|
Ukraine Puts Neo-Nazi In Charge Of Government Institution
The government of Ukraine has named a major fascist ideologist as the new head of its history institution.
Poland has an Institute of National Remembrance established to educate, archive, and prosecute crimes against the Polish nation. It goes back to the General Commission for Research on Fascist Crimes, a body established in 1945 focused on investigating the crimes of the Nazi administration in Poland during World War II. It was later expanded to investigate presumed crimes against Poland under communist rule.
In 2006, shortly after the U.S. instigated 'Orange Revolution', Ukraine under then President Viktor Yushchenko established the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory under the cabinet. It was supposed to have a similar role as the Polish institution. It was however immediately taken over by fascists to white wash the crimes perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalist who had allied with the German Nazis.
In 2010, under the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, it was downgraded to a research institution led by Valery Soldatenko who opposed fascist Ukrainian nationalism.
After the U.S. instigated coup in 2014 Soldatenko was fired. A number of right-wing nationalist followed to lead the Institute of National Memory. In late 2024 the latest one, Anton Drobobovich, was fired for not being sufficiently radical (machine translation):
The Cabinet of Ministers dismissed Anton Drobovich from the post of head of the Institute of National Memory. His contract ended, but they did not renew it.
…
Recall that Drobovich proposed to make the Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian people in Kiev a symbol of LGBT people. He believes that the dismantling of the monument can be avoided only if its former value is completely replaced.
He also called the Red Army "commie detachments", although he condemned the nationalist march in honor of the SS division "Galicia".
Last week the Ukrainian government named his replacement (machine translation):
Alexander Alferov, a former officer of the Third Assault Brigade and [former] Azov battalion, became the new head of the Institute of National Memory. The decision on the appointment was made by the Cabinet of Ministers.
…
"Alexander Alferov is a Ukrainian historian, TV and radio host, public and military figure. Since 2010, he has been a research associate at the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He is the author, co-author and compiler of 15 books and more than 100 scientific articles. With the beginning of the full-scale invasion, he became an officer of the special operations forces "Azov-Kiev", from September 2022 — an officer of the 3rd separate assault brigade, head of the humanitarian training and information support group of the psychological support department of personnel. At the same time, he was the head of the expert group on de-russification in Kiev. He has the rank of major of the reserve in Kiev," the website of the Ministry of Culture says.
Alferov is a fascist. He was the ideological enforces of the Azov brigade.
Azov, you will remember, is the fascist militia which has been pampered by western media which had once described it as "a Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization" to later call it a simple military brigade.
In 2014 the BBC was still warning of it:
Run by the extremist Patriot of Ukraine organisation, which considers Jews and other minorities "sub-human", external and calls for a white, Christian crusade against them, it sports three Nazi symbols, external on its insignia: a modified Wolf's Hook, a black sun (or "Hakensonne") and the title Black Corps, which was used by the Waffen SS.
Azov is just one of more than 50 volunteer groups fighting in the east, the vast majority of which are not extremist, yet it seems to enjoy special backing from some top officials: …
Azov had since followed the path of the Waffen-SS. It has grown from a volunteer group into a battalion, then a regiment, then a brigade, which was split into two (currently fighting each other), each of which is now being upgraded to corps levels. Azov by now, is a full fledged army which has its own financial sources and does its own recruiting.
Alexander Alferov, the new head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, has been deeply involved with Azov.
In 2014, when the founder and leader of Azov Andriy Biletsky became a member of parliament, Alferov became his press secretary. From winter 2014 to June 2015, he was also the head of the press service of the Azov Regiment.
From April 2022, he was an officer of the Azov-Kyiv Special Forces, and from September an officer of the 3rd Assault Brigade, head of the humanitarian training and information support group of the staff psychological support department.
Marta Havryshko, a Ukrainian historian at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, commented on Alferov's new position:
Marta Havryshko @HavryshkoMarta – 20:03 UTC · Jun 27, 2025
The first "Azovite" in Zelensky's government has arrived.
Oleksandr Alfyorov is now the head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory—the country’s main state memory authority. To get the post, he left the ranks of the Azov 3rd Assault Brigade.
He curated his brigade's museum exhibit in Kyiv, "In Steel Storms," which glorified the Waffen-SS Division Galicia. During his time in the unit, one of its subdivisions began using a modified SS Dirlewanger patch as its official emblem.
So why stop there? Maybe the Institute’s new logo will be the Dirlewanger insignia too 🤔
After his appointment as head the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory Alferov gave an interview (video).
As Strana reported (machine translation):
The new head of the Institute of National Memory told why it is impossible to compare Putin with Hitler
The head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, and the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, cannot be compared, because the latter was educated and "brought up on high culture."
This was stated by the new head of the Institute of National Memory of Ukraine Alexander Alferov.
"How can you compare a person who received a German education, who was an artist, who was brought up on philosophy and, in fact, German culture-high culture-and compare with these people? No way. These are people who cannot be compared," Alferov said.
So Hitler, who never finished school, never pursued a degree, who sold his water color pictures to passer-bys in Munich after the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts had rejected him and who ended up as a private first class after the first world war was of 'higher culture' than Vladimir Putin, who is an actual lawyer with an additional degree in resource economics, a former colonel and black belt judoka?
[Alferov] also believes that it is impossible to compare the peoples of Nazi Germany and today's Russia. He called the Russians" not orcs, but goblins."
"How can you compare the German people, brought up in the spirit of law, obedience, with Protestant or Catholic, in general, powerful Christian ethics, with the people who live there, in the East, with goblins? And they also have their own name-Russians, of course. You know, when they started talking – Orcs, Orcs… No, not Orcs. Orcs are former elves. And these are really Russians," Alferov said.
Just imagine what this dude indoctrinated into the minds of young Azov recruits while he was the head of the humanitarian training of Azov. That he will now be in a role where he can indoctrinate all of Ukraine at a national level does not bode well for the country.
The thread’s closed now, but there was much discussion about “Kiev in three days” earlier. The current article is more on the Azov, but you can’t discuss the Ukrainian war without examining the Ultras now in control of the current Kiev administration so I hope not too far off topic.
On the “Kiev in three days” question I venture to offer the view I formed during 2022. Somewhat diffidently – I offered a view on Trump here on “b’s” site that looks a bit dumb now so am conscious that the same might happen in this case. But it’s what I’ve been thinking since 2022 so here goes.
The Russians were never that bothered about taking Kiev. Not as an objective in itself. What they were bothered about was avoiding finding themselves in the position we’d expected they’d find themselves in after they’d invaded Ukraine. Winning a quick military “victory” and then spending lives, time and money on fighting the subsequent guerrilla war.
The Russians sidestepped all that. They conducted a superbly planned and executed blitzkrieg attack that prevented the Kiev forces getting into the Donbass and that demolished the Ukrainian army as a coherent fighting force. That little job done – only took a week or so – they did what they’ve been doing ever since.
Instead of chasing all over Ukraine hunting down Ultras, and policing a powerful and well-equipped and well supported resistance, they sat back in the Donbass and allowed the Kiev forces to come to them. Good logistics, a Donbass population that was utterly determined, and greatly superior artillery and missile forces, ensured thereafter that the outcome of this war was never in doubt. Nor, sadly, the respective body counts.
If I had a pound for every time cries of “Putin Troll” followed any expression of that view in early 2022 I’d be a rich man. But it was the only logical view to take at the time and still is. Because that’s precisely what happened. The fictitious “Battle of Kiev”, and both the Russian and Western propaganda about it (because the Russian propaganda was just as misleading as the Western), must be examined in that context. It can only be examined in that context.
It must also be examined in the context of what is often, rather grandly, called the “Russian Way of War.” That’s usually taken as the integration of all aspects of conflict, internal and external political considerations, diplomatic considerations and moral considerations amongst them. But it can also be taken as the way the Russians work operationally. It’s not the way we in the West think they work.
The Russians don’t do war by following “The Plan”. No one does, except in the history books or in the popular press, and certainly not the Russians. They have a multiplicity of contingency plans. The skill – and we’ve seen repeated demonstrations of that skill – lies in tailoring each of the individual plans so that it “meshes” with the others whichever plan turns out to be the one to follow.
The battles around Kiev illustrate that to perfection.
“Kiev in three days”, in the sense we in the West have always taken it, was never on. That is, the taking of Kiev “Battle of Berlin” style against determined opposition. The Russians did not have enough troops up to do that even had they intended to; and some supply lines were vulnerable in the extreme. Had they intended to take the city like that, and even had they succeeded against the odds, they would have taken inordinate casualties and the city itself would have ended up a corpse strewn ruin.
We in the West imagined they had that in contemplation because, as Martyanov often explains so lucidly, we are nurtured on a false understanding of Soviet tactics in WWII. We believe the Russians defeated the Germans back then because they threw masses of men into combat, heedless of losses, until the Germans were overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers.
Very few military historians, not at the time the histories were written that set the pattern of our thinking and that still inform our popular myths now, understood the fluidity and complexity of Russian operational thinking at that time. Our popular myth is that the Russians throw in “meat attacks” and achieve their ends by brute force and heavy sacrifice.
Our propagandists tap into that popular myth today and still talk of “meat attacks” when they’re explaining why the Russians have gained this or that bit of ground. But that’s not how the Russians fight. Prigozhin’s disregard of casualties in Bakhmut is the exception that proves the rule – the Russian General Staff were not pleased with that excessive expenditure of men, convicts or not, and never adopted that approach themselves before or since.
That’s not to say that the Russians believe you can fight without taking casualties. They know they must lose men, and they know that some operations could well be casualty heavy; but they focus on minimising those casualties. They also focus, and here again our Western propagandists mislead us, on minimising civilian casualties. Given that approach, Gerasimov would have been contemptuous of any attempt to take Kiev by assault with the forces and logistics at his disposal at that time. As contemptuous as would my mechanic be were I to suggest servicing my car with a club hammer!
So what was the “plan” around Kiev, if it was not to be stormed? Since there is no direct line to the Russian General Staff we can only speculate. Best case, surrender. In that case the Russians had troops enough to keep order in the city after surrender. Plenty of Ultras around so quite a few troops would be needed for that.
Second best case, collapse of resistance. Had the Kiev administration fled instead of taking refuge in the basement that was a possibility.
Failing that, the third case. There were more than enough Russian troops around to keep the Kiev forces up north and prevent them coming down south to interfere with the key operations in the Donbass. That is what I mean by “meshing”. Whichever way the cat jumped in Kiev, the objective of holding Kiev forces up north was achieved.
I later discovered Trukhan stating that that was the chief purpose of the operations around Kiev: to hold the Kiev forces up there and block them from intervening where it mattered. Seems likely, but that doesn’t rule out the other cases that looked possible at the time. We must not forget that almost immediately after that first dramatic dawn strike on the Ukrainian communications centre down south, the Russians were beavering away in Belarus, later in Istanbul, trying yet another plan. Getting a political solution.
That again illustrated the multi-faceted and fluid Russian approach to war. From after the first week or so (my belief from 2021!) they knew they were up against whatever the combined West could throw at them. But nothing to lose by running the peace track concurrently. More meshing. They positioned themselves for either outcome.
They can’t be so fluid now. I believe that the Putin administration is running out of options to pick and choose between and make plans for. War has its own momentum. There are now too many Russians around whose blood is up. Many of them will be cruelly disappointed if Odessa is not taken. Some if Lvov isn’t, though I suspect Putin will do his best to avoid that. And there are few Russians around now who don’t expect Putin, however he does it, to put it out of the power of the West to use Ukraine as an attack dog against Russia. Putin must now neutralise Ukraine, remnant Ukraine if there is one and all. He termed it demilitarisation and denazificiation in 2022 but neutralisation is what it amounts to.
In practical terms, that means no more “look no hands” drone and missile attacks using Western munitions and ISR but employing Ukraine as the launch pad. It means no more sabotage and assassination attacks using Western ISR facilities and run out of the bases we set up for the purpose in Ukraine from 2014 on. It means an end to the ten years of shelling of and missile attacks on civilians in the Donbass. It means no more petal mines in the streets and parks of Donetsk. It means an end to the practice of taping Ukrainian Russian speakers to lamp posts. It means that this lot comes down:-
https://forward.com/news/462916/nazi-collaborator-monuments-in-ukraine/
War has its own momentum indeed. There are very few Russian now living in Russia who will be content with any other outcome to the war in Ukraine. Even fewer in the Russian General Staff.
As for Putin himself, he’s Russian too. Capable of holding multiple objectives in his mind and pursuing them simultaneously. He and Lavrov have been working away on the diplomatic and legalistic tack for a couple of wearisome decades now. But hasn’t Putin always known, from the days of Primakov’s loop way back, through Munich 2007 and Valdai 2014, right up to those fateful days of early 2022, hasn’t he always known that it would come to a scrap with the West; and hasn’t he always known how that scrap must end?
Posted by: English Outsider | Jul 1 2025 15:29 utc | 7
|
