| Protesters will gather this Saturday in solidarity with all democrats, progressives, anti-fascists, trade unionists, socialists, communists and communities including Jews, Gays and Roma, who have been targeted by fascist gangs, the police and security service in Ukraine. While our mass media blame Russia and Vladimir Putin for all Ukraine’s troubles, they replace critical facts with lies and fake news. NATO, western governments and the media claim that Russia “invaded” Ukraine, using satellite and photo images from other times and locations, lies which are still repeated today on a daily basis as ‘facts’. But the Kiev government has never cut diplomatic ties with Russia, let alone declared war. To this day it continues to import Russian gas, and even haggle endlessly over the price! Had a ‘Russian invasion’ of Ukraine really taken place there would have been a far more hysterical reaction from western governments and NATO. After the February 2014 coup, backed by the US to the tune of $5 billion, mass uprisings took place in Donetsk, Lugansk, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov, Odessa and Crimea against the far right which hijacked the Maidan anti-corruption protests. Anti-fascists seized local government institutions to prevent the fascist gangs, police and security service taking local control in an overwhelmingly peaceful movement movement. But supporters of the new regime in Kiev responded with extreme violence, including terrorism and assassinations, and the brutal massacre of over 50 Anti-Maidan activists at the Odessa House of Trade Unions on 2 May 2014. Three weeks after the Ukraine coup CIA Director John Brennan paid a secret visit Kiev, and barely a week later a so-called “Anti-Terrorist Operation” responded to these mass civilian uprisings by launching an all-out war with artillery, tanks, aircraft and missiles. It was only then that Russia stepped in to support the rebels in the eastern Donbas region by allowing ‘volunteers’ with military experience to join the anti-fascist struggle in the intense battles of 2014-15. Since then Russia has provided humanitarian and political support including regular convoys with medical and other supplies, given refuge to over a million Ukrainian exiles, and provided holidays for children from the Donbas. In 2015 dozens of heavily armed, openly Nazi militias were incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard, and now conducted joint patrols with the police to “maintain Ukrainian order”. They have smashed up Roma camps, trade union, socialist and communist offices, destroyed holocaust memorials, arrested, beaten and imprisoned opponents of the war, and abducted or assassinated many journalists and activists. The most powerful militia is the Azov Battalion, whose emblem is based on the that of the SS ‘Wolfsangel’ divison, in which Ukrainians who fought alongside the Germans in WW2. The National Guard is controlled by Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, the only minister to be reappointed in Oleksiy Honcharuk’s government in August. The Azov Battalion was brought under the control of the National Guard, controlled by Ukraine’s powerful Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, in 2015. Avakov was the only minister to be reappointed in Oleksiy Honcharuk’s government in August 2019. Adherence to fascist, openly Nazi ideology goes to the very top of the US and EU-backed government in Kiev, one of the dirtiest secrets which western governments are covering up with an avalanche of anti-Russian propaganda. After taking office in 2014, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko declared himself a ‘Banderite’, that is a follower of Stepan Bandera, whose faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists collaborated with Nazi Germany in the massacres and deportaion of 1.5 million jews and 70,000 Poles during WW2. Adherence to fascist, openly Nazi ideology goes to the very top of the US and EU-backed government in Kiev. In 2017 defence minister Yuri Biryukov using the neo-Nazi symbol ‘1488’ in a Facebook post – a code used internationally by nazis which combines a white supremacist message and ‘Heil Hitler’. In October 2019, a photo leaked on Facebook showed new prime minister Oleksiy Honcharuk at a far-right event in Kiev in front of a swastika-style banner. These claims of fascist influence in Ukraine are not some left-wing fantasy. In March 2019 a letter from the ambassadors of the leading G7 countries asked Arsen Avakov “to act against violent political extremist groups”, according to the US government financed Radio Free Europe (RFE). In the same month the US ambassador to Ukraine who met Avakov to discuss "threats and… acts of violence by extremist groups". The letter said these groups "intimidate Ukrainian citizens, which RFE says was “a thinly veiled reference to the National Corps and National Militia, the far-right Azov group's political and vigilante wings”. RFE added, “Members of the National Corps and National Militia (parts of the Azov Battalion) have been blamed for multiple violent attacks on minorities in Ukraine, particularly Roma and LGBTI persons, in the past year”. So if the entire Ukrainian state and armed forces are riddled with fascist organisations, why are the British and US governments supporting the Kiev government to the hilt, and providing training and financial aid for the Ukrainian army and National Guard? Surely if this was happening in Germany or Austria there would be political uproar. We are protesting today to call for an end to British military and other aid to the Ukraine government, justice for the Odessa Trade Union House Fire victims, implementation of the Minsk agreements to end the war in Ukraine, and solidarity with all anti-fascists and democrats in Ukraine. Contacts: Andy Brooks, ncp@ncp.clara.net, 0207 223 4052, 07849 643 702, Theo Russell theorrussell@gmail.com, 07833 303 807. Organised by the New Communist Party of Britain, Socialist Fight, and members of Solidarity with the Anti-Fascist Resistance in Ukraine (SARU). 20 November 2019 |