"Politicians and analysts in the United States and Europe not only celebrated the [2014 Maidan] uprising as a triumph of democracy, but denied reports of Maidan’s ultranationalism, smearing those who warned about the dark side of the uprising as Moscow puppets and useful idiots". Lev Golinkin, The Nation
In yet another shameless performance, Zelensky has appealed to the emotions of the US Congress members and portrayed his country as the innocent victim of Russian aggression. He has likened this to the surprise attack of the Japanese on Pearl Harbor in 1941. How ridiculous can this man get ?
The Russian army had been waiting for almost a year at Ukraine's borders for Zelensky's government and its American backers to do the right thing by Russia's security concerns. When the advance notice was ignored, Russia saw no other option but to intervene militarily in Ukraine.
But wait, there's more. In Europe, Zelensky has portrayed himself as a new Churchill, fighting for the freedom & democracy of the entire world. For reasons beyond my comprehension, major European newspapers like Le Figaro have picked up the Zelensky-Churchill comparison and ran with it. Never mind the fact that the real Churchill was a true blue representative of the British establishment and an Englishman to boot, whereas Zelensky is an Ukrainian of Jewish descent.
The democracy he claims he is defending is no democracy at all, but a successful de facto national-legionary state very similar to the one inaugurated in Romania by the Iron Guard in September 1940, even inspired directly by it, albeit with some democratic trappings about it, to fool foreign observers. The only major difference is that instead of killing Jews, the Ukrainian neo-nazi thugs go after the Russophones from the Donbas.
When I first heard Vladimir Putin claim that Ukraine had been taken over by neo-nazis, I thought he might be exaggerating and that he was probably looking for a pretext for an intervention. Alas, how wrong I was. After researching the issue, I have realised that he told the truth and that Ukraine is being run by gangs of thugs, like the Klitschko brothers in Kiev, by the Azov battalion - whose supporters infiltrated all the major state institutions like the police, army and public administration - and by a constellation of many other neo-nazi armed gangs gravitating around Azov as their benevolent sun. The Ukrainian parliament is there only to deceive foreigners about the true nature of the Ukrainian state. To make an analogy, this cosy relationship between Azov-type gangs and the Ukrainian police or the army would be akin to US southern states' police forces enlisting KKK members to help maintain law and order.
Sure, there are many neo-nazi organisations around Europe and the USA, but as a British reporter has discovered, Azov is the only neo-nazi group that has been gifted by a state (Ukraine) with plenty of weapons, armoured cars and tanks and been given a licence to kill as many Donbas Russians as possible. Its financial backer is - bizarrely enough for such a rabid anti-semitic organisation - Ihor Kolomoisky, a Jewish oligarh who also enabled Zelensky to become president of Ukraine. Now this is a true description of the Ukrainian "democracy" which Zelensky claims he is defending. This, to be sure, is an insult to the memory of Britons who gave their lives during the Second World War in order to protect true freedom and true democracy, that still existed in the world at that time. The fact that the spirit of freedom and democracy has vanished, with only a skewed version of it being currently promoted around the world by the United States is a different matter altogether.
"Both Ukrainian human rights activists and leaders of rival extreme Right-wing groups have complained to me, in interviews, about the unfair advantage Avakov’s patronage gave the Azov movement in establishing its dominant role in Ukraine’s Rightwing sphere — including official functions as election observers and state-sanctioned auxiliary police. Ukraine is not a Nazi state, but the Ukrainian state’s support — for whatever reasons, valid or otherwise — of neo-Nazi or Nazi-aligned groups makes the country an outlier in Europe. The continent has many extreme Right-wing groups, but only in Ukraine do they possess their own tank and artillery units, with the state’s support." (Aris Roussinos)
Hang on, there's still more to the "democratic Ukraine" story. The emulation of Romanian history goes further than the national-legionary state model. Within their constitution, the Ukrainians have decided to adopt, like in Romania, the "national unitary" state model of French inspiration. This has prevented the implementation of the Minsk 2 accords, which would have solved the Donbas' problems for good. Zelensky, as the head of such a state is now asking the Congress of the United States - the prototype of federal states around the world - to prop up and help defend this inappropriate formula of state organisation in Ukraine.
Finally, Zelensky has played on the American obsession of retaining its status of global hegemon (he wants Joe Biden to be the"leader of the world", in his speech), which was simply a never-to-be-repeated accident which came about in the aftermath of the collapse of the bipolar world. Zelensky knows that the same forces that were behind Maidan are hard at work in Washington trying to prop up the US' flawed claim to global leadership, and he is trying to manipulate American politicians and public opinion to his advantage.
Needless to say, American politicians should be wary of Zelensky's pleas and warped arguments and take America's national interest into consideration when dealing with the neoconservatives' push to maintain the status quo in world affairs. One thing is very clear, however. What neither Russia nor Europe need at their respective doorsteps is a nightmarish national-legionary state that would have made Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the Romanian Iron Guard captain, proud. (Incidentally, Zelea Codreanu was of Ukrainian-German ethnic origin, his father's real name was Zelinski)
This is the main reason why, instead of blaming and piling sanctions on Russia, Americans should assist it in cleaning up the mess they helped create in Ukraine.
