In the current conflict between Ukraine and its Western allies versus Putin’s Russia, both sides have blamed the other as being “Nazis”. The Jewish comedian and actor become Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said “Russia attacked Ukraine in a cowardly and suicidal way like Nazi Germany did during World War II.”[1] For his part, Putin declared in his address of February 24, referring apparently to the role of the Azov battalion in the fighting in eastern Ukraine: “The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and de-nazify Ukraine.”[2]

Both statements may appear to have some validity, though the irony and clownish accusations of each side calling the other “Nazis” is inevitably humorous. Putin’s comment seems to have more validity, since circumstances between Ukraine and Russia today are far different than between Ukraine and Germany in 1941. Conversely, news of “Neo-Nazis” in Ukraine have permeated Western media for years, with reporting on such groups as Azov Battalion and umbrella group Right Sector, among others.

Much can be said about this phenomenon of National Socialist and affiliated groups and interests persisting in Ukraine to this day, but here we will focus on the historical roots of why “Neo-Nazis” are said to exist with such prominence in Ukraine today.

Before dawn on June 22 1941, the National Socialist armies, formally joined by the soldiers of Hungary, Rumania and Italy, as well as soldiers from many other nations in the Waffen SS, launched Operation Barbarossa.[3] Stalin had impoverished the USSR assembling and equipping the world’s largest horde of armies, which were poised on the mutual border with Germany via the then double-occupied Poland.  Arranged in two Strategic Eschelons, all Soviet defensive structures and forces had been removed, and Stalin’s immense Red Army was preparing to launch a devastating offensive attack into Germany and onward to seize all of Europe.[4]

Hitler and the National Socialist Germans and their allies struck first in a bold pre-emptive strike on a scope and scale the world had never seen. Three immense columns of troops, tanks, armaments of every kind, and supplies, accompanied by the Luftewaffe forces in the air, surprised the Soviets and immediately captured huge war supply depots and hundreds of thousands of enemy soldiers.

The southernmost of the three columns commanded by General von Rundstedt (of Dunkirk fame) had as its objective Kiev in the Ukraine and the Caucuses mountains beyond. It was this column which the Hungarians and Rumanians joined, equipped with arms taken from the French the previous year. Von Rundstedt had great initial successes against disorganized, surprised Soviet forces, pushing forward rapidly with Panzer encirclement tactics and seizing immense supplies and arms, capturing entire armies from the Soviets.[5]

As this column penetrated Ukraine, the men were dismayed to see the “scorched earth” policy the Soviets had inflicted on the countryside and Ukrainian people still living there, even beyond the general poverty and misery they had seen earlier.[6] Farms and homesteads were burned to ashes, animals slaughtered and rotting, some of the cities and towns destroyed.  Trains had been dismantled and shipped East, along with entire factories. Many people, Ukrainian and Soviet, had been evacuated and deported back into the USSR. Even historic monuments and magnificent architecture had been destroyed with explosives.[7] Some of the Ukrainian people were found slaughtered too.[8] However, Operation Barbarossa was such a surprise to the Soviets that they had not had enough time to carry their strategy of infrastructure and resource destruction to completion.

When the Ukrainian people saw the German/Hungarian/Rumanian armies approaching, some welcomed them as liberators.

“Hitler Liberator” poster

As poor as Jewish-influenced Wikipedia is on accurate history for all things “Nazi,” it does have this to say:

When Nazi Germany with its allies invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, many Ukrainians and Polish people, particularly in the west where they had experienced two years of harsh Soviet rule, initially regarded the Wehrmacht soldiers as liberators.[9]

Further:

Some Ukrainian activists of the national movement hoped for momentum to establish an independent state of Ukraine. German policies initially gave some encouragement to such hopes through the vague promises of a sovereign ‘Greater Ukraine’ as the Germans were trying to take advantage of anti-Soviet, anti-Ukrainian, anti-Polish, and anti-Jewish sentiments. A local Ukrainian auxiliary police was formed as well as Ukrainian SS division, 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Galicia (1st Ukrainian).

Wikipedia, despite its insistent anti-German atrocity propaganda, presents good information about this Waffen SS Ukrainian division formed in the region of Galicia. This region was given to Poland after World War I, but most of its citizens were Ukrainians. The Soviets invaded in 1939 and annexed the region, which was then liberated by the Germans in 1941. Galician Ukrainians were divided among those willing to remain subjects of other nations, and Nationalists who wanted an independent Ukraine. Of these, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists A (OUN-A) were led by Andriy Melnyk, who advocated cooperation with the National Socialists and its Abwehr intelligence office, and the OUN-B led by Stepan Bandera, who would eventually fight against both Germans and Soviets for Ukrainian independence—tragically, as it turned out.

Otto von Wachter, the German governor of the region, promoted formation of the division in April 1943 with the stipulation that it be deployed exclusively against the Soviets and “Bolsheviks” as they were known to these Ukrainians. It saw multiple deployments at the front and was engaged in direct combat against Soviet and Polish forces.[10]

The Ukrainians had suffered brutally under the Stalin regime and its Communist totalitarian rule for many years.  The planned starvation genocide of 1933–4, when Stalin sent the Jew politburo member Gendrick Yagoda to impose “collectivized farming” and starve millions of Ukrainians to death in a slow miserable genocide known as the Holodomor,[11] was in the memories of Ukrainians as were more recent Soviet horrors. Some Ukrainians, always a proud people with a unique ethnic identity among Slavs, were thrilled that the Germans and their allies had pushed back the Red Army and Soviet occupiers. Some of them welcomed their liberators with joy.

An historical account submitted by Konrad Kreft and Clara Weiss (most likely Jewish), writing for the World Socialist Web Site of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI),[12] places Ukrainian nationalist military cooperation with National Socialist Germany even before the launch of Barbarossa. These are obviously Communist authors, with too few citations to support their obviously war propagandistic statements—as well as too many accounts of Jewish persecution and “pogroms” attributed to “fascists” and lavish whitewashing of early Jewish Communists such as Trotsky (Bronstein) to be credible. They do state some honest history however:

Stalin’s murderous policies of repression played into the hands of Ukrainian nationalists and fascists, who agitated in the western parts of the divided Ukraine and collaborated with Hitler when he invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. … In 1940, the OUN split into the Bandera (B) and Melnyk (M) factions, which bitterly fought each other. Bandera’s more extreme group was able to attract more followers than Melnyk’s. It began by establishing Ukrainian militia (the Roland and Nightingale Legions) on German-occupied territory in Poland which, in league with the Wehrmacht (German army), invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

By this account, Ukrainians participated in Barbarossa from the beginning. After the obligatory stories of these Ukrainian Nationalists being used by Germans to massacre defenseless Jews and especially children, we see more credible history:

While Alfred Rosenberg … urged greater involvement of local fascist forces, Hitler opposed the nationalists’ so-called independence projects. On Hitler’s orders, the OUN-B leaders were eventually arrested and the Ukrainian legions disarmed and relocated.

From 1942, the Ukrainian militia served the Third Reich in the “anti-partisan campaign” in Belarus, in the “security service,” and as armed personnel in concentration camps. Bandera and Stetsko remained in custody in Sachsenhausen concentration camp until September 1944.

Some Ukrainian men wanted to join the German armies and fight for their enduring freedom. Some were already aligned with National Socialist ideology and politics, as many were throughout Europe and beyond in many nations, but in Soviet Ukraine such adherence was strictly forbidden. Now they were free, and wanted to fight to vanquish Communist tyranny and ensure their freedom. They called for arms and officers to join Operation Barbarossa.

This posed a dilemma for the German command. Some distrust existed among them that they should give arms to those among who might remain Soviet agents or might turn around and fight the Germans themselves in a misguided attempt at unaffiliated Ukrainian Nationalism, as eventually happened with Bandera. This was most likely Hitler’s reluctance, as opposed to Rosenberg who was Russian himself and longed to see his former homeland liberated from Judeo-Communist control. Vetting was difficult, and certainly von Rundstedt needed to continue his lightning pace and could not stop to equip, organize and integrate such forces. Much Soviet military equipment had been captured, but it was uncertain the Ukrainians could use them, with little time for training.

Von Rundstedt achieved the capture of Kiev by the end of September, and continued in the Ukraine region with the most successful of the three Barbarossa columns, eventually capturing or vanquishing one third of the entire Soviet forces.[13]

Some Ukrainian veterans and men were able to integrate into the Waffen SS and join the later battles against the Soviets in 1943 and beyond, as we saw with the Waffen SS Galicia division. Others organized behind the lines as the Germans moved on, joining the anti-partisan warfare efforts alongside the German Einsatzgruppen against Soviet loyalists trying to sabotage Barbarossa supply lines and communications, and even making swift guerrilla raids against German armed forces. Ukrainians joined the partisan forces fighting against these saboteurs, a fierce aspect of Barbarossa apart from the main battles.

I could find no sources, but one wonders how the Ukrainians greeted the Romanians and Hungarians among the Barbarossa soldiers, since these nations shared a common border with Ukraine and had the same concerns of Soviet domination—and possibly the same hopes of German liberation. Romania was supplying Germany’s crucial need for oil for its war effort and was threatened by a Soviet take-over, having lost two regions to the Soviets the year before. Hungary was a formal ally of Germany, having signed the Tripartite Pact the year before also.[14]

Hitler had issued an offer to Ukrainians, showing how a version of National Socialism, with all its finance policies, economic benefits, social upliftment and religious freedom could be adapted for Ukraine, and many were enthusiastic to adopt it. Of course this was forbidden under Stalin’s cruel domination, but now they were free to pursue it. The combined effect of the arrival of the National Socialist Germans and their allies as liberators, with the promise of a hopeful future as a National Socialist sovereign state and a German as an ally, left a lasting inspiration among the Ukrainians. Of course, eventually Barbarossa was turned back and Ukraine was re-occupied by the Soviets and brutally punished for its betrayal to the enemy.

Let’s examine one example of how this strong influence from the emotional days of Ukrainian liberation and cooperation with National Socialists has endured into the current era. On “Victory Day” May 9^th 2014, the Governor of Ukraine’s southern region Kherson, Yuri Odarchenko, gave a public address to a large crowd. Here are his key statements:

Those [Soviet] aggressors justified their capture not only by their desire to seize others’ territory and enslave the people, but they also put forward slogans about liberating nations and people that inhabit the lands which Hitler hoped to capture. … If you read history books, we have a number of documentaries on this, then we see that he [Hitler] first of all put forward a slogan of liberating people from the communist yoke, and liberating people from the tyrant Stalin.[15]

Many in the crowd had been indoctrinated to a certain perception of history, maintained by Putin today, that the Germans were the aggressors and oppressors, and the Soviets the liberators. Even veterans in the crowd booed and expressed outrage at Odarchenko’s suggestion that the “Nazis” were the liberators.

We are not told what history books or “documentaries” he refers to, but we have presented some here. Odarchenko lost an election for the Ukrainian parliament later that year, but won another in 2016,[16] showing that his outrageous and politically incorrect statement in 2014 did not disqualify him. Some Ukrainian voters most likely approved of it. No candidate could get away with such political heresy in most nations, but in Ukraine it may actually win a candidate votes. Odarchenko represented the All-Ukrainian Union “Fatherland” party.

It is not difficult to understand that a positive memory of National Socialism and negative attitudes toward Russia would survive among many Ukrainians to this day. Revisionist historian Mike Walsh states: “Stories went from generation to generation, anecdotal evidence of the German presence in Ukraine are still commonplace.”[17] This is not the place to trace the history of such persistent groups as the Azov Battalion and other such groups, but this history does help us understand why a strong National Socialist presence would exist in Ukraine today.

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[1]    AFP, “Ukraine’s Zelensky says Russia acting like ‘Nazi Germany’”, The Times of Israel, March 2 2022
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/ukraines-zelensky-says-russia-acting-like-nazi-germany/

[2]    Anisotopia, Putin’s Speech Declaring the 2022 Invasion of Ukraine, February 24 2022
https://anisotopia.files.wordpress.com/2022/02/ebook___putin_s_speech.pdf

[3]    Alan Clark, Barbarossa, the Russian-German Conflict, William Morrow & Co, New York, 1965
Such a source from a Jewish-influenced published must not be fully acknowledge as valid, and Clark is clearly anti-German, presenting some of what must be considered war propaganda atrocity stories. His military history is more accurate.

[4]    Viktor Suvorov, Icebreaker, Hamish Hamilton, London England, 1990

[5]    Clark, ppg 129-144

[6]    Letters, Russia Insider

[7]    Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine: Stalin’s Scorched Earth Policy, Infoukes
http://www.infoukes.com/history/ww2/page-06.html

[8]    Mike Walsh, The Liberation of Ukraine, March 31 2016, Renegade Tribune
http://www.renegadetribune.com/the-liberation-of-ukraine/

[9]    Wikipedia, “Modern History of Ukraine”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_history_of_Ukraine#World_War_II

[10]  Wikipedia, “14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician)”   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_(1st_Galician)

[11]  Sever Plocker (Jew), “Stalin’s Jews”, Ynet News, December 21 2006
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html

[12]  Konrad Kreft, Clara Weiss, “Nationalism and fascism in Ukraine: A historical overview”, World Socialist Web Site, June 9 2014   https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/06/09/fasc-j09.html

[13]  Clark, p 145

[14]  Global Security, “1939-1945 – Hungary in World War II”  https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/hu-history-25.htm

[15]  This link used to go to an RT web page, but during the wirting and research of this essay, it now says “Forbidden”.
A partial mirroring can be found at Revisionist researcher Carolyn Yeager’s site.  https://carolynyeager.net/

[16]  Wikipedia, “Yuri Odarchenko”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuriy_Odarchenko

[17]  Walsh, “The Liberation of Ukraine.”

Note: I didn’t expect the last two articles on Russia to be so popular. Because of the rampant censorship in the West, I had given up all hope of writing seriously about politics in English about two years ago. But, so far, Substack has allowed genuine dissidents to stay platformed on their service, so I figured that I might give it a shot. Here is my recently made substack where I will be re-uploading what has already been published on Occidental Observer and reposted elsewhere. If you like what I’ve written, feel free to sign up there because I’ve got a lot more analysis articles in the pipeline in the coming days and weeks about the situation in Eastern Europe and also some essays about just how much I hate Liberalism and all that it stands for. A huge thank you to Professor MacDonald for publishing my articles. – Rolo

There appears to be a breather in the offensive campaign two weeks in. Every talking head with a Telegram channel, a LiveJournal or a radio broadcast has weighed in on what this means. Some accept the statements from Russian officials at face value—that it is a genuine effort to provide humanitarian relief to the civilian population and to save lives through evacuations. Others, that it is a chance for the Russians to resupply and mass up even more troops. Some patriot voices in Russia are furious that Putin refused to give the order to engage the enemy head-on, choosing the velvet glove approach instead. Others say that this stratagem to win over hearts and minds is the correct one. Most intelligent commentators have already pointed out just how intense and overwhelming the NATO/Ukrainian propaganda barrage was and just how ill-equipped the Russian side was to deal with it. In our previous article, we explained why that may have been the case— the government never really took combatting Western disinformation too seriously until it was almost too late. If there is one clear and objective failing of Putin’s long rule that can be squarely pinned on his decision-making, this would be it. However, Putin did have a media strategy and it was quite clear for many years what it was: he focused on controlling the main TV channels and left the rest of the enemy’s propaganda untouched. In Russia, the “boomers” are the main voting block and they turn out in strength for whoever the TV tells them to… or the Communists, if they’re feeling particularly peeved at the government during that cycle. So it wasn’t a bad plan on Putin’s part by any means and it was better than anything that Trump or any other modern populist leader was able to pull off, by far. It was however, a half-measure, and while the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, the off-ramp was certainly built with half-measures.

Back on the warfront, rumors are circulating that Dniepopetrovsk might surrender by the time that the Russian forces reach it. Apparently, the Jewish oligarch Igor Kholomoisky, the kingpin of the city, may have sued for a separate peace with the Russians. I don’t want to make any hard predictions about the course that this war will take, but this isn’t really as absurd a proposition as it may seem at first glance. Rumor or not, mentioning it does cross us over neatly into the main topic of today’s post: the political power factions that control the Ukraine.

It is worth getting into the details here just so that we can come to an understanding of just what exactly Ukrainian politics was since independence. Ukrainian politics has been almost entirely dominated by the Eastern Mafias since the days of Presidents Kravchuk and Kuchma. There are two factions within the mafia that are worthy of particular mention: the Donbass and the Dniepropetrovsk groups. Both gained power when they took over the factories and the energy resources and the gas pipelines in their respective regions. Analysts who endlessly draw maps detailing ethnic compositions and language differences among the regions of Ukraine show themselves to be woefully uninformed and completely lost when it comes to understanding just what was happening in Ukraine over the last three decades. Dniepopetrovsk—–a Russian-speaking region (which shows how much that matters) has been the senior political power in the country since 2014. And the only shake-up that Ukrainian politics experienced over the last three decades, however minor, was the election and short-lived reign of Orange Revolution firebrand and then President (2005–2010), Victor Yushenko. Yushenko rose in on a wave of support from Western Ukraine, and crucially, he got many centrists in central regions to vote for him who were simply fed up with the corruption and criminal domination of Ukrainian politics. Nonetheless, Yushenko had to make a deal with Yulia Timoshenko (a Jewish gas baroness turned politician from Donbass) to form a powerful opposition block that became the ruling coalition once twice president (2002–2005 and 2010–2014) Victor Yanukovitch was ousted for the first time. Almost immediately, Yushenko ended up getting backstabbed by Yulia and her people. Or, to be fair, perhaps one could make the case that he betrayed her first and worse and got what he had coming. It doesn’t really matter in the grander scheme of things because the political elite of Ukraine always kept themselves busy tricking, arresting and stealing from one another. Yushenko’s ineffectual stint in power led to Yanukovitch’s (also a Donbass Mafia member) return to power and the events leading up to Euromaidan 2014.

That being said, the events that led to the current situation in Ukraine can be traced back to any point in history, really. One event leads to another so long as we are bound by the chain of cause and effect. It all depends on the skill of the writer to connect the dots and construct a narrative, really. So, my decision to pin the start of the sequence of events that led to this conflict on the events that occurred during the Yushenko era is arbitrary— we could just as easily go back to Kuchma and Kravchuk or to the events all the way back to the Khmelnitsky uprising in the seventeenth century if we wanted to. My goal is not to lay the blame on one corrupt politician or gangster to whitewash the others— only to shed light on a part of the story that Western readers might not be aware of and to push back against simplistic explanations offered for the conflict by ideologists with their own personal agendas informing their framing of events in a certain way.

As a direct result of Yushenko’s ascent to the presidency, a new faction began to rise in Ukraine that had hitherto not exercised power on the national level. We will pick up the story with the Orange Revolution president making the historic decision to start legitimizing and integrating the Galician right-wing radicals (often labeled “neo-Nazis”) into his government, but the lore behind the Galician faction stretches back to the bedlam of the Russian Revolution and is certainly worth delving into another time.

Once Yushenko began injecting die-hard Galician faction members into the security apparatus of Ukraine, they quickly carved out a niche for themselves in the secret police (SBU) and began taking up key positions in the military and defense offices. Assassinations, intimidations and power-grabs became the order of the day (not that they ever really stopped). Yanukovitch, who retook office soon after, did nothing to undo what was initiated by his predecessor and continued funding this operation up to the day that he was chased out of the country by many of these very same people working against him in the security services and in the mob that had gathered in the Maidan Square beneath his presidential residence. Why did he do this? Well, after the controlled demolition of the USSR, the political class of literally every single FSU country adopted something that has been derisively dubbed in Russia as the “sitting on two stools” approach to foreign policy. Put simply: they try to play the West and Russia off each other to extract more concessions from Russia. This was indeed a lucrative grift while it lasted, but eventually the stools toppled over and the whole thing came crashing down. Relative to Yanukovich, Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, got quite lucky. But that’s another story for another time.

Suffice it to say, in the FSU, the anti-Russian separatists/nationalists/Westernists have always enjoyed the secret support of even “pro-Russian” politicians and “pro-Russian” governments. This is because their job was to scare and intimidate the majority of voters, and shore up the power of the “moderate” government, which would prop up the radicals as scarecrows come election time. Now, I’m not a moral purist when it comes to politics by any means, and I can even appreciate a dastardly political stratagem pulled off by my enemies so long as it demonstrates acumen in the same way that a military man can appreciate and study a foreign army’s tactics while on campaign. But Yanukovitch was no Sun Tzu, and he ended up outfoxing himself. To be fair, perhaps he was too busy looting the country and settling old scores with his mafia rivals to notice the new pack of hyenas circling in on him. Regardless, after he was gone, the Galician faction got to finish their takeover of the entire security apparatus of Ukraine, helped along by the rebellion in Donbass and the annexation of Crimea, which gave them carte blanche to purge the ranks of unsympathetic officers, spooks and bureaucrats.

The bloggers who have been bellowing about UkroFascists!!! and the “nazification” of Ukraine on the internet for the last 10 years are probably talking about these people and their takeover of the security structures. But because of their use of the same hysterical buzzwords used by the beloved and trustworthy Western media and their thinly veiled USSR nostalgia, they have turned many sympathetic Westerners with conservative, nationalistic leanings away from them and their writings. The tone-deafness and poor persuasion skills of pro-Russian internet boomers aside, they are quite correct in stating that the Galicians or the Banderanazis(!!!) if you prefer, run Kiev now. However, this is only half the picture. The other half is the Eastern Mafia, which is very much still in the picture and hasn’t been sitting idly by. Kholomoisky of Dniepopetrovsk has successfully raised his own private army (the infamous Azov battalion) and he has defeated the Donbass mafia with targeted assassinations and because of his strategic alliance with the Galician faction, which runs the government. This is the power coalition running Ukraine now. The Galician faction runs the security apparatus/military with their gang and Kholomoisky controls the economy and media of the country with his gang. Needless to say, both groups have the support of Western spook agencies. And both groups believe that Ukraine is their turf and are willing to kill a lot of people to keep it that way.

But the largest feather in Kholomoisky’s cap is no doubt President Zelensky himself. Kholomoisky’s channel created and ran the “Servant of the People” show that featured Zelensky as an honest and intrepid President of Ukraine dedicated to fighting corruption and defending the Ukrainian people. When the elections came around, Kholomoisky’s people and his media resources went all out in campaigning for their man. My personal favorite play was when they bribed Facebook fortune-tellers to spin prophecies about the coming of the president-that-was-promised and thereby secured the superstitious peasant granny vote. If any Western politicians are reading this, put down Sun Tzu and try some of this Kholomoisky fellow’s stratagems during the next election cycle instead.

Now, Russia has declared that they are planning to do a thorough “denazification” campaign, which almost certainly means a thorough purge of the Galician faction from the positions that they have taken since Yushenko let them into the government. As for what will happen to the oligarchs who bankrolled this whole operation, well, that’s still somewhat up in the air. It’s worth point out that Russia used to have dealings with them right up until the events of Euromaidan. The arrangement was simple: Russia paid them to behave and not ally against Russia with the West. As we can see looking back, this was clearly a catastrophic strategy, and what’s worse, I can only shake my head at how uncreative and uninspired it was—a cardinal sin in my book. The worst possible outcome for Ukraine at this point is if Russia comes to a compromise with some element of the existing power structure in Ukraine once they wrap up the military operation. We now know that no negotiations with the Galician faction are possible, so we can cross them off the list. That leaves the Eastern Mafia. Rumors of Kholomoisky’s imminent surrender aside, I can’t help but hope that his chutzpah has finally crossed the line and that he will be forced to spend the rest of his days exiled in Israel along with his puppet Zelensky. As for the rest of the oligarchs, well, both Petro Poroshenko and Yulia Timoshenko held photo-ops in Kiev with Kalashnikovs in their hands, so we can cross them off the list as well. Further than that and we enter the realm of pure speculation.

Clearly, the best outcome would be for a military man from Russia with no history of doing politics or business in Ukraine to come in and take the reins as a vizier or military governor of sorts for a time. This solution may offend committed ideologists and apologists for Liberal Democracy (read: Oligarchy), but the hard truth of the situation that Ukraine finds itself in is one in which literally no one who was anywhere near the reins of power in that country for the last three decades has his hands clean. These people all looted, collaborated and murdered with near impunity for 30 years. With Russia now performing a political prison break from Liberal Oligarchic Occupation Government right before our very eyes, we can only hope that Ukraine will be able to follow suit and break free from the shackles as well.

As most serious analysts have admitted already, it has become abundantly apparent that the Ukrainian army was no match for Russia. The front has steadily advanced from the south, the north and the east, with a “cauldron” steadily forming around the most battle-ready Ukrainian units deployed in the east along the frontline of the DNR. Several cities have been surrounded, several Ukrainian politicians have been assassinated for holding talks with the Russians, and perhaps several million Ukrainians have been dislocated because of the war. It hasn’t been all smooth sailing by any means. The Russian Army was wildly optimistic about the Ukrainians seeing reason and quickly surrendering. This led to several flying columns sent ahead into Ukrainian-held territory without any air or artillery support getting themselves into trouble and eventually, around the 5th of 6th day of the war, the big guns having to be brought out.

There’s so much to talk about and analyze around this situation, from the hysterical and nonsensical propaganda promoted by the Ukrainian government, the “Blue Checkha” on Twitter and the death threats against Vladimir issued by prominent members of Con Inc, to the confused and contradictory statements coming from NATO countries.

Once again, while I do not disagree with the seasoned Russia-watcher’s critiques of NATO’s aggressive moves against Russia and the calls for negotiation and de-escalation, I can only shake my head and laugh at this point at the futility of the exercise. Politicians, analysts, generals and even a few honest journalists here and there have been calling for restraint for years in the West. Despite this, the agenda has inexorably marched forward, undeterred. Will a 2015 lecture by John Mearsheimer on YouTube really change the views of the Neocon Occupation Government? To ask the question is to answer it. We are looking at a real, genuine showdown between NATO and Russia and few are as blasé about the prospects of yet another all-out war in Europe as they were 2 weeks ago. We should adjust our predictions and analyses going forward according.

I do want to return to the topic of this series of essays and leave the other topics of international geopolitical strategy, diplomacy and military to the professionals who have written and based their careers around them. What should be most relevant for dissidents in the West are the sweeping changes occurring within Russia as a result of the war, the sanctions and the political upheaval that is occurring.

In my previous article, the discussion started with the closure of prominent flagship Liberal-Oligarchic news outlets and media projects. Since then, several more have been shot down and banned in Russia. These smaller ones differ only in the scope of their operation and not in their content or the people who ran them. The media, in Russia, like in much of the White world, is predominantly run and funded by Jews, but there is a small caveat to be considered because of the undeniable power of the Armenians in the media as well. RT and Sputnik are both controlled by the Armenian diaspora. Armenia itself is a complex topic, and is worth briefly touching on here as well. Despite being totally dependent on Russia for its security from hostile neighbors, the Armenians and the Armenian diaspora in particular has made the dangerous game of biting the hand that feeds it a sort of national pastime. In Yerevan, the liberal, pro-West camp runs the city and is lavishly funded by the similarly pro-West diaspora and has been welcoming Russian liberals (who are now fleeing Moscow and St. Petersburg in droves) with open arms. This is also true of Tbilisi, Georgia, which is another preferred destination of Moscow’s second sons and daughters, the spoiled brats of the nomenklatura, who rent out their apartments in the center of the Russian capital to AirBnB tourists while they form their hipster commune-in-exile and sip Georgian wine in the old town.

Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT and Sputnik, has often made clear her disdain for Russian patriots and nascent feelings of Russian nationalism, going so far as to say that should nationalists ever come to power, she and her friends would be hung in the streets. As recently as the fall of 2021, she was calling anti-vaxxers in Russia enemies of the state and frothing at the mouth for them to be arrested or… well, perhaps hung in the streets as well. Despite this dubious track record, she has managed to stay on the Kremlin’s good side by toeing the right line on foreign policy and taking shots at the West’s blatant hypocrisy vis-a-vis Russia whenever she appeared on the late night political talk shows hosted by the state channels. However, because of her own ideological convictions and perhaps because of her Armenian cosmopolitanism, she has not platformed genuine dissident voices on either RT or Sputnik, preferring to interview washed-up old lefties and Bernie Sanders-types instead. The furthest to the right that Margarita has proven herself willing to go is to platform Ron Paul. This hasn’t stopped the West from stopping and detaining Sputnik Lithuania’s editor-in-chief Marat Kasem (Armenian) and Turkey from detaining Sputnik Turkey’s Mahir Boztepe (probably Armenian) as well. Meanwhile, Telegram, the favored method of communication and proselytization of genuine dissidents and CIA spooks the world over, has shut down RT’s channel as part of a concerted effort by the West to shut the network down for good.

This brings us neatly into the main topic of our essay for today: the social media situation in Russia.

Here, perhaps, a few words about Pavel Durov, the creator of Telegram, are in order. Durov is an outspoken Libertarian and has already attempted to dip his toes into Russian politics with disastrous results. It’s worth mentioning that before starting Telegram, Durov created VK, a superior Facebook clone that rapidly gained popularity in St. Petersburg and the rest of Russia to a lesser extent. He is the equivalent of a fledgling Russian Mark Zuckerberg and he openly supported dissident politicians like Alexei Navalny and made a big show of expressing his opposition to Russia’s action in Ukraine back in 2014. Durov first ran into problems when he clashed with the Mail.ru business group. The story, as told by Durov’s camp, is that the Putin-aligned oligarchs of Mail.ru tried to muscle him out of his own IT company. Whatever really happened, Durov eventually ended up packing his bags and fleeing to London.

His most public political adventure was to support a then no-name Libertarian named Mikhail Svetov with a massive, Telegram-wide promotion campaign. Svetov, boosted by the promotion, immediately took to the streets and called for mass protests and a violent overthrow of President Putin. (As an aside, there have been those who have alleged that Svetov’s real name is Lichtmann and that he is at least partially Jewish, but there doesn’t seem to be any conclusive proof on this as of yet.) More damningly, Svetov had quite a few skeletons in his internet closet that quickly surfaced. An old blog that he ran featured child pornography and some of Svetov’s poetic musings on torture/gore porn. This was, apparently, well-known on the internet for several years and Svetov was eventually confronted on this on several podcasts and radio shows that he took part in. One young man even pulled a knife on him on camera, but it was unclear what his motivation was at the time. Svetov was eventually raided and arrested (but quickly released), and because of this and he fled the country soon after. People speculated that it was because of his mother’s (a member of the Moscow nomenklatura) connections that he got sprung despite the clear fact that he had collected and posted child pornography on the internet. Svetov used the same strategy as Alexei Navalny, his political ally, and went stumping to all of the same people that Navalny had once worked with, i.e., the dissident nationalist scene in Russia. Both he and Navalny ran into problems with Maxim Martsinkevich or “Tesak” a Russian Neo-Nazi who became famous all over the world for his home videos where he kidnapped pedophiles, homosexuals, and the odd African student here and there and bullied them on camera, before sharing his exploits on the internet. Amusingly, the police never bothered to stop Tesak—they basically did nothing but cordially request him to stop doing what he was doing for several years, to which he, in turn, politely refused. Svetov, along with Navalny, were quite vocal in calling for the arrest of Tesak, whom they viewed as a rival and potential political usurper, and many suspect that this may have been the factor that tipped the scales of justice against Tesak, who would later go on to suspiciously die in jail, right before his release.

There is quite a bit of lore here and I apologize for dumping so much on the reader all at once.

The story of Tesak, Svetov, Navalny and Durov and their involvement in opposition circles is quite an interesting one, but I only bring it up to highlight what an absolute Wild West the state of dissident politics was in Russia for many years and to explain some of the weird opposition coalitions that have formed and disbanded and reformed over the years to give context to what the Kremlin fears might happen again and why they may take drastic measures in the near future. Navalny, in particular, became the CIA’s top guy and the leader of an almost united anti-Putin protest movement until he was arrested a few years ago. Both green-haired Liberals and xenophobic Nationalists had no qualms supporting him, despite the fact that he used to run with Neo-Nazis (then betrayed them), and despite his obvious Western backing and support. This would be unheard of in the West. Proud Boys and Antifa working together as a “taran” (ram) while receiving Chinese media support to bring down Trump? Absolutely inconceivable. But in Russia? Well, no one really so much as batted an eye at the time.

With the closure of Facebook in Russia and the Kremlin’s well-founded fear that social media might be used to organize mass protests, there is reason to believe that other sites will be closed down as well. It is worth pointing out that the administrative team of Durov’s VK Facebook clone is pro-Ukrainian and pro-LGBTQ+ and has actively censored even relatively benign pro-Russian content on their platform, while Durov’s Telegram was critical to organizing the recent protests in Belarus (Nexta and its operations) and the near overthrow of Lukashenko, and, of course, Facebook is really nothing more than arm of the CIA—this is hardly disputed by serious people anymore. Also, Yandex, a superior Google clone which is now based in the Netherlands, has had prominent members of its organization openly attack Putin in the past and has even gone so far as to astroturf woke media content in Russia. The most egregious example is no doubt the “New Mothers’ podcast which promotes raising sons as daughters and the same sort of SJW insanity that is so common now in the West. Twitter employs teams of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who actively seek out and destroy pro-Russian accounts. They outmatch the Western censors in their zeal, and this is one of the primary reasons why dissident right-wing Twitter sages never really grasped their cultural impact to the same extent in Russia as they did in the English-speaking world.

For years following the events of Euromaidan in Kiev, patriotic voices called on the Kremlin to do something about this looming threat, but to no avail. Roskomnadzor, the media watchdog, did almost nothing but issue a few minor, symbolic fines here and there. No doubt related to this bizarre hypocritical hands-off policy, it is perhaps worth mentioning that the the previous director, Alexander Zharov and the current one, Andrei Lipov, are almost certainly both ethnically Jewish.

But what was impossible a few weeks ago is now possible because of the decision of President Putin to confront NATO in Ukraine.

The usual political formula in Russia goes something like this: Putin comes up with a plan, parts of the plan are leaked to state-aligned media where they are discussed among the political punditry, the plan is discussed and explained to the public through debate on these shows, so that the publicv become acclimated to the idea. If the reception is warm, the plan is then implemented and Putin gets his way, the pundits get to say “I called it,” and the public nods its head sagely, assured that the correct measures have been taken and that this is the only reasonable path forward. Right now, the pundits are debating the topic of “Russian Internet Sovereignty” and its implementation. I’ll leave you to connect the dots on what that means on your own.

If this description of the Russian political process comes across as overly cynical or even anti-Putin, I assure you that this is not my intention. This is simply how all mass democracies operate to some extent, and we would be naïve to think that that the West operates much differently. The key difference between the West and Russia is that the Russian authorities occasionally actually take into account public opinion and adjust their policies accordingly. But the process by which consent is manufactured among the masses, which is the bedrock of all democratic modes of government, is eternal. In the West, a political, cultural and economic elite (overwhelmingly Jewish) promotes their agenda to the masses and lobbies the politicians, who acquiesce to their demands. In the East, the state takes a more active role and even suppresses the self-styled cultural elite, who gnash their teeth and wail that it isn’t Liberal or Democratic for the state to have a mind of its own. Instead, the state uses the same methods as they would use to promote an illiberal set of ideas and political goals.

All that really matters in the end is who manufactures the consent and, of course, to what end. If Russia is serious about facing down NATO, the fifth column in the country has to be neutralized. That is why the biggest liberal media outlets have all been shut down over the last two weeks. And so, it becomes clear now why the state has turned its attention to social media. The social media platform purge will do doubt continue in the coming days and weeks, with renewed calls to create new, Russian-based platforms to take their place.

To understand what Putin and Russia will do next, one has to simply put oneself in the shoes of someone fighting for survival. What measures would a country about to go to war with NATO take? Answer this question, and you don’t need to read “Kremlin tea-leaves,” as many Russia-watchers do, to understand what’s coming next.