LET’S cast our minds back to the build-up to the Euro football championship in 2012, co-hosted by Ukraine and Poland. There was only one story in the mainstream media then: both countries were hotbeds of Nazism and anti-Semitism, said the BBC’s investigative documentary Stadiums of Hate, andneither of them should have been allowed to host the tournament. Fans were warned by ex-England footballer Sol Campbell to stay at home or ‘you could end up coming back in a coffin’. The story gathered momentum among other Western media, provoking last-ditch efforts by footballing nations to have the tournament moved. There was ‘the creep of extremism reminiscent of the 1930s’, declared Paul Hayward of the Daily Telegraph.
In the wake of the far right–led and constitutionally dubious overthrow, Russia illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula [*see below] and supported a secession movement in the eastern Donbass region, prompting a repressive response from Ukraine’s new US-backed government. Eight years later, the civil war has killed more than 14,000. Of those deaths, 3,400 were civilian casualties, which were disproportionately in separatist-controlled territories, UN data shows. Opinions on remaining in Ukraine vary within the Donbass.
Warm up the Wagnerian orchestra and call in the goose-stepping chorus girls, because … yes, that’s right, it’s Springtime for GloboCap! “The Winter of Severe Illness and Death” is over! The big Black Sun is shining again! God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world!
A left-wing peace activist raised in Ukraine explains how the US government created the crisis, backing two coups in a decade, fueling a devastating civil war, and exploiting his nation as a proxy against Russia.
As a result of the current escalation of events in Ukraine, it appears inevitable that the effort to use RIM to paint Russia as a driving force behind “transnational white supremacism” are due to resurface. This effort appears to have as one of its goals the minimization of the role that neo-Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion, the Neo-Nazi paramilitary unit embedded within Ukraine’s National Guard, are actively playing in the current hostilities.
In January of this year, Jacobin published an article about the CIA efforts to seed an insurgency in Ukraine, noting that “everything we know points to the likelihood that [the groups being trained by the CIA] includes Neo-Nazis inspiring far-right terrorists across the world.” It cites a 2020 report from West Point which states that: “A number of prominent individuals among far-right extremist groups in the United States and Europe have actively sought out relationships with representatives of the far-right in Ukraine, specifically the National Corps and its associated militia, the Azov Regiment.” It adds that “US-based individuals have spoken or written about how the training available in Ukraine might assist them and others in their paramilitary-style activities at home.”
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