04.05.2018, Washigton.
The USA’s tacit approval and tolerance encouraged the establishment of neo-Nazism in Ukraine, Russian studies expert Steven Cohen said during a discussion on the Cold War between Russia and the US, The Nation magazine reported on May 2.
Commenting the “highly selective nature” of the Cold War confrontation, Cohen stressed that the US focuses on Russia’s guilt and “omits” its own actions. Among the “omissions” he pointed out the tacit support of the upsurge of neo-Nazism in Ukraine, which, the expert believes, is the main point of confrontation between the two countries. Americans must know what really happened, Cohen said.
“That the snipers who killed scores of protestors and policemen on Kiev’s Maidan Square in February 2014, thereby triggering a “democratic revolution” that overthrew the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and brought to power a virulent anti-Russian, pro-American regime — it was neither democratic nor a revolution, but a violent coup unfolding in the streets with high-level support — were sent not by Yanukovych, as is still widely reported, but instead almost certainly by the neo-fascist organization Right Sector (organization banned in Russia ― Rossa Primavera Information Agency) and its co-conspirators,” Cohen said.
He also said that the burning of Russians in Odessa in May 2014 reawakened memories of “Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during World War II.” This subject has been all but deleted from the American mainstream narrative even though it remains a painful and revelatory experience for many Ukrainians.
“That the Azov Battalion … which has played a major combat role in the Ukrainian civil war and now is an official component of Kiev’s armed forces, is avowedly “partially” pro-Nazi,” Steven Cohen continued, “as evidenced by its regalia, slogans, and programmatic statements, and well-documented as such by several international monitoring organizations. Congressional legislation recently banned Azov from receiving any U.S. military aid, but it is likely to obtain some of the new weapons recently sent to Kiev by the Trump Administration due to the country’s rampant network of corruption and black markets.”
At the same time, the expert noted that Americans cannot be faulted for not knowing these facts, because the subject of neo-Nazism has not been discussed in the mainstream US media. Cohen also blamed George W. Bush’s administration, under the tenure of which the first “orange revolution” took place in Ukraine, for cultivating neo-Nazism. As for the current moment, he recalled that when the founder of the neo-Nazi party, Andrey Parubiy, arrived in Washington in 2017, he was greeted by the conservatives John McCain and Paul Ryan.
Also, international NGOs such as Amnesty International, according to Cohen, have been reporting human rights violations by neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine over a long period of time. The expert also said that tolerance towards fascists will become an indelible stain on the USA’s reputation. He stressed that “the acid test today may be our elites’ reaction to neo-fascism in U.S.-supported Ukraine.”
Just recently, American politicians and officials were saying officially that the coup of 2013-2014 in Ukraine was a democratic change of power, while any evidence of Ukraine’s banderization was ignored by the American side.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
