Part I. The humanitarian case demands urgent peace.
Part II. The nuclear war danger demands urgent peace.
Part III. The mindless growth and aggression of NATO — which provoked this war and threatens to widen it further — needs shut down in the service of urgent peace.
Part IV. The malignant partnership between CIA covert ops and Ukrainian Neo Nazis needs shut down to bring peace to Ukraine — and a healthier democracy to the United States.
What would a U.S. Congressional or other high-level investigation uncover, if it were to truly dig into the events leading up to the Russian invasion of 2022?
Neo Nazi violence played a decisive role in the 2014 coup d’etat that toppled the elected Ukrainian government. That coup was the Ur crime, the singular event that provoked the entire 12-year catastrophe we now face. It is widely recognized as having been steered and embraced (if not masterminded) by the Barack Obama White House and CIA.
Neo-Nazis took key positions in the new ruling junta, even as the U.S. CIA was establishing formal, close cooperation.
And perhaps most tellingly, when the east of Ukraine erupted in protest over the violent toppling of the Ukrainian government, the White House and CIA supported the violent suppression of resistance to the coup — while the new government openly turned to Neo-Nazis to provide the muscle, and armed them. Thus the Ukrainian Civil War was born.
Ordinary Ukrainian soldiers weren’t prepared to shoot their countrymen, so the slide into Ukrainian civil war had to rely upon “patriots” of the Bandera-Lebed school. As reviewed last time, their ideological forefathers had partnered with the CIA starting in the 1950s; that same CIA-Neo Nazi partnership seems clearly to have continued into the modern era.
The Maidan fairy tale
Many remember the three months of protests on Kyiv’s Independence Square, or Maidan Nezalezhnosti, in 2014 as a story of citizen empowerment. Young people yearning “to join Europe” — Kyiv was pondering a major trade deal with the EU at the time — took to the square. They waved European and Ukrainian flags, and ate the cookies and sandwiches so publicly brought to them by the U.S. State Department, until one day the Ukrainian government just wilted away in shame.
In reality, modern day Ukrainian Neo Nazis hijacked those events. There may have been EU flags waved, but there were also many black and red flags of the World War II-era fascist OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). The Neo-Nazis were instrumental in making the Maidan days incredibly violent, with 125 deaths and many injuries. And in the end, they simply seized parliament and the president’s offices by force.
At the same time, top U.S. government officials not only provided diplomatic and media cover throughout all of this violence, pretending it was about “democracy” — they also made clear in leaked phone calls that they saw themselves as calling the shots, and choosing the country’s post-coup leadership.
So, what was this?
From the perspective of 2026, it looks like a typical CIA-engineered regime change operation.
Like all of the others, it was publicly dressed up with words like “democracy” and “freedom,” even as it made use of (and armed) the available local radicals and thugs.
If that sounds familiar, we just saw this playbook in action again in Iran, where President Trump has freely admitted we were feeding weapons and money to “protesters”, and top CIA and Mossad sources openly winked in agreement. That was a violent, bloody regime-change operation that flopped, and it’s barely even commented on in this country today. The fact that we launched a covert war in Iran this winter that killed thousands was met with the same national media shrug of indifference as was offered for the casually open assassination of Iran’s leader this spring, along with his daughter, a daughter-in-law, and his toddler granddaughter.
In Ukraine a dozen years ago, America’s preferred version of “democracy” also required arming the most repulsive and violent.
Far-right groups, including many that were frankly Neo-Nazi in ideology, joined into a coalition called Pravy Sektor (Right Sector). The group was led by lifelong ultranationalist Dmitry Yarosh, who at 42 had never had a real job other than “professional revolutionary” when he granted a rare interview to TIME Magazine. In the midst of the 2014 Maidan violence, Yarosh said his black-ski-masked men had amassed more than enough weapons to topple the government. Two weeks later, Pravy Sektor and the allied Svoboda political party kicked in the doors of parliament and the president’s office with weapons in hand, and the government fled.
TIME, in this un-bylined bit of U.S. propaganda messaging, put some official distance between the U.S. government and Yarosh. TIME noted that the U.S. State Department had condemned Pravy Sektor for “inflaming conditions on the streets;” claimed the group has “started going rogue;” and said that Yarosh was being kept out of Ukrainian political negotiations because “his ideology, it seems, is just too toxic to let him in the room.”
But, TIME continued sympathetically, you can’t have a successful “uprising” (meaning: violent seizure of power) without muscle:
“[Right Sector] serves some of the uprising’s most essential functions. Its fighters control the barricades … they have been on the front lines beating [riot police] back with clubs, rocks, Molotov cocktails … Around the country, its fighters have helped seize government headquarters in more than a dozen cities …”
Looking back on those times, the Neo Nazis have publicly relished their role in being the men who took over modern Ukraine, while America applauded.
“LGBT groups and foreign embassies are saying, ‘There were not a lot of Nazis on Maidan, maybe about 10 percent who were real ideological ones’. The thing is, that’s something only a moron who was never at war could say,” says Yevhen Karas, leader of the C14 Neo Nazi group, reminiscing about the violence of those days. “The number itself is not the point … If not for nationalists, that whole thing would have turned into a gay parade.”
Speaking at a Feb. 5, 2022 conference in Kyiv — about two weeks before the Russian invasion, by the way — the elated Karas also raved about how, in recent years, the West had been feeding Ukrainian nationalists
“so much weaponry … not because they want the best for us, but because we perform the tasks set by the West, because we’re the only ones willing to do so, because we have fun, we have fun killing and we have fun fighting.”
Whitewashing the CIA / Neo-Nazi Collaboration
Nazi-adjacent symbols and imagery were seen everywhere during those days of violence. But just as Ukraine’s 20th century Nazis used their CIA friends to help whitewash past crimes (remember Lebed, set up with a CIA publishing empire he could use to rewrite history), Ukraine’s 21st century Nazis also manipulated the Western media. As Reuters recounted back in March 2014, Pravy Sektor — fresh from killing police and civilians on the Maidan — called on its supporters to start re-writing Wikipedia, and for a day Wikipedia was calling these ski-masked Molotov cocktail-throwers a “patriotic youth group.”
Oleh Tyahnybok, the head of the fascist Svoboda party — which considers itself a direct descendant of Bandera’s OUN — was one of the three politicians who organized and headlined the Maidan protests. He would later dub the violent overthrow of the elected government “Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity”, a term that has stuck.
I repeat: Neo-Nazi stirred-up violence that killed 125 people and toppled a government is something we now call the “Revolution of Dignity”, because that’s what the Neo-Nazis called it. And now you’re supposed to say: “Slava Ukraina!” But you can skip the straight-arm, Hitler / Elon Musk salute, that’s no longer part of it.
Tyahnybok had frequently described Jews with racial slurs. As a member of parliament, he had written open letters in 2005 to Ukraine’s then-president decrying “the criminal activity of organized Jewry”. Tyahnybok’s adviser Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn called the Holocaust “a bright episode in European civilization,” once founded a Joseph Goebbels Political Research Center, and even once approvingly reprinted what may well be the most fascist thing ever written — a definition of marriage written by a “Ukrainian Nazi poet”:
“Marriage is the duty of the woman to her own gender. The duty of the state, in turn, is to assist her in this,” says this Svoboda-approved thinker. “The 300 ovulations of every Ukrainian woman, as well as the 1,500 ejaculations of every Ukrainian man, are the same national treasures as, say, energy resources, or deposits of iron, coal or oil.”
None of which disqualified Tyahnybok from frequent and jovial public interactions with visiting American dignitaries like the late Senator John McCain.
And when Svoboda, Right Sector, C14 and the rest marched off to seize the parliament and president’s office in February 2014, Joe Biden applauded, and in his memoirs described approvingly how the elected president of Ukraine fled “owing to the courage and determination of the demonstrators.” (Actually, he fled owing to the murderous violence of the American-supported Neo Nazis.)
Western media did start to take note, with a collective frown, when the new post-coup government started filling up with prominent fascists. Less remarked upon was the expanded role of CIA in running Ukraine. Along with MI6, it had been immediately invited (within days of the coup) to set up shop in Ukraine. We know this largely from a remarkable pair of New York Times exposes published over the past two years.
Among other things, as recounted in those reports, CIA immediately started building and fully funding what would become 14 massive listening posts, some with hundreds of personnel, dedicated to spying on Russia; and also training “an elite commando force” that would go on to perform lethal black ops on Russian territory.
The White House & CIA Embrace a Neo Nazi-led Ukrainian Civil War
In response to the coup events, Russia seized Crimea (which it had long wanted anyway), and the ethnically Russian east of Ukraine erupted. Across the east, there were scattered seizures of government buildings, to protest the toppling of the elected president.
The country was sliding toward open civil war.
Did the Obama Administration work to prevent that?
No. Instead, it pushed the post-coup junta to crush all resistance.
“These provocations in eastern Ukraine are creating a situation in which the government has to respond,” said the White House at the time.
CIA Director John Brennan flew to Kyiv in April (roughly around the same time that Vice President Biden’s son Hunter was gifted his $1 million-a-year position on a Ukrainian oil company’s board of directors, by the way). Within days of Brennan’s visit, the political hack interim president of the post-coup government, Oleksandr Turchynov, launched a military assault upon the protesters in the east. It was called an “Anti-Terrorist Operation.”
But when it was time for Ukrainian soldiers to shoot at their own people, Turchynov said, they refused. So, Turchynov and his government called for “patriots” to volunteer.
When a journalist asked him if “patriots” meant “criminals, Neo-Nazis, fascists?” Turchynov famously replied:
“Honestly, some of them had a dark side.”
A BBC interview a few years later reported how Turchynov recounted
“a meeting with volunteer battalions at the front where one of the men present — covered in tattoos — asked [me]:
‘Chief, will there be an amnesty [for crimes previously committed] or not? The guys are asking.’
I asked, ‘What kind of guys?’
‘Well, you know ... murder, robbery,’ he replied.”
Turchynov of course said that those were exceptions. Most of the volunteers were patriot-heroes. Even so, he says, Ukraine’s regular military initially refused his orders to arm such people.
“I remember when I ordered the opening of arms depots to distribute weapons to the [volunteer] battalions, the officers refused to do it,” he told the BBC. “They would ask me, ‘Oleksandr Valentynovych, who will be held accountable for this?’ I would say, ‘I will!’ And I personally signed the orders authorizing the issue of weapons. … Indeed, we didn’t vet anyone back then. Anyone — regardless of whether they had a criminal record — who said they were ready to defend the country would sign up, receive a weapon, and head to the east.”
One of those was Andrei Biletsky, a man who styled himself as the Bely Vozhd, i.e. “the White Leader”, and who infamously once wrote, “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led untermenschen.”
Biletsky was released from prison by the coup government to become the founding commander of what would become the Azov Battalion. Today, he is a brigadier general in the Ukrainian armed forces. President Volodomyr Zelensky just gave him a Golden Star to thank him for his service.
A decade ago, when USA Today went to check out Biletsky’s Azov Battalion, journalists saw Nazi tattoos and paraphernalia everywhere. A drill sergeant interviewed said half of the group were frank Nazis; the Azov official spokesman disagreed and said at most 20% would identify themselves as Nazis.
What happens when one arms and empowers self-identified Nazis, including people with criminal records for, “you know … murder, robbery”?
One answer came May 2, 2014, when Neo-Nazis and pro-Russian (or at least, anti-coup) demonstrators faced off in Odesa. The violence culminated in the pro-Russian demonstrators pushed into a public building that the Neo-Nazis then set on fire. Some 42 people trapped inside died, including eight who jumped to their death while crowds outside cheered “Glory to Ukraine!” This is one of those historic events known to nearly every Russian citizen, but to virtually no Americans.
Our allied nihilists and Naziis
But it’s all ancient history right?
Sure, maybe.
Or maybe it all just awaits a more thorough investigation.
What is the CIA’s role today in Ukraine?
The Kremlin reported with fury this winter that drones launched from Ukraine tried to target President Putin’s family in their home in the Lake Valdai region. Trump initially expressed anger and disapproval on Putin’s behalf, and indeed, the recklessness of this is astounding.
But then the CIA took Trump aside, and the U.S. president later said he no longer believed any such assassination attempt had happened. Yet it clearly did — Ukrainian President Zelensky would later publicly taunt Putin about that near-miss. So, is the CIA lying to the President?
For that matter, with all of the pull we ought to have with the Ukrainians, why do we allow the semi-official publications of Ukrainian enemies lists, which lump violent criminals, Russian military officials, and skeptical American journalists and scholars together?
The mysterious Myrotvorets Center then gleefully stamps LIQUIDATED in red Cyrillic across the face of every killed enemy — on a website that claims to be housed out of “Langley, Virginia,” i.e., CIA headquarters. The website has been cautiously criticized by the U.S. State Department for years, yet nothing changes.
Why is Zelensky falling all over himself to honor Nazi collaborators today, even to the point of enraging key Western allies? In May, his government exhumed the body of Andriy Melnyk — a Bandera rival with his own wing of the OUN that was even more slavishly loyal to Hitler — from its grave in Luxembourg, and brought it to Ukraine for reburial with honors. Zelensky also named some Ukrainian military units as “Heroes of the UPA,” a reference to the Bandera-era forces guilty, among other things, of the massacre of 100,000 innocent Poles from 1943-45. An enraged Poland responded by revoking a medal it had previously given Zelensky.
Zelensky, whose native language is Russian, was elected president in 2019 on a platform of negotiating peace with Russia. But when he tried to impose his will on the CIA-backed fighting forces at the eastern front, they mocked him — there’s famous video of it — and hardliners like Yarosh talked openly about killing him. The little Jewish comedic actor-turned-politician backed down before the Neo Nazis. Russia then invaded, Zelensky put on his green T-shirt, supported bans on the use of his native Russian language, and bans on Russian books, movies and songs, and the rest is history.
Could it be that Zelensky, like the rest of the world, is just one more hostage of the CIA-Neo-Nazi partnership running Ukraine today?
We need to wind all of this up.
To prevent more death and suffering; to avoid nuclear war and work for nuclear disarmament; to reclaim our democracy from NATO and the CIA; and to renounce (obviously!) the Nazis. It shouldn’t be that hard. All it will take is someone willing to go up against entrenched, secretive and violent Washington interests — to say to our military-security state, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said to other moneyed interests, “I welcome your hatred.” And then fire them all.
Yes, this war needs to stop, urgently. The Russian Federation forces may provide the impetus for some urgency on our part (meaning the USA) to stop funding the Ukrainian government, and get some sort of peace deal done. Forget the Donbas and Odessa being anything other than Russian. The way the order of battle is setting up, and the way the RF forces are deployed and moving abet slowly from east to west, may just topple the whole affair, and all the EU/NATO hero’s will wake to find that there is nothing they can do stop Russia dictating the peace terms and sending waves of humiliation throughout the “power centers” of Europe and within our own State Department and CIA. A lot blame to go around. Let’s hope ultimately the truth about our role in fomenting revolution in Ukraine comes to see the light of day. This was a very helpful synopsis of the last 14 years. Thanks for the Cliff notes version. Keep up the good work.
Great stuff - useful maps.
I'd add one more - you showed the 2010 election results - the last election where pro-Russian parties were able to stand.
2019 was a different kind of race between the ultra hawk - Poroshenko and the Dove, Zelesnky who ran on the promise of no further conflict with Russia (promises obviously broken).
From the wiki article on 2019 election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Ukrainian_presidential_election#/media/File:2019_Ukrainian_presidential_election,_round_2.svg
This makes clearer that it is not a simple East vs West, Ukrainian speaking vs Russian speaking split.
There is a bigger Galician/Soviet or Greek Cathoic / Orthodox split.
About a quarter of Ukraine was only attached to Soviet Ukraine in 1945. Prior to that it had never been part of the Russian or Soviet empires, invariably part of the Austro-Hungarian empires with much of it part of Poland post WW1. This is the land of Lwow, of Volhyn where mass slaughters of jews and Poles took place in 1940s, where the Ukrainian part of the population worked closely with the Germans to kill jews and Poles to promote Ukrainian nationalism.
So where the Ukrainian nazis were based.
The civil war in Ukraine was not the Russian speaking vs Ukrainian speaking split shown in the 2010 election. It was the Greek Catholic vs Orthodox civil war, and many orthodox Ukrainians will have far more in common with Russian speaking orthodox than Greek Catholics.