“The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month…” Is there a U.S. History teacher who hasn’t recited this phrase while discussing World War I and the Armistice that promised its end? There is, however, another date worthy of mention in this discussion. It is November 19, 1919, on which date the United States Senate did something it had never done before: it rejected a peace treaty, specifically the Treaty of Versailles.

Trump is now faced with the same problems as Wilson with his “Fourteen Point” plan when he had to please the Senate, European Allies, and the American public. One major difference is that, contrary to WWI, when American soldiers were also dying, in Ukraine, they are not, except for mercenaries. Still, one’d assume that Americans who sincerely claim their adherence to Judeo-Christian values should oppose the war between two Christian nations. However, it looks like they are in the minority, especially among democrats. In Congress, they are joined by Republicans who would prefer this war to continue, since it weakens Russia, and who absolutely do not cares about the lives of Ukrainians.

Jared Peterson: “The West’s interest in Ukraine is merely a U.S. hegemony adventure, seeking to assert U.S. top dog dominance in Eastern Europe and thereafter the world.”

According to Pew Religious Landscape Study, nearly nine in ten American adults say they believe in God or a universal spirit. At the same time, unlike in the previous two decades of disastrous wars led by the United States and NATO in the Middle East, the current war in Ukraine involves no militant Islamic factor. Those now in the driver’s seat are wholly composed of self-identified Christians and Jews.

Jared Peterson from American Thinker is correct when he states that “the West’s interest in Ukraine is merely a U.S. hegemony adventure, seeking to assert U.S. top dog dominance in Eastern Europe and thereafter the world.”

Official Washington and its transatlantic loyalists call this war “unprovoked” and blame it all on Vladimir Putin. However, there is another America, which disagrees, including many well-known experts both on the Right and Left, who can hardly be dismissed as Putin’s bootlickers or useful idiots.

Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, in his article “Ukraine is the Latest Neocon disaster,” didn’t hesitate to mention some specific names of those who got us into this quagmire when they declared that the United States must dominate the world and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge U.S. global or regional dominance.

The list of people in the know who believe that the West provoked this war is long. It keeps growing, but why not quote the late Pope Francis, who didn’t mince words by saying that the “barking of NATO at the door of Russia” might have led to the invasion of Ukraine and that he didn’t know whether other countries should supply Ukraine with more arms.

One would assume that formal meetings between government leaders would not be in the spirit of what is a solemn occasion, a sacred ceremony of the Pope’s funeral. However, I’d risk thinking that Pope himself would approve of these meetings if these efforts helped Trump in his search for peace. Still, for those like Macron, Starmer, Zelensky, von der Leyen, who, no one doubts, would attempt to convince him to continue this war, the killing and devastation, it is a total disgrace.

April 30th is an important date in American politics. This is the day 100 for the American President in the White House, and all attention will be on the reports of his achievements and failures. Nothing can be more critical than Peace, and on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Elbe River reunion, when Americans and Russians were allies there were many celebrations in Moscow, Washington, and German city of Torgau, where related memorials are located, those who took part or watched them online wished Trump success in his Peace efforts.

A symbolic event took place not far from the Elbe Ceremony in downtown Moscow, when an automobile motorcade with Trump advisor Steve Witkoff drove by on the way to the Kremlin, and the crowd greeted him with Russian and American flags.

On March 9, Ukraine’s Chicago consulate posted photos of Consul Serhiy Koledov participating in a commemoration for Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych, whose troops massacred Jews and Poles. This is the story of how that event, at St. Joseph the Betrothed Ukrainian Catholic Church in Chicago, happened — and why some of the same people who usually speak out against Holocaust revisionism are refusing to say anything about it.

Holocaust distortion continues to be a rampant problem, with monuments to monsters going up regularly. But continuing celebrations of Shukhevych, whose men were responsible for many thousands of deaths during World War II, stand out: The U.S. State Department’s Special Envoy on Holocaust Issues has twice highlighted Shukhevych glorification as an example of Holocaust revisionism.

Similar condemnations have come from the World Jewish Congress, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Israel.

Why? For starters, unlike some other collaborators, Shukhevych actually served in Nazi uniform. He was a hauptmann, or captain, in the Nachtigall Battalion, an auxiliary police unit in the Third Reich military that participated in the deadly 1941 Lviv pogrom.

After getting hands-on experience in conducting a genocide with the Germans, Shukhevych went on to lead the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a paramilitary group that butchered thousands of Jews and between 70,000 and 100,000 Polish villagers.

So why does Ukraine still insist on lionizing him?

Well, first of all, it’s a mistake to ascribe that insistence to Ukraine, unilaterally. Two million Ukrainians died fighting against the Nazis and their lackeys. Only a portion of the country’s populace today will defend its Nazi collaborators; millions more revile them. Saying Ukraine idolizes Shukhevych is like saying America idolizes Robert E. Lee.

But those who do honor Shukhevych vehemently deny that they’re commemorating a Nazi collaborator. They instead dub him a “hero” and “freedom fighter of Ukraine” who resisted Moscow — those are exact terms used by the Chicago consulate in describing the March commemoration. They insist his memory has been unfairly smeared by Russia. They’ll even claim that the UPA saved Jews, a lie that’s been disproved by scholars.

These excuses are similar to those peddled by fans of the Confederacy and, more currently, Hamas. That’s what Holocaust revisionism is: an act of transforming war criminals into role models.

Almost anyone affiliated with a political movement can claim to be a freedom fighter. The Hamas militants who butchered, kidnapped and raped civilians in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, were, to some, fighting for freedom. The question is: Whose freedom, and the freedom to do what?

The freedom Shukhevych fought for — and exercised — was freedom to slaughter Jews in ditches and murder Poles in particularly graphic fashion, including by crucifixion.

So why are so many so hesitant to call out celebrations of his memory?

Neither Chicago’s main Jewish federation nor the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum responded to numerous requests for comment. I met the same silence from the Anti-Defamation League — which, the same week as the ceremony at the Chicago consulate, lambasted podcaster Joe Rogan for an episode featuring a man who traffics in Holocaust revisionism.

Rogan is extremely influential. But surely a fete for an actual Holocaust perpetrator should warrant mention, too?

It was silence, as well, from Rep. Brad Schneider, who represents Chicago’s north suburbs. In 2022, Schneider, who is Jewish, proudly announced that he was drafting legislation to censure Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for comparing former President Joe Biden to Adolf Hitler. “She owes the American people, the survivors and families of those persecuted by the Nazis, and every family of what is still the ‘Greatest Generation’ an immediate apology,” he proclaimed.

If Ukraine doesn’t want to be accused of honoring Nazis, the first thing to do is quit honoring Nazis.

One would think the representative who couldn’t sleep knowing someone compared Biden to Hitler would be aghast at the celebration of a Nazi collaborator in his backyard. But Schneider’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

I suspect that much of the reason why has to do with the broad movement for solidarity with Ukraine amid its ongoing war after Russia’s 2022 invasion. I’ve been told that drawing attention to Ukraine’s penchant for honoring Nazi collaborators feeds into the Kremlin’s attempt to paint Ukrainians as Nazi lovers.

But it isn’t justifying that war to make the point that if you don’t want to be accused of honoring Nazis, the first thing to do is quit honoring Nazis.

Indeed, the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine has been a godsend for Shukhevych fans. People rightfully outraged by Russia’s war crimes now think twice about criticizing Kyiv, or its emissaries elsewhere. Those who glorify Holocaust perpetrators cynically weaponize this sympathy to commit brazen acts — like throwing a lovefest for a Third Reich hauptmann in the heartland of a nation that lost more than 405,000 men in the fight to defeat the Nazis and their allies.

I look at photographs of the Jews hunted and murdered by Shukhevych’s men in Lviv and elsewhere and ask myself: If I were them, how would I feel about my fellow Jews — safe, privileged Jews with jobs in Congress, or with organizations that collect millions to fight antisemitism — failing to speak out when my tormentors get cheered as heroes?

How far we have fallen to even require the question.

Lev Golinkin is a regular contributor to the Forward whose work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, NBC, The Boston Globe, Politico Europe, and Time.com. His memoir, A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka, chronicles his immigration from Ukraine.

George Kennan famously authored the U.S. policy of containment of the Soviet Union, in an article in the New York Times of 1947, which he signed X, to maintain his anonymity. His view was that containment would lead to the eventual break up or mellowing of Soviet power and, as it turns out, the former prediction came to pass.

Yet, he was opposed to the expansion of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union and argued that asking European nations to choose between NATO and Russia would eventually lead to conflict.

In an article in the New York Times of 5 February 1997 he asked: ‘Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the cold war, should East-West relations become centred on the question of who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom in some fanciful, totally unforeseeable and most improbable future military conflict?’

His article was intended to influence discussions ahead of the July 1997 NATO Summit in Madrid which would consider the planned expansion of NATO to include the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Each state had suffered under Soviet repression after World War II but were now free and democratic after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.

Kennan’s warning went unheeded, the NATO Summit agreed to the inclusion of three of the four former Warsaw Pact countries within NATO, excluding Slovakia which had not received the required number of votes in a referendum.

On 1 May 1998, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution approving expansion, as every NATO member state is required to do. After the Senate Resolution, then President Clinton said at the White House, ”by admitting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, we come even closer than ever to realizing a dream of a generation – a Europe that is united, democratic and secure for the first time since the rise of nation-states on the European continent.’

The idea then, which continues today, is that NATO is a military alliance of countries with the same democratic principles acting as a bulwark against military aggression, by implication, from Russia. Yet, Kennan seemed to consider absurd the idea – which peppers political and media discourse still today – that Russia aspires to conquer western Europe by military means.

In a separate New York Times article on 2 May 1998, the day after the U.S. Senate resolution, Kennan said, ‘I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.’

In his 1997 article, Kennan went on to say that Russia would ‘have no choice but to accept [NATO] expansion as a military fait accompli. But they would continue to regard it as a rebuff by the West and would likely look elsewhere for guarantees of a secure and hopeful future for themselves.’

Russia did accept the expansion of NATO as a fait accompli, in part because she was too weak to resist. In 1998, the Russian Federation was possibly at its lowest point after the collapse of the Soviet Union. On 17 August 1998, Russia defaulted on its sovereign debt and devalued the rouble. In visibly declining health, President Yeltsin cut an increasingly weak and erratic figure on the world stage. The billionaire oligarch class had built an outsized role in Russian politics, having swept up state assets under the Loans for Shares scheme, and having bankrolled Yeltsin’s 1996 election success, for their own personal gain. Russia was politically, economically and militarily weak, and internally distracted by a costly war in Chechnya. It was by no measure comparable to the fearsome might of the Soviet Union, or a threat to NATO. Indeed, tentatively, and in ways that were sometimes strained, Russia and NATO ended up collaborating, including in Kosovo in 1999.

The next crunch point came after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC on 11 September 2001.

President Putin was one of the first world leaders to phone President Bush to express his condolences to the president and to the American people and offer his unequivocal support for whatever reactions the American president might decide to take. This led quite quickly to a period of U.S.-Russia cooperation, including concrete Russian assistance to the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan and acquiescence to the establishment of U.S. bases in Central Asia.

Michael McFaul, who is now one of the most vocal anti-Russia hawks, wrote an article for the Carnegie Endowment, saying that ‘the potential to build a new foundation for Russia-American relations is great.’ He advanced a radical agenda, starting with a declaration that ‘the United States no longer recognizes Russia as the successor state to the Soviet Union.’ In substantive terms, this meant a repudiation of the idea that Russia represented a threat to NATO in the way that the Soviet Union had.

McFaul proposed deeper Russia-NATO collaboration and possible future Russian membership, which President Putin had shown a willingness to consider. He also recommended other measures, including removing Soviet era trade restrictions, lifting a ban on NATO countries buying Russian weapons and encouraging a closer relationship between Russia and the EU.

However, one week after McFaul’s article, the Brookings Institution wrote an article, raising a red flag against any departure from U.S. engagement on across the globe as a concession to the new ‘war on terror.’ Among other things, it pointed out that ‘the new premium on Russian cooperation.. might make it harder or more costly for Washington to proceed with current policy plans to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, enlarge NATO, or press for human rights in Chechnya.

Deepening Russian-American collaboration immediately ran up against the separate juggernaut of NATO expansion which had continued to gather pace after the 1998. Nine other former Soviet or Warsaw Pact countries were already waiting in the wings to join NATO, and a comprehensive reboot of relations with Russia would have made expansion more difficult. In the teeth of Russian concern about the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and western concern about President Putin’s clampdown on the oligarchs, U.S.-Russia collaboration lost steam and NATO pressed on regardless. Seven new Members joined the military alliance in 2004, including the Baltic States, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, bringing NATO much closer to Russia’s border.

In his 5 February 1997 article, Kennan said that NATO expansion ‘may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.’

Ten years later, on 10 February 2007, President Putin made his now famous speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he said, ‘I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?’

The following year at the 2008 NATO Bucharest summit, nonetheless advanced the idea of Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO one day. President Putin, who joined part of the Summit, conceded in his speech that he could not veto NATO expansion. But he went on to asset that ‘if we introduce [Ukraine] into NATO.. it may put the state on the verge of its existence. Complicated internal political problems are taking place there. We should act.. very-very carefully.’

His views were again ignored, and the idea of Georgian and Ukrainian membership of NATO was set in train with the consequences that we see today.

However, a central truth of NATO expansion towards Ukraine, visible to me in 2013 when I first started to focus on Russia, is that western powers have never committed to fighting for Ukraine’s right to join. This is exactly the point that George Kennan acknowledge in his 1998 comments. He said, ‘we have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.’

Looking at Ukraine today, with its de facto exclusion from NATO membership, denied the deployment of U.S. military force to support for its war effort and practically bankrupt from the slow depletion of western financial support, who would say that Kennan was wrong, 28 years ago?

The 1998 New York Times article in which Kennan was widely quoted also noted that ‘future historians will surely remark upon the utter poverty of imagination that characterized U.S. foreign policy in the late 1990’s’. History would surely judge western foreign policy since 2013 more harshly still.

His forthcoming book, Anastas Mikoyan: An Armenian Reformer in Khrushchev’s Kremlin, will be published by Indiana University Press in July.

Carden: I think we should probably begin with the big New York Times investigation into the war in Ukraine—the big takeaway seemed to be that the role the Biden administration played was far larger and more involved than they ever publicly acknowledged. What are your thoughts on what we learned from that report?

Shakarian: I mean, the report itself is a nothing burger. For anybody who has been following the war in Ukraine seriously, it really doesn’t tell you anything. On the other hand, what’s revealing about the whole thing is that now they’re actually talking about it. Now they’re discussing it openly. Before they weren’t doing that—before they weren’t openly admitting that the US had a direct hand in the war in Ukraine, but it was kind of an open secret, right? What is new is the fact that the Times openly now admits it. That was the most groundbreaking element of this piece.

The other thing that was really striking and really quite distasteful about this article is the way in which it seemed to be an effort, a very elaborate effort through the use of investigative journalism, to blame the Ukrainian people for losing the war—the idea was effectively to say, well, yes, the great guiding hand of Uncle Sam was trying to help these poor Slavs, but they just weren’t listening to us and we are more advanced than they are because we are the great Western civilization, and this is the white man’s burden replayed, except with the Slavic people of Eastern Europe. They just wouldn’t listen. They just couldn’t understand..

Carden: Access journalism at its worst. The reporter ran around these different US bases in Germany, and he got the Pentagon and the IC’s side of the story, and they all wanted to portray how heroic their efforts were to prop up the Ukrainians, and if only they had listened, they would’ve beat the dastardly Russians…

Shakarian: I know. It’s atrocious.

Carden: Since you wrote what is, in my view, the definitive piece on the Russian-Iranian agreement, what are your views with regard to Steve Witkoff’s recent meeting with Abbas Araghchi in Oman?

Shakarian: Frankly, I was actually quite surprised. It was a rather positive development because I was thinking he might be more kind of pro-Israel on this issue, but it seems to me, again, that he wants, and I would suppose the President wants, a de-escalation with Iran. And that also reflects something else, that there is this tension within this Trump administration over the NeoCon element and that element that is genuinely America First. And this is a big issue because Israel has never been more pro-war toward Iran. I mean, the current administration in Israel really is, I mean, we’re talking about fundamentalist regime in Tel Aviv that really wants to have this ultimate showdown with Iran. But imagine the catastrophe that this would lead us to: Iran is a huge country; a huge country in terms of population, a huge country in terms of area. It’s the size of Mongolia. It’s not Iraq, it’s not Syria. So if you break a country like that, it’s going to be immensely costly, and it’s going to be a catastrophe for everybody’s security.

Is that in America’s interest? Look at where the American economy is right now, look at the way in which the economy was structured to benefit the top 1% of the top 1%. In the past few decades, the economy has been rigged against the American working class. People are surprised that there is a crisis today. Well, maybe the crisis is being sped up, but the crisis was already there in the making. And my point is that a war with Iran will not help the American people or American national security at this moment…

Carden: It’s safe to say I agree with all that. Let me ask you some Russia-centric questions since you’re one of the foremost experts on Moscow’s relations with Iran. It seems Trump and Witkoff do not want a war with Iran…

Shakarian: I agree. Absolutely. I mean, Trump is extremely pro-Israel. He has his ties with Netanyahu, but he does not want a war…

Carden: …So given the recent agreement between Russia and Iran, what would Russia do in the event that Trump gets captured by the neocons and Netanyahu and launches an action against Iran?

Shakarian: We don’t really know what they’re going to necessarily do. The Russia-Iran agreement, it’s important to highlight, again, it’s not a defense pact, although it has a strong defense component in the sense that it envisions very, very deep and intensive defense technical cooperation. So it would be very disingenuous to say there’s no defensive element to it at all.

Carden: Like any EU association agreement…

Shakarian: Yes, absolutely. And also, we have to also think about it like this, that there is a clause in there that basically specifies that if one of the signatories of this agreement is attacked, then the other party will not support the aggressor, which I mean, that also is kind of a form of indirect support. I mean, you have to think of it like that. It remains to be seen what exactly Russia would do in that scenario—and same with China, by the way. It’s not just about Russia. It’s also about China.

Carden: Since you bring up China, what’s the significance of President Xi coming over to Moscow as the guest of honor for the 80th anniversary of Victory Day [VE Day] in early May?

Shakarian: I mean, it is enormous on two different levels.

Carden: Can you first just back up a second? Talk to people who will be reading this who are not overly familiar with Russian history. Explain the significance in Russia of the upcoming Victory Day celebration, and then talk about the significance of Xi.

Shakarian: So for the uninitiated, basically Russia, as the Soviet Union, won the Second World War. I hate to disabuse you of the notions of the Saving Private Ryan version of events, but that wasn’t the history. The history was that the Russians won World War II in Europe and for the Americans the main war was in the Pacific. For Russia, it was the Great Patriotic War. We’re talking about a situation where 14% of the Soviet pre-war population died in the war, in particular, the Slavic core of the Soviet Union: Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. These are the countries that suffered most, although many of the non-Slavic republics also contributed massively to the war. Armenia, I guess you could say, punched above its weight in terms of contributions to the war—but anyway, the war for the Russians is sacred. The memory of the Second World War is sacred. This was a war of survival because Hitler, in addition to killing 6 million Jews in the Holocaust was also very, very hardcore anti-Slav.

He was extremely racist against the Slavs, and, if anybody looks at Mein Kampf, they will see the idea was that Slavs are the “untermenschen (sub-humans),” that the Slavs are the “slaves,” that basically Germany “never lost the First World War.”

It was a war of survival for Russia. And so Xi’s invitation is of immense significance, especially now because this is the 80th anniversary. With each anniversary of the great patriotic war, there are fewer and fewer veterans of the war left. So this is enormous. Also, I’m here in St. Petersburg. Back then, this was Leningrad. Think about the blockade of Leningrad, right? Last year, the St. Petersburg government recognized the siege as genocide, and I mean, for the Russians, this was genocide.

And not only against the Russians. Objectively what the Germans were doing to the Slavic people was genocide. It was, like I said, a war of annihilation. So for Russia, it’s absolutely sacred, but also for China. China in the Second World War—think about what the Japanese did to the Chinese. Think about how they suffered, think about how they suffered under the Japanese, these memories are still very, very painful and sensitive for China today.

So for Xi to visit, to come to Moscow for this anniversary is immensely significant. And then in addition, you also have the significance of the present moment, which is the rise of the BRICS, the greater association of Russia and China. And this process was sped up with the war in Ukraine—that actually the war in Ukraine really put Russia and China closer together than they’ve ever been.

Carden: And it seems to have placed or created a terribly large divide that’s going to last generations, I think, between Russia and Europe. Talk about Russia’s opinions towards Europe in the aftermath of the current war…

Shakarian: Absolutely. And the Russians see this in the grand trajectory of history. It’s not just about the Second World War. It’s also about the Crimean War. I mean, going back past 1914, you can look at all the various wars that the Russians fought with various European powers. To Russia it looks like the Europeans are, again, entertaining expansionist designs against Russia or aggressive designs against Russia. What’s especially shameful, and the Russians have not missed a beat on this, has been the behavior of Germany— that Germany has become so aggressive and so gung-ho for this enterprise has the Russians stunned.

In fact, the Russians in many ways feel betrayed because it was Russia that consented for Germany to be reunified. We talk about the reunification of Germany and the fall of the Berlin wall. Well, our good friends, the French and the British, were not so thrilled about a united Germany, but the Russians who suffered more than anybody else thanks to German aggression, said, it’s OK. We should allow you to come together on the condition that NATO does not move to the East.

When it comes to the German people, I don’t think they like where the elites are taking them on this journey. Germany knows what war looks like and what the costs of war are—but I don’t believe that the United Kingdom understands this. I think the UK is especially out for war, and I think that they’re especially delusional when it comes to Russia.

And I think that that’s very dangerous…

Carden: In particular, I think the meeting of the minds between the UK and the Baltic states is one of the more dangerous developments…

Shakarian: Oh, absolutely. Especially when we look at Kaja Kallas [EU Commissioner for Foreign Affairs], she’s out of control. What’s amazing to me—we look at the wars of religion in Europe, we look at the a hundred years war, we look at World War I, we look at World War ii, and yet it seems as if Europe, just when we think Europe is turning a corner and wanting to move beyond war, we have this new kind of crusader mentality as personified by Kallas. And not only her, Mr. Starmer of the UK seems to be especially gung-ho about a war with Russia. It’s almost as if he wants to relive the Charge of the Light Brigade. He wants to go back to the days of the British Empire and the Crimean War…

Carden: I think that’s exactly the case. I was just in the UK, and everyone I spoke to said that the main reason the UK acts the way that it does with regard to the Russia-Ukraine war is because the memory of Munich looms so large there. And they all have these Churchillian fantasies…

Shakarian: …But at the end of the day if you want to really help the Ukrainians, you help them find a way to diplomacy, help them find a way to the negotiating table. Don’t help them impale themselves in this bloody imperialistic war.

Mykola Lebed, a top aide to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the fascist OUN-B, was recruited by the C.I.A. after the war, according to a 2010 study by the U.S. National Archives. 

The government study said, “Bandera’s wing (OUN/B) was a militant fascist organization.” Bandera’s closest deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, said: ““I…fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine…. I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine….”

The study says: “At a July 6, 1941, meeting in Lwów, Bandera loyalists determined that Jews ‘have to be treated harshly…. We must finish them off…. Regarding the Jews, we will adopt any methods that lead to their destruction.’”

Lebed himself proposed to “’cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population,’ so that a resurgent Polish state would not claim the region as in 1918.” Lebed was the “foreign minister” of a Banderite government in exile, but he later broke with Bandera for acting as a dictator. The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps termed Bandera “extremely dangerous” yet said he was “looked upon as the spiritual and national hero of all Ukrainians….”

The C.I.A. was not interested in working with Bandera, pages 81-82 of the report say, but the British MI6 was. “MI6 argued, Bandera’s group was ‘the strongest Ukrainian organization abroad, is deemed competent to train party cadres, [and] build a morally and politically healthy organization….’”  An early 1954 MI6 summary noted that, “the operational aspect of this [British] collaboration [with Bandera] was developing satisfactorily. Gradually a more complete control was obtained over infiltration operations … “

Britain ended its collaboration with Bandera in 1954. West German intelligence, under former Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen, then worked with Bandera, who was eventually assassinated with cyanide dust by the KGB in Munich in 1959.

Instead of Bandera, the C.I.A. was interested in Lebed, despite his fascist background. They set him up in an office in New York City from which he directed sabotage and propaganda operations on the agency’s behalf inside Ukraine against the Soviet Union.  The U.S. government study says:

“CIA operations with these Ukrainians began in 1948 under the cryptonym CARTEL, soon changed to AERODYNAMIC. … Lebed relocated to New York and acquired permanent resident status, then U.S. citizenship. It kept him safe from assassination, allowed him to speak to Ukrainian émigré groups, and permitted him to return to the United States after operational trips to Europe. Once in the United States, Lebed was the CIA’s chief contact for AERODYNAMIC. CIA handlers pointed to his ‘cunning character,’ his ‘relations with the Gestapo and … Gestapo training,’ [and] the fact that he was ‘a very ruthless operator.’”

The C.I.A. worked with Lebed on sabotage and pro-Ukrainian nationalist propaganda operations inside Ukraine until Ukraine’s independence in 1991. “Mykola Lebed’s relationship with the CIA lasted the entire length of the Cold War,” the study says. “While most CIA operations involving wartime perpetrators backfired, Lebed’s operations augmented the fundamental instability of the Soviet Union.” 

Bandera Revival

The U.S. thus covertly kept Ukrainian fascist ideas alive inside Ukraine until at least Ukrainian independence was achieved. “Mykola Lebed, Bandera’s wartime chief in Ukraine, died in 1998. He is buried in New Jersey, and his papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University,” the U.S. National Archives study says.  

The successor organization to the OUN-B in the United States did not die with him, however.  It had been renamed the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), according to the International Business Times (IBT).

“By the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members. Reagan personally welcomed [Yaroslav] Stetsko, the Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7,000 Jews in Lviv, in the White House in 1983,” IBT reported.  “Following the demise of [Viktor] Yanukovich’s regime [in 2014], the UCCA helped organise rallies in cities across the US in support of the EuroMaidan protests,” it reported.

That is a direct link between Maidan and WWII-era Ukrainian fascism.

Despite the U.S. favoring the less extreme Lebed over Bandera, the latter has remained the more inspiring figure in Ukraine.

In 1991, the first year of Ukraine’s independence, the neo-fascist Social National Party, later Svoboda Party, was formed, tracing its provenance directly to Bandera. It had a street named after Bandera in Liviv, and tried to name the city’s airport after him. (Svoboda won 10 percent of the Rada’s seats in 2012 before the coup and before Sen. John McCain and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland appeared with Svoboda’s leader the following year.)

In 2010, pro-Western Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko declared Bandera a Hero of Ukraine, a status reversed by President Viktor Yanukovych, who was overthrown with the help of Ukrainian neo-Nazis in 2014. 

More than 50 monuments, busts and museums commemorating Bandera have been erected in Ukraine, two-thirds of which have been built since 2005, the year the pro-American Yuschenko was elected. A Swiss academic study says:

“On January 13, 2011, the L’vivs’ka Oblast’ Council, meeting at an extraordinary session next to the Bandera monument in L’viv, reacted to the abrogation [skasuvannya] of Viktor Yushchenko’s order about naming Stepan Bandera a ‘Hero of Ukraine’ by affirming that ‘for millions of Ukrainians Bandera was and remains a Ukrainian Hero notwithstanding pitiable and worthless decisions of the courts’ and declaring its intention to rename ‘Stepan Bandera Street’ as ‘Hero of Ukraine Stepan Bandera Street.’”

Torchlit parades behind Bandera’s portrait are common in Ukrainian cities, particularly on Jan. 1, his birthday, including this year. 

Mainstream on Neo-Nazis

From the start of the 2013-2014 events in Ukraine, Consortium News founder Robert Parry and other writers began providing the evidence NewsGuard, which bills itself as a news-rating agency, says doesn’t exist. Parry began reporting extensively on the coup and the influential role of Ukraine’s neo-Nazis. At the time, corporate media also reported on the essential part neo-Nazis played in the coup. [See: ROBERT PARRY: Ukraine’s Inconvenient Neo-Nazis]

As The New York Times reported, the neo-Nazi group, Right Sector, had the key role in the violent ouster of Yanukovych. The role of neo-fascist groups in the uprising and its influence on Ukrainian society was well reported by mainstream media outlets at the time.  

The BBC, the NYT, the Daily Telegraph and CNN all reported on Right Sector, C14 and other extremists’ role in the overthrow of Yanukovych. The BBC ran this report a week after his ouster:

And this one in July 2015:

After the coup a number of ministers in the new government came from neo-fascist parties.  NBC News (100 percent NewsGuard rating) reported in March 2014: “Svoboda, which means ‘Freedom,’ was given almost a quarter of the Cabinet positions in the interim government formed after the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych in February.”

Svoboda’s leader, Tyahnybok, whom McCain and Nuland stood on stage with, once called for the liberation of Ukraine from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” The International Business Times (82.5 percent) reported:

“In 2005 Tyahnybok signed an open letter to then Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko urging him to ban all Jewish organisations, including the Anti-Defamation League, which he claimed carried out ‘criminal activities [of] organised Jewry’, ultimately aimed at the genocide of the Ukrainian people.”

Before McCain and Nuland embraced Tyahnybok and his social national party, it was condemned by the European Parliament, which said in 2012:

“[Parliament] recalls that racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views go against the EU’s fundamental values and principles and therefore appeals to pro-democratic parties in the VeVerkhovna Radarkhovna Rada [Ukraine’s legislature] not to associate with, endorse, or form coalitions with this party.”

Such mainstream reports on Banderism stopped as the neo-fascist role in Ukraine was suppressed in Western media once Putin made “de-nazification” a goal of the invasion.  

The Azov Battalion, which arose during the coup, became a significant force in the war against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass, who resisted the coup. Its commander, Andriy Biletsky, infamously said Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival … against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

In 2014 the now Azov Regiment was officially incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard under the control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It is further integrated into the state by working closely with the SBU intelligence service. Azov is the only known neo-fascist component in a nation’s military anywhere in the world.  

As part of the Ukraine military, Azov members sported yellow arm bands (until the PR problem was understood in December 2022) with the Wolfsangel once worn by German SS troops in World War II. Including the atrocities it has continued to commit, Azov shows the world that integration into the state has not denazified them. On the contrary, it may have increased its influence on the state.

The U.S. and NATO have also trained and armed Azov since Barack Obama had denied lethal aid to Ukraine. One reason Obama declined sending arms to Ukraine was because he was afraid they may fall into these right-wing extremists’ hands. According to The New York Times,

“Mr. Obama continues to pose questions indicating his doubts. ‘O.K., what happens if we send in equipment — do we have to send in trainers?’ said one person paraphrasing the discussion on the condition of anonymity. ‘What if it ends up in the hands of thugs? What if Putin escalates?”   

In October 2019, U.S. House Democrats demanded that Azov should be prosecuted as “international terrorists.” In May 2024, the House denied funds to Azov because of a 2018 U.S. government spending bill, which said “none of the funds made available by this act may be used to provide arms, training or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.”

 NewsGuard’s Objections

NewsGuard, which bills itself as an “apolitical” news rating agency, argues that there is no major influence of neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine because neo-fascist political parties faring poorly at the polls. This ignores the stark fact that these groups engage instead in extra-parliamentary extremism.

In its claim against Consortium News for “repeatedly publishing false content” about neo-fascism in Ukraine, NewsGuard’s Zack Fishman wrote:

“There isn’t evidence that Nazism has a substantial influence in Ukraine. Radical far-right groups in Ukraine do represent a ‘threat to the democratic development of Ukraine,’ according to 2018 Freedom House report. But it also stated that far-right extremists have poor political representation in Ukraine and no plausible path to power — for example, in the 2019 parliamentary elections, the far-right nationalist party Svoboda won 2.2 percent of the vote, while the Svoboda candidate, Ruslan Koshulynskyy, won just 1.6 percent of the vote in the presidential election.”

But this argument of focusing on elections results ignores its extra-parliamentary influence and has been dismissed by a number of mainstream sources, not least of which is the Atlantic Council, probably the most anti-Russian think tank in the world.  In a 2019 article, a writer for the Atlantic Council said:

“To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of ‘red herring.’ It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity. Whether this is due to a continuing sense of indebtedness to some of these groups for fighting the Russians or fear they might turn on the state itself, it’s a real problem and we do no service to Ukraine by sweeping it under the rug.” [Emphasis added.]

“Fear that they might turn on the state itself,” acknowledges the powerful leverage these groups have over the government. The Atlantic Council piece then underscores how influential these groups are:

“It sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not. Last week Hromadske Radio revealed that Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports is funding the neo-Nazi group C14 to promote ‘national patriotic education projects’ in the country. On June 8, the Ministry announced that it will award C14 a little less than $17,000 for a children’s camp. It also awarded funds to Holosiyiv Hideout and Educational Assembly, both of which have links to the far-right. The revelation represents a dangerous example of law enforcement tacitly accepting or even encouraging the increasing lawlessness of far-right groups willing to use violence against those they don’t like.

Since the beginning of 2018, C14 and other far-right groups such as the Azov-affiliated National Militia, Right Sector, Karpatska Sich, and others have attacked Roma groups several times, as well as anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, an event hosted by Amnesty International, art exhibitions, LGBT events, and environmental activists. On March 8, violent groups launched attacks against International Women’s Day marchers in cities across Ukraine. In only a few of these cases did police do anything to prevent the attacks, and in some they even arrested peaceful demonstrators rather than the actual perpetrators.”

The Atlantic Council is not the only anti-Russian outfit that recognizes the dangerous power of the neo-fascist groups in Ukraine. Bellingcat published an alarming 2018 article headlined, “Ukrainian Far-Right Fighters, White Supremacists Trained by Major European Security Firm.”

NATO has also trained the Azov Regiment, directly linking the U.S. with far-right Ukrainian extremists.  

The Hill reported in 2017 in an article headlined, “The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda,” that:

“Some Western observers claim that there are no neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine, chalking the assertion up to propaganda from Moscow. Unfortunately, they are sadly mistaken.

There are indeed neo-Nazi formations in Ukraine. This has been overwhelmingly confirmed by nearly every major Western outlet. The fact that analysts are able to dismiss it as propaganda disseminated by Moscow is profoundly disturbing.

Azov’s logo is composed of two emblems — the wolfsangel and the Sonnenrad — identified as neo-Nazi symbols by the Anti-Defamation League. The wolfsangel is used by the U.S. hate group Aryan Nations, while the Sonnenrad was among the neo-Nazi symbols at this summer’s deadly march in Charlottesville.

Azov’s neo-Nazi character has been covered by the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, the Telegraph and Reuters, among others. On-the-ground journalists from established Western media outlets have written of witnessing SS runes, swastikas, torchlight marches, and Nazi salutes. They interviewed Azov soldiers who readily acknowledged being neo-Nazis. They filed these reports under unambiguous headlines such as “How many neo-Nazis is the U.S. backing in Ukraine?” and “Volunteer Ukrainian unit includes Nazis.”

How is this Russian propaganda?

The U.N. and Human Rights Watch have accused Azov, as well as other Kiev battalions, of a litany of human rights abuses.”

Neo-fascism has infected Ukrainian popular culture as well. A half-dozen neo-Nazi music groups held a concert in 2019 commemorating the day Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

Amnesty International in 2019 warned that “Ukraine is sinking into a chaos of uncontrolled violence posed by radical groups and their total impunity. Practically no one in the country can feel safe under these conditions.” 

Zelensky & Neo-Nazis

One of Ukraine’s most powerful oligarchs from the early 1990s, Ihor Kolomoisky, was an early financial backer of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. According to a 2015 Reuters (100 percent) report:

“Many of these paramilitary groups are accused of abusing the citizens they are charged with protecting. Amnesty International has reported that the Aidar battalion — also partially funded by Kolomoisky — committed war crimes, including illegal abductions, unlawful detention, robbery, extortion and even possible executions.

Other pro-Kiev private battalions have starved civilians as a form of warfare, preventing aid convoys from reaching separatist-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine, according to the Amnesty report.

Some of Ukraine’s private battalions have blackened the country’s international reputation with their extremist views. The Azov battalion, partially funded by Taruta and Kolomoisky, uses the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol as its logo, and many of its members openly espouse neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic views. The battalion members have spoken about ‘bringing the war to Kiev,’ and said that Ukraine needs ‘a strong dictator to come to power who could shed plenty of blood but unite the nation in the process.’”

In April 2019, the F.B.I. began investigating Kolomoisky for alleged financial crimes in connection with his steel holdings in West Virginia and northern Ohio. In August 2020 the U.S. Department of Justice filed civil forfeiture complaints against him and a partner:

“The complaints allege that Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Boholiubov, who owned PrivatBank, one of the largest banks in Ukraine, embezzled and defrauded the bank of billions of dollars.  The two obtained fraudulent loans and lines of credit from approximately 2008 through 2016, when the scheme was uncovered, and the bank was nationalized by the National Bank of Ukraine.  The complaints allege that they laundered a portion of the criminal proceeds using an array of shell companies’ bank accounts, primarily at PrivatBank’s Cyprus branch, before they transferred the funds to the United States.  As alleged in the complaint, the loans were rarely repaid except with more fraudulently obtained loan proceeds.”

Meanwhile, the Azov backer’s television channel had by this time aired the hit TV show Servant of the People (2015-2019), which catapulted Volodymyr Zelensky to fame and ultimately into the presidency under the new Servant of the People Party. The former actor and comedian’s presidential campaign was bankrolled by Kolomoisky, according to multiple reports, including this one by Radio Free Europe (not rated).  

During the presidential campaign, Politico (100 percent) reported:

“Kolomoisky’s media outlet also provides security and logistical backup for the comedian’s campaign, and it has recently emerged that Zelenskiy’s legal counsel, Andrii Bohdan, was the oligarch’s personal lawyer. Investigative journalists have also reported that Zelenskiy traveled 14 times in the past two years to Geneva and Tel Aviv, where Kolomoisky is based in exile.”

Before their run-off election, Petro Poroshenko called Zelensky “Kolomoisky’s puppet.” According to the Pandora Papers, Zelensky stashed funds he received from Kolomoisky off shore.

During the campaign Zelensky was asked about Bandera. He said it was “cool” that many Ukrainians consider Bandera a hero. 

Zelensky was elected president on the promise of ending the Donbass war. About seven months into his term he traveled to the front line in Donbass to tell Ukrainian troops, where Azov is well-represented, to lay down their arms. Instead he was sent packing. The Kyiv Post (87.5 percent) reported:

“When one veteran, Denys Yantar, said they had no arms and wanted instead to discuss protests against the planned disengagement that had taken place across Ukraine, Zelensky became furious.

‘Listen, Denys, I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons. Don’t shift the conversation to some protests,’ Zelensky said, videos of the exchange show. As he said this, Zelensky aggressively approached Yantar, who heads the National Corps, a political offshoot of the far-right Azov volunteer battalion, in Mykolaiv city.

‘But we’ve discussed that,’ Yantar said.

‘I wanted to see understanding in your eyes. But, instead, I saw a guy who’s decided that this is some loser standing in front of him,’ Zelensky said.”

It was a demonstration of the power of the military, including the Azov Regiment, over the civilian president.  

After the Russian invasion, Zelensky was asked in April 2022 by Fox News about Azov, which was later defeated in Mariupol. “They are what they are,” he responded. “They were defending our country.” He then tries to say because they are part of the military they are somehow no longer neo-Nazis, though they still wore Nazi insignia until Dec. 22, 2022. (Fox’s YouTube post removed that question from the interview, but it is preserved here:)

Outrages Greek Officials

Also in April 2022, Zelensky infuriated two former Greek prime ministers and other officials by inviting a member of the Azov Regiment to address the Greek Parliament. Alexis Tsipras, a former premier and leader of the main opposition party, SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance, blasted the appearance of the Azov fighters before parliament.

 “Solidarity with the Ukrainian people is a given. But nazis cannot be allowed to speak in parliament,” Tsipras said on social media. “The speech was a provocation.” He said Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis “bears full responsibility. … He talked about a historic day but it is a historical shame.”  

Former Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras called the Azov video being played in parliament a “big mistake.” Former Foreign Affairs Minister Nikos Kotzias said: “The Greek government irresponsibly undermined the struggle of the Ukrainian people, by giving the floor to a Nazi. The responsibilities are heavy. The government should publish a detailed report of preparation and contacts for the event.”

Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’ MeRA25 party said  Zelenky’s appearance turned into a “Nazi fiesta.”

Zelensky has also not rebuked his ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, for visiting Bandera’s grave in Munich, which provoked this reaction from a German MP: “Anyone like Melnik who describes the Nazi collaborator Bandera as ‘our hero’ and makes a pilgrimage to his grave or defends the right-wing Azov Battalion as ‘brave’ is actually still benevolently described as a ‘Nazi sympathizer.’”

Zelensky has closed media outlets and outlawed 11 political parties, including the largest one, Eurosceptic Opposition Platform for Life (OPZZh) and arrested its leader. None of the 11 shut down  are far-right parties.

Donald Trump was rightly castigated for remarks he made about white supremacists in Charlottesville. But Zelensky, whose oligarch backer funded Azov, and who brought a neo-Nazi to address a European Parliament, is given a pass by a Democratic and Republican administrations and the U.S. media though he condones the far worse problem of neo-fascism in Ukraine.   

Still Going

More than three years into the war, the Azov Battalion is still what The Guardian called in January 2025 “Ukraine’s highest profile combat unit.”  But in an article about the unit recruiting English-speaking fighters, the newspaper tried to whitewash its Neo-Nazism by saying:

“Azov, a volunteer brigade whose decade-old nationalist origins have made it a target of Russian propaganda, plans to form an international battalion to boost its numbers as Ukraine heads into a fourth year of full-scale war. …  Travelling to Ukraine to fight in its armed forces is not illegal, unless you are a member of the UK armed forces, though it is not encouraged.” 

What The Guardian doesn’t say is that previous British and other foreign volunteers are often right-wing extremists themselves.

Rita Katz, director of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremists, told The New York Times that “numerous far-right white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups throughout Europe and North America had expressed an outpouring of support for Ukraine, including by seeking to join paramilitary units in battling Russia … with the primary motivation to gain combat training and also being ideologically-driven.”

The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung published a report on “foreign far-right volunteer fighters who have flocked to Ukraine since the invasion of Russian troops.”

This article has been updated. It was originally published on Dec. 29, 2022.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.

While Kallas did not threaten any specific punishments if her warning is ignored, she said any participation in Moscow’s parade would “not be taken lightly” by the EU, suggesting diplomatic or political repercussions against dissenting countries.

Some leaders did interpret her words as diplomatic blackmail and predictably, it sparked backlash. Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico rebuked Kallas and affirmed his own plans to attend the Moscow celebrations honoring the defeat of Nazism. “The year is 2025, not 1939,” Fico declared.

Fico’s stance reflects a core principle of the European Union: foreign policy remains the prerogative of member states under the Treaty on European Union (Article 24), not the bureaucracy in Brussels. The EU’s foreign policy framework does not grant the High Representative the ability to unilaterally sanction or penalize member states for their foreign policy choices. In that context, Kallas’ statement can be seen as an attempt to encroach on Slovakia’s right to determine its own foreign policy actions.

The Brussels’ warning might be particularly ominous for Serbia, whose president, Aleksandr Vucic, was also invited to Moscow. Unlike Slovakia, Serbia is not a member of the EU, but it is a candidate. As the EU increasingly behaves like a geopolitical bloc, it expects an unconditional foreign policy alignment from those eager to join it.

Serbia has long balanced its ties between the EU and Russia, a pragmatic stance given its history and geography. Yet the Kallas faction pushes the Balkan nation to choose a side — EU’s side — or essentially risk membership. The EU can use Belgrade’s status to arm twist it into submission, or erect hurdles on its path, if not freeze the process altogether.

There is a precedent for that: the suspension of Georgia’s candidate status, ostensibly for democratic backsliding, which some experts, however, believe to be merely a cover for the real reason — retaliation for Tbilisi’s failure to fully join the EU’s sanctions against Russia (there is some credence to that argument given how obsequiously the EU treats Azerbaijan, the real dictatorship next door to Georgia ).

This isn’t integration; it’s coercion. And, when it comes to Serbia, it’s also a dangerous game. By criminalizing attendance at a parade commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany, the EU risks alienating the nation which lost over a million lives in World War II fighting against the Nazis. To threaten them now over a symbolic gesture is not just tone-deaf — it can be perceived in Serbia as forcing a betrayal of its own history as a price of joining the EU.

Apart from Kallas’s overreach, the collective Brussels’ approach also demonstrably lacks pragmatism and realism in dealings with Russia, and in particular, to bring the war in Ukraine closer to an end. Yes, Russian President Vladimir Putin will use the celebrations in Moscow, particularly the presence of the foreign leaders, as a massive photo op. He will try to bridge the Soviet Union’s victory in the WWII with the war in Ukraine which he consistently frames as a “war against the Nazis.”

That said, however, trying to impose a boycott of the event on all EU members and candidates would amount to no more than a form of virtue signaling — without discernible gain for the EU. If Kallas and her allies indeed are worried about handing Putin a diplomatic victory, then their own hawkish ineptitude is already delivering it to him. They are fueling the narrative, not only in Moscow, but in Europe too, of unelected Brussels bureaucrats dictating foreign policies to sovereign nations, running roughshod their historical and political sensitivities.

The prospect of Fico and Vucic’s travel to Moscow echoes the Brussels meltdown over earlier attempts at diplomacy by Hungary’s Prime-Minister Viktor Orban. When Orban visited Moscow in 2024 and met with Putin, instead of learning about what Moscow’s bottom-line on Ukraine was, the EU tried to sabotage Hungary’s rotating presidency of the European Council.

Furthermore, when the U.S. President Donald Trump started his own talks with Moscow, the EU was left scrambling when it could have used Orban’s diplomacy, which was already a few months ahead of Trump’s efforts.

And yet, the EU is repeating the same mistake again — bullying its own members instead of using their outreach to at least explore ways in which the EU could move towards the end of the war in Ukraine, something that its own citizens increasingly expect and demand. As the prominent Cold War historian, professor of the London School of Economics Vladislav Zubok said, by rejecting the diplomacy track, the EU-guided Europe makes itself less, not more relevant in international politics.

Eldar Mamedov is a Brussels-based foreign policy expert and Non-resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute.

2025.04.10 – Adm Rogers NSA interview.pdf
2025.04.10 – Bruce Ohr interviews.pdf
2025.04.10 – Christopher Steele Binder.pdf
2025.04.10 – Comey text messages.pdf
2025.04.10 – DJT Flynn Christie defensive briefing.pdf
2025.04.10 – FISA notes on Steele reports.pdf
2025.04.10 – Flynn interview.pdf
2025.04.10 – Halper files.pdf
2025.04.10 – HRC attorneys defensive briefing.pdf
2025.04.10 – McCabe memos.pdf
2025.04.10 – McCabe text messages.pdf
2025.04.10 – Mifsud interview.pdf
2025.04.10 – Page & Strzok Lync messages.pdf
2025.04.10 – Page text messages.pdf
2025.04.10 – Priestap text messages.pdf
2025.04.10 – State Dept Steele binder.pdf
2025.04.10 – Steele reports thru Simpson & McCain.pdf
2025.04.10 – Strzok text messages.pdf
2025.04.10 – Wolfe interview.pdf

Not everyone is listening to these pathetic appeals, and the list of heads of state who have confirmed their participation is growing—it has now reached 20. Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico reacted angrily​ to “disrespectful” remarks ​from Brussels.​ “I would like to inform you that I am a legitimate premier of Slovakia, a sovereign country,“ he said. “Nobody can order me where to go or not to go.“ Fico said he will travel to Moscow to honor the Red Army soldiers who liberated his country and other victims of the nazis.

The international founding group of the Spirit of Elba movement called on Trump to “join guests attending the 80th anniversary of the victory over nazi-fashists in World War II in Moscow.”

At the same time, an international group that started the “Elbe Spirit” movement is publicizing its appeal to President Trump to join Moscow attendees where he could meet among others Chinese leader XI, Indian Modi, and Brazilian Lulu to make a historic Yalta 2.0 summit and start drafting the new World Security Architecture to have peace and win-win cooperation in the years to come.

Additional incentives for Trump will be the recent disclosure of the facts that provoked the war in Ukraine and prevented its end almost immediately after it started in February 2022, as well as the direct role of Biden and European generals in taking over the command of this war. This is beside the dirty work of the US deep state and Parties of War that ruined Trump’s first term and are still trying to do it again.

Almost simultaneously, the New York Times and the Times published devastating and recently declassified information implicating those responsible for the Ukraine tragedy. Why they suddenly told the truth remains a mystery after years of nonstop lies and barrages of fake news that earned them many Pulitzer prizes. Perhaps they did it to save their ruined reputation after newly declassified documents by the Trump administration.

The latest disclosures explained how the top brass in the FBI and intelligence community, the Department of Justice, and the media were determined to stop President Trump from winning the White House in 2016, and they talked about removing him from office months after he was sworn in.

RussiaGate and Trump-Russia collusion allegations were presented in the 700 pages of emails, memos, interviews, and other material connected to the 2016 “Crossfire Hurricane” probe.

In addition to Trump’s enemies in the US, British involvement was no less devastating. Its spy, Christopher Steele, who was working earlier at the British Embassy in Moscow, prepared the “Steele Dossier,” which was paid for and created on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and alleges Russia had damaging but fake information about President Trump.

Newly released documents show that Christopher Steele told the FBI that he feared “how Trump’s presidency negatively impacted the historical U.S.-UK alliance and special relationship.” Trump called the investigation into his campaign “total government weaponization” and “a disgrace” without precedent.

Trump keeps repeating that the war in Ukraine is Biden’s, and recently, he added that Zelensky is also to blame. It is time to fulfill his pledge to end this war. Using the symbolic dates of May 8-9 and celebrating the end of WWII, to prevent WWIII would inscribe his name in history books.

When one speaks about history, in addition to the US-Russia alliance during WWII, Trump could recall the role of the Russian Empire during the American Revolutionary War. Empress Catherine the Great refused British pleas for military assistance by sending 20,000 troops to suppress the rebellion. King George III offered the island of Minorca as a bribe to get Russia, but Catherine refused. Russia’s neutrality helped the American cause by decisively hindering British efforts to defeat the rebels.

It is the time to return the favor.