UKRAINIAN NATIONALIST ARMY OUN–UPA AND THE NAZI GENOCIDE

THEORY AND PRACTICE

Historical representation of the wartime accounts of the activities of the OUN–UPA (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists—Ukrainian Insurgent Army)

Per Anders Rudling parudling@ualberta.ca 

Introduction

When it comes to assessing the history of the violent 20th century, historical analysis hasoften been restricted by ideological blindness and selective interpretation. This is not anissue limited to one side of the ideological spectrum, or to any particular ethnic community.

This article focuses on the nationalist historiography of the post-war or “third wave” of Ukrainian immigrants to North America and the largely positive representation of the OUNand UPA by some high-profile Ukrainian historians. In this paper, I attempt to highlight thediscrepancy between theory and practice, and I suggest that the change in the ideology of the OUN was not followed by changes in practice. 

Rather, the political course of the OUN–UPA remained one of uncompromising ideological and ethnic extremism. This translated into a continuation of a policy the implementation of which completed the mass murder initiated in the summer of 1943. I also focus on the unwillingness of a number of Central Ukrainian and diaspora historians to confront this bloody past. This article will consider Ukraine in a European context, adjudged by the same tools of analysis as other European states, which is particularly apposite given contemporary circumstances. Confronting the past means challenging myths, something that is painful for a country still in the process of nation-building and actively constructing national myths. There are attempts at casting the OUN in a heroic light in the official Ukrainian historical narrative.At the same time, the Orange Revolution has shown that many Ukrainians identify with Europe and desire European integration. To a large extent, European integration requires realignment with liberal democratic or “European” values. Much like post-war Germany was forced to confront its history, post-Orange-Revolution Ukraine faces a similar challenge of Vergangenheitsbewältigung . If Ukraine is serious in its attempts to orient itself towards the European Union, the anti-democratic trends of the past need to be confronted rather than allowed to enter the new national mythology as doctored recollections.

The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths, 

The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 2107 (Pittsburgh: University Center for Russian and East European Studies, 2011).

Per Anders Rudling

During the past decade, particularly under the presidency of the third Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko (2005–2010) there have been repeated attempts to turn the leading figures of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) into national heroes. As these fascist organizations collaborated with the Nazi Germany, carried out ethnic cleansing and mass murder on a massive scale, they are problematic symbols for an aspiring democracy with the stated ambition to join the European Union. Under Yushchenko, several institutes of memory management and myth making were organized, a key function of which was to deny or downplay OUN-UPA atrocities. Unlike many other former Soviet republics, the Ukrainian government did not need to develop new national myths from scratch, but imported ready concepts developed in the Ukrainian diaspora. Yushchenko’s legitimizing historians presented the OUN and UPA as pluralistic and inclusive organizations, which not only rescued Jews during the Holocaust, but invited them into their ranks to fight shoulder to shoulder against Hitler and Stalin. This mythical narrative relied partly on the OUN’s own post-war forgeries, aimed at cover up the organization’s problematic past. As employees of the Ukrainian security services, working out of the offices of the old KGB, the legitimizing historians ironically dismissed scholarly criticism as Soviet myths. The present study deals with the myth-making around the OUN, the UPA, and the Holocaust, tracing their diaspora roots and following their migration back and forth across the Atlantic.

"Memories of 'Holodomor' and National Socialism in Ukrainian Political Culture"

in Yves Bizeul (ed.) Rekonstruktion des Nationalmythos?: Frankreich, Deutschland und die Ukraine im Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress, 2013), 227-258.

Per Anders Rudling

Subsequently, World War II brought nearly incomprehensible suffering and population losses.

A 2004 study lists the total Ukrainian war deaths at 6,850,000 people, or 16.3 % of the population. Of these, a full 5,200,000 were civilians,whereas military victims “only” constituted 1,650,000. Of these civilian deaths,at least 1.4 million, but perhaps as many as 2.1 million Jews were murdered in Ukraine.

The German occupation of Ukraine was extraordinarily harsh. Ukraine was divided between German, Romanian, and Hungarian occupants, the largest part organized as the so-called

 Reichskommisariat  Ukraine. The western most part way incorporated into the Greater German Reich, as the Distrikt Galizien.

 Here the occupation was considerably milder, and the Ukrainian population played off against the Poles.Whereas Ukrainian national sentiments were suppressed in the rest of Ukraine they were partially supported in Galicia. Talented Ukrainians were offered scholarships to study in the Reich,and in 1943 even a GalicianWaffen-SS Division was formed.

The occupying authorities strictly guarded the sealed border to the Reichskommissariat, where the situation was quite different.

The brutal Reichskommissar Erich Koch banned education above the third grade, and mused that “if I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot.”

Ukraine saw considerable resistance to the Nazi occupation. 4.5 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army to which The estimates differ greatly, and have been manipulated by various political interest groups.

Gregorovich, Andrew: Ukraine’s Population Losses in World War II: 7.5 million

Terrorists or national heroes? Politics and perceptions of the OUN and the UPA in Ukraine

Ivan Katchanovski

Tudy analyzes controversies and public attitudes concerning the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)
and Stepan Bandera in Ukraine. The research question is: Which factors affect attitudes toward the OUN-B, the UPA and Bandera in contemporary Ukraine? This article employs comparative and regression analyses of surveys commissioned by the author and conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in 2009 and 2013 to determine the effects of regional and other factors on attitudes toward these organizations and the OUN-B leader. The study shows that regional factors and perceptions of these organizations' involvement in mass murder were the strongest predictors of the views concerning the OUN-B, the UPA and Bandera. Their public support is strongest in Galicia and weakest in the East and the South, in particular, in Donbas and Crimea, two major conflict areas since the “Euromaidan.”
Journal Name: Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 48 (2-3), 217-228
Publication Date: Oct 15, 2015

The OUN, the UPA, and the Nazi Genocide in Ukraine
Mittäterschaft in Osteuropa im Zweiten Weltkrieg und im Holocaust / Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust, 2019Ivan Katchanovski
Ivan Katchanovski
The issue of the political rehabilitation and glorification of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) became one of the central political issues in Ukraine after the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan. It provoked major political and historical controversies and debates in Ukraine and other countries. Presidents Yushchenko and Poroshenko, their parties, far right organizations, and many Ukrainian historians attempted to recast the OUN-B and the UPA as parts of a popular national liberation movement that fought against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and to present the OUN-B and UPA leaders as national heroes. They denied, minimized or justified the involvement of the OUN-B and the UPA leaders and members in the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians.The analyses of biographic publications, historical studies, and archival documents show that the majority of the OUN-B and UPA leaders and very large proportions of their members collaborated with Nazi Germany, mainly in the beginning of the Second World War. early half of the top and middle-ranked leaders of these organizations andat least until the end of 1943 the majority of UPA members served in various police formations. They assisted the German occupation authorities in implementing genocidal policies towards the Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles by helping to carry out mass shootings and create conditions intended for the physical annihilation of the entire Jewish population and large numbers of Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles, specifically in Volhynia. The fact that many police commanders and large numbers of policemen in various locations and formations followed orders from the OUN-B by deserting en masse from their service, in particular in Volhynia in the spring of 1943, and forming the basis of the UPA shows that these commanders and police members were de facto controlled by the OUN-B.
More Info: In Black , Peter; Rásky, Béla; Windsperger, Marianne (Eds)
Page Numbers: 67-93
Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: Mittäterschaft in Osteuropa im Zweiten Weltkrieg und im Holocaust / Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust

Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide or Ukrainian-Polish Conflict? The Mass Murder of Poles by the OUN and the UPA in Volhynia
Ivan Katchanovski
This paper analyzes the mass-murder of Poles in Volhynia in Western Ukraine during World War II. The mass murder of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Stepan Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) during the Nazi occupation of Volhynia in 1943 became an important political issue in Poland and Ukraine after the collapse of communism. Previous studies by Polish, Ukrainian, and Western researchers offered different and often divergent theories of this historical event. It is often presented in Ukraine as a mutual Ukrainian-Polish conflict. In contrast, in Poland, the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia is often characterized as genocide. A research question is whether this was a Ukrainian-Polish conflict, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This study analyzes a variety of archival documents, historical studies, and eyewitness accounts. It offers an estimate of Polish casualties derived from analysis of OUN-UPA, Polish, and Soviet, and sources and demographic data. This study concludes that the mass murder of the Polish minority in Volhynia by the OUN-B, the UPA, and their security service (SB) represented not a mutual Ukrainian-Polish conflict or genocide of Poles but that it was a part of ethnic cleansing.
More Info: Paper presented at the 19th Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Columbia University, New York, US, April 24-26, 2014


Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN-UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943-1944
Jared  McBride

The Ukrainian nationalist-led ethnic cleansing campaign against Poles in Volhynia during 1943–44 has long been the subject of international tension and contentious public and scholarly debate. This article analyzes the topic through a microhistorical lens that looks at one ethnic cleansing operation in the Liuboml’ area of Volhynia that killed hundreds of Poles. Using newly declassified materials from Ukrainian secret police archives, alongside more traditional testimonial sources, I demonstrate that not all participants were prepared nationalist ideologues eager to kill. Rather, there was a range of actors involved in the massacres and the Ukrainian nationalist leadership was able to recruit average peasants to participate in ethnic cleansing through diverse mechanisms. This disaggregation of the killers and their motives not only contributes to growing social science research on mobilization for violence, but also challenges assumptions inherent in the double or triple occupation thesis frequently used to explain violence in Volhynia from 1939 to 1945.

Debating, obfuscating and disciplining the Holocaust: post-Soviet historical discourses on the OUN–UPA and other nationalist movements

Grzegorz  Rossoliński-Liebe

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union the archives of the former republics and satellite states of this multiethnic empire were opened. This allowed historians to investigate the history of nationalist and radical right organisations and armies that, during the Second World War, had been involved in the Holocaust and other atrocities. Among them was the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. For a long time the history of these movements was unknown or distorted by Soviet propaganda and propagandist publications written during the Cold War by veterans of these movements living in the West and cooperating with Western intelligence services. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was simultaneously accompanied by the “rebirth” of nationalism that was not free from antisemitism and racism, and which triggered different types of nationalist distortions of history and obfuscations of the Holocaust. Post-Soviet historical discourses were shaped not only by journalists or political activists, but also by radical right historians. These discourses impacted as well on historians who in general were critical of the post-Soviet rehabilitation of nationalism, war criminality or East Central European fascism. Concentrating on Ukrainian and Polish history, this article explores how the radical right historical discourses appeared in the post-Soviet space, what types of historians were involved in them and what kinds of distortions and obfuscations have predominated.
More Info: East European Jewish Affairs Vol. 42, No. 3, December 2012, 199–241.

“Introduction: The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Memory Politics, Public Debates, and Foreign Affairs,”

Andreas Umland and Yuliya Yurchuk,

 Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 3, no. 2 (2017): 115

This second introduction, like the one to the first special section within this series, does not list many of the previous scholarly studies on this section’s topic in as far asmost of the relevant articles and books are listed in the two special sections’papers’ footnotes. We are very grateful to Julie Fedor for her extremely careful and patient final editing of the contributions to these two special sections (including this introduction). Responsibility for any remaining impressions and misinterpretations here and below lies, however, solely with the respective texts’ authors.

Reclaiming the Past, Confronting the Past: OUN-UPA Memory Politics and Nation-Building in Ukraine (1991-2016), 

in: War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, ed. Julie Fedor, Markku Kangaspuro, Jussi Lassila, and Tatiana Zhurzhenko, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2017.


Yuliya Yurchuk

THE ORGANIZATION OF UKRAINIAN NATIONALISTS

AND THE UKRAINIAN INSURGENT ARMY:UNWELCOME ELEMENTS OF AN IDENTITY PROJECT

 Ab Imperio, 4/2010

John-Paul HIMKA

 Introduction

What follows below are four polemical texts that aim to repudiate thelegacy of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and of itsarmed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). They were motivated by the, unfortunately largely successful, campaign of former presidentViktor Yushchenko in Ukraine and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress(UCC) in the North American diaspora to put the glorication of these radical right nationalists at the very center of the Ukrainian national identity project.

On the most recent Remembrance Day in Canada (November 11, 2010), the UCC issueda statement containing this passage: “As Ukrainian Canadians we also remember and paytribute to the millions of men and women who perished ghting for the freedom of their ancestral Ukrainian homeland. The men and women of the Ukrainian Sich Riemen, the1st Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army, the Ukrainian Insurgent Armyand the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.” The Ukrainian Sich Riemen foughtfor an independent Ukraine after World War I, and the 1st Ukrainian Division was aWaffen-SS unit in World War II

Why Ukraine lost a hundred years ago and why It can and should win today

Mon, June 13, 2022
The New Voice of Ukraine

And the lessons of defeat are even more valuable than victories – because they can help us avoid mistakes.

So why did the Ukrainian state collapse a hundred years ago?

Let’s quickly reject the simple answers. Because simple answers to complex questions are simply wrong.

Read also: A history of adversaries, not brothers. Why did this war happen?

Ukrainians are not worse than other nations which also rebuilt their states on the ruins of empires after the First World War. We are no less zealous than Poles, Lithuanians, or Finns. No less sacrificial.

The political elite of Ukrainians was not slow or indecisive, as some say. We were second after the Finns to declare independence. The challenges faced by Ukrainians were more serious than those of our neighbors.


But I do not call for idealizing our politicians of that time or the general state of Ukrainian society. Mistakes played a significant role in their defeat.

So let us try to understand the objective and subjective reasons for the fall of the Ukrainian state, born out of the 1917-1921 revolution. To understand what mistakes we must not repeat.

Let’s start with the objective circumstances, which were almost impossible to influence.

The national consciousness of Ukrainians gradually grew along with the national movement of the 19th century. This was the potential that leaders had to deal with.

Read also: Seven popular myths about Russia's aggression against Ukraine

By the beginning of the revolution, the movement had already entered the political stage of development. That is, its main spokesman was not only poets, writers, and artists. At the beginning of the 20th century, Ukrainian political parties were formed.

The Revolutionary Ukrainian Party, led by Mykola Mikhnovsky, outlined in 1900 its main task – to create an independent Ukrainian state. It defined its direction for the next century.

But the low level of education or its complete absence, the catastrophic economic situation of a large mass of Ukrainians left them behind in the process of national self-awareness or even active participation in the national movement.

Another objective problem was too little awareness of us in the world. At that time, there was no political emigration that could talk about Ukrainians. It began to form just after its defeat.

And those of our compatriots who left their homeland earlier because of poverty and moved to Europe or America, fought for their survival abroad. Their first public association started to appear. Ukrainians in the world were still far from being lobbyists for the Ukrainian national movement.

And finally, the last and most important problem was a large number of powerful enemies. Those who created the Ukrainian state in the early 20th century were opposed by:

The Russian Bolsheviks – the strongest enemy who also counted on the support of some Ukrainians;

UKRAINIAN BOLSHEVIKS THE BOROBITZ WERE AUTONOMOUS FROM THE RUSSIANS

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: UKRAINIAN REVOLUTION CENTENARY 1917-2017 

Military formations of the so-called “White Russia”, which was supported by some European states; ANTI SEMITIC REACTIONARIES

The restored Polish state also enlisted the help of other Europeans. ANTI SEMITIC CATHOLICS

None of the other nations that won their independence had to face such strong, multifaceted and large-scale external aggression.

And now let’s talk about the mistakes that could have been avoided.

First of all, insufficient attention to the development of the armed forces. The creators of the Ukrainian army not only did not have the necessary support from the political elite – they were forced to prove the need for the army.

Politicians believed that after the bloody First World War, all nations would refuse to resolve issues using force, and Ukraine would be the first in this process. These romantic ideas cost Ukrainians dearly.

The lost time and potential of the first months of the revolution were difficult to make up. And it was not possible to “get together in the middle” with the aggressor, so we had to form an army after a full-scale invasion.

The leaders’ belief in the possibility of reaching an agreement with Russia was a gross mistake. It didn’t matter if it was “red” or “white” Russia. None of them were going to put up with the existence of an independent Ukraine.

An even more dangerous delusion was that many Ukrainians believed that this war for independence did not concern them. They believed that their lives would not change much from the victory or defeat of either side.

That it was possible to sit quietly and imperceptibly in a “house on fire”. The decades following this showed that the occupiers will come to the last house and take whatever they want. Including your life.

But the most important mistake was the inability of Ukrainian politicians to distinguish political rivals from enemies of the state. Fierce discussions about different visions of Ukraine’s future were inevitable and quite natural. The problem became that at some point, these disputes became more important than confronting the enemy.

This mistake was very costly to everyone – Hrushevsky, Petliura (ANTI SEMITE), Vynnychenko, Skoropadsky (ANTI SEMITE), Makhno ANARCHIST ARMY OF UKRAINE – they rethought this only in exile. Ukrainians who remained in their homeland paid even more for this mistake – decades of bloody repression awaited them.

And now let’s compare this with today’s Ukraine, to understand why we can win this war with Russia.

The vast majority of Ukrainians today consider themselves Ukrainians. Thus, there are almost no issues with national self-awareness that our predecessors faced.

They don’t just know about Ukraine. We are a state whose independence and integrity are recognized by almost all countries of the world. The Ukrainian diaspora works effectively in many of them. The struggle of Ukrainians for freedom is one of the main topics of the world media.

For the first time in our history, we receive not only economic but also military assistance, including offensive weapons.

The degree of Russian aggression today and a hundred years ago is roughly comparable. But we are dealing with only one enemy, even if he attacks from the territories of two countries. And against this enemy is the whole civilized world. And so, it is easier for us than for our ancestors.

As for the mistakes of the past, which we cannot repeat, the situation is worse here. Society and government began to realize the importance of the army only after the start of the war in Russia in 2014. Having wasted two decades of independence on wasting its military potential.

But even after the start of the war, Ukrainians weren’t consistent. In 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky won, claiming that the war could not be ended by military means. And most Ukrainians believed this was possible.

And so they agreed that the priority of state policy was the construction and repair of roads, not the development of the army and the purchase of weapons.

A new wave of aggression in 2022, which reached Kyiv, changed the situation. Parliament began to allocate more resources to the Armed Forces. The President spoke about the Ukrainian army as the main guarantor of independence.

Most Ukrainians are actively involved in the war – in the Armed Forces, the Territorial Defence, and volunteers. A well-known proverb sounds different now: “I’ll meet the enemy first as my house is on the edge.”

But what about the main political problem of a century ago – the inability of political leaders to cooperate? Unfortunately, the further away from the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, the less confident they are that they have learned this lesson.

Do Ukrainian politicians really understand that they can have friends, allies, competitors, rivals, and opponents? But our enemy outside the country, in Russia, is waging a war against us all.

Competitors, rivals, opponents may see a different Ukraine in the future. Enemies simply do not see a future for us. They can pretend to be allies or even friends, formulate tempting proposals to fight opponents, but we must not forget – their goal is to destroy our state.

Read also: Top five Russian propaganda WWII myths debunked

And so comparing Ukraine a hundred years ago and today, we have better objective circumstances for victory. And even better conditions for overcoming subjective obstacles. We have a chance for our children to read about our era. Unlike our predecessors, we know what defeat in the war with Russia means. We know that peace can cost more than a war.

After all, we have learned our lessons, haven’t we?

 

How Russia “ground down” Ukrainians

10.09.2021 15:00

Russia's narrative of its own national diversity and peaceful coexistence of languages and cultures is not quite consistent with reality

Speaking at the MGIMO University on September 1, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said: "We have never tried to grind down the traditions, culture, language of those peoples who have inhabited the territory of our country since the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation.” But then why is the vast majority of languages in Russia endangered? And where have millions of Ukrainians disappeared?

mid.ru

The territory of Russia covers one-eighth of the entire land surface on Earth, with the population constituting 1.9% of the world’s, while languages spoken in Russia account for about 2% of all the world’s languages. At the same time, over 90% of these languages (121 out of 131) are threatened to a varying extent, according to UNESCO assessment. The report says 19 languages are “vulnerable,” while the rest are in an even more critical situation.

In late 2019, a post by a High School of Economics Professor Gasan Guseynov made quite a splash in Russia, where he wrote that in the capital of a multinational country “hosting hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Tatars,” nothing is available in languages other than Russian. Perhaps that is why, Guseynov wrote, it seems to some Russians that Russian speakers in Ukraine are unable to learn Ukrainian. The professor was soon fired.

Despite Russia’s rhetoric about its multinational nature and multilingualism, the presidential Hotline only accepts questions in Russian, while letters to Ukrainian political prisoners in Russian prisons won’t be delivered if written in any other language. Federal TV and radio broadcast entirely in Russian as well. It is the only available language of vocational and higher education, including the Single State Exam in secondary school. National languages, on the other hand, have not been mandated in schools since 2018. In September 2019, Albert Razin, a Russian scientist, set himself on fire in defense of the Udmurt language (the number of speakers dropped by a third from 2002 to 2010 alone), protesting against the innovation. The government turned a blind eye to the dramatic move.

According to a 2010 census, some 552,000 Udmurts were living in Russia, along with 1.9 million Ukrainians, making the latter the third-largest ethnic group in the Russian Federation, after Russians and Tatars. They also make up for the world’s largest Ukrainian diaspora. Somewhat fewer (1.3 million) people of Ukrainian descent reside in Canada.

Getty images

However, overseas it is much easier than in the “sisterly” Russia to remain a Ukrainian, as noted by Forbes. Families are welcome to baptize a child either in a Ukrainian Orthodox or Catholic Church. The child is free to attend a Ukrainian kindergarten, and then, they can learn their native language and history in a municipal secondary school. There are 12 schools like that in Toronto and suburbs, and 25 in the Province of Ontario. In Russia, on the other hand, there are no government schools where Ukrainian is the language of command. Any attempts to open them, as explained by Mykhailo Ratushnyk, head of the Ukrainian World Coordinating Council, immediately get into the FSB focus, with its operatives starting to intimidate the initiators.

“Over the past 20 years, the Ukrainian diaspora in Russia has been under enormous pressure from the government, both at official and unofficial everyday levels,” was mentioned at the V All-Ukraine Research Conference in 2013.

Needless to say, it has become very inconvenient to be a Ukrainian in Russia since 2014.

“If we speak about Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, they are almost the most disempowered people in Russia. It is simply dangerous to be a Ukrainian or a Crimean Tatar. Going to a Ukrainian church, studying the language (you can do it in Kuban, but as a “Russian dialect,” “Kuban-speak”) – it is all informally prohibited, said Director of the Oleksandr Nykonorov Foreign Policy Research Center and co-coordinator of the “Kuban with Ukraine” Committee Serhii Parkhomenko.

On the other hand, being a Ukrainian had become dangerous in Russia long before 2014.

According to a 1926 census, Ukrainians were the second-largest ethnic group in Russia. Back then, it was 7.8 million people. By the next census, the number more than halved – in 1939, there were just 3.3 million Ukrainians in Soviet Russia. Over the past century, Ukrainians in Russia remained at a quarter of the previous number. Given the circumstances, it would be fair to call it “cultural genocide.”

Kuban

This genocide was most severe in the 1930s when forcible suppression of Ukrainians and their culture started in regions with a historically high Ukrainian population, particularly Kuban.

The first general census of the Russian Empire of 1897 recorded more than 900,000 Ukrainian speakers in Kuban (62% of the total population). Manifestations of the Ukrainian culture were so strong in Kuban that soon after the revolution in the Russian Empire, Kuban People’s Republic emerged, and its Legislative Council in 1918 adopted a resolution to join the Ukrainian National Republic in the form of a Federation. The merger never happened due to aggression by Soviet Russia. In 1920, Kuban People's Republic was destroyed by the Bolsheviks. However, insurgent units operated in the Kuban area until 1925.

The Soviet census of 1926 showed there were 915,000 Ukrainians in Kuban. At the time of a 2010 census, there were 84,000 left.

In 1992, film director Valentin Sperkach shot a documentary entitled Cuban Cossacks. For Two Hundred Years Now..., which tells the story of Zaporizhia Cossacks moving to Kuban and the genocide of Ukrainians in Russia.

Kuban on the map of Ukraine, released in Vienna in 1919 or 1920 by the "Christoph Raiser and Sons" Publishing House. Artist "Verte", idea by G. Gasenko

Its characters open up about their experiences: “Why am I registered as Russian, not Ukrainian... Because we were being strangled, so help us God!.. The entire Krasnodar Krai was made Russian... We were Ukrainians, and now we no longer know who we are. Shapeshifters... In school, I studied in Ukrainian. And we spoke Ukrainian. And since 1933, everything has come to naught.”

On December 14, 1932, the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) and the SNC of the USSR adopted a resolution "On Grain Procurement in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Western region," which radically changed approaches to national policy: the fight against “Petliura's Ukrainization" in the Ukrainian SSR and against any manifestations of Ukrainization in the North Caucasus. The next day, the ban on the use of the Ukrainian language in education, office work, and press was extended to other regions of Soviet Russia with a highly dense Ukrainian population.

This was accompanied by repressions. According to one of the characters of Sperchak's documentary, his family was saved from deportation after his father forbade him to enroll in a Cossack culture club at school. The families of all kids who had signed up were deported.

Far East

Another powerful Ukrainian center outside Ukraine, besides Kuban, was Green Ukraine – a territory in the southern part of the Far East. Based on various estimates, Ukrainians constituted a third to a half of the population in the Far East. In some areas, they even accounted for 60–80% of the population.

“This is a big Malorossiya village. The main and oldest street is Mykolska. Along the entire street, on both sides, white huts are lined up, occasionally still covered with straw... people from the Great Russian counties are barely noticeable among those from Poltava, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Volyn, and other Ukrainians – they vanish among the primary Malorossiya element... People sport Ukrainian clothes. You can hear the joyful, populous, and lively Malorossiya speech everywhere” correspondent Ivan Illich-Svitych wrote, describing the city of Ussuriysk in 1905.

From June 1917 to January 1918, the Provisional Far Eastern Ukrainian National Committee, which was the main executive body of the Ukrainian Far Eastern Republic, was located here in Ussuriysk. Ukrainians also tried to form their state in the Far East.

Throughout its existence, the state-building movement in Green Ukraine focused on unification with the Ukrainian People's Republic. The Second All-Ukraine Congress of the Far East, held in Khabarovsk in January 1918, appealed to the government of the Ukrainian People's Republic, demanding that the Russian government recognize Green Ukraine as part of the Ukrainian state.

“Of course, the conditions were hardly auspicious – civil war between the Red and the White armies was already underway in the Far East. Both of them were very negative, even hostile, towards Ukrainians – not only towards their aspiration for independence, but even towards their cultural needs,” said Viacheslav Chornomaz, researcher of the Ukrainian diaspora in the Far East and its representative, editor of the encyclopedia Green Ukraine. Ukrainian Far East.”

But as soon as the 1930s, the Far East turned into a “desert of Ukrainian culture,” said Chornomaz. Ukrainians had no opportunity to preserve their identity.

Siberia

The third center was the Ukrainian communities of Grey Ukraine – the territory of Ukrainian colonization in Siberia. After the February Revolution of 1917, the Ukrainians of Grey Ukraine established their own self-government and military units in Siberia. At the First Ukrainian Congress of Siberia in Omsk in July-August 1917, the Main Ukrainian Council of Siberia was elected.

Seryi Klyn. Cossacks of the Hetman Petro Sahaidachny squad. In 1917-1920, a movement for Ukrainian state autonomy was launched Seryi Klyn.

Ukrainian state movement in Siberia stretched across the regions of Western Siberia, where Ukrainians accounted for the majority of the population. At the time of the Ukrainian governmental movement in Grey Ukraine, Ukrainian press was available, Ukrainian unions and associations were created, and even Ukrainian national rallies were held, flying blue and yellow flags.

After termination of the Ukrainian statehood in Grey Ukraine and the occupation of Western Siberia by the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainian population, which constituted about 40% of the 1.5 million people of Grey Ukraine, was destroyed or assimilated.

Volga Region and Others

In addition to Green and Grey Ukraine, there was also the so-called Yellow Ukraine, an ethnic Ukrainian territory in the Volga region where the presence of Ukrainians was so massive that the German Republic of the Volga region created by the Bolsheviks had three official languages – German, Russian, and Ukrainian – enshrined in the constitution. Moscow, however, never approved the constitution, and the autonomy was soon abolished.

In 1926, Ukrainians made up more than 70% of the population of the Taganrog area but in 1939, the Soviet census showed that most Ukrainians in that region had mysteriously “disappeared.” While Ukrainians accounted for about 40% of the population in the Belgorod region in the 1897 census, the area has become practically mono-ethnic today: 94.4% of the population are Russians.

Today’s Russia

In the aughts, Ukrainian social, cultural, and religious activists in Russia faced attacks, assaults, attempted and completed assassinations. Ukrainian organizations and establishments that emerged on the wave of democratic reforms were eliminated.

In 2003, the vicar of the Moscow parish of St. Ignatius the Godbearer, Bishop Oleksandr Simchenko of Antioch (UGCC) was first assaulted by a group of unidentified men while on an Ivano-Frankivsk – Moscow train. The priest spent several weeks in hospital but no criminal inquiry was opened. After that, he was assaulted five more times. The perpetrators were never found.

In 2002, Volodymyr Poburynnyi, a businessman, philanthropist, and member of the "Dream" Ukrainian Cultural Society  was killed in Ivanovo region.

In April 2004, Anatolii Kryl, leader of the Ukrainian choir “Horlytsia” and doctor by profession, was killed in Vladivostok.

In July 2006, Natalia Kovaliova, head of the Audit Commission of the Federal National and Cultural Autonomy of Ukrainians in Russia (FNCAUR), survived an assassination attempt in Tula. Two men attacked her, inflicting multiple grave injuries. A metal rod, found near the crime scene, was used to smash her face, break her teeth, and almost knock out her right eye. The woman suffered a fractured skull and intracranial bleeding.

In December 2006, her husband, Volodymyr Senyshyn, member of the Council of the Union of Ukrainians in Russia and head of the Tula regional organization Parents' Roof, was killed in Tula.

In 2008, the Ukrainian Educational Center was terminated in Moscow.

In 2010, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation revoked registration of one of the two largest public associations of the Ukrainian minority, the Federal National and Cultural Autonomy of Ukrainians in Russia.

In 2010, due to a criminal case, the only official library of Ukrainian literature in Russia was shut down to visitors (and eventually closed altogether in 2018).

In 2012, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation ruled to close the second all-Russian public organization of the Ukrainian minority, the Union of Ukrainians in Russia.

Roman Tsymbaliuk / hyser

Roman Tsymbaliuk, an UNIAN staff writer in Moscow, said: “Even before the invasion, the Russian authorities had done everything possible to destroy the Ukrainian movement in the Russian Federation.”

Center for Strategic Communications and Information Strategy

How the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years

 ago still haunts Ukraine

As western Ukrainians clash with their eastern counterparts, the divides that Soviet authoritarianism masked are reasserting themselves.

Barbara Gibson


By Ido Vock
15 September 2021

“Russia was robbed,” wrote Vladimir Putin in a 5,000-word essay on “the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”. Modern Ukraine, Putin argued, “was shaped… on the lands of historical Russia” by the Bolsheviks, who had no regard for the history of Russia.

Putin’s argument is hardly new. Regime figures alternately argue that Ukraine is not a genuine sovereign state; that only its Ukrainian-speaking west is rightfully divided from Russia; or that Ukrainians and Russians are essentially one people, artificially separated. That line of thinking was taken to its extreme in 2014, when Moscow annexed Russian-speaking Crimea, in its view righting a historical wrong. The transfer of the territory from Russia to Ukraine in 1956 had been under the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev; a nominal change at the time that became consequential when the USSR collapsed 30 years ago this December.

The argument is premised on a supposed division between different language groups. In the west of the country, annexed to the USSR in 1940 from Poland, Ukrainian is spoken. In the east and centre of the country, historically part of the Russian empire, Russian is much more common. It is that distinction which Russia plays on to undermine its neighbour’s statehood. The parts of Ukraine that interest the Kremlin are the east and centre: the Crimean peninsula, the borderlands of the Donbass, the Black Sea coast. “Kyiv does not need Donbass,” Putin wrote in his article.

Now geography is reasserting itself in the territories of the former empire, nowhere more so than in Ukraine, where a war continues to be waged between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east.

***

Lviv, in western Ukraine, only feels like a Soviet city during the drive in. Crumbling abandoned factories line the streets on the outskirts that ring the city. The same blocks of flats that can be seen across the territory of the former socialist empire line the city’s wide boulevards.

Approach the city centre, though, and the urban fabric changes completely. Reinforced concrete gives way to elegant sandstone buildings along cobbled streets. Mid-rise art deco buildings painted in elegant pastels are ornamented with cherubs and sculptures of toned men and women. Trams rattle along the winding roads. This is no longer Lvov, the city’s name in Russian, but Lemberg, as it was known in German under the Austro-Hungarian empire – more Vienna than Volgograd.

The city’s identity has been shaped by the succession of flags that have flown over the town hall. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire following the First World War, it came under Polish rule with the re-establishment of Polish statehood. At the outbreak of the Second World War, eastern Poland was annexed to the USSR, under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Occupied by the Nazis in 1941, it was back under Soviet control by 1944. Although Lviv is at the centre of what the US historian Timothy Snyder called the “bloodlands” of Europe, it experienced relatively little fighting and, unlike other Polish cities, most of its architecture survived the war. Since 1991, it has been part of independent Ukraine.

In the city’s ethnic make-up, the lines were blurred, as so often in central Europe. Gravestones in the Lychakiv cemetery pay tribute to Lviv’s diverse history. Modern inscriptions in Ukrainian stand next to tombs of Poles and Austrians as well as Soviet-era plaques in Russian celebrating heroes who died defending the socialist motherland from the fascists. The city’s modern homogeneity is a historical anomaly, a product of the Holocaust, which emptied Lviv of its Jews, and of postwar population transfers between Soviet Ukraine and Poland.

This is central, not eastern Europe. Western Ukrainians think of themselves as different from homo sovieticus. “The Austro-Hungarian empire was freer than the Russian empire. People have freedom in their blood here,” one local official told me.

***

An 11-hour journey south on a clattering Soviet-era night train leads to the port of Odessa. At 9:30pm, the night train heaves out of Carpathia on its way to the Black Sea. Passengers pour glasses of vodka and cut slices of sausage in anticipation of the night ahead. I fall asleep as the train leaves behind Lviv’s Austro-Hungarian architecture. Seven hours and a few sudden stops and starts later, I wake as the morning sun peeks behind the window shutters.

The setting as the train pulls into Odessa could be anywhere in the old USSR: grey concrete walls, wheel-less Ladas propped up on breeze blocks, abandoned factories. The train finally arrives at the Black Sea, a giant banner atop the Stalin-era station welcoming visitors to the “hero city of Odessa”, an honour bestowed upon it by the Soviet government for its resistance to the Nazis’ Romanian allies.

Odessa, founded by the Russian empress Catherine the Great on the site of an Ottoman fort in the late 18th-century, has for centuries been as cosmopolitan a city as Lviv. Under the tsars and then the Soviets, Greeks, Armenians and Moldovans mingled with Russians and Ukrainians, forging the city’s reputation for easy-going cosmopolitanism underpinned by a commercial spirit.

Most of all, it was the Jews who made Odessa’s reputation. The city was, at its peak, more than 40 per cent Jewish, the community centred on the neighbourhood of Modovanka, whose gangsters the writer Isaac Babel immortalised in his Odessa Tales. During the tsarist era, rampant anti-Semitism and frequent pogroms, such as that of 1905, are believed to have killed about 400. This undermined the image of Odessan liberalism which would later come to dominate the popular image of the city, as the historian Charles King wrote in Genius and Death in a City of Dreams.

Odessa formed some of the most consequential Jewish politicians of the 20th century, from Leon Trotsky, who studied in the city, to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of Revisionist Zionism, whose experience of Odessan anti-Semitism convinced him that Jews would never be welcome within gentile nations and needed a state of their own. “Wasn’t it a mistake on God’s part to put the Jews in Russia, where they suffer as if they’re in hell?” asks the mobster Benya Kirk in the Odessa Tales.

Babel, executed in 1940 by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, did not live to see how much worse life would get for Ukraine’s Jews. As in Lviv, the Holocaust emptied Odessa of the vast majority of its Jewish population, though they retained their cultural imprint on the city. Yiddish-inflected Russian still marks out the city’s distinctive dialect and its famous dry wit.

***

Odessa and Lviv embody the divisions in Ukraine perhaps better than any other cities in the territory that Kyiv controls. Ukrainophone, ex-Austro-Hungarian, central European Lviv contrasts with Odessa, founded by a tsarina, whose reputation was made in the Soviet era.

Ukraine’s linguistic divide is played up by outsiders who know little of the country, says Vladislav Davidzon, the author of From Odessa with Love. He argues that most Ukrainians, equally comfortable in both languages, do not see much political significance in their choice of tongue. Ethnic or linguistic divisions do not map well along political lines. “It’s absolutely true that Russian is the language of Ukraine’s neighbour and historical occupier – but this country has the lowest rate of people speaking the state language of any country in Europe.” (Just 55 per cent of Ukrainians speak Ukrainian at home, according to a 2019 survey by Pew Research.)

But real differences do exist. They revolve around, in particular, views of history. Especially since the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, which ousted the pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych, a revived Ukrainian nationalism, seeking to distance Ukraine from its Soviet past, lionises figures such as Stepan Bandera, a Second World War-era Ukrainian nationalist leader who pledged allegiance to Hitler. That reading of history appeals to Ukrainians in the west of the country but grates with those living further east.

Signs of the rehabilitation of Bandera and his Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), responsible for wartime anti-Jewish pogroms and the ethnic cleansing of Poles, are manifold in Lviv. A large thoroughfare in Lviv is named Bandera Street. There is also a monument to Bandera and a Heroes of the UPA street.

This expression of nationalism, largely embraced at the national level, alienates those in the east who are more comfortable with the Soviet legacy. It also serves to frighten some Ukrainians from ethnic or religious minority groups, according to Eduard Dolinsky, the director general of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee. “A monument to Bandera is disgusting and a mockery. It’s a monument to a killer on the grave of his victims.”

Vasyl Filipchuk, a former Ukrainian diplomat, argues that western Ukraine’s post-communist rehabilitation of Bandera is one of the biggest obstacles to the creation of a consensual national narrative. It is not surprising that Odessans, coming from a city with impeccably maintained Soviet war memorials such as the Monument to the Unknown Sailor, feel unsettled in Lviv, he says.

***

In May 2014, Odessa was the site of one of the most contentious episodes of the early stages of the Ukrainian Revolution (when pro-EU, anti-Russian protests led to the overthrow of the Ukrainian government). As protesters and pro-Russian counter-demonstrators clashed in the streets, the latter retreated into the Trade Unions House. Shortly afterwards, a fire broke out. Although it is still unclear how the fire started – or which side caused it – the flames quickly spread, killing 46 pro-Russian activists. (Two of the opposing protesters were also killed.)

The episode was seized upon by the Russian state to allege that “Ukrainian nationalists” had massacred peaceful demonstrators expressing their desire not to give up close ties to Russia. It became one of the foundational myths of the pro-Russian separatist movement. Putin’s article this year raised the prospect of similar massacres being committed by “the followers of Bandera” in other Russian-speaking Ukrainian cities.

In the long search for a post-communist national narrative, in common with many of the other newly independent Soviet states, Ukrainian authorities looked to the past to write a new story for their country. Even if the war united many Ukrainians against Russia, the country’s recent embrace of western Ukrainian nationalism risks alienating those who have a different reading of the past. Thirty years after the Soviet Union fell, the divisions its authoritarianism masked continue to perturb Ukraine.

 

Azov Battalion hopes to relieve the blockade of Mariupol and calls on rescue workers to clear rubble

Saturday, 2 April 2022, 20:13

Sviatoslav Palamar, Deputy Commander of the Azov Battalion, said that another "batch" of Russian military equipment has been destroyed and called for the relief of the blockade of Mariupol and for rescuing people from under the rubble of the destroyed buildings.

Source: Sviatoslav Palamar’s Twitter video address

According to Palamar: "Mariupol’s defenders are constantly on the verge of life and death. Despite the complete blockade, they continue the heroic struggle for Ukraine and for their fellow citizens, fighting for every metre of their land.

I would like all Ukrainians to be as true to themselves, as courageous, as determined as our guys. Yesterday alone, they destroyed 2 infantry fighting vehicles. And today, one tank and enemy infantry.

We hope for the blockade to be relieved. We know that politicians and the military are doing everything they can to achieve this. We believe that Ukraine has a way out of this situation.

In the history of our country there have been many victories, instances of fortitude and heroism among our military […] Therefore, we have to win, because we are capable of it. I call on all Ukrainians to fight for our territory, for our children, for our future. I urge that everything possible be done, that rescuers come to Mariupol with special equipment to clear away the rubble…"

Background: On 31 March, the command of the Azov Battalion of the National Guard of Ukraine called on the military and political government of Ukraine to carry out an operation to relieve the blockade of Mariupol.

Pavlo Kyrylenko, Head of the Donetsk Regional Military/State Administration, said that Ukraine’s military leadership is making every effort to help those fighting in Mariupol, but it remains very difficult to break the blockade of the city.

Earlier, Sviatoslav Palamar, the deputy commander of the Azov Battalion, explained why Ukrainian defence forces have not left Mariupol when the situation there became particularly grave, in spite of President Zelenskyy having given permission to do so.

How the West enabled genocide in Mariupol with its misguided Azov obsession

2022/04/02 -

• ANALYSIS, OPINION
Article by: Anton Shekhovtsov

Editor’s NoteThe Azov Regiment has been combating Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine, heroically resisting the siege of Mariupol, where Russia murdered at least 5,000 civilians, with incredible stamina. Yet, they are woefully underarmed in their epic struggle against a superior invading force: because of the Kremlin-abetted Western obsession with the “Neo-Nazi threat” of Azov, the defenders of Mariupol are armed with neither Javelins nor Bayraktars. As Azov continues to resist the brutal slaughter of Ukrainians in Mariupol, political scientist Anton Shekhovtsov invites Western commentators to contemplate their own moral procrastination that enabled a true genocide to unfold before their eyes.

More than a month has passed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian invaders have already committed multiple war crimes, and the genocidal intentions of the current Russian leadership towards the Ukrainian nation are becoming increasingly obvious.

Although massively demoralized and often – and understandably – turning arms against each other, Russian invaders do not hesitate to shell and bomb any building they can reach. No matter if it’s a residential building, a hospital, a kindergarten, a local council, a theater, or a museum. They destroy everything, they kill indiscriminately.

It sometimes feels that they have adopted the United Nations definition of genocide as literally their program:
Killing members of the group – check!
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group – check!
Preventing births within the group – check!
And now they have started kidnapping Ukrainian children and moving them to Russia. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group – check!

In order to distract Western attention from the immense humanitarian catastrophe caused by the invasion, Russia is using a wide range of “smoke and mirrors” techniques.
One of those deceptive practices is Moscow’s focus on the Ukrainian Azov Regiment which is falsely described in the Russian and pro-Russian media as a “fascist” or “neo-Nazi” “battalion” or “militia.”

All these descriptions are wrong, and this article discusses Azov, its history, and evolution, as well as explaining the reasons behind the information attacks on this military unit that plays an important role in resisting the Russian genocidal invasion.
From the Azov Battalion to the Azov Regiment

Back in 2014, when pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia after his regime had killed more than a hundred of protesters, Russia took advantage of the political turmoil in Ukraine and the hesitancy of Western leadership.

It illegally annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine. Ukraine could hardly defend itself – years of corrupt pro-Russian leadership almost destroyed Ukrainian armed forces. And many in the Ukrainian military were simply not psychologically ready to offer an armed response to those who were their neighbors. Malicious Russian leaders were obviously aware of those weaknesses of the Ukrainian society at that time and exploited them to the maximum.
What Moscow was not aware of was the strength of Ukrainian volunteer networks.

Those networks were built during the EuroMaidan revolution and following the beginning of the Russian invasion, they formed the first resistance groups that were eventually transformed into volunteer territorial defense battalions and special tasks patrol police units. Azov was formed as a volunteer police battalion in May 2014.

The original battalion consisted mostly of football hooligans and members of the Ukrainian far-right, and it was the far-right organization “Patriot of Ukraine” that was in charge of the original battalion.

Like many of my colleagues researching the far right, I was extremely skeptical and critical of the original Azov battalion for the following four major reasons:
The “Patriot of Ukraine” was one of the most racist and anti-Semitic groups in Ukraine. Its members were involved in spreading far-right propaganda and occasional political and criminal violence. It was almost impossible to trust those people, especially given their anti-establishment and anti-democratic rhetoric.
With very few exceptions, the leadership of the “Patriot of Ukraine,” including the first commander of Azov, did not participate in the Maidan revolution, as they were imprisoned on different charges. They were released – together with other people who were considered political prisoners of the pro-Russian regime – right after Yanukovych fled to Russia. That meant that the leaders of the “Patriot of Ukraine” did not have an opportunity to show their worth during the dramatic periods of the Ukrainian revolution, and we did not know what to expect of them.
The far-right imagery of the original Azov battalion played into the hands of the Russian propaganda that pictured the Ukrainian revolution as a “fascist coup” and presented all Ukrainian volunteer military units as “neo-Nazis.” As the West was hesitating to help Ukraine in its defense against the Russian aggression, the far-right imagery of the battalion contributed to the Russian discreditation of Ukraine on the international level.
Several key people who were directly involved in the formation of the Azov battalion had an extremely dubious history of cooperating not only with pro-Russian forces in Ukraine but also with Russian political spin-doctors. Moreover, neither Azov nor other battalions did proper screening of volunteers, some of whom came from Russia. All that created a huge security risk of Russian operatives seizing control of Azov and turning it into an anti-Ukrainian force.

To sum up these points, we had well-justified concerns about Azov and did not trust it. Nobody doubted the fact that, at that time, Ukraine needed volunteers of any social or political background – again, the Ukrainian army was almost non-existent then.
If you are drowning, you are unlikely to ask about the social attitudes or political convictions of those willing to save you from drowning. But what if they were willing to save you just to kill you in a different manner?

With time, some of our concerns disappeared. In June 2014, Azov played an important role in liberating the Ukrainian city of Mariupol from pro-Russian forces, and that proved not only Azov’s combat effectiveness but also their truly pro-Ukrainian position. Because of its proven fighting abilities, Azov started to attract more volunteers, and many of them had no political background at all.

In autumn 2014, the battalion was transformed into a regiment and was enrolled in the National Guard of Ukraine, which is part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. That created a hierarchical vertical to ensure – as much as possible – that Azov would remain loyal to the Ukrainian state.



A military ceremony in the Azov battalion on 19 November 2021.

Photo: t.me/polkazov

Moreover, within a few months after the creation of the Azov battalion, people with a history of dubious links to Russian and pro-Russian stakeholders moved away from Azov. And although several Russian agents indeed infiltrated the regiment, they were never able to exert any serious impact on its military service.


Related: At the front in Shyrokyne with the Azov regiment – photo report (2015)
The National Corps and electoral failure of far-right in Ukraine

The remaining major concern was the political aspect of the regiment. However, because of the domestic and international criticism of the far-right background of the regiment’s original leadership, Azov started the process of de-politicization. In 2015, a number of former fighters of Azov formed an NGO “Azov Civil Corps,” which was transformed into a political party National Corps in 2016.

Far-right figures departed from the command of Azov and became engaged in the party-building.

They hoped that the popular support for defenders of Ukraine would somehow translate into political success and electoral victories. Hence, at that time, the separation of the National Corps from Azov was yet not complete – they had to keep the link, even if only symbolical, between the defenders of Motherland who enjoyed respect from the Ukrainian society and the political project. But already then, it was clear that the regiment followed orders of Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, while the National Corps had no power over the military unit.

The party’s hopes to benefit from Azov’s military valor were all in vain.

Figures for the National Corps and other Ukrainian far-right parties in public opinion polls were devastatingly low. The National Corps kept on referring to Azov as its affiliated organization, and naïve Western journalists and experts took all that bluster at face value instead of realizing that Azov was not a political organization and that its command structure was completely separate from the National Corps.

By the time of the parliamentary elections in 2019, it became evident that no Ukrainian far-right party would make it to the parliament. Out of despair, the Ukrainian far-right joined forces to compete in the parliamentary elections. However, their united list, which included members of the Freedom party, National Corps, Right Sector, and a few minor far-right groups, received only 2.15% of the vote and failed to get them elected into the parliament.
The electoral failure of the Ukrainian far-right can be explained by the fact that they cannot offer any viable modernization program to the Ukrainian state and society.

Men evacuate a pregnant woman injured by a Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital on 9 March 2022. It was later reported that the woman and her unborn child died. 

Photo: Yevheniy Maloletka/Instagram

The only time when the Ukrainian far-right was relatively successful in the elections was in 2012 when the Freedom (Svoboda) party received 10.45% of the vote.

The only reason for their relative success was because at that time they were considered the most radical opposition to the pro-Kremlin foreign policy agenda of Yanukovych’s regime. It is important to stress: they secured seats in the Ukrainian parliament not because of their far-right program but because of their radical criticism of Russia and its agents in Ukraine.

After the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, the Ukrainian far-right lost their monopoly on radical criticism of Russia, and, with that, they lost all the electoral appeal they had.

The Ukrainian far-right in general fell into irrelevance, and the National Corps and groups around it suffered an identity crisis. They tried to experiment with different ideological narratives, largely borrowed from Western far-right discourses, but none of them worked outside of very small circles

Ironically, while Western far-right groups tried to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021 to promote their anti-establishment conspiracy theories, the National Corps ran an information campaign on how to avoid getting infected, and their explanations and recommendations conformed to the mainstream domestic and international understanding of the new coronavirus and its spread. The National Corps still refers to its symbolical link to the Azov regiment, but it is rather political propaganda of the National Corps than a reality.

Azov today: defenders of Mariupol

Azov today is a highly professional special operations detachment. Not a political organization, not a militia, not a far-right battalion. It is still formally subordinated to the National Guard of Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, but now it largely coordinates its military activities with the Armed Forces, therefore, one can expect that Azov will move under the command of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry.



The Azov regiment uploaded this video of a street fight in which they destroyed a Russian IFV on 14 March 2022

Azov consists predominantly of Ukrainian citizens of various ethnic backgrounds.
Among Azov’s members there are ethnic Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Crimean Tatars, Jews, Georgians, Greeks. But whatever their ethnic origin, they are all Ukrainian patriots who are risking and sacrificing their lives for Ukraine’s sovereignty, freedom, and democracy.

The Kremlin, pro-Kremlin, and far-left media picture Azov as haters of Russian speakers. But not only do Azov fighters speak mostly Russian language among themselves, on average they speak better Russian than the Russian invaders. This fact alone dismisses blatant Kremlin lies about Azov allegedly fighting against Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.

One may ask: why has Azov become one of the main targets of lies, falsehoods, and fabrications produced by the Kremlin and pro-Kremlin propaganda?[/box]

An obvious explanation is that the attack on Azov is part of the Kremlin’s disinformation narrative on Nazis in Ukraine.

A less obvious yet probably more important explanation is linked to the place where Azov has been stationed since 2014. This is the Ukrainian city of Mariupol and the area around it. Back in 2014, Azov greatly contributed to the liberation of Mariupol from the pro-Russian henchmen.

Mariupol is not simply yet another Ukrainian city. If you look at the map of Ukraine, you will see that Mariupol is the largest and most important city located in the area that is considered to be a potential land bridge from Russia to the annexed Crimea. Given the logistical troubles that Russia has with supplying Crimea with water, electricity, and other resources, it is crucial for Russia to occupy the territories of that potential land bridge. But Mariupol stands in the way. And Azov stands in the way.



The entire regiment is now in Mariupol.

Through its agents in Ukraine and elsewhere, Russia has been trying to destroy Azov or, at the very least, weaken its military capabilities.

Especially in NATO member states, there was a massive effort to prevent members of the Azov unit from receiving training from Ukraine’s Western allies, as well as to prevent Azov from obtaining advanced weapons and hardware.

The Kremlin’s efforts have, to a certain extent, succeeded. And today, the Azov regiment, which defends Mariupol completely surrounded by the Russian invaders, has neither Javelin portable anti-tank missile systems nor Bayraktar combat aerial vehicles that would have helped them to defend the city and save the lives of thousands of residents of Mariupol.

All “thanks” to those people – Western pro-Russian politicians, pseudo-journalists, fake experts, ignorant consultants – who directly or indirectly lobbied against training Azov and equipping it with advanced weapons.
There is no doubt that they all share responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe in Mariupol.

Mass graves in Mariupol, where the dead killed by a Russian airstrike on 9 March 2022 are buried. Photo: Yevheniy Maloletka/Instagram

The West’s dysmetropsia and moral procrastination

Naturally, one can say that the Westerners obsessed with the alleged “neo-Nazi” threat of Azov are all victims of dysmetropsia, an inability to judge an object’s size. In one of the episodes of the great British sitcom, “Father Ted,” the main character tried to explain to his less smart colleague, Father Dougal McGuire, the difference in size between the small toy cows in his hand and the real cows in the distance. Father Ted was unsuccessful because Father Dougal had dysmetropsia and, frankly, was an eejit.
The same can be said about Western commentators who see no difference between the alleged “far-right” threat of Azov and the Russian genocidal invasion of Ukraine.

But I think that dysmetropsia cannot explain everything, and I would rather talk about Western moral procrastination.

Procrastination is about voluntarily distracting ourselves with insignificant activities from performing really important tasks. Moral procrastination is about giving preference to small exciting things instead of dealing with difficult issues that actually matter.

Mariupol, where Azov is based, is a predominantly Russian-speaking home of ethnic Ukrainians, Russians, Greeks, Belarusians, Armenians, Jews. Or it used to be their home; before the Russian invaders came.

The Russian invaders have already killed thousands of people in Mariupol and are killing them as I write.

Many of the dead are lying on the streets of Mariupol because every time their relatives and friends try to pick them up to bury them, Russian invaders shoot at them. If people are lucky to pick up the dead, they often have to bury them in mass graves. And those Ukrainians who still survive are forced to hide in the basements, where they starve, freeze, and die.

This chilling horror is psychologically hard to process, but we are morally obliged to be aware that this is happening in Europe, just around the corner. And our human nature pushes us to do something to stop Russian inhuman war crimes.
There are many in the West who – instead of even starting to comprehend the brutal horror of the Russian war against Ukraine – prefer to distract themselves with inquiries of whether Azov fighters have any politically incorrect tattoos or t-shirts.

It’s much more exciting, of course, than to stand up to the Russian genocidal invasion. This is moral procrastination that should be met with disdain and contempt.

For Azov’s selfless epic struggle against superior numbers of the Russian enemy forces in Mariupol, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently awarded the country’s highest award, “Hero of Ukraine,” to Azov Commander Denys Prokopenko. Well deserved.


President Zelenskyy awards Azov commander Prokopenko during the Independence Day parade on 24 August 2021

In Mariupol, Azov defends not only the living and the wounded but also the dead. Not only do they deserve to be properly buried, but they are also silent witnesses of the Russian war crimes. As we well know, Russian invaders are equipped with mobile crematoriums which they use to destroy evidence of their villainy. And in Mariupol, Azov is now defending not only the freedom of the living but also the dignity of the dead.

Read More:
“They talked to us like we were criminals” – how Russian occupiers deported me from Mariupol

Martyred city of Mariupol wiped out of existence by Russia’s incessant shelling

I was inside when the Russians bombed Mariupol drama theater: survivor’s story

Is the Azov Battalion a terrorist organization as 40 US House Democrats claim? (2019)

Azov regiment debunks fake video with impostors by making one themselves (2016)

Fake Azov video tries to frame Ukraine prior to Dutch referendum (2016)

At the front in Shyrokyne with the Azov regiment – photo report (2015)

The Azov regiment is “outraged” by statements in the USA House of Representatives (2015)

About the Source

Anton Shekhovtsov

Dr. Anton Shekhovtsov is Director of the Centre for Democratic Integrity (Austria), Senior Fellow at the Free Russia Foundation (USA), and an expert at the European Platform for Democratic Elections (Germany). Follow him on Twitter: @A_SHEKH0VTS0V