The CIA May Be Breeding Nazi Terror in Ukraine
By Branko Marcetic
September 01, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- The US
government has a well-documented history of
backing extremist groups as part of a panoply of
foreign policy misadventures, which inevitably
end up blowing up in the American public’s face.
In the 1960s, the CIA worked with Cuban
anti–Fidel Castro radicals who turned Miami into
a
hub of terrorist violence. In the 1980s, the
agency
supported and
encouraged Islamic radicals converging in
Afghanistan, who would go on to orchestrate the
September 11 attack. And, in the 2010s,
Washington
backed Syria’s not-so-“moderate” rebels who
ended up cutting a swath of atrocities through
civilians and the Kurdish forces that were meant
to be US allies.
Based on a new report, it looks like we may
soon be able to add another to that list of
fatally unlearned lessons: Ukrainian neo-Nazis.
According to a recent Yahoo! News
report, since 2015, the CIA has been
secretly training forces in Ukraine to serve as
“insurgent leaders,” in the words of one former
intelligence official, in case Russia ends up
invading the country. Current officials are
claiming the training is purely for intelligence
collection, but the former officials Yahoo!
spoke to said the program involved training in
firearms, “cover and move,” and camouflage,
among other things.
Given the facts, there’s a good chance that
the CIA is training actual, literal Nazis as
part of this effort. The year the program
started, 2015, also happened to be the same year
that Congress passed a spending bill that
featured hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth
of economic and military support for Ukraine,
one that was expressly modified to allow that
support to flow to the country’s resident
neo-Nazi militia, the Azov Regiment.
According to the
Nation at the time, the text of the
bill passed in the middle of that year featured
an amendment explicitly barring “arms, training,
and other assistance” to Azov, but the House
committee in charge of the bill was pressured by
the Pentagon months later to remove the
language, falsely telling them it was redundant.
Despite sometimes
open acknowledgement of its Nazism — its
former commander
once said the “historic mission” of Ukraine
is to “lead the White Races of the world in a
final crusade for their survival” in “a crusade
against the Semite-led Untermenschen” — Azov was
incorporated into the country’s National Guard
in 2014, owing to its effectiveness in fighting
Russian separatists. US arms have
flowed to the militia,
NATO and
US military officials have been
pictured meeting with them, and members of
the militia have
talked about their work with US trainers and
the lack of background screening to weed out
white supremacists.
Given all this, it would be more of a
surprise that the neo-Nazis of Azov haven’t
been trained in the CIA’s clandestine
make-an-insurgency program. And we’re already
seeing the early signs of blowback.
“A number of prominent individuals among
far-right extremist groups in the United States
and Europe have actively sought out
relationships with representatives of the
far-right in Ukraine, specifically the National
Corps and its associated militia, the Azov
Regiment,” states a
2020 report from the West Point US Military
Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. “US-based
individuals have spoken or written about how the
training available in Ukraine might assist them
and others in their paramilitary-style
activities at home.”
A 2018 FBI
affidavit asserted that Azov “is believed to
have participated in training and radicalizing
United States–based white supremacy
organizations,” including members of the white
supremacist Rise Above Movement,
prosecuted for planned assaults on
counterprotesters at far-right events, including
the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally that
Joe Biden later co-opted as a rationale for his
presidential campaign. While it seems the
perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque massacre
didn’t travel to Ukraine as he claimed, he
clearly took inspiration from the far-right
movement there, and
wore a symbol used by Azov members while
carrying out the attack.
Since taking office, Biden has launched an
incipient domestic “war on terror” on the basis
of combating far-right extremism, even though
the strategy is
quietly aiming to target left-wing
protesters and activists, something
it has already done. Yet at the same time,
three separate administrations, Biden’s
included, have been providing training, weapons,
and equipment to the very far-right movement
that’s inspiring and even training those same
white supremacists.
Destroying the Village to Save It
Adding to the absurdity here is that the
reason Washington has been giving Ukrainian
Nazis its assistance is so they can serve as a
bulwark against Russia, which war hawks
liken, as they always do, to Adolph Hitler’s
regime and its expansion through Europe in the
1930s. While Vladimir Putin’s Russia may be a
malevolent actor on a number of fronts, Putin’s
recent incursions into neighboring states like
Ukraine are
driven largely by the expansion of the NATO
military alliance up to his borders and the
security implications that come with it.
In other words, to stop what US hawks
classify as the next Hitler and Nazi Germany,
Washington has been backing literal neo-Nazi
militias in Ukraine, who are in turn
communicating with and training homegrown white
supremacists, which Washington in turn is
ramping up a menacing repressive bureaucracy at
home to counter. It’s what some have called the
“self-licking ice cream cone” in action — the US
national security establishment creating the
very threats that justify itself. Instead of
defusing the tensions by simply agreeing to
long-standing Russian demands to set a hard
limit on NATO’s eastward expansion, Washington
has apparently decided that unlimited planetary
military dominion is so important that it would
rather just get into bed with actual fascists.
The US alliance with Nazi-infected Ukraine
has already proven awkward for a president who
is both trying to strike a contrast with his
far-right predecessor and
establish the United States as the leader of
a global effort to strengthen democracy. Late
last year, in a vote that went completely
unreported in the press, the United States was
one of just two countries (the other being
Ukraine) to
vote against a UN draft resolution
“combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism
and other practices that contribute to fueling
contemporary forms of racism.” Both countries
have
consistently
voted
against
this resolution
every single
year since 2014.
The Biden administration
deployed a nearly identical, boilerplate
explanation for its no vote that Donald Trump
had used, citing the constitutional right to
free speech even for those with repugnant views.
But this concern is hard to square with the
text, which simply expresses concern about
public memorials, demonstrations, and
rehabilitation of the Nazis, condemns Holocaust
denial and hate violence, and calls on
governments to eliminate racism through
education and addressing far-right terrorist
threats — all roughly the same as Biden’s own
rhetoric and policies.
Washington’s real concern here lies in its
description of the resolution as “thinly veiled
attempts to legitimize Russian disinformation
campaigns denigrating neighboring nations” —
meaning Ukraine. But Ukraine’s connections to
modern Nazism are far from Russian fake news,
and are in fact
extensive and well-documented: from Azov’s
official incorporation into the ranks of
Ukrainian law enforcement and government
officials with far-right ties to state-sponsored
tributes to Nazi collaborators and promotion of
Holocaust denial.
It’s no small irony that the US president,
elected in large part to halt the perceived
march of fascism at home, is continuing
long-standing US support for literal Nazis in
what might well be the nexus of international
fascism. And if these Ukrainian Nazis really are
among the insurgents being trained by the CIA,
it will be no small tragedy if they one day take
the same career trajectory as Osama bin Laden.
