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Who are Ukraine's "Moderate Rebels?"

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Who are Ukraine's "Moderate Rebels?"

History is repeating itself as the US and UK arm extremists | Issue #44

Asa Winstanley
Mar 1, 2022
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Who are Ukraine's "Moderate Rebels?"

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Ukrainian Nazis training civilians in the use of small arms. (ABC)

Russia’s president Vladimir Putin announced a new military operation in Ukraine on Thursday.

The invasion is focusing on the heavily Russian populated Donbass region in the south-east of the country.

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In a dramatic speech, Putin announced it came after “Ukrainian aggression” and requests to intervene from the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics to defend against anti-Russian “genocide” in Donbass.

That Monday, for the first time, Putin had officially recognised the DPR and LPR.

The DPR and LPR declared breakaway republics in 2014, in response to the “Maidan” coup in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, which overthrew the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych.

War has been waging in eastern Ukraine in one way or another since then. Thursday marked the start of a major new phase in that war.

Within only one hour of his Putin’s speech announcing his “special operation”, Russia had knocked out Ukraine’s entire air force and air defence systems, wiped out military targets all over the country, sent ground forces into eastern and southern Ukraine and invaded from the north, sending an invasion force towards Kiev in an apparent attempt to decapitate the Ukrainian government.

Russia’s endgame is not clear. In his speech, Putin stated the goal of the operation was “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine, stressing that “We do not have plans to occupy Ukrainian territories.”

Palestine is Still the Issue
How Israel is arming Ukrainian Nazis - #40
Since just before Christmas, there’s been a lot of hype in the capitalist press about Russia supposedly planning an invasion of Ukraine. Shades of Tony Blair’s infamous lie that Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” could be deployed within 45 minutes. Hardly anyone seems to be buying the pretext …
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a year ago · 7 likes · Asa Winstanley

A lot has been stated about Ukrainian Nazis in the last few weeks — and it’s a problem I’ve written about before — see Issue #40. But any time you try to point out the danger posed by the neo-Nazi and other far-right armed groups embedded within the Ukrainian state, you get accused of “Putin propaganda.”

But inconveniently for US empire and its pro-NATO apologists, on Sunday, that line was once again dis-proven — by no less a source than the official, blue-tick Twitter account of Ukraine’s National Guard.

As I’ve reported before, the explicitly neo-Nazi militia known as the Azov Battalion, soon after the 2014 coup, was integrated into the Ukrainian armed forces — including the National Guards.

On Sunday, the National Guards boasted (in English) that its neo-Nazi Azov fighters had been preparing to fight Muslim Russian troops by greasing their bullets with pig fat (Muslims don’t eat pork). They even posted an accompanying video.

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The account referred to the Russian Muslim soldiers as “Kadyrov orcs”. Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Russia’s Chechnya region, said on Saturday that his forces in Ukraine had yet to suffer a single loss.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s book Lord of the Rings — and in the norse myths that inspired it — orcs are the monstrous and barbaric sub-human creatures who make up the foot troops of the enemy’s anonymous hordes.

The video was widely viewed online — and widely criticised. Checking the Twitter replies on Sunday, you could see the liberal, pro-NATO meltdown.

Twitter avatar for @christoaivalis
Christo Aivalis 🌹🍊 @christoaivalis
@ng_ukraine Do you want to feed the narrative that your country sympathizes with Nazis? Because this is exactly what you would post if you wanted to look like you're supporting Nazis
5:33 PM ∙ Feb 27, 2022
6,138Likes356Retweets
Twitter avatar for @theresaverity
Theresa Verity @theresaverity
@ng_ukraine Chaps, you're actively sabotaging your international support when you make posts like this. Sort it out and put someone else in charge of writing these.
5:00 PM ∙ Feb 27, 2022
365Likes17Retweets
Twitter avatar for @AsaWinstanley
Asa Winstanley @AsaWinstanley
This Novara NATO fan is deliberately ignoring the fact that Azov has for years been *an official unit of this same Ukrainian National Guard*! This not just some "worrying" aberration. The posting is not the problem: the Nazis embedded in the Ukrainian state are the problem.
Twitter avatar for @AyoCaesar
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar
The Ukrainian National Guard sharing explicitly racist propaganda from the Azov movement is deeply worrying. As others have said, Russia exaggerates the role of the far right in Ukraine. But Western media coverage mostly ignores it so as to avoid copying Kremlin talking points. https://t.co/qKywlS1S9S
8:51 PM ∙ Feb 27, 2022
360Likes159Retweets

There were a lot of tweets along these lines, fretting about the bad PR for the imperialist NATO cause, and somehow still managing to spin this into an anti-Russian line about the problem with Ukrainian Nazis somehow being Putin lies and exaggerations.

After a lot of two-faced criticism, Twitter eventually hid the tweet behind this warning about “hateful content.” You can still click through to the tweet, but you can no longer reply to it and all the replies to date have also been hidden.

But as I emphasised on Twitter to Novara’s fake leftist Ash Sarkar (see above), this tweet was not just a worrying aberation, or a rogue element online. This is evidenced by the fact that the National Guard account wrote its Nazi tweet in English and has still refused to delete it — even though its liberal Western backers have advised that it will be bad for their image.

Every country has bad elements. But, as John Pilger explained recently, Ukraine is the only European country where the Nazis are openly embraced, armed and utilised by the government.

Twitter avatar for @MarkAmesExiled
Mark Ames @MarkAmesExiled
Amazing. Czech media reporting that Granny Valentyna's photo op was organized by the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Meaning a bonafide Nazi propaganda tool is the darling of the Angloid media elites. Truly the face of Ukrainian resistance. irozhlas.cz/zpravy-svet/do…
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12:18 AM ∙ Feb 14, 2022
8,858Likes2,843Retweets

The now infamous “Ukrainian granny” photo op the week prior was even organized by the Azov Nazis, who were the ones running the civilian arms training in questions

And they are also being armed and trained by NATO and its allies — the US, UK, Canada and Israel.

Twitter avatar for @johnpilger
John Pilger @johnpilger
"Invasion" news you won't read. The US is sending millions of dollars worth of arms to Europe's only openly neo-Nazi infested country while Britain trains Ukraine's neo-Nazi infested National Guard and the regime lays siege to Russian-speaking Donbas. theintercept.com/2022/02/18/ukr…?
theintercept.comNeo-Nazis Not Top of Mind for Senate Democrats Pushing Weapons for UkraineTop foreign policymaker Sen. Bob Menendez couldn’t say whether his bill would monitor where U.S.-funded arms end up.
2:51 PM ∙ Feb 21, 2022
2,112Likes1,249Retweets

If, despite Putin’s promises, the Russian military operation does in fact result in a protracted military occupation, it could end up backfiring, fuelling and empowering these neo-Nazi elements.

With US training of these extremists, there are massive shades of Syria here — “Moderate Rebels”. But this time instead of “Moderate al-Qaida,” in Ukraine we have — if you believe some beltway think tanks — “Moderate Nazis”.

And it appears the US empire is even training the respective “rebels” in the same tactics. A recent analysis in the LA Times by a historian of US intelligence explains.

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“For years now the Central Intelligence Agency has been preparing for such a moment . . . by preparing Ukrainians to mount an insurgency against a Russian occupation,” Jeff Rogg wrote.

But despite training Ukrainian fighters since 2015, CIA optimists “seem to be forgetting the lessons from past U.S. efforts, including the CIA’s first attempt to support a Ukrainian insurgency against the Soviets in 1949, which ended in failure.”

Rogg argued that:

In 1950 . . . U.S. officers involved in the program knew they were fighting a losing battle. Today, we have no clear evidence that the Ukrainians are capable of sustaining an insurgency, or that Russia would retreat if faced with such resistance.

He wrote (my emphasis):

In the first U.S.-backed insurgency, according to top secret documents later declassified, American officials intended to use the Ukrainians as a proxy force to bleed the Soviet Union. This time, is the primary goal . . . to weaken Russia over the course of a long insurgency that will undoubtedly cost as many Ukrainian lives as Russian lives, if not more?

And a New York Times report from December coming out of the countryside near Kiev gave even more details about how Ukrainian Moderate Rebels will fight Russian soldiers.

In the piece, the reporter admits that, “Ukraine’s own generals say their regular military stands little chance in a full-fledged invasion.” Instead,

The goal is not to achieve victory against the weight of the Russian military, which would be virtually impossible for Ukraine anyway. Rather it is to create the threat of disruption and resistance to an occupying force.

The military training programme to civilians that the Times was reporting details on was run by mercenary group the Territorial Defense Forces, including “a nearly two-hour lecture . . . on likely plans of attack on Kyiv — including armored columns rolling in on highways or paratroopers seizing the airport — by Lt. Yuri Matviyenko, a former Ukrainian military attaché to Israel.”

“Expect a fast storming,” he said. “We won’t have much time.”

He described how the volunteers might resist based on the tactics of Islamist militias in Aleppo, Syria. The volunteers should use their knowledge of their own neighborhoods to move close to the Russian soldiers, leaving too little separation to call in airstrikes or artillery, he said.

Moderate Rebels indeed.

Recommended Reading and Listening

  • “Ukraine, Palestine and the propaganda of war,” Ali Abunimah

  • “Ukraine crisis highlights West’s hypocrisy over Israeli land theft,” Ali Abunimah

  • “From the Black Sea to the East Med, don't poke The Russian Bear,” Pepe Escobar

Tweet of the Week

Twitter avatar for @aaronjmate
Aaron Maté @aaronjmate
Russia has not used anywhere near its full military power. It's avoided civilian areas & focused on NATO-tied military targets. That's why CNN-MSNBC-Fox have so little actual footage. US can avoid disaster if it stops treating Ukrainians as cannon fodder & gives up on NATO there.
12:57 AM ∙ Feb 27, 2022
15,476Likes4,566Retweets
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Who are Ukraine's "Moderate Rebels?"

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Chris Shaw
Mar 1, 2022Liked by Asa Winstanley

Thank you. I have switched off all social media and stay off the news websites. Everyone I know is in full on Love Ukraine mode, and it is so helpful to read your article.

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