17.04.2022, Geneva.
Since 2014, the West has supported and armed Ukrainian militants from Nationalist battalions, which are guilty of numerous crimes against civilians: rapes, tortures, and massacres. This is stated in research by Jacques Baud, a former colonel in the Swiss General Staff and former strategic intelligence officer, published on April 15 in the Spanish newspaper Diario16. Baud was the chief policy officer for UN peacekeeping operations.
The title of the research is “The West Created the Conditions for the Ukrainian Explosion“. The author looks at the entire history of the conflict since the 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine.
According to him, in 2014 the Ukrainian army was in a deplorable state, and young people did not want to serve in it. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry asked NATO to help make its armed forces more “attractive”. Because Bo had already worked on similar projects within the UN, NATO asked him to participate in a program to restore the image of Ukraine’s armed forces. “But it’s a long process and the Ukrainians wanted to act quickly,” Baud noted.
Then, to cover the shortage of soldiers, the Ukrainian government turned to nationalist units. As of 2020, they made up about 40 percent of Ukraine’s forces and numbered about 102,000, according to Reuters. They were armed, financed and trained by the US, Britain, Canada, France, and others, 19 countries in total, Baud claims.
“Since 2014, the nationalist battalions have been operating in Donbass with Western support. These militants are prone to violence, spread disgusting ideology, and are fiercely anti-Semitic. They consist of fanatical and violent people. The most famous of them is the Azov regiment (organization banned in Russia), whose emblem reminds us of the 2nd SS Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’, honored in Ukraine for the ‘liberation’ of Kharkov in 1943, and then the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre in France in 1944,” writes Baud.
The characterization of Ukrainian paramilitary units as “Nazis” or “neo-Nazis” is considered Russian propaganda. However, Baud notes, this is also the view of the Times of Israel newspapers or the West Point Academy’s Counterterrorism Center. In 2014, Newsweek magazine compared them to ISIL (organization banned in Russia) militants, Baud writes.
“So the West has supported and continued to arm militias that have been guilty of numerous crimes against civilians since 2014: rapes, tortures and massacres,” Baud writes.
Baud stresses that the integration of these paramilitaries into Ukraine’s National Guard was in no way accompanied by “denazification,” as some claim.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
