The unpalatable reality is that a significant portion of eastern Ukrainians — the very people on the ground living and suffering through this conflict — distrust Kiev and the West and at least tacitly support Russia and the separatists. And frankly, that isn’t surprising...
Kiev [has made a ] decision to maintain a relationship with the Azov battalion, an ultranationalist paramilitary group of around 400 men that uses Nazi salutes and insignia. To anyone familiar with eastern Ukraine’s bloody history during World War II, allowing the Azov battalion to fight in the region is a bit like sponsoring a Timothy McVeigh Appreciation Night in Oklahoma City. It does nothing but infuriate the local population and provide Mr. Putin with yet another opportunity to shed the mantle of invader and position himself as a protector.
The impact of World War II, or, as most people there call it, The War, on eastern Ukrainian consciousness cannot be understated. My childhood in the northeast city of Kharkov (now called Kharkiv) in the 1980s was surrounded by The War, 40 years after it ended. Every family — Russian, Ukrainian, Roma, Jewish — had ghost relatives who had vanished or perished. One of my earliest memories is of asking my father where the mortar holes pockmarking the outside of our apartment block had come from; one of my father’s earliest memories is of fleeing Kharkov mere hours before the Nazis invaded the city. Eastern Ukrainians today, especially the older generations, respond to swastikas and wolfsangel runes — Nazi symbols now used by Ukrainian ultranationalists — about as well as African-Americans respond to burning crosses.
Thursday, December 11, 2014
This is Who the US is in Bed with in Ukraine
Lev Golinkin writes at NYT:
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There aren't really any Nazi in Ukraine. That is just something made up by right wingers who support Putin to spite Obama . The right wing nuts think Putin is tuff and Obama is weak.
ReplyDeleteThis is what NPR listeners think. Seariously, to this day if you criticize forienge policy today the lefties will go to great lengths to denounce you due to Obama's saint hood.
Antiwar.com and Scott Horton .org have been reporting on the Nazis in Ukraine since January 2014. Nice to see it in the Times.