Sitting in his grandfather’s apartment in Belgrade, Serbia, Novak Djokovic recalls living through not one, but two wars. The bombings over his home continued for so long that the young Djokovic became used to the sound of planes overhead. Djokovic recounts some of the more harrowing moments and how he used the experience to fuel his success. Continue reading
Yanukovich did not want Ukraine to join NATO: he wanted a neutral Ukraine maintaining the traditional close relationship between the Ukraine and Russia. This infuriated Victoria Nuland, the head of the Eurasia desk at the State Department, who has made it her life’s project to pull Ukraine into NATO. This would be NATO’s ultimate prize in eastern Europe: a country of 44 million well-educated people, the size of France, strategically located on the Black Sea historically dominated by the Russian Black Sea Fleet. An ethnically divided country, with a generally pro-Russian and Russian-speaking east, and a more western-oriented Ukrainian-speaking west with an unusually vigorous and fiercely anti-Russian neofascist movement—just there waiting to be used.
Nuland, a former Cheney aide whose neocon worldview drew Hillary Clinton’s favorable attention, resulting in her promotion, is the wife of neocon pundit and Iraq War cheerleader Robert Kagan. (Kagan was a founding member of the notorious Project for a New American Century “think tank”.) The couple represents two wings of incessant neocon plotting: those who work to destroy Russia, and those who work to destroy the Middle East, consciously using lies to confuse the masses about their real goals. Continue reading
Between 1989 and 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev let the Berlin Wall be pulled down, Germany be reunited and all the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe go free.
Having collapsed the Soviet empire, Gorbachev allowed the Soviet Union to dissolve itself into 15 independent nations. Communism was allowed to expire as the ruling ideology of Russia, the land where Leninism and Bolshevism first took root in 1917.
Gorbachev called off the Cold War in Europe by removing all of the causes on Moscow’s side of the historic divide.
Putin, a former KGB colonel, came to power in 1999 after the disastrous decade long rule of Boris Yeltsin, who ran Russia into the ground.
In that year, 1999, Putin watched as America conducted a 78-day bombing campaign on Serbia, the Balkan nation that had historically been a protectorate of Mother Russia.
That year, also, three former Warsaw Pact nations, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, were brought into NATO.
Against whom were these countries to be protected by U.S. arms and the NATO alliance, the question was fairly asked.
The question seemed to be answered fully in 2004, when Slovenia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania and Bulgaria were admitted into NATO, a grouping that included three former republics of the USSR itself, as well as three more former Warsaw Pact nations.
Then, in 2008, came the Bucharest declaration that put Georgia and Ukraine, both bordering on Russia, on a path to NATO membership. Continue reading
It is remarkable that Johnson would forget that war because in 1999 he was in the old European city of Belgrade, capital of Yugoslavia (then consisting of Serbia and Montenegro), as a London Telegraph correspondent covering the last phase of the war: NATO’s unjustified and illegal bombing of Yugoslavia (mainly Serbia and its province of Kosovo) from March 24 to June 10, 1999. Continue reading
“Ukraine has emerged as a hub in the broader network of transnational white supremacy extremism, attracting foreign fighters from all over the world. Where the jihadis travel to fight in places like Syria, white supremacists now have their own theater in which to learn combat – Ukraine, where the conflict between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces has been raging since 2014, attracting fighers from around the globe who are fighting on both sides. Recent research shows that around 17,000 foreigners from 50 countries, including the United States, have gone to fight in that conflict. Continue reading
An advertisement for “Fortress Europe” in Kyiv in May 2020, featuring a number of neo-Nazi bands
While the lineup is still incomplete, bands already slated to perform in Kyiv include Italian band Bronson, affiliated with the neo-fascist CasaPound movement, German “National Socialist hardcore” (or hatecore) band Path of Resistance and anti-Semitic Slovak band Krátky Proces, whose former singer ran for far-right extremist Marian Kotleba’s party in 2016 elections in Slovakia. Of course, both Bilodub and Levkin’s bands, Sokyra Peruna and M8L8TH, will be playing too, and some of the same fans who posted photos from Asgardsrei will likely be doing so from Fortress Europe. Continue reading
In several instances analyzed by Bellingcat, organizations that were approved for and apparently received state NPE projects funding share leadership with C14 and National Corps; both of these groups attracted international attention in 2018 because of their reported roles in attacks on members of Ukraine’s Roma minority, LGBT populations, feminist activists, and journalists. Furthermore, in 2019, these same groups made headlines due to violent clashes they had with Ukrainian law enforcement in separate incidents that led to charges against these organizations’ members. For example, in March 2019, clashes between National Corps and police in Cherkasy left 22 members of law enforcement with injuries, according to a statement by Ukraine’s National Police.
Documents analyzed by Bellingcat suggest that Ukraine’s government apparently earmarked 845,000 hryvnias — over $30,000 — for projects by organizations linked to National Corps and C14. Continue reading
Radio Free Europe reports that axes and hammers were used on 7 June by neo-Nazis from the Azov National Militia to perpetrate yet another assault on Romani people in Ukraine. Their entire 7 June pogrom in Holosiyivskiy Park in Kyiv was broadcast live by them on Facebook without police ever intervening.
The organized assault was the fourth of its kind to be committed against Romani people in Ukraine during the last six weeks. The National Militia was created by veterans of the ultra-right Azov Battalion in January and on 6 June issued an ultimatum, again through Facebook, to these particular Romani people instructing them to vacate their camp within 24 hours. Continue reading
Neo-fascist Ukrainian groups like Right Sector and Svoboda played a major role in this Western-backed regime change operation. In the violence following the putsch, these forces cohered into neo-Nazi militias like the Azov Battalion and C14 (named after the white supremacist “14 words” slogan).
In 2014, the Azov Battalion was directly incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard, merging the explicitly fascist militia with the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior and military.
The United States strongly backs Ukraine and has given it significant military support. Many of the weapons provided by Washington have ended up in the hands of avowed neo-Nazis.
The Grayzone has repeatedly reported on the US government’s support for these neo-Nazis forces, including both Azov and C14. Continue reading
“Our organization is designed to take power. If circumstances warrant, that could happen by nondemocratic methods. Believe me, we are very capable of acting in extreme situations,” he adds. “At the Maidan we had only 300 activists, and look what we did. In fact, if you consider that there was never more than 1 million people participating in the Maidan altogether, out of a population of 42 million, it shows how things really work. The active minority always leads the passive majority. Scenarios change, and we are ready. Our purpose is to save Ukraine.”
The Right Sector, and other militant street groups such as C-14 and the newly created National Corps, already pose a real and present danger to vulnerable groups of the population, such as gay and transgender people, women’s activists, Roma, as well as any dissidents who might, rightly or wrongly, be viewed as “pro-Russian.” Continue reading
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