Ukraine's ghosts of the past I (by CP)

They say 'One Picture is Worth a Thousand Words' ...

This particular picture shows a formation of the Ukrainian Azov volunteer batallion on parade in the Bundeswehr flecktarn uniforms they have chosen for themselves.

Having worn that uniform myself with pride (and without ski mask), I have a problem when I see them using it, given the fact that the troop presents their distinctive yellow flag with the Wolfsangel and the flag of the Azov Batallion.

Context matters, symbols matter, as does history, and the primary reason for my disgust is that what we are seeing here is in sum so clearly nazi symbolism that it takes wilfulness to ignore it.

♦ Reading the signs

Pea Soup
	The flecktarn pattern on their Bundeswehr Flecktarn uniforms is an evolved version of the 'pea soup' patterns used by the Waffen SS in WW-II.  The image shows Ukrainian veterans posing with a re-enactor in such a Waffen SS uniform, apparently reminiscing about the good old days. In that sense, the Azov Batallion's choice of camouflage pattern mirrors political choices Ukrainian nationalists made during World War II when they collaborated with Nazi Germany.
The Wolfsangel
	The Wolfsangel rune that can be seen on the flag and in the Badge of the Azov batallion is a symbol that was rather popular during National Socialism. It is in Germany a prohibited symbol. It's history of use is instructive: During W-II it was used by various Nazi organisations, including, among others, the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, the 4th SS Polizei Panzergrenadier Division, the 34th SS Volunteer Grenadier Division Landstorm Nederland.
The Black Sun
	The Black Sun (German Schwarze Sonne), or Sonnenrad (German for "Sun Wheel"), is an esoteric and occult symbol and has been used in a sun wheel mosaic incorporated into a floor of Wewelsburg Castle during the Nazi era. It is today it is being used in neo-Nazi circles. "Black Sun" (Chorne Sontse) is the title of the newspaper published by the Azov Battalion.
Synthesis: Azov Batallion badge
	The badge of the Azov batallion combines the Wolfsangel rune with the Ukrainian trident, the sea, and, in the background, the symbol of the Black Sun.
The Lion of Galizia
	To get back to Ukrainian veterans and SS uniforms - this is the badge of the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division Galizien, a Ukrainian volunteer unit recruited from Galizia. The below image, taken in Lviv in 2013, shows fans of the West-Ukrainian football club FC Karpaty Lviv showing colour in a match against FC Zorya Luhansk, from the ethnic Russian eastern Ukraine. Considering that the 14th Waffen SS Division was encircled and destroyed fighting the Red Army at Brody, the message could hardly be clearer.

That list is incomplete, but comprehensive enough to make the point: If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck ...

♦ A brief late history of Ukraine's brown soup and the Wolfsangel

Symbolic continuity ...

SNPU flag (Svoboda predecessor, 1999 - 2004) and PoU (2006 - present)	Svoboda Logo (2004 - present)	Azov Batallion Logo (2014 - present)	Azov Batallion flag (2014 - present)

In Ukraine the Wolfsangel symbol was used by SNPU (Social-National Party of Ukraine) till 2004 and is currently used by the Neo-Nazi Social-National Assembly and the Azov Battalion.

The party was co-founded in 1991 by Andriy Parubiy and Oleh Tyahnybok. In 2004 Tyahnybok became sole leader of the SNPU, and replaced the Wolfsangel with the symbol imitating the Tryzub and renamed the Party Svoboda. The SNPU's paramilitary arm Patriot of Ukraine (PoU) that had been founded in 1999 was dissolved on the occasion.

It  was refounded in 2006. PoU defines itself as a 'revolutionary vanguard of the Ukrainian social-nationalistic movement' that pursues the goal of 'a uniracial and uninational society'. Social-Nationalism as in Leninism-Marxism.

At the end of 2013, at the beginning of the Euromaidan protest movement, the PoU created the Right Sector along with other far-right and nationalist parties and groups, including: Trident of Stepan Bandera (Dmytro Yarosh), UNA-UNSO (Oleksandr Muzychko) and others.

These paramilitaries, organized in 100-man company-sized units called “sotins” or “hundreds” did most of the brutal streetfighting against Ukrainian riot police, eventually forcing Yanukovych and his administration to run for their lives.

The Azov Batallion is one of the volunteer units that then emerged from these paramilitaries to fight for the Ukrainian nationalist cause in the Ukrainian civil war. Azov uses the old flag of the SNPU/PoU. The continuity is not accidental but entirely deliberate.

 

♦ Outlook

Ukrainian ultranationalists are today the most fervent and vocal opponents of the Minsk II Agreement from 11 February 2015. It is an open question whether they can be controlled.

Excerpt from an OSCE Special Monitoring Mission report from 12 April 2015:

"At 9.35hrs on 12 April, upon arrival at Donetsk railway station (“Donetsk People’s Republic” (“DPR”)-controlled, 8km north-west of Donetsk city centre), the SMM witnessed heavy fighting between “DPR” and the Ukrainian Armed Forces in areas near the city visible from its position. Both the Ukrainian Armed Forces representative and the Russian Federation representative to the Joint Centre for Control and Co-ordination (JCCC) told the SMM that the Ukrainian side (assessed to be the Right Sector volunteer battalion) earlier had made an offensive push through the line of contact towards Zhabunki (“DPR”-controlled, 14km west-north-west of Donetsk), but the SMM was not able to verify this."

The revolutionary vanguard of the Ukrainian social-nationalist movement sees a ceasefire as treason and has as a result violated Minsk II frequently and is in no mood for an armistice. On 21 June 2015 Right Sector posted on their web site:

"We demand that the Poroshenko regime reject the Minsk agreements, and renew the offensive military operations aimed at liberating occupied territories [in eastern Ukraine],"

So far, Poroshenko seems intent to adhere to Minsk II. But then, for how long will he matter? He has apparently taken the unusual step to consult the Ukrainian constitutional court to clarify that the removal by force of his predecessor, the evil Yanukovych, was illegal. Quote from the document (unavailable in english):

"I ask the court to acknowledge that the law ‘on the removal of the presidential title from Viktor Yanukovych’ as unconstitutional"

Curiouser and curioser.

Comments

[rkka]

Doubtful. So far, the proxy war is sustainable for Russia and the DNR, and it is Ukraine that is collapsing economically and politically as we speak. Barring NATO military intervention to stave off Ukrainian military collapse, the Russian armed forces will not cross the border.

It's the prospect of that NATO military intervention, into a conflict NATO does not really understand, that contains the gravest of risks.

[William R. Cumming]

Did the US promise the Ukraine military protection in return for surrendering their nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War in some open or secret arrangement?

[William R. Cumming]

Is Merkle fearful or just recalcitrant that the fig leaf is being torn off German soft power [or possible hard power?]?

[David Habakkuk]

rkka,

All this takes me back many years. In an introductory note to the English translation of Makhmut Gareev's 1985 study of Mikhail Frunze, a pivotal figure in the creation of the Red Army, one Joseph D. Douglass Jr wrote:

'The importance of the first strike in nuclear war is stressed. The logic is the same as set forth in V.D. Sokolovskiy's landmark text from the 1960s, Military Strategy.' This was the standard interpretation of Soviet military thinking, championed by Albert Wohlstetter, Richard Pipes, and figures like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.

It is their successful attempt to claim that their analyses and prescriptions were vindicated by the retreat and collapse of Soviet power which has made it possible for them to lead the United States towards disaster.

I have just looked again at the translation of an – incandescent – letter from Gareev which was inserted into the copy I bought. Among other things, he points out that the Soviet Union had 'solemnly taken upon itself the commitment not to be the first to use nuclear weapons.'

Actually, Gareev was the theorist of the conventional strategy which developed, after the Soviets concluded in the late Sixties and early Seventies both that a general war with NATO need not necessarily escalate to an all-out nuclear conflict, and that the notion of victory in such a conflict was meaningless. It could not be anything other than an irretrievable catastrophe.

The study published under the name of Sokolovskiy to which Douglass referred had actually been compiled and co-authored by General-Mayor Larionov. In the late Eighties, he emerged as one of the military theorists most closely associated with Gorbachev's 'new thinking', if not indeed the principal military figure associated with it.

When I and a colleague interviewed Larionov for the BBC at the start of 1989, unfortunately, we did not know of this background. Likewise, I was not in a position to grasp what was at issue when he talked about a Soviet theorist of the Twenties called Alexander Svechin.

Among the many drivers of change at this time was the fact that the conventional strategy had proved economically ruinous. But beyond this, there was the collapse in faith in large areas of the Soviet elite in Marxism-Leninism, and also a deep-seated fear of nuclear war.

One of the central objections of Soviet military theorists to Western-style 'deterrence' theory was, quite precisely, that it took inadequate account of the danger that, in a kind of Sarajevo-style situation where events might run out of control, it might be impossible not to implement nuclear threats.

And indeed, when in response to the collapse of their conventional power the Russian government adopted Western-style theories of 'deterrence', Gareev had more or less to be dragged kicking and screaming into acceptance of the change.

(See http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/rusrma.htm .)

By the time Gareev's 1985 study was published, two notable Western intelligence analysts turned academics – the American scholar-diplomat Ambassador Raymond Garthoff, and Michael MccGwire, who had been the Royal Navy's principal expert on its Soviet counterpart – had established that the 'neocon' interpretation was simply wrong.

From mid-1987, they were pointing out that changes in Soviet negotiating positions indicated the likelihood of a decisive shift to the kind of defensive strategy which Svechin had championed, against Tukhachevskii, in the Twenties.

Both, moreover, had come to believe that the objections of Soviet theorists to Western theorising about 'deterrence' had a great deal of cogency.

Unfortunately, the neocons, who are as good at PR as they are incompetent at strategic analysis, were able to persuade everybody that changes in the Soviet Union they had signally failed to foresee were a vindication of the analytical frameworks which had made it impossible for them to foresee them.

Having successfully pushed the Russians into using the same kind of approaches as we once used, we seem blindly oblivious to the possibility that we may be creating precisely the kind of situation in which their underlying problems could prove fatal.

[FB Ali]

I doubt that Poroshenko has enough power to decide one way or another. He's just making the most of his position by filling his own (already pretty full) pockets.

The real power appears to be in the hands of Yats and the neoNazis. And they are controlled by the US neocons. When the former think they are ready to resume "open hostilities", and the latter OK that, the war will start again.

Have you seen Senator Durbin's letter to Yats published by the Saker? (It's at http://tinyurl.com/qxnrjhh ).

[VietnamVet]

CP,

I want to make a belated thanks. I have been wrapped up thinking about the divisions in the USA raised by Donald Trump and the lowering of the Confederate battle flag. However, this is more important. My old unit in Vietnam is training these troops near Lviv:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32349308

I no longer think this is incompetence. From a strategic sense what is best for the citizens of America and Germany is to keep Greece within our alliances, our people prosperous, and avoid a nuclear war with Russia. Yet, clearly the policy of the Western rulers is the exact opposite. All else are diversions to avoid us from seeing the truth.

[rkka]

"One of the central objections of Soviet military theorists to Western-style 'deterrence' theory was, quite precisely, that it took inadequate account of the danger that, in a kind of Sarajevo-style situation where events might run out of control, it might be impossible not to implement nuclear threats.

And indeed, when in response to the collapse of their conventional power the Russian government adopted Western-style theories of 'deterrence', Gareev had more or less to be dragged kicking and screaming into acceptance of the change."

Theories of deterrence fail to consider that war is the continuation of political intercourse. They fail to consider that if one's policy has convinced the government that one is seeking to deter that you pose a dire and immediate threat to their national independence, you have created conditions under which what you think are your deterrent threats will actually provoke the behavior you are seeking to deter.

And that's where Nuland's coup in Kiev last February have landed us.

And there is no indication that folks in DC are even capable of understanding this.

[rkka]

Not that I am aware of.

However, folks in DC, unaccustomed as they are to having their cherished policies visibly and embarrassingly defeated, will probably raise the stakes by militarily intervening in Eastern Ukraine at that point, expecting Putin to back down.

And that's when the Russians will crack open some Instant Sunshine.