152. Nazis, Cookies, and Ronald Reagan -- Pt. 1

Welcome to Pick Me Up, I'm Scared, the podcast. I'm your host, Madeline. I'm your co-host, David. And this is our second time recording the intro. Because it sounded tenny. It sounded too tenny. I always sound tenny. I don't think that's... Someone told me the other day that I have a deadpan voice. That was, I do not think they meant it as a compliment. It's literally neutral. I'm trying to be more expressive. With your voice. Can't you tell?

No, not at all. But I respect it. So you said the first time we have a controversial topic. We have a controversial topic. Football hooligans. Kind of, yes. My favorite. I've been getting into French oi. It's not going to happen, David. No, there is a... It's going to happen. There are so many good French Roy bands right now. From when? Like right now. I do not believe anything good is coming out of France right now. That's... Yeah. I mean, they got that new guy.

That's not Macron. Oh, yeah. That guy is not Macron. Right, right, right. Well, today's episode, actually, I have some notes that are kind of poetic. I don't remember writing these notes, but I'm looking at them now, and I was like, I was on a roll. I read those notes, you sent them to me, and I was like, I'm already annoyed. It's a long episode. No, I was like, Madeline is going to cast this, and like...

You know, Manichean terms is like an epic battle of good versus evil. It is an epic battle. It is an epic battle of normal versus evil. I'm going to say it. At one point, it was a battle between good versus evil. Now it's a battle between normal versus evil. I'm going to say, I have my own thoughts, which we'll get to. We'll get it. But, like, I think this is, it is, like.

We should be Marxist about it and just say it's about resources. You know, and it's about historical materialism. Yes. Which means we're going to be talking about history a lot. And we are talking about... Well, let me do the lead up I wrote, the poetic lead up. I said... This is a story about the epic fight between fascism and communism. It's a story about capitalists profiting from fascists winning. It's a story about Nazis and coups and colors and cookies.

Oh, that's right. What's his name? He's like a confectioner. No, what? No. The Poroshenko. Oh, is he? Okay. It's talking about cookies in two different ways. Today we are talking about Ukraine. We decided after... How many years? 2022 is when the whole thing really popped off. Really popped off. It has been popping off. But we decided to give it three years. The dust has settled a little bit. People are less emotional about it, maybe. I get the impression I was reading.

like some like strategic analysis thing by some think tank or whatever. And they were like, look, it kind of seems like it's going to wind itself down. And Russia is going to just take like 20% of Ukraine.

Which, you know, if you don't know much about the history of the situation or what's going on, especially if you have only been consuming Western media, that might seem horrifying to you. But I think the more you learn about this issue, the more you're going to be like, wait, this all kind of does make sense. I mean, my take. Hot take. Hot take.

Is that Russia happens to have like a material interest in taking large parts of the eastern part of the country, which are some of the most resource rich areas in all of Europe. and are essential to... Russia's economy, which is I agree with that. However, I will say that Russia is rational enough to know they're not going to do that and start World War Three unless there's heavy support for it. Yeah. And it turns out.

There was heavy support for it, which we do not hear about in the West. Now, what I really think this is a story about is it's it's almost like an allegory. This is the story about Ukraine, but it could be a story about. probably a hundred different countries around the world. Because what it really is a story about isn't even a story about Ukraine or Russia. It's a story about how the United States steals countries.

It's a story about how we do it slowly and steadily over time, right in front of everybody's eyes, like the proverbial frog being boiled alive in hot water to the extent that nobody even realizes it's happening.

Okay, so I'm gonna preempt you on something because I know you're starting World War II. I'm starting pre-World War II. Okay, okay. We're doing it. Oh, for fuck's sake. But, like, because I was thinking about it. I was like, oh, yeah, I took that, like, Russian history class in undergrad or whatever. And so it's like... In, like, Russia, the country's sort of, like, founding mythology. Yes. Kiev. Yes. Kiev. Kiev. Whatever. Plays a formative role. Like, the...

Kingdom of Rus. Yes. Is like has its formation in Kiev, not in like Moscow or whatever. Yeah, that's totally true. And a lot of people from Russia, if you ask them about it, they're like, well, just talk about this. We just started the year 800. Yeah. And it's for that reason. Okay, I have two favorite Yvonne the Terrible stories or whatever. I love that you call him Yvonne. As opposed to? Ivan. Most Americans call him Ivan.

Yvonne the Terror. I pronounce everything horribly. Give me this one. Me too. Give me this. Do Yvonne. Let's go. Okay. So Yvonne. So at some point, like the like aristocrats, I can't remember what they're called in Russian or whatever, were like. dude, you're doing too much shit, you're, like, killing everyone, we don't love this, you have usurped our, like, righteous authority or whatever, and so you need to not be czar anymore.

And he was like, sick, I will definitely do that. However, I'm going to take my patrimony, which is all of Russ, as my personal possession. so he just he just took the entire country and was like it's mine now you guys can like this is better than dealing with you No, well, he was just, I mean, they were like, I guess we kind of have to deal with you because you took all of the stuff that we were doing politics about. Right. And the other, and this one is like very, like, it.

It's obviously not true, but it's a common story told that at some point, Yvonne hired an architect to build St. Basil's Cathedral and found it so beautiful. That he had the architect's eyes gouged out so that he could he would never make anything as beautiful again. Wow. I need that energy in my life. Yeah. Well, OK, so I think.

the the thing about talking about ukraine is it's kind of a taboo subject because we have been so propagandized about it and again like it's wild you would have to say this but we do have to say this i think anybody who is not deeply evil thinks that it is sad when innocent people are harmed by warfare yeah and it kind of feels like the whole history of ukraine from like the 19th century onward is kind of like them being like overrun on one side or the other by like where it's just like

we kind of all want your resources if we're the austro-hungarian empire if we're like the czar if we're czarist russia we're kind of like you're the breadbasket and then in like the 20 20th and 21st century you were the source of all of the like rare earth minerals uranium yeah used to make our microchips or whatever right so i think though what is important to remember is that Our government in the West relies on you being too afraid to question the mainstream narrative that we put forward.

And the way they do that is by trying to position things as though you would be amoral or evil to question. The Western media's narrative on this. That it is one of those things that is so obviously has a morally good side and a morally wrong side that anybody who questions why our country is getting involved in this, why we care about it, what's happening exactly must be in some way like.

ethically and principally flawed. And so to listen to this episode, you're going to have to get rid of all that thought. You're also going to have to remember that the people of Ukraine are not monolith. They are just as complex in their political outlook as the United States is. And that generally speaking, every country in the world has its weird kooky right wing freakazoids. It's got its, you know.

bleeding heart liberals. It's got its diehard commies. These things happen in every country around the globe. And Ukraine is not any different than that. So the thing we're really going to look at is, first of all, strip all of the Western media away from your mind if this is something you have not looked into yet before. We're going to actually talk about the actual situation that has occurred there that's relevant to the United States.

interests and where our tax dollars have gone and what we're doing there and yeah we're going to start this in pre-world war ii just to give you an idea of what was going on in ukraine while it was under the ussr still before world war ii hit it so

Ukraine was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe, estimates as high as nearly 3 million Jewish residents there before World War II started. And it was a part of USSR, like we said. And it's worth noting that contrary to what most Westerners think,

People in Ukraine did not hate the USSR, largely. I'm sure there were some people who hated it. I mean, the Ukrainian nationalists fucking hated it. Ukrainian nationalists hated it, but they were a very small part, relatively speaking, at the time. Of Ukraine. It's worth noting these things, which are statistical and true and real. Ukraine reported the highest satisfaction with life in the USSR out of any Soviet country, including Russia. And what year are we talking? So.

There's different types of polling we can look at. First of all, during the 1991 referendum where every country in the USSR voted on whether it wanted to dissolve the USSR or not, the average for all of the USSR was around 70% voted no.

Overwhelmingly, nobody wanted to dissolve the USSR. The average vote was 70%. Let's keep doing the USSR. Ukraine's was over 80%. Which is why we still have the USSR today. No, it turns out it didn't matter. And the corrupt leaders just dismantled it anyway. But when... corrupt leaders dismantle it people in ukraine were so uniquely mad that ukrainians tried to assassinate him sick so ukrainians did actually more than other countries in the ussr love the ussr 80

Over 80 percent voted to keep the USSR compared to a 70 percent average of the USSR. That's something that if you're an American, you probably don't know that. And that doesn't mean everybody loved it. 20 percent of people were like, fuck the USSR. OK, that's one in five people. That's not nothing.

But you can't please everybody all the time. And that is a really high number, higher than average. And again, yes, the people who did try to assassinate the USSR's leadership when they started dismantling it, they were Ukrainian. So another thing to consider.

is that in 2009 and this timing is relevant as we go through the episode you'll learn that things started to change around 2010 when the united states started dumping a ton of money into aggressively taking control of the narrative in ukraine in 2009 before that started when

People in post-Soviet countries were polled, people over the age of 65 who had spent 20 years living as an adult in communism and 20 years living as an adult in capitalism or under a place with communist leadership if you want to be a stickler about what is communism or socialism anyway. They reported, most countries reported on average, being happier under communist rule, communist leadership than under capitalist. Ukraine's were the.

highest rates of dissatisfaction with the change in 2009 out of any post-Soviet country polled. Most places, you ask them, do you approve of the switch to a market economy? like 30 to 40 percent of people in that age range would say yes. The majority of people would be like, no. Ukraine, it was like 20 percent said yes, 80 percent said no. So the numbers stayed the same, basically.

from 1991 to 2009. In 1991, 80% of people were like, fuck that, we like the USSR. And in 2009, 80% of people were like, fuck that, we liked the USSR. So it stayed very, very consistent. Even into 2013, Ukraine had the highest highest rate of response when asked the question was, did dissolving USSR do more harm than good? More Ukrainians said it did harm.

that the opposite i think i mean it's pretty obvious but more than any other post-soviet i mean it's just like right anyone who lived i did not grow up in russia or whatever but like If you look at the Yeltsin years and like the shock doctrine years, it was bad. It was like the former Soviet bloc countries essentially all became one form or another of like a kleptocracy where it was just like oligarchs stole what had been.

you know, state-owned enterprises for their own enrichment. Yes. I mean, that's definitely true. But I will say theirs was significantly higher than other post-Soviet countries. So during the USSR... They were some of the happiest people with the USSR out of all the USSR. After the USSR, they were some of the angriest that hit it left, okay? Now, this is a detail that's important because...

You have to remember going into this, you have to unlearn what you think as a Westerner about Ukrainians in the USSR, Ukrainians in Russia. Ukrainians also were more likely from 2009 to 2013 to report that the influence of Russia in their country was a net positive.

And again, that wasn't everybody, but it was the majority of people in Ukraine said Russia had a positive influence on their country in 2009. All right. So this is significant because, again, if you grew up in the West, you probably don't think this is true.

you're probably there's no way and the reason that we're going to come to find out is that ukraine is a very deeply divided place and it's divided right down the middle of the river on the west side and the east side and just like you might imagine the east side closer to russia tends to align itself more with russia

In terms of ethnicity and culture and political outlook. And the West side tends to be the side that aligns itself more with Europe and the United States. And if you are from the West, even if you are not. born in the West, if you're exposed to Western media, that's the only side we're really hearing from. But most of us don't know that there's a whole other half of Ukraine with different political beliefs than that. And they matter, too, and they're significant to the story. Now.

We're going to start this in 1941 going forward. German troops under Hitler, the Nazis, took control of Kiev. And when they took control of Kiev. They were welcomed by a small minority of people in Ukraine who were happy that they had showed up. I mean, it is the case that in the preceding decade, right, there had been a giant civil war.

that had been primarily fought in ukraine like we think of it as the russian civil war but large parts of it were fought in ukraine yes right and when i was because i was looking through sort of like the uh various like fascist parties uh

during World War II or like Ukrainian Nazi parties and all of them had their roots and like we really hated being a part of the Soviet Union in the 30s and we were a part of like the white army or whatever yes and this but again this wasn't everybody this was a minority of people but Historians know that out of every country that was taken over by the Nazis, Ukraine had some of the highest rates of civilian assistance.

pay to the Nazis. And again, not the majority of people, but a large minority there, a significant minority there. So when the German troops arrived in Kiev, they were welcomed with Hail Hitler banners from locals. Not every local. But immediately, the Nazis, with the help of the few locals who supported them, who were very, very nationalist, they immediately rounded up 34,000 Jewish people along with Roma or other people deemed undesirable.

They marched them to the fields outside of Kiev on the pretext of resettlement, and they massacred them in what came to be known as the Holocaust by bullets. And what happened from here is that a ravine, the Babenyar Ravine, would fill up as a mass grave for people from Ukraine for two years. As many as 100,000 people were murdered there.

They were killed by Nazis and it became one of the largest single killing sites of the Holocaust outside of Auschwitz. Now, nearly a quarter of all Holocaust victims, when all is said and done, came from Ukraine. That honestly kind of makes sense. It's significant. So they had a large Jewish population and they had a large enough presence. albeit a minority, but a large enough presence of people local to Ukraine who are willing to assist the Nazis. Researchers have found that

Some of these locals, the ones we're going to talk about, did play a key role in fulfilling Nazi orders, especially at Baben Yar. And these locals, a prominent one that we're going to talk about a lot through this episode, is a man named Stefan Bandera and his group.

the OUN. And it's important to note because for a lot of people in Ukraine today, especially on that west side, Steppenbandera is considered a national hero. He was, was it Poroshenko who commemorated him as a hero or was it? Many, many leaders have commemorated him as a hero since the coup.

So we're going to talk about Stefan Bandera and the OUN because it's important for you to understand who this guy is for us to understand current events in Ukraine. What does the OUN stand for? We're going to get into it, but it is the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Bandera attended school in Stryit, where he joined Ukrainian youth organizations and did gymnastics, right? But these Ukrainian youth organizations kind of gave him a very nationalist outlook on the world.

And eventually, he would end up becoming the leader of a nationalist organization in Ukraine called the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, OUN.

The OUN was a radical Ukrainian anti-communist nationalist group who wanted independence from Poland at the time, from the USSR as well later, and they were into some real Nazi shit. Remember, like... I always say most of modern history can be best understood as communist versus fascist fighting while capitalists look on and go, oh, no, but profit off of fascism. And this is no exception, right? Bandera was on the side of the fascists in this whole fight. The nationalists hate communism.

They love fascism. And it makes sense, right? A lot of fascist ideology is rooted in the idea of the state, our state in particular, succeeding the nation, what it is to be our nation. And they rely on a lot of kind of nationalist rhetoric and nostalgia in order.

to sell this idea to people. And Bandera was not just a nationalist. He wanted Ukraine to be an ethnostate. So he was really into what Hitler had going on. His friends described him as being a fanatical, uncompromising nationalist from an early age as he publicly scorned students who did not want to be involved with the nationalist movement when he was part of that youth group.

The OUN, meanwhile, by the time he became an adult and kind of took over the lead of this organization, they had made it its mission before he even got there to fight off anyone seen as an invader of Ukrainian territories. And you can see how this gets really Nazi really fast, like all nationalism, right? Who is us and who is them? Wait, so I'm assuming that when Nazis came in, right, 41.

The OUN was like, oh no, fuck those guys, invaders. No, they were like, you're kind of like us. Sure, why not? So it gets very weird when you start to try to figure out nationalism because the invariable next question is who deserves to be part of the nation and who doesn't? Who is us? Who is them? And that's how you end up falling off this weird ethnostate shit. And next thing you know, boom, you're a Nazi.

And also a lot of people have a hard time conceiving of this idea that now today some Jewish people could be engaging in Nazi behavior places like Israel. It's like the fact that. the Germans chose the Jews to be the scapegoat is not insignificant, right? A lot of cultures have scapegoated Jewish people. However,

That's not the only way to engage in the core principles of like a Nazi fascist ideology revolving around ethnic cleansing. Right. We see very obviously Israel is engaging in those same principles, but against Palestinian people. And we're going to see Ukraine is. Ultimately, later on, no exception to that. I will also say, in a fun turnaround, Israel is also providing weapons.

For modern day right wing groups in Ukraine. Yes, they are. And there's going to be a huge tie in that we're going to talk about, too. So in 1929, the OUN published something called the Decalogue of Ukrainian Nationalists. And it said. So they were really kind of trying to breed a far-right fashion. ethnostate criminal element within Ukraine.

And Bandera, this appealed to him. Remember, he had been part of those Ukrainian nationalist youth groups. He'd been described as fanatical, even as a kid. So when he got old enough, he joined the OUN. He was like, this is exactly what I want to be a part of. And he rose up quickly through its ranks. Like by 1931, remember, he joined in 1929. By 1931, he was already the head of the propaganda department.

And by 1933, he was the head of the National Executive, which is a position he used to enact terror against Jewish people and the Polish in Ukraine. On June 15th, 1934, his men actually carried out an assassination of the Polish Minister of Internal Affairs, Bronislaw Pieraki. And on July 25th, 1934, the principal of a Ukrainian secondary school in Lviv, which I've also seen described as a gymnastics school, named Ivan Babi, who's a former UHA officer, a Ukrainian patriot.

was considered very well respected in ukraine he was actually murdered by the o un for preventing them from spreading propaganda on school grounds okay i just want just to cut in I believe it's common usage in like German and a lot of stuff like gymnasium in the early 20th century. It was just school. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes more sense. So.

Ivan Bavi was a supporter of Ukrainian and Polish coexistence. Right. He was like, we can coexist here. And the day that he was murdered, the part of Kiev that he was murdered in. Today, that street that he was killed on is named after Stephen Bandera, the people who killed him. Right. So that's a pretty interesting thing we're going to get into later. Like, how did that come to pass?

Now, the majority of victims of the OUN, as they sought to basically create this ethnostate nationalist Ukraine, most of them were not. quote-unquote foreign invaders. They were just other Ukrainians who did not agree with what the OUN had going on. Now, for this murder, Sepin Bandera was actually imprisoned, and he would be released five years later on September 13th of 1939.

By 1940, the OUN was split into two factions. Bandera was still active in the OUN even from prison, so one faction was led by him, and they called it the OUNB for Bandera.

The other faction we'll get into in a second, but it's obviously the Bandera one that we're going to pay extra attention to. Under Bandera, the OUNB carried out espionage missions for Hitler and received funding directly from Nazi Germany. And one author who wrote about this said,

At a Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists held in Krakow in April 1941, the attendees officially adopted numerous fascist principles, symbols and rituals. These included the principle of one nation, one party, one leader. the black and red flags symbolizing blood and soil, and the fascist salute, which became a greeting. In addition to that, both the ideology and the actions of the OUN included anti-Semitic themes.

So, Bandera's main goal in all of this was to establish an independent Ukrainian state that would be allied with Nazi Germany. And this is why he was like, not only do we like what the Nazis have going on, we want to do something like that here in Ukraine, they might be able to help us achieve our independence. And again, their quote unquote independence, that is not something the majority of Ukrainians wanted.

ukrainians wanted that is what a group of fringe super far-right kind of wackadoos wanted think about like q anon level kind of wackadoos here in the united states or like those are conspiracy theories though like Think about if the Proud Boys wanted to take over the United States. This is kind of the case across much of Europe, right? Like in Romania, it's the Ustashi or whatever. It's like there are a lot of these groups who are sort of like, hell yeah, this is a way of like...

You know, exercising our sort of like nationalist agenda, even though we do not have the sort of like numbers to gain power legitimately. Right. So. During World War II, the OUN was like, we're all in collaborating with Nazis, hoping that it's going to lead to an independent Ukraine.

And they volunteered their followers to act as basically local militias for the SS and the German army if they came to Ukraine. Now, there is a historian named Russ Bellant that we're going to talk about kind of a lot in here. And he writes about specifically the relationship between the United States and Nazis in Ukraine. And he had a book come out in 1988 that we'll get into more when we get up to that time period, but it was very, very influential. And he says,

with the Nazi powers. They formed several military formations so that when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, they had several battalions that went into the main city at the time where their base was. They went in, and there's a documented history of them participating.

in the identification and rounding up of Jews in the city and assisting in executing several thousand citizens almost immediately. There was also involved in liquidating Polish group populations in other parts of Ukraine during the war. So, you know, pretty much every historian knows and agrees like, yes, this group of Ukrainian nationalist Nazi collaborators were responsible for.

Rounding up and killing Jews in Ukraine as well as Polish people in Ukraine as well. So Bandera and his followers, who are now called Banderites, they were all kind of involved in this whole Nazi thing from the jump. Right. Even before Hitler came, you know, Bandera was writing to Hitler, being like, come, come to Ukraine. We love what you're doing. Oh, my God, this is so cool.

And when the Nazis finally actually came, the Bandarites in the OUN marched through the city just attacking Jewish people and Polish people and repeating their slogan everywhere they could. And their slogan was, long live Adolf Hitler and Stephen Bandera, death to the Jews and the communists. So... This is when we talk about this being like an issue about communism versus fascism. It is quite literally that. And the fascists knew it. They knew their enemies were the communists.

So on June 30th, 1941, in Wormach's occupied Lviv, the followers of Bandera proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state with a new government that would be headed by Yaroslav Stetsko with Bandera as the head of state. But Nazis were like, absolutely fucking not. We didn't take over Ukraine to give it to you. We took it over so we could be in charge of it. So they arrested key members of the OUN, including Bandera.

But they gave him kind of cushy arrests. Like Bandera was on house arrest in Berlin, you know, for like a month. And then he was sent to a concentration camp, but he got super preferential treatment. He had a two-room basically apartment as his cell with a guest room, a bedroom furnished like a normal bedroom. He ate all of his meals in the SS dining room next to all of the Nazis. And he didn't have to wear prisoners clothes, and he wasn't forced to work.

He was allowed to talk to his wife. He was allowed to communicate with the outside world. He was just kind of like kept there, but in a pretty... So, I mean, this raises a question, I guess, which is, like, he was sent to a concentration camp, but was he really sent to a concentration camp? No, he was, like, doing house arrest, but... in a house that they decided where it was and it was an apartment on concentration campgrounds so in 1943

Kiev in Ukraine was liberated from Nazi occupation by the troops of the, yes, Communist USSR Red Army. As we all know, the communists in the USSR were the ones who defeated the Nazis. And the specific faction that helped liberate Kiev... was led by a man named Nikolai Vatutin, who was a general. And Vatudin actually was wounded in an ambush by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators from the OUN while attempting to liberate Ukraine from Nazi Germany.

And he later died from his wounds, and he actually got buried in one of the central parks of Kiev that he had liberated. And a monument was made on his grave, and it was inscribed to General Vatutin from the Ukrainian people. So his death was considered this symbolic, like...

Great sacrifice to get rid of the Nazis who had been terrorizing Ukraine and again murdering like 100,000 people. But still, the OUN, even with the Nazis gone, attempted to carry out the ethnic cleansing campaigns of the Nazis. So according to Ian Sayre and Douglas Botting, who've written about this issue, the OUN played a significant part in the extermination of the Jews and other undesirables, often performing the dirty work of the German.

Eisen commando extermination squads who were tasked specifically with killing children and continuing the war afterwards under American sponsorship. So they were doing some of the worst of the worst work. in ukraine and after the war ended they didn't give up on their kind of vision or their cause they just kind of switched alliances and started doing anti-communist nationalist work under american kind of funding and guidance

So from 1943 to 1944, Banderas forces set themselves up to ethnically cleanse Western Ukraine of Poles without the Nazis there. And in 1943, they launched a genocidal anti-Polish. campaign called OUN-UPA, done by them, right, in Virginia. In the process, they killed over 90,000 Poles and many Jews. And Bandera's top deputy and acting quote unquote prime minister of this like not real government, Yaroslav Stetsko, was like, we have got to exterminate all of these people. So on September 27, 1944.

Bandera was officially released from the Nazi Germany camp right under an informal agreement with Ukrainian Sturgeon Army to ensure their basically sabotage and intelligence cooperation against the Soviets. So he was like, hey, if you guys kind of let me out of here. doing all UN stuff from Nazi prison, right? I'll spy on all the Germans, or I'll spy on all the Russians, and I'll give the info to the Germans, basically. And this was after Kiev had already been liberated, right?

So in the 1940s and 1950s, obviously, we know the war came to an end in 1945. But Bandera held on to this like super fascist ideology, and he still continued to advocate for totalitarian, ethnically pure Europe. And his affiliated Ukrainian insurgent army, which was UPA, remember we said the OUN-UPA campaign, that was the Ukrainian insurgent army under the OUN, they carried out basically a continued armed struggle against the Soviet Union trying to secede.

But they didn't have the numbers and they didn't have the backing. And obviously people hated them because they collaborated with the Nazis in Ukraine. So it didn't really go anywhere. So the 1950s is really when the United States started taking a lot of action to collaborate with.

former Nazis and Nazi collaborators from the war. In the post-war era, the U.S. government basically assembled a bunch of Nazi collaborators, including people from the OUN, into a network of kind of anti-communist fascists that would work at our behest.

By 1952, John Loftus estimates that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of important Nazi collaborators brought to the United States. And we all know, obviously, the United States imported Nazis under Operation Paperclip, right, and had them workplaces like... I don't know, NASA and stuff like that and her new assumed identities. But they also had this really interesting way of just recruiting these people and bringing them into these kind of...

ethnic nationalist organizations in the U.S. that would help support our government. Well, I mean, there was like there somewhat famously. uh like the rat lines organized sort of in concert between like us intelligence and the vatican which helped uh is secret nazis out of

Europe, usually to South America, to Argentina, where a lot of them wound up in like Perón's government. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So we had something similar going on here. But the way we organized them was kind of interesting, which we'll talk about in a minute. So the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps ran something called Operation AnyFace, I believe it was called, to protect the fascist leaders of the OUN.

Bandera, Wright, was supposed to be under this operation, protected from being brought to justice by the Soviets for his crimes during the war. Meanwhile, his chief of national security, Mikola Lebed, was... Basically, one of the highest ranking Ukrainian Nazis to ever enter the United States, one of the highest ranking Nazi collaborators ever to enter the United States. And we brought him in here to basically work for us. So CIA covert operations chief Frank Wisner at the time said in 19.

1951 that there were at least 20 former or active members of the SB of the OUN and Bandera in the United States. So we took a key interest in that. We were like, hey, bummer you didn't win the war. All right. Bummer that the USSR won. Sorry. We had to fight them too, whatever. But we liked what you had going on. Let's bring you here and see what you can make happen for us in fighting the communists now.

So the USA forged political alliances with right wing elements everywhere around the globe. And the Reagan administration was particularly into this. So we have a quote here from Russ Bellin, who we said wrote that book that came out in 1988, talking about this. And he says that he was talking to somebody who... was in the Reagan administration who told him, you have to understand, we are an underground organization. We have spent years quietly penetrating positions of influence.

And he published about his experiences meeting these people who work for the Reagan government in his 1988 book, which was called Old Nazis, New Right, and the Republican Party. And you can find this book for free on Internet Archive. It's a very, very interesting book. So in Washington, the OUNB basically reconstituted and had a new name. They called themselves the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, UCCA. And it became an umbrella organization comprised of complete OUNB.

fronts, according to Belland. The U.S. intelligence services worked with these former Nazi collaborators. in the former OUNB now called the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America here in the U.S., but also Nazi collaborators from a bunch of other countries who have similar organizations. I got to say, we're in the Reagan administration at this point. Well, yeah, we're kind of jumping ahead. OK.

The 1950s is when we started importing, and the Reagan administration would later be in. No, because I was sort of like, these OUN guys have got to be old as shit by that point. We'll talk about how it evolved, but yeah.

This is we're setting the stage for what would happen in the administration. We're still technically in the 1950s when they're being imported and brought into the United States. So. You know, basically what the United States would do in the 1950s with these Nazi collaborators they brought in is they would basically get them to run extensive sabotage, terror, and assassination campaigns against the USSR. Like in 1951, Weisner estimated that over 35...

members of the Russian secret police had been killed by the OUN-UPA since the end of the last war. So not counting World War II. Kim Philby couldn't get there soon enough. I mean, 35,000 is a massive number. Remember, once Kim Philby got to the State Department in the United States, he just kept just being like... Yo, the CIA is going to send some guys your way. Just a heads up. Yes.

Bandera himself, meanwhile, after the war, did not come to the United States. Remember, the United States helped him avoid justice, and we imported some of his top guys, but he actually went to Munich. where he sought refuge and he ended up living in the American occupation zone under the fake name of Stefan Popel. And from 1949 on, he collaborated with, speaking of Ken Philby,

MI6, the British Intelligence Service. This is what I'm saying. Kim Philby needs to show up and just be like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's Seven Bandera. Get them, guys. Yes. Well, MI6 used Bandera to send spies into the Soviet Union. So exactly what we're talking about. And if you guys want to hear more about this Ken Philby character and what he was up to, we have some bonus episodes on our Patreon that talk about him. The Cambridge Five is the series of episodes.

And our Patreon is pick me up. I'm scared. And it's like, what, three bucks, I think, to subscribe. So 1959, Stephen Banderas. horrible Nazi collaborating ways caught up with him. And KGB agents found him and they assassinated him in Munich. And I read this and I was like, you know, the USSR did what the USSR does best, which is kill Nazis.

That's what they do. The USSR was great at killing Nazis. And then a new leader of the OUN stepped up, none other than Jaroslav Stetsko, who had been kind of Banderas right-hand man. And this was the same guy who once wrote, quote, I insist on the extermination of the Jews in Ukraine.

And Stetsu had actually marched into Ukraine with the German army in 1941. And I have kind of a quote from Bellant here that explains this whole situation. He says, the Allied forces set up displaced persons camps and picked up tens of thousands of these former allies. of Hitler from countries all over the East.

Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania. There weren't Polish collaborators. I think most people know the Germans heavily persecuted or persecuted and murdered millions of Polish residents. But Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, and so forth. Belarus.

They had these camps they built and organized them where the Ukrainians were assassinating their Ukrainian nationalist rivals. So they would be the undisputed leaders of Ukrainian nationalist movements. So they would get the sponsorship of the United States to continue their political operation.

And they were successful in that regard. So when Bandera was out of the picture, Stetsko became the undisputed leader of all of the Ukrainian nationalists. And this is what I think is really, really interesting how the United States did this. We basically were like... These guys, we can't officially be into them because they're technically our enemies.

But there's something here we can work with. So we literally put them in these weird camps and we were like, fight amongst yourselves. Whoever becomes the victor will. We're doing like a like a whichever rat comes out of the cage alive. That's a rat. Kind of like a death match thing. Right. So. It says in the United States when they came, his.

These groups organized captive nations committees. And this is what I'm talking about, where their structure in the United States is pretty interesting. So they became supposedly the representatives of people who were being oppressed, quote unquote, in Eastern Europe, in the Baltic countries by the Soviets. But they were. In fact,

being given an uncritical blank check to represent the voices of all of these nations that were part of the Warsaw Pact, but they represented the most extreme elements of each of the national communities. They basically politically, oh, they became politically active through the Republican National

Committee because there's really the Eisenhower administration that made the policy decision in the early 1950s and brought them in. They set up these campaign organizations. Every four years, they would mobilize for the Republican candidate, whoever it would be. And some of them, like Richard Nixon in 1960, actually had.

close direct ties to some of the leaders like the Romanian Iron Guard and some of these other groups. So just to really understand what this means. And basically, the Republicans were like, hey. We're fighting Nazi Germany, but some of these Nazi collaborators, we might be able to work with them. So save them.

Don't kill them in the war. Put them in special camps based on whatever country they are from. Let them kind of figure out amongst themselves who the leader is. If some people die, some people die, whatever. Once they've kind of settled in these camps and we see the clear hierarchy of what's happening, we're

going to take the top guys from each of these countries, basically Nazi collaborators. We're going to import them to the United States, give them new identities. And we are going to give them a special kind of operation in the US government to work in like committees as representatives of.

the countries they're from and talk about how oppressed they were by the USSR. So these kind of groups in the United States, like representing, for example, Ukrainian national interests, they would actually be created by the Republican Party. made up of former Nazi collaborators and then given legitimacy through Republican campaigns to talk about issues happening in Ukraine. So this is why here in the United States we end up hearing so many extreme far right.

wackadoo opinions from people who are from these countries and also why if you're like, well, if we want to know what's going on in another country around the world, we just need to listen to the voices of people from that country. Well, if you're in the United States, guess what voices of people from that country you're going to hear?

You're going to hear Nazi voices. You're going to hear Nazi voices, Nazi collaborator voices from these countries. So Madeline is saying that all Ukrainian Americans are Nazis. Yeah, sure. If you know. Anyone from Kiev or whose family is from Kiev and. They, you know, they just want to eat their damn pierogies or whatever. Madeline is saying they're a Nazi. No, no. But what it's saying is the voices that are amplified and sold to us, especially in the West.

are the voices of far-right extremist wackadoos. And those are the voices we're going to hear the most because the Republican Party... literally created a system to do that, which I think is so interesting. And in case you're wondering, we're going to get into this too, but Russ Bellin's book, when it came out, was so monumental. It was such a bombshell. Nine people had to resign from the...

Republican Party and two of them were from Ukraine. That makes that makes perfect sense. And I mean, it's still back when Paul Ryan was still in the Senate, he was meeting with like straight up neo-Nazis from Ukraine. Exactly. Right.

So, 1960s, this didn't stop. By the 1960s, we actually had Operation Gladio going on, and this was overseen by the CIA and MI6 together. And through this, NATO established a large secret army of trained militant soldiers. including former Nazi collaborators, and was like, we're going to use these guys to hinder the communists. I mean, Gladio was specifically the operation in Italy, but it became sort of like the catch-all term for...

With stay behind operations throughout Europe, right? Exactly. So the Italian Senate investigation into Gladio said it emerges without a shadow of a doubt that elements of the CIA started in the second half of the 1960s, a massive operation in order to count. So basically, the Italian basically investigation was like the CIA.

has been doing shit in Europe to try to stop the influence of communism from spreading here. And this included targeted killings and false flag terrorist attacks that were blamed on communists in order to terrify the civilian population in supporting right wing governments and anti- I remember reading somewhere that like the CIA through Gladio was also funding like goofy ass fringe left groups that where it was like that couldn't be taken seriously or that made the left look bad.

Or just like splintered the left where it was like, oh, like which of a million ass fucking parties are you in? Right. A party with two people. Right. And that's why democratic centralism is so important if you are part of left wing politics, because this kind of stuff will really kill the movement. This is the kind of stuff that the American government loves. You know, so this is why if you.

Join a party, right? If you get involved in a socialist organization, which I recommend everybody do, democratic centralism is really, really useful. And it basically just says, look, there's a period of time set aside where we debate things and discuss them in a healthy manner. But once we've made a decision, we're all on board with it and we just support. it until the next opportunity for debate comes along. That's how democracy works. We all voted on what to do. If you don't agree.

You still go along with it because we don't have time for any of this stuff. Because the constant kind of fighting and bickering and splintering, that was all heavily utilized by the West to kind of subvert communism. So. The Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1963 to 1969 was a man named Lyman Lemnitzer, who had given the green light actually to Operation Northwoods in 1962. Do you remember what that one was, David? No, no. That's when...

The United States tried to float the idea that they would bomb Miami and blame it on Cuba to justify overthrowing the Cuban government. So this guy, Lyman Lemnitzer, was like... That sounds great. We should do that. And he was actually, yeah, the Supreme Allied Commander from Europe of NATO.

So Legnitzer also worked with high ranking Nazis in the U.S. military networks like Adolf Hüsinger, who served as Hitler's chief of general staff of army and later became chairman of the NATO military committee from 1961 and 1960. I'm just saying, OK, listen, I know the RAF were kooks or whatever. And also, like, at some point, you know who their handler was in the 80s, like third generation? No. Putin.

Putin. Oh, wow. But anyway, the RAF kooks, right? However, wow, NATO and much of like the West German government is all made up of ex-Nazis. We should do something about that, including maybe kidnapping an ambassador or two.

I mean, it's a very real problem. Like they were not wrong. They're not wrong. And this is why people are like, you can't talk about Nazis in Ukraine. That's a Putin conspiracy theory. I'm like, you literally would have to have no functioning knowledge of history or be extremely indoctrinated. to deny this fact. This would be like denying that there's a role of Nazis in the United States. I'm American. I have no problem admitting that the United States has a massive neo-Nazi problem.

And if you live in any country that is predominantly white, odds are your country has a massive neo-Nazi problem. No, I've actually... And you should ignore... I've actually been thinking about this a lot because when we get into like the modern stuff, like the degree to which what's happening in Ukraine has been like a sort of clarion call for like the international right.

is like an actual issue where it's like that like a bunch of like weirdo racist shitheads from all over the world are like flying to ukraine to like fight and like get training exactly And what we really need to know is that even though we took a bunch of neo-Nazis out of Ukraine and brought them to the United States and put them in NATO to help us fight against the communists, we also... didn't just bring them out of ukraine we also left some in ukraine and fostered their growth and development

So we continued also to fund and facilitate Nazi activity in Ukraine long after World War Two ended. And according to investigative journalist Douglas Valentine, who ended up kind of building his whole career specializing on the CIA after he was. actually granted access to one-on-one interviews with a bunch of agents which are now on record in the national security archives you can actually see them online you can develop or

download whole zip files of the interviews and of all this data, which is really, really fascinating and a really cool thing that you can do on a website that, again, looks like it's from 1996. I do not. People need to get. OK, well, this is the National Security Archive. They can do whatever they want. But I will say, as I said last time, if you are a socialist party, hire a fucking web developer, you guys.

Douglas Valentine did all of these interviews with CIA agents that you can access online yourself. And he says the CIA has been developing fascist assets in Ukraine for 70 years. And according to CIA executives, quote, the CIA. has provided training to Ukrainian intelligence units to try and shore up an independent Kiev and prevent Russian subversion for decades. So this gets us to 1968. Richard Nixon runs for president. Now.

Remember those weird groups after World War II that were formed in the United States with the people from other countries based on the premise of nationality? And then they all were like weird neo-Nazi groups. And the Republican Party was like, we can work with you. OK, well, Nixon was like.

I need these guys. So the Ukrainian one, which we talked about, remember, was called the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, UCCA. And those were basically the people who had previously been the OUN under Bandera, who had carried out... like mass extermination genocide campaigns against Jewish people in Poles, killed at least 35,000 people, murdered Jewish children. Those people, that was now the UCCA in the United States.

And that was just the one from Ukraine. Remember, there were ones for all sorts of different countries, right? So Nixon made a promise to the leaders of all of these different groups in the United States that emerged from that post-World War II landscape that, hey, if I win the presidency...

I'm going to make you an official ethnic outreach arm of the Republican National Committee on a permanent basis. So if you help me win, I'm going to set you up with good government jobs for life, basically. And he made that promise through this guy named Laszlo Pastor, who served. five years in prison after World War II for crimes against humanity, right? So Pasteur served as a liaison between the Hungarian Nazi Party and Berlin.

Which is wild. And he also served in the Berlin Embassy of the Hungarian Arrows Cross movement. So big surprise. Yeah. The people that he actually selected to kind of help Nixon with this turned out to be. Big Nazis are Nazi collaborators high up in there. So Russ Bellant notes that these groups very obviously were not like representing. all of the ethnicities of the world which would be impossible i guess but also not even representing like dominant ethnicities he's like notably

There was no African-American committee. There was no Jewish committee. And there was certainly no Russian committee. These were specifically from countries that were mostly white in the USSR of the Nazis who'd been kicked. I feel like the Russian one is like if you're.

doing anti-communism having a bunch of russian expats that's the easiest fucking thing in the world yeah i don't think they had enough of them though this is i wear it like in eastern washington on the columbia river there's this like crazy ass uh i guess you call it a museum that's like

a bunch of, like, Russian aristocrats found their way to, like, Spokane for some fucking reason. Okay. Oh, I think I remember you talking about this. It's, like, on the rivers? Yeah, it's on the Columbia River, and it's just, like, you walk through it, and it's, like, they looked at it. They got to eastern Washington, and they're, like... You know what this reminds us of? The Russian steps. And so they settled there and like...

built like a pseudo-Russian palace full of like the Tsarina's gowns and shit like that. It's sick. Very interesting. If you live in eastern Washington, go to the weird like fake Russian palace. So basically these groups...

you know, that that came to the United States that got absorbed by the Republican Party and legitimized and Richard Nixon was courting. You know, they were neo-Nazi ethnostate enthusiasts and they all hated, obviously, Jews, black people and communists. So that's why there was no African-American, Jewish or Russian.

affiliate basically groups so 1980 1988 reagan these are the reagan years By the mid 1980s, the Reagan administration was actually full of UCCA members. Remember the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, a.k.a. the former OUN Nazi collaborators on a bandera. The group's chairman. Lev Dobryansky served as ambassador to the Bahamas. His daughter, Paula, sat on the National Security Council. That's so sick. Can you imagine if you're like some like weird Ukrainian bro and you're like.

I've been Nazi-ing so hard. Oh, my God. And you get sent to the Bahamas. Yeah, you Nazi your way into the sun, basically. But you don't burn. I mean... He didn't fly too close. He flew the perfect amount to get a lovely tan in the Bahamas. That's good for him. I mean, he Nazi won. So by 1983, Reagan was personally welcoming Stetsko, the Banderas Nazi collaborator who took over after Bandera of the OUN and oversaw personally.

the massacre of 7,000 Jews in Lviv into the White House. And Reagan stood next to this Nazi collaborator guy who killed 7,000 Jewish people, innocent Jewish people, and told him, your struggle is our struggle.

Your dream is our dream. Which he meant very literally. He definitely, I was going to say, which at least the guy was on. No, I. He was like, I. i'm a nazi i also i gotta love that like at the same time reagan is like calling israel and being like bro you guys gotta stop it in lebanon yeah right like yeah well that's the thing too it's like ronald reagan was somehow mysteriously to the left of the modern-day Democratic Party on Israel?

Yeah. He would actually call and be like, I can't justify this. It's looking really bad. Yeah. No, he was literally telling Nazi collaborators, I'm just like you. We're the same. We want the same things. So 1985, the Justice Department launched a crusade to capture and... prosecute Nazi war criminals. But the UCCA snapped into action and they lobbied Congress aggressively to halt the initiative because they're like, tell it too far, busties. We're right here. Cool it, right? I sue.

We have a quote on this from Bellant, who said the UCCA has also played a leading role in opposing federal investigations of suspected Nazi war criminals since those queries got underway in the late 1970s. Some UCCA members have many reasons to worry. reasons which began in the 1930s so he's basically like of course they're going to stop this with any political power they have that they were given by the republican party they are nazis and nazi war criminals

So Russ Bellin also wrote that once the OUN got sponsored by the American security establishment intelligence agencies, they ended up getting embedded in a variety of different ways in Europe as well, like Radio Free Europe, for example, which is headquartered in Munich. And if you guys don't know about Radio Free Europe,

So for Europe, you can learn about it in our episodes on the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the USAGM, which are my favorite episodes we've ever done. So a lot of these groups were kind of... headquartered in munich they also got a lot of sponsorship from radio free europe and they ran all sorts of operations where they were basically trying to do work inside of what we call the warsaw pact countries like the ussr and affiliated countries

Now, by the time we get to the Bush senior administration in 1989 to 1992, this is when we really see the first Bush administration assuring. Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet leader at the time, hey, you don't have to worry about us. NATO is never going to expand one inch to the east of Germany. I'm just going to say Mikhail Gorbachev.

Very dumb guy. I thought you were going to say tear down this wall. No, he, yeah, also, well, he almost, he almost did, or he was like, well, I guess the wall is going to be torn down. Yeah. He was like. The dumbest guy. Like, do a nuclear pact with the United States? Hell yeah. The United States doesn't follow it. He's like, well, it's fine now.

We'll be so good that you'll have to love us and let us be a country. No, it didn't work. It didn't work. For anybody wondering, spoiler alert, it didn't work. David, do you want to take a second here to explain what NATO is? It is also sometimes OTAN. Okay. Yeah. We also have a podcast episode about NATO. If you guys want to listen to that as well, it's an old one. But NATO is the North American Free or Treaty Organization. NAFTA. Yeah, no, I almost just it is essentially like.

Military Coalition of Western Powers. that the United States heads. Yeah, it's the most powerful Western capitalist countries on Earth coming together to just basically control everybody else. But they've only done defensive things. No, they are a defensive organization. And they have killed many people. Yeah, they love to slaughter. No, but they're like the rhetoric of NATO is very specifically whenever NATO talks about itself.

It's like we are a defensive organization. We are together to defend ourselves against the aggressors, the Soviet Union, which like I will say by Stalin's time.

Right. Like the Soviet Union was like, we got no hope of expanding. Like, we're good. Stalin era USSR was like, we're not doing that. And, like, for, like, practical reasons. Like, there's, like, there are some... The resources could not be there. There's a couple reasons. There are, I mean, the ideological stuff is... Complex. But I think the practical things to know about why the USSR was not like this expansionist evil.

like land gobbling demon that the West portrays it as is number one, they did not have the resources. If they wanted to invest in stabilizing their country and making their country successful, they did not have enough resources to also be trying to steal every country around the world at the same time. You famously went through a giant fucking famine, which has specific sort of rhetorical value when it comes to Ukraine. Yes, it does. Right. And I want you to remember that.

even that first of all a lot of the writing we hear about in the west about the famine is totally made up and not correct the famine was real very much so but in complex causes and uh Also a not insignificant part of it was a bunch of capitalist landowners in...

in ukraine rather than collectivizing their food at their farms while people were starving to death during this famine they intentionally killed their own livestock and lit their own crops on fire rather than sharing yeah okay but so the point being

So you were saying there are two reasons. One, not enough resources. Not enough resources. They would go through a famine, right? Yes. And so not enough resources, cut off from the world, you know, whatever, in terms of trade. They kind of had to be self-reliant.

And the second reason is that they started to realize that by fostering and supporting revolution attempts in countries that did not have public backing they were actually acting counter-revolutionary because if you roll into a place where 20 dudes are trying to have a revolution but nobody else knows what the you're talking about they're like what's a proletarian what are you saying

And they just see USSR tanks and they don't know what's happening. Not only is that not going to be a successful revolution, you have actually like left a bad taste in people's mouths and now they hate the idea of a Marxist revolution. the uss are kind of realized this they're like first of all we don't have the resources to be doing this is a drain on us and second of all this is not the way to successfully get people on our side

You have to wait till enough people there are educated and at the point where they want to organically have their own revolution. And then we can talk about supporting them if we want. But probably we won't be able to because we don't have the resources. And I will say, right, like they did.

In sort of, like, some material and also rhetorical ways, when there was, like, a popular uprising, which we talked about in the Bienio Rosso episode, lend material support to, like... to like popular uprisings they did as long as it was popular enough and had enough public support they would lend military assets to them but it wasn't like this whole like yeah they just this idea that they had millions of guys out stealing countries

is like that's not that didn't that didn't happen that's not what was going on so and also worth noting even with the great famine of ukraine Ukrainian people still voted over 80 percent just a couple decades later to stay in the USSR. So their understanding of the famine, how it worked, how it operated, what the effects of it were, obviously very different than how the West portrays it as this like.

Stalin ate all the grain with a big spoon kind of thing. But I mean, the point being like NATO's sort of defense of itself or it's like rhetoric about itself, which is it is purely a defensive organization to defend against Soviet aggression. is like on its face like on like a like realistic analysis of what the soviet union thought it was doing bullshit it was total bullshit it was total bullshit just like we pretend to care about

millions of Ukrainians starving to death because we care about millions of Ukrainians. We don't. We supported Nazis killing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. We don't care. We're not talking about the Ukrainian famine because we care about Ukrainian people. We're talking about it because we want to dunk on the fucking USSR. We're not building NATO because we want to defend ourselves and we're so worried we're building as we want to duck on the USSR.

Everything at this time is all about dunking on communism, halting communism, hurting communism. And meanwhile, the communists are not actually posing an active threat. They're trying to end the famine. They're trying to not do revolutions places where people don't want them. They're trying, you know.

They're sending telegrams to England being like, we don't really want to do the Molotov-Ribbentrop act, but you're kind of forcing our motherfucking hand. And also, yes, that is also worth noting. The USSR prior... to anything happening with nazi germany reached out to the west and was like dear god please help us fight the nazis the nazis are going to be bad we need help we need help and the western world was like basically like girl you no and that is when the uss are signed

non-aggression pact to Germany they're like hey we'll agree not to fuck with each other right haha but meanwhile They were secretly building up all of their military investment, recruiting more people, putting a ton of money into weapons stuff because they knew they were going to have to go to war with Germany. They knew the whole time. And then they did. They violated. Yeah.

That Germany violated. Germany violated the agreement. And they were like, OK, fuck, we're ready. And then by that time, the West was ready as well. So, you know, again, I think that people want to paint the USSR as being comically evil. And that doesn't mean it's a perfect place that didn't run into issues. definitely issues, but this idea that it's this comically evil entity, no. It was like a realist political organization attempting to run a country. I think that is how I think about it.

They did a pretty good job, I will say. You know, whatever. So, 1994, right, obviously the USSR doesn't exist anymore. They... They had the 1991 referendum. Hey, should we dismantle the USSR? The leaders in the USSR were pretty corrupt. Over 70 percent of people in the USSR from every country, not just Russia, were like, no, don't dissolve the USSR. What are you talking about? Ukraine in particular voted 80 percent.

sent not to dissolve the USSR. Then everybody saw the leaders were starting to dissolve the USSR anyway. Then chaos broke out. Some Ukrainians tried to assassinate the leaders of the USSR. And then they were like, well, you're doing this reform anyway against everybody's will. So like, fuck you, we're going to.

form our own country and it's going to be communist and we hate you. So then while they were dismantling the USSR, all these other countries were basically panicking and trying to figure out what to do to take care of themselves because USSR wasn't going to exist anymore. You know, massive power vacuum occurred many, many. places, Ukraine became its own country. So that's kind of what happened there as this was all falling apart. So by 1994...

Leaders in the United States, Britain and Russia signed something called the Budapest Memorandum, where they all said, you know, we're going to respect Ukraine's sovereignty. It's its own country. We're going to respect its independence. We're going to respect its territorial integrity. And we are not going to use any. force against Ukraine. In return, Ukraine was like, we will give up

2,000 strategic nuclear warheads and associated strategic missiles and bombers as long as you guys agree to respect our sovereignty because we're our own country now because USSR doesn't exist anymore. I'm sorry. That is the dumbest motherfucking thing. It's unbelievable. Like that, like...

At what point in the history of NATO or the United States or... frankly for that matter like any sort of western power being like we're not gonna fuck with you has that ever been true i mean they're fucking with we're fucking with everybody all the time we're doing it all the time this is a bad deal so by the year 2000 we've got A president in Ukraine named Leonid Kuchma. And Kuchma has a scandal. It turns out that Kuchma has ordered the murder of a journalist named Georgi Gongodze.

who had founded an online paper called Ukrainska Pravda. And this would be fundamental in building up some momentum for something that would follow four years later called the Orange Revolution.

So when this is revealed, Ukrainians get kind of unhappy with their government and they might just be a little more susceptible to the idea of change. Now, 2003, the Ukraine NATO Civic League gets founded. And their goal is to gradually integrate the state into NATO. The problem is that NATO isn't one inch east of Germany, David? I do believe it is very many inches east of Germany. So this goes against what the Western world had promised Russia.

We were like, we're not going to expand because remember, even though we position it as a defensive thing, it's very clearly an offensive measure, right? So this is starting to build up some tension between Russia and Ukraine and NATO. Now, 2004. Presidential elections happen in Ukraine. And we've got some new candidates coming up. We have, for example, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who is endorsed by both the sitting president and the Russian president.

at the time who is vladimir putin and it's important to note again here that eastern ukraine aligns itself culturally more with Russia, and Western Ukraine aligns itself culturally more with Europe and the United States. And the two sides, again, are divided in half by a river down the middle of Ukraine, and the capital city of Kiev is kind of in the middle of it.

So we've got Yanukovych, popular with the existing president there and the Russian president. And so he's going to be a more popular candidate in the eastern side of Ukraine. His opponent, meanwhile, is a guy named Yushchenko. And he is backed by the Western world, including the United States. So he's going to be more popular where? In Western Ukraine. Now, when we say this guy is backed by the United States...

This is kind of an understatement. Like, this is the United States guy. His wife, Catherine Chumachenko, for starters, was a former Reagan administration official and also an ex-staffer at the Heritage Foundation. Oh, that rocks. Yeah, so David, do you want to do a recap of the Heritage Foundation for anybody who doesn't know? The Heritage Foundation, that's the Koch brothers one, right? Yes.

Actually, the Project 2025 people, it's the Coors Beer one. Oh, that's right. So we have a two-part episode about the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025. These are the people who created Project 2025, which is obviously just 2025s.

issue of their something they call their mandate for leadership which they come out with basically every presidency that's like super right-wing and they're like here's how we think the world should work and it's all the bad stuff you hate about the republican party basically since the reagan administration it's been these guys are up

to it. And they give people a grade, if I recall correctly. They do about how much they listen to the Heritage Foundation. So, you know, the Western-backed presidential candidate Yanukovych, his wife used to work for these guys, right? an ex-staffer at the heritage foundation the project 2025 people so this tells you the west is backing these far-right extremists in in ukraine as early as 2004.

And I mean, like Yanukovych, he is not explicitly like some like OUN affiliated guy. Well, no, he wouldn't be because he. Or like the what was the OCC whatever thing. You see, but that. Yeah. That.

those would be the far right guys so yanikovic is the one that was more popular or i'm sorry yeshenko i get the i get all the i know there's a lot of similarities and stuff yeah no so yanikovic was the one who was more eastern aligned you shanko the one that was more Western-aligned. And yeah, he's not explicitly like, I love Stephen Mandela, I'm a Nazi, blah. But you can tell by his relationships, like, look, his wife...

doing all this American political work under Reagan and the Heritage Foundation. They're super right wing. And the United States is starting to use a lot of NGOs. You remember non-governmental organizations from our other episodes, I'm sure, which basically work at the behest of the government more or less most of the time. But they have fewer restrictions because they're not technically the government. We kind of use them as a tool.

The role of these NGOs during this presidential election over there was to basically provide a bunch of services that would oppose Kuchma, who was still the president at the time, and his support of Yanukovych. So they were going to use these NGOs, the United States government, to help plan demonstrations against Yanukovych and Kuchma and try to manipulate people and force the narrative that they should support Yushchenko instead.

And because everybody was pretty unhappy with the whole, I don't know, murdering a journalist thing that Kuchma had done, which was bad, I will say. I'm sorry. They first of all, in the intervening years between. Then and now, murdering journalists has been kind of like a popular fucking move. Everybody's been murdering journalists. Like, no, I mean, like specifically in Ukraine, like this is like a thing they've been doing. Right. But this was kind of, you know, people.

We're more susceptible, I'm going to say, because they're like, well, obviously this government sucks. What else do we have? And the United States shows up with a bunch of money and is like, we've got the perfect guy for you. He's a far right freak extremist. He would never murder.

So we all know these far ahead extremists would never kill a journalist. That's that's crazy. So we're pumping a ton of money into this guy whose wife, again, comes from the Reagan administration and the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 people. Meanwhile. The U.S. State Department and USAID, alongside the International Republican Institute, start getting involved in uplifting supposedly grassroots campaigns of people who are mad at their government to help basically get

Yankovic out of there. Now, it's estimated that $14 million of funding went into these groups under the guise of, quote unquote, aiding democracy. and putting in place a pro-U.S. candidate as president in Ukraine. So this is really essential. I think, like, when we talk about democracy in the United States, we're always out in the world trying to spread democracy, spread democracy. We are literally...

Here's the way elections work in the United States. They're not super democratic, right? We get these two candidates. Very often, we don't even get to vote for them in primaries. They're all paid by the same rich guy corporations. And we're told we have to choose one. And the person who wins is usually the person who spends the most money.

campaigns right here in the united states the way campaigns work is you buy them you buy an election this is right like the uh the sort of like neoliberal hayek uh milton friedman guys like came up with the freedom index at some point which like has nothing to do with sort of like what we might think of as political freedom.

it has everything to do with sort of property rights and shit like that and milton friedman is quoted somewhere as saying something like it's turning out that democracy is incompatible with a free market democracy or with a free market system because Because like when people vote for stuff, they tend to vote for like making their lives better. Right. And free market capital doesn't do that. Which is just to say that when like it's like we're promoting democracy in Ukraine.

We are promoting like a very specific vision of freedom. Free market. Right. We're we're promoting a free market capitalist vision of the world and it's not democratic. So we're like, OK, you guys are holding election. We'll just buy your election, too. We're the United States. We have money. An election is pretty cheap to buy. One U.S. dollar goes a long way, especially.

in propaganda and messaging. So we're like, $14 million, that should be enough for us to buy the Ukrainian election, put in place our guy whose wife was from the Reagan administration. So meanwhile, the National Democratic Institute, the NDI, based in the United States, an NGO, They are like, we're going to donate a bunch of money also to this campaign and we are going to send election observers to Ukraine while funding, you know, basically this.

this right wing candidate guy as well you shouldn't go and these end up being election observers who are going to be important in a moment now remember that The existing president had killed that journalist, right, in the year 2000, four years back. Well, that journalist had been working for an online-based news organization, right, Ukrainska Pravda. So... What ended up happening is that everyday Ukrainian people started viewing these online news outlets as really legitimate.

Right. Because why else would this guy have been killed if they weren't telling the truth? And that meant that it was really easy for the United States to convince the people of Ukraine of absolutely anything we wanted. You just put it in an online newspaper and they believed it. So they were like.

Everything that's on the internet is now true. It's not like Ukrainska Pravda or whatever is like, wow, that seems like a cool legitimate source whose name is not redolent of like... historical communist newspapers no I mean they literally were just like well look you either get the truth in these online newspapers or you get the state's heavily censored oligarch run media so obviously the online newspapers are telling the truth all of them so the united states was like

bet we're going to use every online newspaper we can buy or influence or create to coordinate demonstrations in favor of our guy. this was a really easy election for us to try to sell this also this is early enough in the internet existing as like a popular phenomenon to where everyone's just like it's on load what like that's so sick oh my god like i'm sure they had like a like aol like you've got mail logo up for everyone that sounds totally so

Meanwhile, the election, we've got some claims that things are looking like they're going to be kind of unfair. First of all, Yushiko in the West claims his campaign was actually prevented from visiting the east side of Ukraine altogether. We don't know if this is true or not. It's probably not true, I guess, but whatever. It might be true. In September, Yushchenko has a health kind of issue.

Medical tests later reveal he suffered from dioxin poisoning, which leaves his face disfigured. And he says this is carried out by the Ukrainian State Security Service under the sitting president, which I don't know, the guy killed a journalist. It could have been. But whatever. of the case all of this stuff is making him look even more popular with ukrainian people like he's an outsider fighting the power never mind the fact that he also is the power just the american power yeah right so

You know, they're wanting a change, though, and this guy is a change. So by the time the election happens on October 31st, Yuschenko and Yanukovych... Both win about two-fifths of the vote. They kind of tie, and that means they need a runoff election. So they have this runoff election, and Yanukovych is declared the winner. Illegitimately. Obviously. Well, according to the U.S. National Democratic Institute, who were election observers but also donators to Yoshenko, he...

He stole the election. Ah, he stole the election. That's what they said. So the Western-backed Yushchenko supporters charge fraud and they stage more mass protests. And these mass protests become what we know today.

as the orange revolution now protesters took to the streets dressed in orange which had been ushenko's campaign color for two weeks and this is what we think of it color revolution he picked orange as his campaign color yeah i gotta say orange doesn't look good on many people that's a that's a hard one to pull off it's like a bunch of safety cones protesting yeah yeah but it had impact and Basically, this

kind of protest movement the orange revolution as it's called it was driven by western backed media narratives and the state department specifically in the usa as well as ngos and other government groups who sometimes planned the protests out themselves This was a very U.S.-backed, George W. Bush-created kind of movement. And yet, Kovich supporters in the East threatened to secede from Ukraine if the results were changed at all.

So this is important. So everybody in eastern Ukraine is like, we think the Americans are trying to steal an election. And if you guys change the vote, which clearly shows our guy won, we're just going to leave and we're just going to become our own country. OK, let's say asterisk on 2004. Asterisk on everybody.

A lot of people. The majority. The majority of people. Like, right? Well, I mean, I'm just going to say that one and almost all of the people voted for him were in the East and almost all the people voted for Yushchenko were in the West. No, I guess what I'm saying is that when it. But the alliances and who goes where get real complicated. I mean, generally speaking, this is like a very clear, this is like almost like an East Germany, West Germany division.

But this is, I guess what I'm saying is, right, like when we start talking about football clubs, there's a lot of like, well, we really like the Russians, but we think Putin's a Jew. OK. OK. I don't know about that. But yeah, no. So basically, as early as 2004, we see eastern Ukraine being like, hey, if the West tries to steal our government.

We'll just fucking join Russia. We're not about to have this shit. So that's important to know because this is going to be important to what we think of as being the Ukrainian-Russian conflict years down the road. Now, December...

Third, the Supreme Court rules the election invalid and orders a new runoff vote for December 26th. And at this new runoff vote, Yushchenko is sent to a 1 with 52% of the vote and Yanukovych... does not agree and challenges the validity of the results but ultimately loses so eastern ukraine at this time does not secede but it is becoming very very clear that eastern ukraine and western ukraine

do not have the same idea about how their country should run. So from 2005 to 2009, we enter a period of the Yushchenko presidency. And remember, this is... The Heritage Foundation, Reagan wife guy. This is the United States guy. This is us pumping $14 million into his campaign. So he wins our guy. And we do that because we know we're going to make profit off of him sitting there. And he he runs like. I remarkably uncorrupt. I...

totally not kleptocracy type government in which he does not just seek to personally enrich himself over the course of his term in office. Yes? Well, I mean, it's kind of hard to see what he does because the whole time, the... Eastern Ukrainians are fighting this guy. They're like, we know what's trying to happen here and absolutely not. So 2005, Yushchenko gets inaugurated on January 23rd. And from the jump, his presidency...

Very unstable. His first cabinet, for example, only served like eight months until September of 2005. Then he dismissed all of his members, including somebody who's going to be important, Yulia. who was a fellow leader during the Orange Revolution. She had been an ally, but now she's dismissed. She had been the prime minister of the cabinet. The next prime minister, Yuri Yekinorov, stayed in office only a few months longer until January 2006. So we're bouncing around here.

In 2006, constitutional reform takes place to give the prime minister more power to try to deprive Yushchenko's presidency of power. And then some new parliamentary elections happen, including for a new prime minister. He's already gone through two of those in a year. But.

Yushchenko's guy that he thought would win the prime minister position from his political party, which is called Our Ukraine, he finished his third behind Yanukovych's party, which is called the Party of Regions, and the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc. The prime minister he had kicked out, right? Who had been his ally before. And she's not going anywhere. So Chebyshenko, we got to keep your eye on her. Now.

They attempt to form a coalition of people who had supported the Orange Revolution in the parliament, but that falls apart. So Yoshiko really has no choice but to accept Yanukovych himself as the prime minister of his cabinet. A house divided. This is wild. A house divided. Divided. This leads to a power struggle. This is absolutely bonkers. So imagine, for example, if you will, Donald Trump wins the presidency, but like...

Kamala Harris is the vice president and the head of the Senate and the House of Representatives. I mean, that often actually does. Right. Imagine more power in one person. Because we have the House and the Senate are divided. You know what I mean? At the moment, we are in a very unitary executive type fucking...

So imagine, because remember, they gave this person more power. So the prime minister has a lot more power than what we're used to. So it's almost like having Donald Trump be president and Kamala Harris being vice president or something like that. It's pretty gnarly. In 2007, Ifchenko calls for another round of parliamentary elections.

He's like, this time we're going to do better. Again, his party finishes last. People are not actually into it, which kind of leads people to believe that maybe he did not win the original election if he can't even win a parliamentary election for his party. Like, maybe... That election really was stolen by the West.

You know, so this means that Yanukovych's party again would fairly win the prime minister position. So he's like, I got to form an alliance with the Yulia Temoshenko bloc again and allow the pro-Western Orange parties to form a government. with Temoshenko as prime minister. So he's like, we got to get her back. We got to get Temoshenko back in here. She's the buffer, right? If I can't get these Yanukovych people, I can work with Temoshenko. So the next year...

2008. You know, the short rekindling of romance, if you will, politically between Yushchenko and Timoshenko. Totally. falls apart again. The conflict is still mounting. These people don't get along. There's a reason why she was prime minister for six months and he was like, no, they're just not seeing eye to eye. So this coalition totally collapses in September of 2008. And in October, Yushchenko just dissolves the parliament. It's like, this is fucked. We got to start over again.

They're like, all right, we're going to do new parliamentary elections in December. But then he cancels them. And Yushchenko and Taimushchenko's parties agree to form a new coalition to try again together with a new party that's smaller.

basically the Lintvin block, which is headed by someone named Voldemort Lintvin. Now, also this year, the NATO Bucharest summit happens. And this is going to be relevant. So... A public statement gets issued at the NATO Bucharest summit that says NATO welcomes Ukraine and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries... will become members of NATO. Listen, I'm just going to point out the following thing.

That they picked two countries that have some of the largest manganese deposits in Europe or the world. They want it. I'm just throwing that out there. We want this sweet, sweet mineral. Right. So Russia, meanwhile, is like, um.

We also would like the manganese, please. I mean, I think Russia is more like, um, hello. You can't do that because that's a threat to our national security. Because the thing that Russia is really worried about is these countries are really close to us. And if you put NATO missiles there. Pointed at Moscow? They're not going to hit us. Listen, I'm going to say, why not both?

like i legitimately do think that because it's like russia was more interested with ukraine that we'll see later is pork access so perhaps this is more relevant to russia in the ukraine situation strategically but their biggest concern is quite literally like missile a nuclear warhead in Kiev 500 kilometers from Moscow okay so that is really what they're like uh

about okay it's not like they don't want resources but we're going to see the main thing that they want is the port access so remember george bush senior had said nato will never expand one inch to the east of germany And Russia is like, I'm sorry, there are literally NATO missiles aimed at us right now from Poland and Romania. Okay, and if...

Ukraine joins. These NATO missiles are literally going to be 500 kilometers from Moscow. This is not okay. You cannot just surround us with your missiles pointing inward and expect us to feel cool about this, man. Which I think they're fair to say. Like, imagine... This is what I tell people to imagine. Imagine you live in Los Angeles, right? And Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China team up and are like, we're going to put some missiles in Tijuana. Is that cool with you? You'd be like...

I don't know how cool I am with that if you're the United States. Honestly, missiles in Tijuana, I'm fine. You're fine with that. Okay, but do you think the United States government would be cool with that? No, they would not be cool. Mexico would become a new state of the United States if that happened. No, no, but I would protest vociferously against that. But I would, like, you put missiles in Tijuana?

It would be fair for people to do to us because we do it to everybody. But I use that as an analogy. You can understand why Russia might not be happy with that arrangement. That might not be great. They might be like, I'm not so into this. When Russia is like NATO is a national security risk to us, that is what they're talking about. We are trying to surround them with missiles pointed at them. And they know, they see it happening. And they're like, absolutely fucking not. So 2009.

Timoshenko gets involved in this natural gas deal with Russia, which sounds like nothing, but it's going to be important later, so I have to mention it here, so just put a pin on that for a moment. Meanwhile, in the United States, that old neo-Nazi Ukrainian group, the UCCA,

They're still active, by the way. They haven't gone anywhere. And on the 50th anniversary of Bandera's death, the group proclaims him, quote, a symbol of strength and righteousness for his followers who continue to inspire Ukrainians today. So this tells us in 2009, very often, there's still an active right-wing pro-Bandera kind of minority of people running around Ukraine being really into Nazis. Now, meanwhile...

Back in Ukraine on the 50th anniversary of Bandera's death, Yushetko, the Reagan guy, the Reagan Heritage Foundation guy, he issues stamps in honor of Bandera. Badira, the guy who killed a bunch of Jews and Polish people, and was like, hey, dear Hitler, please come invade Ukraine. Love you lots. We'll help you. The president of...

of Ukraine. Yushchenko was like, love him. Here's a stamp with his face on it. This blows my mind. This is so crazy today. Now, to give you an idea about just how fringe these right-wing banter rights are in Ukraine, I want to talk about polling that we talked about earlier in this time period. So the year is 2009. So the same year Yushchenko is like...

Love our Nazi collaborator, Bandera. Here are some stamps with his face on them. We honor him. I'm so sad he's gone. This was also the same year that those polls we talked about at the beginning of the episode happened, where only 30% of Ukrainians reported approving of a shift. from communism to what we call democracy today and only 36 percent approved of a shift to a market economy and that was generally speaking across every population group okay so like 70 percent of ukrainians are like hey

Swishing out of communism was a bad idea. And Yushchenko was like, here's a here's a stamp commemorating our biggest enemy ever who murdered hundreds of thousands of you. I keep thinking, right, like if. again you do not have to be a genius or like like a to be like well yeah the 90s sucked for all of those countries because they experienced essentially like the wide scale dismantling of their entire fucking industry

Yeah, that's true. That's definitely true. I mean, the destruction of the USSR was horrific. But again, Ukraine in particular missed the USSR a lot. And I would argue they had more political stability than some of the other places even with all of this. up to this point. Now, for people over the age of 65 who are old enough to have been adults under both communism and capitalism,

Remember, only 20% reported an approval in the shift to a multi-party system and a market economy, both. And older Ukrainians who had experienced life in the USSR said overwhelmingly that they were now, in 2009, not satisfied with their life. 15% reported life satisfaction during the same survey. And in 2009, all in all, 62% of Ukrainians said people were worse off under capitalism than they had been under communism.

World War II, as we know, had been a massive fight between the fascists, right, the Bandera-style Hitler supporters who murdered innocent Ukrainians by the thousands, and the USSR who defended Ukraine and expelled those murderous genociders from their land. These people are overwhelmingly not siding with the Nazis. Not in 2009. So this stamp thing is a real slap in the face to most Ukrainians who are starting to think progressively that the United States just stole their election because...

This guy's actions are not matching up with what most people in Ukraine want or do. Now, it's also worth noting that that same year, 46% of Ukrainians said Russia's influence in Ukraine was a positive thing. They were happy Russia was involved in their politics or whatever degree of influence they had. Only 25 percent of people in Ukraine said Russia's influence there was bad, which is still it's a people. But you know what I mean? This is not.

This idea that Ukrainians hate Russia and hated the USSR and desperately want to be Western-aligned, it's not really matching up with the reality of polling being done at this time. So Yushchenko is not really representing...

The people of Ukraine's interests. He's representing the people of the United States interests very clearly. And in the United States, remember, we've got the UCCA, the old OUN that's active in our right wing Republican governments. Right. And they're the ones really calling the shots.

So from 2010 to 2014, political instability is mounting in Ukraine. Like there's tension going on. Like this is not a good arrangement. So our far right wackadoo president there, Viktor Yushchenko.

awards bandera additionally the title of national hero of ukraine then the nazi collaborator the nazi marking the culmination of his efforts to basically create this anti-Russian national narrative that sanitized the OUMB's history of Nazi collaboration and fascism and basically attempted to position Ukraine as being fundamentally opposed to Russia in some way.

This basically started in 2010. Now, the European Parliament, for its part, is like, um, you can't really, you know, like... say that a nazi dude is a national hero if you want to align yourselves with europe like pretty famously we're not into the nazi thing you can't like do that uh ukraine you shanko so The UCCA-affiliated Ukrainian World Congress then gets outraged by this and accused the EU of, quote, another attempt to rewrite Ukrainian history during World War II.

Which is wild because this is not disputed that this guy was a Nazi. Everybody knows this guy is a Nazi. But the UCCA is now helping to try to sanitize the image of Bandera from the United States. I think this is I mean, this is. kind of interesting because eventually it will go like i mean they'll always say we're not nazis but it will eventually go to like look but like maybe the nazis had a good idea right like that is like it goes from like

Not Nazis. Come on. What the fuck are you talking about? You're crazy. Dude, would it really be so bad if we were? Yeah. Yes, and this is exactly what's happening. And that's why if you're ever talking to somebody about Ukraine and their takes seem a little weird, save yourself a lot of time and ask them if...

they think bandera was a nazi or not right most people with a brain are gonna be like yeah that guy was a fucking nazi somebody who's extremely pedantic might be like well he wasn't technically a nazi i guess because nazis were all german but he was a nazi collaborator for sure like Anybody who's like, no, or like, or like menses around the question, that person is just like a weird right wing wackadoo, too. They are a Nazi, basically. Again, Madeline's opinion is that all Ukrainian Americans.

Nazis. Not all Ukrainian Americans love Bandera. That is insane to say. I'm making it. I know. I know. Okay. Okay. So. On its website, the UCCA starts dismissing historical accounts of Banderas collaboration with Nazis as, quote, Soviet propaganda, which is absolutely bonkers. And it's worth noting. we're in the 2000s no oh yeah we are we are but we are in the the soviet propaganda yeah the ussr doesn't exist anymore first second of all again this is not disputed not even a little bit

Not even close. It is not propaganda. And Bandera himself and all the OUN people were like, yes, we would love to kill Jews. Yay, Hitler, we will help you kill Jews. And then people in Ukraine were like, oh my God, the OUN and Stephen Bandera are killing Jews. Like, nobody's debating this. I cannot wait for someone to clip. Yes, we want to.

i like okay it's it's all bandera all right this not me okay so she says oh i mean i you know i think that what bandera and his people did is so fucking repulsive and disturbing the idea that you live in a country who would put a man like that on a fucking stamp in your country must feel so upsetting and disturbing and so many ukrainian people were so upset about this like like we have nazis here in the united states for sure we definitely have nazis um

think about how upset people would be if you put charlie kirk on a stand no a lot of people would be stoked right like a lot of people would be stoked but like it's content okay charlie kirk did not even murder uh a hundred thousand jewish people I will also point out that like we do, you know, commemorative stamps for a lot of presidents who not criminals, more criminals of like huge numbers.

for whatever reason it seems more egregious because with bandera it was like his neighbors yeah right it was like i know that fucking sucks but it's like it's bad either way it's your country man it's your like i think the thing too is like Nazis are the one thing we all agree on are bad. That's why even people who are Nazis are like, I'm not a Nazi. Because it's so bad. We all know it's bad. I'm allowing myself this one digression. Yes.

I've told you the story about my friend who grew up thinking bad guys were cool. My Jewish friend. Oh, tell him again, I guess. Who, when he was a kid.

His favorite movie was the Indiana Jones series. I can't remember which one. I love the Indiana Jones movies. And he was like, bad guys are cool and they have better outfits. And so he was asked to design... wrapping paper for christmas at school one day when he was in elementary school oh no and he just covered it in swastika oh my god oh this is like how when i did drew drew is jewish and would like make everything into swastikas and one day i was like

all right, dude, I gotta ask, what's up with swastika? And he was like, Swazi? So what's he funny? And I was like, I do not understand you. I do not understand you. You are Jewish. I will give you this pass. This is funny to you in some way to make the fruit from the farmer's market into a sastaka. I cannot condone or engage in this behavior with you, but more power to you, my Jewish love of my life. Lovely person.

I do think there is a certain sort of logic, because as meaning in popular culture, Nazism has been emptied out of all sort of historical meaning, and it's just like... cartoon bad guy yeah I think for Drew's thing is he because he grew up in like the 80s punk scene he was like oh these guys were like cosplaying LARP or losers anyway so it was like a way to like

Maybe like devalue the significance of the imagery or something. Yeah, I guess. But I think, right, like in American popular culture, it was pretty like pretty devalued in terms of like it had been like emptied of meaning. Yeah. By like the 70s where it was like.

Those are if you need a bad guy. Just like put a swastika on something. Yeah. I mean, meanwhile, they were literally in the Republican Party and in our government. The actual Nazis is wild. So, OK. So January 17th, 2010 comes around. And what do we have?

We have a new election. So we've got the Western Bakushenko running again. But guess what? This time the United States isn't sending out election observers. So guess how much of the popular vote he gets? I'm going to say. Less than two-fifths. That was the last time. We're going to go less than one-fifth. Five percent. Okay. So.

Deeply unpopular man. All this Bandera shit was... I mean, like, right, like, he also had kind of fucked up the, like, he couldn't form a stable government. He couldn't form a stable government. He was talking about how awesome all these Nazis were, but arguably... It means he probably didn't actually win the last election and the United States just kind of swung it for him. Meanwhile, Yanukovych earns 35 percent of the vote and Timoshenko earns 25 percent. Remember her? So.

Per Ukrainian law, this means that Yanukovych and Temoshenko have to have a runoff election to see who wins. And we've got most of Western Ukraine supporting Temoshenko and most of Eastern Ukraine supporting Yanukovych. So Yanukovych wins with 49 percent of the vote compared to Timoshenko's 45 percent. And he becomes president.

And so what do you think international people do? International? The international community, in air quotes. He stole the election. Oh, my God. He stole the election. Yep. International observers declare the election. though, is fair. So you can't, nothing actually happened. But Timoshenko is like, I'm not recognizing it. I think it must be fake. And she and her supporters boycott his inauguration on February 25th, 2010. Now I want to take a second to say my assessment of Timoshenko.

is that she's kind of like an opportunist. She just loves her and her stuff she's about. I don't think she's really bought and paid for by the U.S. government. I think she's just kind of like a drama queen, maybe, from what I can tell. Madeline. Yes. Have you looked up a picture of this woman? No, what does she look like?

Just check out the fucking hair. Her hair is wild. She's got a Heidi braid on her head. She is a drama queen. This hair says everything. Wow. This woman. This woman I think is really into her. That's what I think she's into. And you know what? She is girlbossing. That's sick. She is girlbossing in the truest sense of the word. So she is like, this election's unfair. Not because she's being paid by the U.S., but because she just really thinks she should have won because she thinks she's great.

And I do respect the energy. I do respect the energy. I gotta say, look, she's got, I believe this is called a Peter Pan collar. She does have a Peter Pan costume. This is... She's a whimsical and fantastical way of dressing. Honestly, I'm going to say... This is very interesting. It is, uh, like... early mid-2000s like Bella and Sebastian style twee. She looks very twee. Like this is... Like if you gave her a ukulele or a harp, it would make sense.

That just made me hate her. We ruined it. Well, you know, that's what's going on here. I hate the ukulele. It's the worst instrument. You can give her a harp. I said either one.

A heart might be worse. Okay. All right. Well, so she is like, no, this must be fraudulent because I, Timoshenko, did not win. And we all know. I'm fabulous, right? So she and her supporters boycott his inauguration in February. Parliament... then launches a vote of no confidence against timoshenko in parliament she was still the prime minister remember and parliament is like this timoshenko chick is out of her mind we gotta get her out of here she's super wackadoo so a new prime minister

is installed named Nikola Azarov of the Party of Regents. And the 2006 reform that had granted the prime minister extended power, they overturned that. They're like, this Yushchenko guy was a mess. We're undoing this thing he did about the prime minister.

So in April, Ukraine agrees to extend... a lease to russia of a port in crimea and it was originally set to expire in 2017 but daily breathing extended to 2042 now in exchange ukraine is supposed to receive a reduction in the price of russian natural gas and this will come back later so just put a little pin in that Russia's leasing a port from them okay dang NATO meanwhile the whole thing about like yes we're definitely gonna welcome you know Ukraine into NATO this kind of falls apart And...

They're like, all right, we're not going to do that. You know, we're making deals with Russia. They're our neighbor. We're not going to do the NATO thing. It's going to antagonize them very clearly. So in June of 2010, Ukraine officially declares we're not going to join NATO. And this improves their relationship with Russia. to some. EU leaders though get mad at this because I guess we all know it's important for the EU to approve of your country's relationship with its neighbor for some reason.

So meanwhile, in the USA, that UCCA group, remember the Bandera OUN Nazi collaborators, they honored the 60th anniversary of the death of Roman. Shukovic, who had been the OUNB commander of the Nachigal battalion that had slaughtered Jews in Lviv and Belarus, calling this guy a hero who fought for honor and righteousness.

So we're just normalizing Nazis in Ukraine here in the United States. And Russia is like, there's some increasing public relationship being built between Americans and these anti-establishment opposition forces in Ukraine. And Russia comes forward and is like, look, we're not stupid. We see what the West is doing in Ukraine. We are prepared to take drastic action if you in the West continue to use Ukraine as a tool against us.

Like, this is not fucking happening. Get out of our backyards. So, 2011. Former Prime Minister Timoshenko gets convicted of abuse in power in connection with that 2009 natural gas deal with Russia, and she gets sentenced to a seven-year prison sentence.

She can't do a Heidi Braid in prison. She probably did. Her prison outfits were probably fabulous, if I had to guess. Meanwhile, the National Endowment for Democracy in the United States, which is the CIA's NGO, which we have a whole episode about if that interests you, they start to...

tried to use a bunch of money to stoke revolution and manipulate media and elections in ukraine which we've been doing this in other countries for forever whatever so they allocate three million dollars nearly 2.9 million dollars in spending on Ukraine alone in 2011. And I...

As Al Akbar reporting says on this, quote, the stated goals of supporting civil society and promoting accountability often mask two key objectives. The first one is aggressive privatization of state owned enterprises. And the second is creating political parties that reflect. So this is how Al Akbar Press basically describes the National Endowment for Democracy and what they're up to. And this is the group that gives nearly $3 million in funding towards these types of endeavors in.

Ukraine. Now, this is important because from 2011 to 2014, we're going to see a huge ramp up in the spending. Now, I also want people to remember, in 2009, we had polling showing that Ukraine was actually pretty pro-Russia, right? We're going to see that start to change the more the United States pumps money into into Ukraine via the National Endowment for Democracy. So this is important. Keep note of. So 2012, net upset spending in Ukraine to three point.

$3 million. And Timoshenko's interior minister, Yuri Lutsenko, gets convicted of abuse of power as well and sentenced to four years in prison. Now, allegations of political motivation for these imprisonments follow mostly by the European Union. Remember? So Timushenko had kind of been their girl up to this point, maybe. And Ukraine ends up co-hosting the UEFA European Championship football tournament like soccer match. And a lot of EU countries boycott it.

just because of Timoshenko's imprisonment. So this becomes kind of a hotbed political issue for the West. Now, October parliamentary elections happen. Former minor party, party of the region, they emerge as a clear winner. They get 185 seats in parliament and Mikula Azarov becomes prime minister. Timoshenko's party only gets 101 seats.

And this other party, Vitaly Klitschko's Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reforms, UDAR, they get 40 seats. Now, what's notable about this election, though, is a new far-right extremist political party called Svoboda, aka Freedom, ultra-nationalist following in the footsteps and legacy of the OUN and Bandera, they win 37 seats, which is not insignificant. And they literally are derived from the Nazi-affiliated OUN party that still exists today. So from prison, Timoshenko.

goes on a hunger strike like she's just she's like i'm striking ah i'm not eating um But even the EU parliament is like, this election is fair. Sorry you did not win. So everyone ultimately accepts the results. And I guess she starts eating again. Now, by December of 2012, Prime Minister Azeroth forms a government with the support of both communist and

and independent deputies in the parliament. Now, also this year, something else happens. The United States... Gets even more interest, I guess, in trying to buy shit in Ukraine because this new organization is formed called the Center UA or the Center United Action. Now, it's in part founded by...

The billionaire eBay guy, Pierre Omidyar. Do you know this guy? Slightly. Okay, so this guy is our friend Lizzie's favorite billionaire because he's... a weirdo um and she says this ironically obviously so he became a billionaire because he found ebay right uh but he also was famous because it turned out that he was spending a lot of time on second life pretending to be like this weird and he ran a flicker account just taking pictures of

himself on second life and people found his flicker account and it's like really really weird so he's a weirdo so he forms in part with some other people this group the center ua and it is like a coordinating group of The New Citizens Public Campaign, which is a massive umbrella campaign overseeing 40 NGOs that were all active in Ukraine.

And Omidyar gave it over half a million dollars, which sounds like a lot of money, I guess. But, you know, he's a billionaire. So it's not actually that much money. But remember, propaganda is cheap. So also. And some money comes in to Center UA from something called Packed In, which is a project funded by USAID. So basically we've got...

Omidyar, billionaire, giving this group money. We've got USA, the U.S. government, giving this group money. And Century UA is overseeing 40 NGOs, all doing different operations to try to win influence and power in Ukraine. And another key group funding this. Obviously, if you had to guess, who would it be? Have we done USAID yet? We did. We did USAID and Omidyar, the billionaire. One more group funding this.

God, I don't know. National Endowment for Democracy. Oh, gosh, sorry. Of course. It's always National Endowment for Democracy. They're funding it. So according to investigative journalist Douglas Valentine, who's the one who basically spends his career now talking about the CIA based on these huge amounts of interviews he did with the agents. The new citizens campaign would come to play a big role in protests that would follow. Now, Center UA, when talking about a Valentine's set,

Quote, to me, it looks like a CIA facilitated mechanism to create a crisis in Ukraine and exploit it. The 40 NGOs it coordinates are perfectly placed to provide cover for covert CIA political action. Now, it's important to note that's just him speculating based on his understanding of the CIA. We can't prove that. But we do know that Center UA journalists do provide favorable press for pro-USA politicians operating in Ukraine.

And the Century UA itself stated that its purpose was to pull Ukraine out of the Russian orbit and deliver it to Western corporations. So they're pretty transparent about this. And a few years after Century UA gets established, for example, Joe Biden, then vice president of the time, his son Hunter Biden actually ends up being really high up in the largest natural gas company in Ukraine. So we know there is some interest in this. No, I mean, this is OK. So back.

This intersected U.S. politics, right? Because in the 2015-2016 campaign season, no, I'm sorry, 2019-2020 campaign season, it... uh the trump admin then in power relentlessly hammered on the fact that hunter bite had all of these bizarre corrupt interests and like natural gas companies in Ukraine. Yes. And it was one of those things where it was like, he's not wrong. I mean, it was true. It was. It is true. It was weird. He like.

I don't know how to say that without sounding like I'm not like a Trump person, but it's like Hunter Biden did like, why was Hunter Biden all mixed up with Ukrainian natural gas shit? It's very, very weird. I mean, I'm sure Donald Trump is mixed up in just as weird. No, he very much is. Yeah, they're all fucking weird. They're all slimeballs. They're all slimeball rich guys who want to fuck us over so they can get richer. OK, so.

Valentine talks about this and says, quote, the Obama regime and its privateering corporate partners overthrew the pro-Russian Ukraine government and installed a government packed with neo-Nazis and American elites. The average Ukrainian citizen doesn't benefit, just the super.

predator American elites who organized the coup. So what coup are we talking about? Well, potentially the 2004 thing was a coup. Jury's out on that. That's looking suspicious. Are we at Euromaidan yet? But we're getting into Euromaidan. So.

I feel like this starts in 2013. I kind of feel like this is a good natural place for us to stop. Okay. And we can start next week's episode getting into the meat and potatoes of it. But what I want to challenge people to really think about is like, look. He is not popular in the West to acknowledge that Ukraine has a neo-Nazi problem. But just because it's not popular doesn't mean it's not real. Maybe it's very much real. And I think we owe it to ourselves.

to confront the truth, even if it's uncomfortable for you, if maybe you're new to thinking about politics in this way, if you're a person who wants to do the right thing and all you've seen everywhere is save Ukraine, save Ukraine, right? I think it's important to note that, like, Ukraine...

is caught in the middle of a power struggle, right? And it's being dominated by, yeah, neo-Nazi Western-backed forces. And Ukraine does need to be saved. It needs to be safe from the West. It needs to be safe from the United States.

And we're going to see that Ukrainians actually have a good idea of what they want and what that looks like for them. And all we have to do is respect it. But when we get into Euromaidan and the protests that follow and what's really setting the stage for the situation in Ukraine today. You're going to have to really understand of Ukraine as a diverse place full of diverse people with diverse political outlooks in the world. And I think it's important as a Westerner to remember you can't just.

Find a random person from a random country and decide whatever they tell you about their country is true. And the example I always give is, like, imagine if you plucked a random American from Kentucky and asked him what he thought about the United States. Right?

Kentucky's a deeply conservative place. You probably would get a deeply conservative right-wing opinion. I'm sorry. Actually, I'm going to push back on that. You don't think Kentucky's a conservative place? No, Kentucky's a conservative place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, right, like, but, like... I will say that the largest metropolitan area, so statistically, in Kentucky is Louisville, which is like a liberal, you know what I mean. Okay. Right? Like a holdout.

Right. It's like Fresno in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley. Right. And so just statistically, if you plug a random Kentucky in, they're probably from Louisville. Okay, what about Alabama? We'll say Alabama.

If you pluck a random person from Alabama, odds are you're going to get a pretty conservative political opinion. That doesn't mean that's the opinion you need to agree with just because it's the one person from there that you heard. You are obligated, especially if you are an American and your tax dollars are getting used to destabilize these places.

you're obligated to do research to assess all sides of your situation to get to the bottom of what's going on and to form an educated opinion yourself using your brain with information you find readily available and in doing that you have to know that sometimes people from that country are going to disagree with you and that's the right that's fine not everybody has the same politics but that doesn't mean they

You just go off and support neo-Nazis because one random wackadoo from Ukraine loves neo-Nazis. Or that doesn't mean that you deny that Stephen Bandera was a Nazi or at the very least a Nazi collaborator. Just because some weirdos in Ukraine have suddenly decided he's not and he's great. Like, you know, you don't do that. Right. And I want to also put it out there that, like.

The people from Ukraine whose voices we do not hear in the United States that we don't hear from enough are the people in eastern Ukraine. Their voices are not made readily available to us. Those are the voices of Ukrainians that we're not allowed to hear. Right. Because they don't agree with us. I mean, we are allowed to hear, for example, Andre Bell... Oh, fuck, let me find his last name. Who is very much an Eastern European guy.

andre balitski oh blitzki right like who's like an eastern if he's been fighting in eastern ukraine yeah right like he's not an eastern ukraine guy he's fighting on behalf of the west yeah no i mean he's not I'm just saying, if you were to pluck a random, you buy gay Andre Belitsky. Who is, spoiler alert. uh not a neo-nazi yeah yeah so this is the fun stuff that's important to remember so this is why you know just being from a place doesn't grant you

you know, special magic powers about that place. That means all of your politics are exactly right. If you're an American, you have to do your due diligence. You have to do your work. And you have an obligation if you're always your tax dollars, your funding. And I'm going to say the correct position to take is the anti-imperialist position 100 percent of the time.

And in this situation and very clear, the imperialist power is the United States. Yeah. I mean, like the analysis that I have heard sort of over and again is that a lot of this has to do with like. the eu for example wanting energy independence yeah right uh america looking at a circumstance that they created in the 1990s or that we created in the 1990s uh And thinking, okay, the sort of free-for-all free-market bullshit was fun. However...

It would be cooler if we had a more sort of bureaucratized control over Ukraine in order to better exploit the markets in Ukraine. Right. Like that has been so it's like. We had we had a fun wild party in the 90s. And now we're just going to go in there and we actually just do want all the things. Yes. Right.

That's totally it. So that's the kind of stuff to keep in mind before we get into next week's episode, which picks up in 2013. And it's going to be a wild one. And we're not even to 2014, the longest year that ever existed. I had a good.

2014 was a good year on the internet. It was a good year on Tumblr. I'll say that much. All right. So that's it for this week's episode. Thanks so much for joining us. If you want to hear more, you can check out our Patreon, patreon.com slash pick me up. I'm scared for $3 a month. And if three bucks a month is too much for you to spend right now. We totally get it, and we are just happy you're here.