The Dark Side of Ukraine: Its History of Nazi Collaboration and Animus Towards Israel

 

As the war that Russia launched on Ukraine in early 2022 continues unabated, it has become abundantly clear that the international community of nations, for the most part, are throwing their support behind Ukraine as they battle for their survival against the Russian onslaught.

Earlier this year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky even addressed a joint session of Congress and is the recipient of tens of billions of dollars in US military aid.

Since the war began between Putin’s troops and the civilian army of Ukraine, the one nation that has provided extensive humanitarian aid to Ukraine but not military aid, despite the repeated requests and even demands from President Zelensky has been Israel. The question that begs to be answered is why has Israel taken this position of reluctance to in helping to arm Ukraine with technologically advanced military hardware.

Ukraine has had an historically adverse relationship with Jews and were unapologetically supportive of the Nazi regime during World War II. Moreover, Ukraine has consistently voted against Israel in the United Nations and has taken positions that foster the support of Israel’s hardened foes.

In January 2020, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel told Jerusalem to butt out of the debate about the country he represents honoring Nazi collaborators.

The intervention by Hennadii Nadolenko, head of Ukraine’s diplomatic mission in Tel Aviv, reflected an escalation in the disagreement between Israel and Ukraine over the issue, at the time, the JTA reported. The subject is related to “internal issues of Ukrainian politics” and Israel’s protests about it are “counterproductive,” Nadolenko told Israeli diplomats in 2020, according to the news site, Jewish.ru.

The JTA also reported that in early 2020, Israel’s ambassador to Ukraine, Joel Lion, and his Polish counterpart Bartosz Cichocki wrote officials an open letter condemning the government-sponsored honoring of Stepan Bandera and Andryi Melnyk, two collaborators with the Third Reich.

The two had written on the subject before. The JTA reported that in 2018, Lion wrote that he was shocked at an earlier act of veneration for Bandera, saying: “I cannot understand how the glorification of those directly involved in horrible anti-Semitic crimes helps fight anti-Semitism and xenophobia.”

Ukrainian diplomats had previously refrained from commenting publicly about Lion’s protests.

The veneration of Nazi collaborators, including killers of Jews, is a growing phenomenon in Eastern Europe, where many consider such individuals as heroes because they fought against Russian domination, according to the JTA report.

But few of Lion’s counterparts in those countries have spoken out as forcefully and publicly on this issue.

On January 15, 2023, the Jewish Voice reported that Ukraine’s outspoken ambassador to Germany, a talk show staple who was central to the public debates that led Berlin to step up weapons deliveries to Kyiv, was facing harsh criticism for defending World War II fascist Stepan Bandera who was a Ukrainian collaborator with the Nazis in a July 2022 interview, according to a Reuters report.

Andriy Melnyk is easily the best known ambassador in Berlin, known for robust social media exchanges in which he condemned as appeasers politicians and intellectuals who opposed arming Ukraine for its fight against Russian invaders, the Reuters report stated in July.

In an interview with German journalist Tilo Jung on the summer of 2022 Melynk defended the World War II-era figure, saying that “Bandera was not a mass murderer of Jews and Poles,” arguing that there was no evidence for such accusations, according to a report on the dw.com web site.

Stepan Bandera is an extremely controversial figure in Ukraine, with some hailing him as a hero in his fight for Ukrainian statehood against the former Soviet Union, but with most acknowledging that he did collaborate with Nazi Germany and participated in massacres of Jews and Polish citizens, dw.com reported.

“The statement made by the Ukrainian ambassador is a distortion of the historical facts, belittles the Holocaust and is an insult to those who were murdered by Bandera and his people,” the Israeli embassy said in the summer of 2022.

Polish deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz wrote on a local online platform of Melnyk’s statements on Bandera that “such an opinion and such words are absolutely unacceptable.”

Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry quickly moved to distance itself from Melnyk’s comments, according to the dw.com report.

“The opinion that the Ambassador of Ukraine to Germany Andriy Melnyk expressed in an interview with a German journalist is of his own and does not reflect the position of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement late on Thursday night.

It also expressed its gratitude to Poland “for its unprecedented support in the fight against Russian aggression,” and emphasized the need for “unity in the face of shared challenges.”

Nazi sympathy amongst the populace of modern day Ukraine still exists, and news pertaining to it rarely trickles out.

Lviv already has a large statue of Bandera, who collaborated with Nazi forces that occupied what is now Ukraine and is believed to have commanded troops that killed thousands of Jews, as was reported by the JTA. Kiev and several other cities have streets named for him.

Bandera was assassinated by a KGB agent in Munich in 1959. The JTA noted that Nazi collaborators in Ukraine were once regarded by authorities as illegitimate to serve as national role models because of their war crimes against Jews and Poles, but Bandera and other former collaborators are now widely regarded as patriot heroes.

In March of 2022, CNN reported that the far-right Azov movement has been part of the military and political landscape in Ukraine for nearly a decade.

CNN offered a background of the movement. They wrote: “An effective fighting force that’s very much involved in the current conflict, the battalion has a history of neo-Nazi leanings, which have not been entirely extinguished by its integration into the Ukrainian military.”

The report added that, “In its heyday as an autonomous militia, the Azov Battalion was associated with White supremacists and neo-Nazi ideology and insignia. It was especially active in and around Mariupol in 2014 and 2015. CNN teams in the area at the time reported Azov’s embrace of neo-Nazi emblems and paraphernalia. “

The existence of an identifiably Azov element within the Ukrainian armed forces – and an effective element at that – poses uncomfortable questions for the Ukrainian government and its Western allies, which continue to send arms to the country, CNN added.

On January 5, 2023, the WND.com web site reported that a column at the Geller Report by jihad expert Robert Spencer explains that in 2019, a letter from 40 Democrats described Ukraine’s “Nazi Azov Battalion” as a terror group.

The report indicated that some of those same Democrats are sending it billions of dollars.

Explained Spencer, “One thing is certain: the full extent of the ties between Ukraine and the posturing, self-righteous, desperately corrupt, hypocritical and self-serving U.S. Democrat establishment is not publicly known, and may never be known. But what we do know should have brought that entire establishment crashing down years ago.”

WND.com also reported that Spencer explained that Kanekoa News, an independent journalism site, revealed that in 2019, “the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee’s counterterrorism subpanel, Rep. Max Rose, N.Y., led a letter signed by 40 Democrats asking the State Department why they had not placed Ukraine’s Azov Battalion on the U.S. list of ‘foreign terrorist organizations.’”

That report, in fact, said the letter “compared the Azov Battalion to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS, and said how the group had radicalized Brenton Tarrent, the New Zealand mosque shooter who killed 51 people,” WND reported.

The report said the letter demanded: “For Example, the Azov Battalion is a well-known ultranationalist militia organization in Ukraine that openly welcomes neo-Nazis into its ranks. The group is so well-known, in fact, that the 115th Congress of the United States stated in its 2018 omnibus spending bill that ‘none of the funds made available by this act may be used to provide arms, training or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.’ The United Nations has chronicled human rights abuses and incidents of torture in this group’s relatively short history. Despite these facts, Azov has been recruiting, radicalizing, and training American citizens for years according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

In January of this year, the Jewish Voice reported that according to an August 12, 2021 article in the Edmonton Journal in Alberta, Canada, a Canadian Jewish organization once again called for the removal of two Edmonton monuments commemorating Ukrainians who fought with Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

The report indicated that the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies (FSWC) called for the removal of a bust of Roman Shukhevych, which has stood outside the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex in north Edmonton since the early 1970s.

The Edmonton Journal also reported that the Shukhevych statue, which has previously been vandalized, has been a lightning rod for controversy since it was erected in 1973.

Shukhevych, who commanded various military units including the German-backed Nachtigall Battalion and the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (which at various times fought both the Nazis and the Soviets), is a hero to many Ukrainians. In 2007, the Ukrainian government posthumously awarded Shukhevych the title “Hero of Ukraine” on the anniversary of his 1950 death fighting Soviet forces, as was reported by the Edmonton Journal.  In March of 2021, the Ukrainian city of Ternopil renamed its largest stadium in Shukhevych’s honor.

The statue, along with a memorial in St. Michael’s Cemetery to Ukrainian soldiers who fought in Nazi units, were  vandalized in 2021 with red paint, according to the Edmonton Journal.  The words “Actual Nazi” were smeared on the statue of Shukhevych, while the St. Michael’s memorial was covered in the words “Nazi Monument 14th Waffen SS.”

Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, the policy director at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies told the Edmonton Journal is August 2021,  “Over the years he was in charge of a number of different military units, some of which were collaborating with the Nazi regime. They were engaging in the genocide of the Jewish population as part of the program of the Holocaust. They also were committing massacres on Polish civilians.”

“The history on this is unequivocal,” she added. “There’s absolutely no doubt about the scope of this individual’s involvement in war crimes. It’s just beyond unacceptable that such a person should be celebrated in any way — symbolic or otherwise — in our country.”