always a risk if you have an invasion and others take over, there’s always a risk that anywhere in the world that arms can be used by someone else,” he added, despite evidence that neo-Nazis already exist in the Ukrainian military.
Shaheen, for her part, said that she’s not considering provisions to keep an eye on arms because “the administration has already approved weapons to Ukraine.”
Meanwhile, as Senate Democrats and Republicans debate a strategy toward Eastern Europe moving forward, Ukraine has already received from Lithuania Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, the small, lightweight weapons that the U.S. famously armed the mujahideen with during the 1980s war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union."
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were interested in joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which was a source of concern to the Russian president. Of course, Yeltsin noted, every country can decide for itself what alliance it would like to be a part of. But the Russian public, he continued, saw the eastern expansion of NATO as "as a sort of neo-isolation" of Russia, a factor, he insisted, that must be taken into account. Yeltsin also made a reference to the Two Plus Four Treaty pertaining to Germany’s reunification in 1990. "The spirit of the treaty," he wrote, "precludes the option of expanding the NATO zone into the East."
In the years since Yeltsin sent his letter, NATO has accepted 14 countries in Eastern and Southeastern Europe into the alliance. And the Kremlin has complained of having been duped every step of the way. Just recently, current Russian President Vladimir Putin complained: "You cheated us shamelessly."
The focus of the Kremlin’s ire is no longer exclusively on the Two Plus Four deal, but essentially on all accords negotiated since the fall of the Berlin Wall. "You promised us in the 1990s that (NATO) would not move an inch to the East," Putin said in late January. And he is using that history to justify his current demands for written guarantees that Ukraine will never be accepted into the Western alliance.
But that’s not all. At the end of January, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov wrote an open letter to his Western counterparts in which he cited additional understandings. In particular, he focused on the Charter for European Security, rooted in agreements reached in 1990. East and West had concurred at the time that every country has a right to freely choose the alliance it wished to be part of, while also emphasizing the "indivisibility of security." Later, that became "the obligation of each State not to strengthen its security at the expense of the security of other States," as Lavrov explicitly mentions in his letter.
So, is Putin right in feeling that Russia has been duped by NATO’s eastward expansion?
There is no lack of accounts from a variety of witnesses to the various discussions between the West and Moscow following the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1990, a veritable army of politicians and high-ranking officials from Moscow, Washington, Paris, London, Bonn and East Berlin met for discussions on German reunification, on the disarmament of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and on a new charter for the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) – which became the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 1995.
But the recollections of those involved aren’t always consistent. Roland Dumas, who served as the French foreign minister in 1990, would later say that a pledge was made that NATO troops would not advance closer to the territory of the former Soviet Union. But the U.S. secretary of state at the time, James Baker, has denied that any such promise was ever made – a claim that some of his own diplomats, however, have contradicted. Jack Matlock, who was the U.S. ambassador to Moscow at the time, has said that "categorical assurances" were given to the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand eastward.
The versions of the talk provided by Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, are particularly confusing. On one occasion, he said that German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the Americans had promised him that NATO "will not move one centimeter further east." But in another instance, he said that "the topic of NATO expansion was never discussed" – yet he nevertheless insisted that the West had violated the spirit of the agreements reached at the time.
Luckily, there are plenty of documents available from the various countries that took part in the talks, including memos from conversations, negotiation transcripts and reports. According to those documents, the U.S., the UK and Germany signaled to the Kremlin that a NATO membership of countries like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic was out of the question. In March 1991, British Prime Minister John Major promised during a visit to Moscow that "nothing of the sort will happen." [Hmm .. doesn't sound very "complicated"] Yeltsin expressed significant displeasure when the step was ultimately taken. He gave his approval for NATO’s eastward expansion in 1997, but complained that he was only doing so because the West had forced him to.
There is, of course, no legally binding agreement between the two sides from the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The verdict as to whether the West has broken its word depends entirely on how binding one believes the assurances made by Major and the others actually were.
The wrestling over NATO’s eastward expansion began in January 1990 with an initiative from German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. Across Eastern Europe, the people had toppled Moscow’s satellite governments, and Genscher was concerned about the Kremlin’s possible response. He still had vivid memories of the 1956 uprising in Hungary. When an element of the rebellion sought to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and establish closer ties to the West, the Soviets moved in to crush the rebellion. Genscher wanted to avoid a repeat, and he was prepared to make broad concessions to the Kremlin.
His American counterpart Baker "wasn’t exactly elated" by the idea, but considered it to be "the best we had at the moment." The primary concern among the Western allies was whether a united Germany would remain in NATO, and not the future of Eastern European countries, all of which were still in the Warsaw Pact.
An Issue SettledIn early February, Genscher and Baker presented the idea in Moscow independently of one another. The German foreign minister assured the Kremlin that: "For us, it is a certainty that NATO will not expand to the east. And that applies generally," clearly meaning beyond just East Germany. The American, for his part, offered "ironclad guarantees that NATO’s jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward." When Gorbachev said that NATO expansion was "unacceptable," Baker responded: "We agree with that."
Later, Baker would say that his exclusive focus had been on Germany. Apparently, he was uncomfortable with having negotiated with the Soviets to the detriment of Budapest and Warsaw. Genscher would also play down the importance of his visit to Moscow, later saying that he had wanted to "gauge" the Soviet response, nothing more. A short time after that, the Two Plus Four negotiations began, extending into September 1990. The Soviets, Genscher said, never returned to the question of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, a fact he interpreted to mean that the issue had been settled.
There is room for doubt regarding this version of events. As early as February 1990, it was no secret that some Eastern European countries had begun dreaming of eventual NATO membership. Newspapers were writing about it and Soviet officials mentioned it on a number of occasions to Western politicians. Without success. The West only provided general statements of reassurance. U.S. President George H. W. Bush, for example, said: "We have no intention, even in our thoughts, to harm the Soviet Union in any fashion." French President François Mitterrand told Gorbachev that he was "personally in favor of gradually dismantling the military blocs." NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner later expressed his clear opposition to the expansion of the Western alliance.
The message was clear. [but somehow still "complicated"] If Gorbachev were to provide his acquiescence for German reunification within NATO, the West would aim at establishing a Western security architecture that took Moscow’s interests into account.
Informal assurances were not unusual during the Cold War. U.S. political scientist Joshua Shifrinson compares the 1990 discussions with the verbal agreements made between the Americans and Soviets that led to the easing of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
This view of the situation is supported by the fact that it was extremely difficult for Gorbachev to accept NATO membership for a reunited Germany. It is difficult to imagine that the Kremlin boss would have agreed to such a step if he had believed that the pledges from Bonn, London, Paris or Washington were anything but genuine. In fact, the German government ultimately had to accept a special status for the states that formerly belonged to East Germany, guaranteeing that the region would in principle not play host to troops from NATO alliance members or any other country.
Given the documents available, some even speculate that the West intentionally misled the Soviets from the very beginning. A few weeks after his trip to the Kremlin, in any case, Baker expressly told Genscher that some Eastern European countries were eager to join NATO, engendering Genscher’s response that the issue "shouldn’t be touched for now." A formulation which kept all options on the table for later.
The U.S. administration at the time also included influential hardliners like Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and his neo-conservative undersecretary of state, Paul Wolfowitz. These were men who dreamed of developing the U.S. into the only global superpower, and saw NATO primarily as a tool to assert U.S. dominance in Europe. The interest shown by countries in Eastern Europe in joining the alliance was helpful in that regard. The Defense Department urged that NATO leave "the door ajar."
Such statements would seem to support Putin’s assertions that the West has "cheated" Russia intentionally. Nonetheless, that view, in its simplicity, is erroneous. ["nonetheless"!]
The 1990s was the decade of good intentions and vast illusions, on both sides. Gorbachev promised that the Kremlin would introduce democracy, respect human rights and recognize the right of countries to self-determination. He even broached the possibility that the Soviet Union itself could become a member of NATO. His successor Yeltsin expressed a similar confidence, claiming that "we are becoming a different country."
Growing DistrustThe eastern empire looked for a time as though it was ready for reform. And with that impression foremost in their minds, Kohl, Genscher, Bush and his successor Clinton really did want to transform NATO and take the Kremlin’s interests seriously. There was, however, one potentially significant contradiction: On the one hand, all countries were allegedly united by the "indivisibility of security," while on the other, each country allegedly had the right to decide which alliance it wanted to join. Still, that seemed at the time to be nothing more than a theoretical problem.
On top of that, Clinton, Kohl and the others spent years rejecting NATO membership for Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Such an expansion was viewed as too expensive, the fledgling democracies in those countries appeared too fragile and their militaries were too reactionary. But then, the reform process in Russia slowed and distrust began to grow. And the Republicans, for their part, realized that the issue of expanded NATO membership was useful for scoring political points against Clinton. Many Americans with Eastern European roots lived in the decisive swing states in the Midwest. Leading Clinton to ultimately decide to expand the alliance. [So all these decades of tsouris and sepration, of arms build-ups and eight years of bloodshed in Donbas, and now a full-fledged war with escalation possible at anytime, can be traced back to Bill Clinton's expedient political decision to ensure himself another term by betraying the words and spirit of a straight-up (not so "complicated") American and Western European promise? .... lovely]
In doing so, the West didn’t break any treaties, but some participants were concerned nevertheless. Years later, Genscher said that the expansion was just fine from a formally legal point of view. But it was impossible to deny, he said, that it was counter to the spirit of the understandings reached in 1990."
"Nearly 60 years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio in a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:
I’ve learned to hate the Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It’s them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side
“And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”
During the last six decades, the religiosity of U.S. militarism has faded into a more generalized set of assumptions — shared, in the current crisis, across traditional political spectrums. Ignorance about NATO’s history feeds into the good vs. evil bromides that are too easy to ingest and internalize.
On Capitol Hill, it’s hard to find a single member of Congress willing to call NATO what it has long been: an alliance for war (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya) with virtually nothing to do with “defense” other than the defense of vast weapons sales and, at times, even fantasies of regime change in Russia.
The reverence and adulation gushing from the Capitol and corporate media (including NPR and PBS) toward NATO and its U.S. leadership are wonders of thinly veiled jingoism. About other societies, reviled ones especially, this would be deemed “propaganda.” Here the supposed truisms are laundered and flat-ironed as common sense.
Glimmers of inconvenient truth have flickered only rarely in mainstream U.S. media outlets, while a bit more likely in Europe.
“Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized — NATO enlargement — there has been no American diplomacy at all,” Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Financial Times as this week began. “Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”
As Sachs noted, “Russia has adamantly opposed NATO expansion towards the east for 30 years, first under Boris Yeltsin and now Putin. Neither the U.S. nor Russia wants the other’s military on their doorstep. Pledging “no NATO expansion” is not appeasement. It does not cede Ukrainian territory. It does not undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.”
Speaking Monday on Democracy Now, Katrina vanden Heuvel — editorial director of The Nation and a longtime Russia expert — said that implementing the Minsk accords could be a path toward peace in Ukraine. Also, she pointed out, “there is talk now not just of the NATO issue, which is so key, but also a new security architecture in Europe.”
A new European security framework, to demilitarize and defuse conflicts between Russia and U.S. allies, is desperately needed. But the same approach that for three decades pushed to expand NATO to Russia’s borders is now gung-ho to keep upping the ante, no matter how much doing so increases the chances of a direct clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers.
The last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union before it collapsed, Jack Matlock, wrote last week: “Since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.” But excluding Russia from security structures, while encircling it with armed-to-the-teeth adversaries, was a clear goal of NATO’s expansion. Less obvious was the realized goal of turning Eastern European nations into customers for vast arms sales.
A gripping chapter in “The Spoils of War,” a new book by Andrew Cockburn, spells out the mega-corporate zeal behind the massive campaigns to expand NATO beginning in the 1990s. Huge Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin were downcast about the dissolution of the USSR and feared that military sales would keep slumping. But there were some potential big new markets on the horizon.
“One especially promising market was among the former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact,” Cockburn wrote. “Were they to join NATO, they would be natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had inherited from General Dynamics. There was one minor impediment: the [George H. W.] Bush administration had already promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of the settlement ending the Cold War.”
So let’s leave the last words here at this solemn time to Bob Dylan, from another song that isn’t on radio playlists: “Masters of War.”
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness
Western Media Fall in Lockstep for Neo-Nazi Publicity Stunt in Ukraine
When the corporate media push for war, one of their main weapons is propaganda by omission.
In the case of the recent crisis in Ukraine, Western journalists have omitted key context about the expansion of NATO since the end of the Cold War, as well as US support for the Maidan coup in 2014 (FAIR.org, 1/28/22).
A third and crucial case of propaganda by omission relates to the integration of neo-Nazis into the Ukrainian armed forces (FAIR.org, 3/7/14, 1/28/22). If the corporate media reported more critically about Western support for the neo-Nazi-infested Ukrainian security services, and how these forces function as a front-line proxy of US foreign policy, public support for war might be reduced and military budgets called into greater question.
As recent coverage demonstrates, one way of resolving this issue is by not mentioning the inconvenient matter of Ukrainian neo-Nazis altogether.
The Azov BattalionThe Azov Battalion's Nazi-inspired logo can be seen in an MSNBC segment (2/14/22).
In 2014, the Azov Battalion was incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU) to assist with fighting against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
At the time, the militia’s association with neo-Nazism was well documented: The unit used the Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel symbol as its logo, while its soldiers sported Nazi insignia on their combat helmets. In 2010, the Azov Battalion’s founder declared that Ukraine should “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade...against Semite-led Untermenschen."
The Azov Battalion is now an official regiment of the NGU, and operates under the authority of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs.
'A granny with a gun'
Pointing out that people training the 79-year-old woman to use an assault weapon (London Times, 2/13/22) were members of a fascist force would have spoiled the heart-warming aspect of the image.
In mid-February 2022, as tensions mounted between the US and Russia over Ukraine, the Azov Battalion organized a military training course for Ukrainian civilians in the port city of Mariupol.
Images of Valentyna Konstantynovska, a 79-year-old Ukrainian learning to handle an AK-47, soon featured across the Western broadcast and print media.
The figure of a pensioner lining up to protect her homeland made for an emotive image, collapsing the conflict into a simple good versus evil binary, while adding weight to US and British intelligence assessments forecasting an immediate full-scale Russian invasion.
Such a narrative was not to be ruined by reference to the neo-Nazi group training her. Indeed, mention of the Azov Battalion was largely erased from mainstream coverage of the event.
The BBC (">2/13/22), for instance, showed a clip of “civilians lining up for a few hours’ military training with the National Guard,” with International Correspondent Orla Guerin describing Konstantynovska endearingly as “a granny with a gun.” Though Azov Battalion insignia was visible in the report, Guerin made no reference to it, and the report ends perversely with an NGU combatant helping a child to load an ammunition magazine.
">2/13/22) depicts a young boy getting a lesson on how to load ammo—without mentioning that the training was sponsored by a far-right paramilitary.The BBC (12/13/14) has not always been so reluctant to discuss the Azov Battalion’s neo-Nazism. In 2014, the broadcaster noted that its leader “considers Jews and other minorities ‘sub-human’ and calls for a white, Christian crusade against them,” while it “sports three Nazi symbols on its insignia.”
Both MSNBC (2/14/22) and ABC News (2/13/22) also reported from Mariupol, showing similar video footage of an Azov Battalion member teaching Konstantynovska to use a rifle. As with the BBC, no mention was made of the regiment’s far right association.
Sky News updated its initial report (2/13/22) to include mention of the “far right” trainers (2/14/22), while Euronews (2/13/22) made a rare mention of the Azov Battalion in its initial coverage.
'Glorification of Nazism'There was a time when Western news outlets (Daily Telegraph, 8/11/14) recognized the Azov Battalion as a neo-Nazi force rather than a source of photo ops.
The printed press fared little better. On February 13, UK newspapers the London Times and the Daily Telegraph ran front-page spreads showing Konstantynovska preparing her weapon, without any reference to the Azov Battalion running the training course.
Worse still, both the Times and the Daily Telegraph had already reported on the militia’s neo-Nazi associations. In September 2014, the Times described the Azov Battalion as “a group of heavily armed men” with “at least one sporting a Nazi logo…preparing for the defense of Mariupol,” adding that the group had been “formed by a white supremacist.” For its part, the Daily Telegraph described the battalion in 2014 as “the neo-Nazi brigade fighting pro-Russian separatists.”
In light of NATO’s recent posturing in defense of Ukraine, the fact of the Azov Battalion’s neo-Nazism seems to have become an inconvenience.
On December 16, 2021, only the US and Ukraine voted against a United Nations resolution condemning the “glorification of Nazism,” while the United Kingdom and Canada abstained. There can be little doubt that this decision was made with the conflict in Ukraine in mind.
In the doctrine of Western militarism, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And if that friend happens to enlist neo-Nazis, Western corporate media can be relied on to look the other way."
