A report obtained by POLITICO details specific plans to reform Ukrainian institutions and warns Western support may hinge on cutting corruption.

A pall of gloom descended on Europe as the long-feared uncertainty set in over the weekend as to how long would the collective West underwrite the proxy war in Ukraine. To lift their sagging spirit, some European foreign ministers impromptu took the train to Kiev to spend Monday with President Zelensky. It was an extraordinary sight of defiance of the call of destiny, as the war passed the 19-month mark.

As opposition to funding the US proxy war in Ukraine increases on Capitol Hill, empire apologists have been frantically churning out think pieces about how much the war serves US strategic interests in order to manufacture support for its continued backing by Washington. Such arguments flatly contradict the propaganda messaging we were inundated with at the beginning of the war that this was an “unprovoked invasion”, but empire managers don’t seem particularly interested in defending that narrative anymore.

In April 2019, Ukraine was brimming with optimism as it elected Volodymyr Zelensky, a candidate who promised peace, an end to government corruption, and economic prosperity. Fast forward four years: a civil war within the Donbas region turned into a European war raging on Ukrainian territory, destroying the country’s infrastructure, killing hundreds of thousands of its citizens, and creating millions of refugees. Government corruption is an all-time high, and the country is in a state of material poverty.

In 2007, Putin asked the world, “What happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.” He then went on to remind his audience of NATO’s promise not to expand east of Germany toward Russia’s borders.

If you’re Volodymyr Zelenskiy right now you’ll take little solace from Joe Biden’s earnest assurances that the US “will not walk away” from Ukraine.

It should be no surprise that the Canadian parliament was misled into applauding an old Nazi and former member of the Waffen SS Galizien in Ukraine during the second world war. Yaroslav Hunka served in the 14th SS Volunteer Division “Galicia”, which was made up of Ukrainian nationalists. At the end of the war, these “volunteers” who fought with Hitler’s army and collaborated in massacres committed on Ukrainian soil during the Second World War, were not extradited to the Soviet Union but like Hunka were able to emigrate to Canada while many others escaped to the UK and through the Vatican’s “Rat Lines” to South America.

For the record, I knew Simon Wiesenthal well, he was an honorary member of the Board of my non-profit Andrei Sakharov Institute, and I am a contributor to his anti-Nazi Simon Wiesenthal Center. Occasionally, I contribute to some other charities, including the Holocaust memorial in DC.

Deliberate provocations of a nuclear rival, coups d’état, colour revolutions, broken promises, broken treaties, escalation of tensions, demonization, invective, double-standards — all this while asserting adherence to international legal norms and playing innocent about our aggressions, our violations of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, of articles 1(2)[1], 2(3)[2], 2(4)[3] and 39[4] of the UN Charter.

There’s been an astonishingly brazen propaganda push to normalize war profiteering in Ukraine as Kyiv coordinates with the arms industry and western governments to convert the war-ravaged nation into a major domestic weapons manufacturer, thereby turning Ukrainians into proxies of the military industrial complex as well as the Pentagon.