Washington D.C.’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine continues to grind up lives. Increasingly, the war looks like an indefinite hellscape, though there have been bright moments of hope. U.S. President Donald Trump has at times seemed sincerely committed to ending the war. In August, he hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin at a diplomatic summit in Anchorage, Alaska. It was encouraging to watch an American leader at least treat the head of a state which possesses 6,000 nuclear weapons with basic respect.
Unfortunately, Trump and his administration either don’t fully grasp the fundamentals of the conflict or have deemed it politically unacceptable to base their policy on that reality. Part of that reality involves the presence of actual Nazis within the upper echelons of the Ukrainian military, something that is intolerable to Russia and may prove deeply problematic for Washington.
The White House has settled on demanding Russia accept an immediate ceasefire and have promised to continue funding and arming Ukraine and sanctioning Russia until it submits. On Oct. 22 the U.S. Treasury Department announced new rounds of sanctions:
“Now is the time to stop the killing and for an immediate ceasefire. Given President Putin’s refusal to end this senseless war, Treasury is sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies that fund the Kremlin’s war machine.”
Of course, it may be unadvisable for Russia to agree to such a ceasefire, something that could amount to just a Minsk 3-style new course stabilization and rearming period for Ukraine. Russian officials have repeatedly made this clear. On Oct. 21, a day before the new sanctions were imposed, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said there would be no cessation of hostilities until the “root causes” of the conflict are addressed:
“I mean ensuring Ukraine’s off-bloc, neutral, nuclear-free status, which means abandoning any attempts to drag it into NATO. I mean ending the actual genocide of the Russian and Russian-speaking population the Kiev regime has been practicing since even before Mr. [Vladimir] Zelensky came to power, when it banned all potential rights of the national minority Russians are formally recognized in Ukraine. As a matter of fact, most of Ukraine’s population speaks and thinks in Russian, but the Russian language has been banned in all spheres of life. An absolutely Nazi regime.”
Accusing Ukraine of being a Nazi regime has been a consistent Russian talking point since 2014, when D.C. engineered a coup in Kiev. As Russia escalated the conflict with its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin said one of the “special military operation” objectives was “to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.”
Unfortunately for the West, this Russian talking point is not mere propaganda. Ukraine is filled with Hitler-loving, racial “social nationalists” who descend both biologically and ideologically from men who directly collaborated with the Third Reich, participated in the Holocaust, and sought to create a fascist Ukrainian state. Many of them have prominent positions within the current government and are celebrated figures within Ukrainian society. Let’s catch up with some of these celebrity Nazis.