UKRAINE

THE SAKER—COVID19 has hit the Ukraine very, very hard.  The problem is that the authorities, which fully knew that they had no means to do anything meaningful began by thumping their chests and saying that there were no cases in the Ukraine only to then suddenly decree drastic quarantine measures.  And yet, the true information is seeping out: Ukrainians hospitals are full of cases, mostly un-diagnosed, and many have already died.  Officially, and as of right now, there are only 14 confirmed cases in the Ukraine, and only two fatalities.  But absolutely everybody knows that these numbers are totally fictional and that the real number of cases remains unknown due to a lack of testing kits, not a lack of cases.  MDs in Ukrainian hospitals are sounding the alarms, but nobody is listening.

We published this video interview first in 2017 (Aug 22, 2017) but the relevancy of the material, in view of the growing role of Ukraine in the sordid kerfuffle between the two wings of the US ruling class, continues. So all the points made here are as good today as they were 3 years ago. That’s what happens with solid news analysis, it doesn’t age much at all.

MAX PARRY—Svoboda and its militant offshoots like the Azov regiment fighting in Donbass are the self-proclaimed ideological progeny of the fascist collaborators led by the Ukrainian nationalist, Stepan Bandera, who sided with Nazi Germany during its invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. In the Cold War, the CIA provided covert assistance to the post-war remnants of Bandera’s faction as it waged a failed insurgency in the 1950s. In post-Soviet Ukraine, a disturbing campaign of historical revisionism has rewritten Bandera‘s fifth column as nationalist heroes who fought solely for Ukrainian independence.

RICHARD SANDERS—Such crimes are so huge that they cannot possibly be committed by just a few psychopathic individuals.  To orchestrate these horrors, widescale social complicity is required.  When bigotry and hatred become accepted and normalised within a culture, societies face the spectre of mass psychosis.  There are of course a million shades of grey within the cultural syndromes which accept racism, apartheid, slavery, imperialism and other forms of exploitation, hatred and abuse, as the norm.  Neither does such social madness happen suddenly.  It is a heavily institutionalised cultural process that creeps up slowly from behind our backs. 

THE SAKER—For the Novorussians, it’s now clear: the rump-Ukraine* does not want them, nor will Kiev ever agree to the Minsk Agreement.  That means that the LDNR will separate from the rump-Ukraine and, on time, rejoin Russia.  Good bye Banderites and Ukronazis!