THAT was an interesting hand-wrist tattoo on the “Ukrainian soldier” pictured (incongruously) in Wednesday’s column by Greg Sheridan. Yes, it is a Slavic swastika (five across, five down) topped by an eagle facing left – just like the Parteiadler of the Nazi Party. The Reichsadler of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic faced right. No, I will not accept that he was fondly showcasing an old pagan symbol of good fortune (any more than the Guardian would). A year and a half ago – before referencing the fact had been effectively banned in the Western media – Ukraine’s massive network of nazis was the subject of an excellent piece in Time. Reporters Simon Shuster and Billy Perrigo were especially interested in the mysteriously well-financed and overnight emergence of the Azov Battalion in 2014. By 2019 – five years after the CIA had curated a revolution with Azov’s help – 40 Congressmen petitioned the State Department to categorise it as a terrorist organisation. This request was ignored. Apparently, certain people thought the work of the re-badged ‘regiment’ wasn’t done. Last week, Azov members visited the US Capitol. For PR purposes, most of them were women and, remarkably, none were shot. Not since Operation Paperclip has America rehabilitated brown shirts so quickly. And these ones aren’t rocket scientists.
In 2015 – merely twelve months after the coup that brought Petro Poroshenko to the presidency – Kiev had begun to panic about nazi rōnin. The top animals of the Tornado Battalion – whose fortes were electric torture, making Russian captives sodomise each other and molesting children – were brought to trial. Der Spiegel noted that its leader – a psychotic rapist named Ruslan Onischenko – was a national hero five minutes earlier. The so-called Patriarch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had even awarded him a medal. Also in 2015, Reuters reported that the extremist Right Sector and Aidar battalions – alongside as many as 40 other outfits – were becoming a law unto themselves. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov assured Reuters that Ukraine was “rebooting” its power structures. Not according to Chief Rabbi Yaakov Bleich. Far from ridding the country of nazis, Avakov was in fact promoting some of them to senior police commands, he charged. Ironically – given the Trump Administration’s later unwillingness to do so – a nervous President Poroshenko began threatening to declare Ukraine’s fascist multitude “terrorists.” The same commentators who praise Joe Biden for calling 120 million Americans nazis deny that nazis have ever been a problem in Ukraine. This is just one of the brazen lies of our time that future historians may well liken to the chefs-d’oeuvre of Goebbels, Riefenstahl, Smollett and Joe Stalin’s air-brusher.
I have no confidence that future historians will be any more honest and factual than today’s alleged “reporters” are.
Any analysis of today’s current events will be clouded by marxist interpretations.
One commenter at the Sheridan column observed the photograph was “ironic” given that Sheridan was obviously playing down the nazi problem.
This was subsequently deleted.
We are all Nazi’s now!
This has always been a baddies vs baddies war. Commos v Nazi’s.
That said one side is grabbing land from the other and threatening a whole raft of independent countries with invasion; wouldn’t be wise to align with them.
Steady on, I mean it’s not as if they’ve been photographed doing stiff arm salutes somewhere in the Grampians.
I was once browsing through some WW2 era copies of the Melbourne Herald and was astonished to come across an editorial cartoon mocking the Poles for maintaining (correctly) that the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest was the work of our brave Russian allies, rather than the Nazis.
Random Russian.
Ok, not random: he’s Dmitry Utkin, who founded Wagner Group.
Baddies vs baddies.
The man supposed to be Utkin wth the tattoos does not resemble that of another man in the same article said to be Utkin. All ver dodgy.
Hooray! Putin saves the world from Nazis! Hooray! What a wonderful man! Let’s make him PM of Australia! Yay!
Franx – That Italian NGO report of Wagner activity is from March 2021 – predating the current war. I’ve seen other photos of Utkin, that’s him. But you are welcome to do your own searches.
I’ve seen plenty of other Nazi insignia on the Russian side, as well as on the Ukrainian side. It’s not surprising – there’s long been a neo-Nazi subculture in Russia, especially in St Petersburg, and those guys are just the sort of people who might join up in a PMC to go play in Africa, which Wagner and Rusich have been doing. (The Africans rather like them since they are quite firm with the Mahometans.)
I don’t especially care. Ukraine and Russia each have Chechens fighting in their OoB. Pretty much says everything you need to know. Both sides are rather fruity.
On the Africans, there was a coup in Burkina Faso a few days ago, and one of the fun things about it was the new leader Capt Traoré said nice things about Russia and Wagner Group. Burkina Faso has a lot of Muzzie mayhem going on in the north of the country. Capt Traoré replaced Lt Col Damiba, which suggests the ToO of the Burkina Faso Army is going to be very short of any officers above the rank of Lieutenant.
Bruce of Newcastle
The point was that the photograph said to be of Utkin sporting suspect tattoos does not at all match what was said to be a passport photograph of Utkin. Now, that passport photograph in the same article was said to have been verified as the tattooed Utkin by some facial recognition program. Yet clearly, the two photographs do not at all match, despite any claim about a facial recognition program. In other words, the article and its bent cannot be taken at face value. A pity, and pardon the pun.
Yes Bruce, but I don’t think it can be said with a straight face that Western governments and the global media are telling the story along those lines. We are only sending billions of dollars to Ukraine – for many years Europe’s most corrupt country and a veritable Jurassic Park for the world’s surviving nazis.
Precisely because the conflict is Bad vs. Bad, it must be seen strictly in terms of realpolitic. It isn’t about feelings; it’s about how a nuclear-armed, historically imperial power has reacted to the encroachment of the Americans via NATO (and its Romper Stomper proxies) on its border. Moscow’s response to that is rational.
Which is not to say it is moral, nice or founded on a known known regarding a future existential threat from NATO – any more than Australia’s panic about China in the Pacific is based on any actual military threat to us from Beijing’s encroachment on the Solomon Islands.
CL – As we did for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War.
As we did for Kuwait in the Kuwait-Iraq War.
It’s all geopolitics. Which is realpolitik.
I think Putin’s aim is rational, as basically summarized by his Peter the Great comments. And I think a KGB guy unfortunately believed the rubbish his guys were telling him about the coup de main strategy. Which didn’t work. There’s a difference in mindset between spooks and military guys, chalk and cheese.
If Mr Putin really is a statesman he’d take his lumps and pull out, to play another day. Richelieu would do that. But unfortunately it appears he can’t as he’s dying, this is his last chance to do what has been his whole life’s effort since the fall of the Soviet Union. Dying old men are not good for the nations they lead.
Bruce of Newcastle
We are all dying.
I’ll say it plainer. Mr Putin by miscalculation has made it possible for every wet dream the CIA has had for seventy years, which is to take down the premier opponent to the United States. Of course they’re going to go for that, and the glovepuppet in the WH is always going to let them. The CIA is an integral part of the acronym mafia, they’re all together lockstep as Trump found to his dismay.
Even if you think China is now the premier opponent to the US, Russia is still the Mussolini to the Chinese Hitler. DC beltway denizens want Putin obliterated and his country broken. It’s the way they think.
As I said, the correct strategy is pull out entirely, then rebuild. But Mr Putin is a mortal man, as we all are, and unfortunately he can’t get past that hard barrier for the sake of his country. I’m really sad, because I have Russian friends and things were going extremely well before this mess.
Putin has just turned 70, which is pretty young by American standards.
I don’t think the Iraq War was realpolitik at all. It was unrealpolitik. A handy Sunni thug was overthrown in favour of Shiite terrorists to achieve no other goal but a domestic American sense of world-historical vengeance for 9/11. This was irrational.
As for calling quits and bailing at this early point, that isn’t going to happen. America kept at their unwinnable vendetta for 20 years. Russia has a strong case for Crimea and it has a rational national security case for the eastern corridor. Again, I don’t say this is preferable – comity among nations is always preferable – but it is geo-strategically rational. There is also a case for ethnic Russian majorities having a moral right to self-determination – especially given the tendency of Ukrainian nazis to ethnically cleanse them. If they were Uyghurs, the UN would be demanding a partition.
This week – under the pretext of punishing collaborators – the sport began all over again: Kiev admitted it was committing war crimes by shooting people “in the street.” Zelensky also called for a preemptive nuclear strike a day after the Pentagon fingered him for an assassination. Media interest: none.
I also point out that Ukraine is not a democracy.
He’s clearly dying. I don’t know what he has but it’s serious. He’s in a lot of pain.
Time for him is short. You need to look at the footage.
Yup. They’re a bunch of fruity types. But then backing Saddam Hussein against Khomeini was just peachy in the eighties. Then in the nineties he was worse than Hitler. That’s how it works. The art is to cope with that, but it can take a long time – time which Mr Putin no longer appears to have.
I think it will take more than 10 months to decide if it was a miscalculation but I agree that Putin has no talent for undermining the intelligence czars that now run America. However, the only way over their heads would have been to initiate ultra-liberalisations which he (and Russian culture generally) regard with understandable hostility. People say Putin is no Gorbachev but the West in 2022 is not the same as the West of the 1980s. It has grown morally insane. What non-Western country in its right mind would want to emulate it?
Remember in this context that Brussels has made it plain that a country (like, say, Hungary, Poland or Italy) cannot have some Western goodies without taking the entire unholy package. That the West has undermined itself in this respect is also proved by the appeal of China to the traditional societies of Africa and the Pacific.
I think that’s the advisable strategy for the United States. It is a broken country with a national debt (reported today) of $30 TRILLION. If there is one thing Americans don’t understand it’s the virtue of patience. Putin will not live forever.
Excellent points Bruce.
These are necessary steps towards a one-world government, get rid of the noncomplying. China will fall into line later as they crumble. NK also.
I think Russia, if they did pull out now, could negotiate to keep Crimea. But not Donetsk and Luhansk, nor any of the bits around Kherson and Mariupol.
The equation is that painful outcome versus all in. At the moment Russia is all in, and the cost is awful. I don’t know that Russia can survive it – another six months and you could see serious secession movements in central and southern areas, like Kazan. Kadyrov could change sides easily, he’s a complete feral. If the Caucasian statelets had a chance he’d go for it I suspect. We’re already seeing reports that Russia has failed to uphold their defensive alliance with Armenia – that will tell in Dagestan, Ingushetia and Chechnya.
I would much prefer a solid Russia than one which has been split into even more pieces. I’ve read a lot of Russian history – when Russia is behaving civilly they’re a stellar contribution to the world.
The Russian elite had thought to see themselves as European, preferably, of the French-speaking variety. Perhaps, then, it’s the Europeans and not the Chinese who are the ‘premier opponent’ of the US, at least insofar as the elites within the Europeans represent a quasi-aristocratic ruling class, always a thorn in the side of the New World. As for Russia, well maybe they no less than Ukraine are the proxies in the struggle. Over that civilisation which is Europe.
Not disagreeing with you.
The US as we’ve been discussing for some time is very close to a fascist one party state itself. We shall see what happens in the mid terms. The Dems are still remarkably complacent, not unlike how they were in the run up to 2020.
I think there’s a lot of truth in that, Franx. Or – if the EU-Europeans are not exactly an enemy to America – they are seen as mere provincial governors in the ‘Western World’ Empire.
Eastern Orthodoxy complicates the relationship too, of course. I made reference to the filioque controversy last week. For a thousand years, the Orthodox have resented it even though giant theologians in its own tradition (most especially Maximus the Confessor) have said it is totally OK. This seems to me to encapsulate the mentality of Third Rome as much as it did Constantinople. Viz: it’s not so much that those Latins are wrong, it’s the way they go about being right!
Ratzinger – some few years after The Man Maximus – has said that the filioque is not a genuine obstacle; and the filioque is increasingly recognised as more a matter of simple ecclesiological reckoning, or something along those lines. Divisions both real and contrived can be to used to divide and then polarise. Apologies, but to take the filioque as an analogy, nazis exist in both the Ukrainian and Russian camps.
Right but America isn’t financing and arming Russian nazis.
It’s financing and arming Ukrainian nazis – and has been for eight years.
If that isn’t a casus belli, few things are.
True about the casus belli, about the real thing, so to speak; it was just to note that there are pretty boys on both sides.
Perhaps because they know the fix is in.
This post is the angriest I have ever seen you.
On the subtext I agree with you 100%
I don’t know where else we can take ourselves, the world is at war and there is no other option but to fight.
10 years ago I lived next door to this adamant German in Red Hill and he constantly had this idea ‘the world needs a war so we can rid ourselves of the useless people ‘
Not verbatim, but this chap was adamant that history was repetitive and that ‘we need a big war’ to thin out the community
Looks like we are going to get it. The methane leak heard around the world. Doesn’t matter who did it, it has the potential to drag all of Europe into another war, and there does not appear to be anyone in the continent making noise to prevent it.
The Albow government has committed tens of billions to this war which should send numberwang into conniptions. But I doubt that. I bet that stupid fuck is fully on board with financing the beginning of the third world war.
Thank you, as always, Ragu.
The longer tripartite war against the citizens of the West – climate/covid/Ukraine – and all of the lies being told to keep it going infuriates me, yes. The world has been wrecked in a matter of a few years deliberately. And I tune in to Sky some nights and hear Paul Murray and his guests going on about the cost of living – but all of them signed up for net zero, lockdowns and endless war in Eastern Europe.
Brilliant strategy of the Ukrainians to pick a Jewish leader and recruit a nazi army. A perfect strategy that must undoubtedly explain the cohesive effort to repel Russian defenders of democracy and sovereignty.