DEPUTY head of Russia’s Security Council, and Russia’s former president, Dmitry Medvedev has described Ukraine’s Western backers as a ‘pro-Nazi coalition’, dismissing the idea of Moscow reconciling with the West as a vain illusion.
Washington and its allies in Europe and elsewhere continue to support Kiev despite it acting increasingly like the Nazis during World War II, Medvedev said in a Telegram post on Saturday.
Moscow should abandon hope of any reconciliation with the West and see it for what it is, he added.
The leaders of Ukraine are ‘increasingly talking about “holding all Russians accountable”,’ Medvedev said, adding that Kiev sees all Russian citizens as ‘Russians’ regardless of their ethnic background.
In a thinly-veiled reference to the Nazis’ plans for the Soviet Union, the former president said that the world had already seen similar aspirations.
And he pointed out that Ukraine is still being supported by almost every Western leader, as well as by the heads of Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. All of them ‘are direct and obvious Nazi accomplices’ he said.
‘They should be treated as the leaders of a pro-Nazi coalition.’
The former president, who now serves as the deputy head of Russia’s National Security Council and the Military Industrial Committee, then insisted that Russia should not ‘lapse into sweet daydreaming’ about achieving reconciliation with the West and joining what he called a ‘big polyamory family of non-binary genders’.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin has denounced the oppression against ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s east as ‘certainly looking like genocide’.
Medvedev had earlier condemned what he called open glorification of Nazism in Ukraine, pointing to an initiative calling for the establishment of the Stepan Bandera Order that would supposedly be awarded to Ukrainian servicemen.
Bandera was a notorious Ukrainian nationalist leader and fascist during World War II whose organisation was responsible for mass killings in Ukraine, including the ethnic cleansing of more than 100,000 Jews and Poles.
The petition requesting the creation of such an order in Ukraine appeared on the official website of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in May. It has since received nearly 2,300 signatures of the required 25,000.
Medvedev blasted the initiative by comparing it to Germany establishing an order of Adolf Hitler or Italy introducing an order of Benito Mussolini.
‘What is there to be ashamed of?’ Medvedev mockingly wrote on Telegram at the time. ‘Let’s just glorify all European Nazis at once. This appears to be the new European ideology,’ he added.
A Ukrainian far-right military regiment hit the headlines after Russia launched its military operation in the country.
The Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine has long been a target of the Ukrainian nationalism movement led by notorious neo-Nazis linked to Kiev, including Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion founder Andriy Biletsky.
The self-proclaimed ‘White Leader’ has called on Kiev to impose a tough and balanced state policy – which includes genocide alongside eugenics – to procreate a pure biological quality of individual Ukrainian families in the Russian-dominant regions of eastern Ukraine.
Biletsky’s manifesto, entitled ‘Language and Race – Primary Issues’, expanded on this concept.
‘Ukrainian social-nationalism considers the Ukrainian Nation to be a blood-racial community… Race is everything for nation-building – Race is the basis on which the superstructure grows in the form of national culture, which again comes from the racial nature of the people, and not from language, religion, economy, etc.’
As for the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine, Biletsky wrote: ‘The issue of total Ukrainisation in the future social nationalist state will be resolved within 3-6 months with the help of a tough and balanced state policy.’
Russian President Putin cited one of the reasons for launching Moscow’s February 2022 special military operation in the Russian-majority Donbas region to stop the persecution of its people by Kiev’s pro-Nazi regime.
- Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, a close ally of President Volodymyr Zelensky whose support is widely believed to have helped the former actor secure the country’s presidency, has been arrested over money laundering charges.
Kolomoisky was handed over to Kiev’s Shevchenko district court on Saturday after the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) accused him of illegally transferring approximately 500 million Ukrainian hryvnia (12.5mn) through the ‘infrastructure of banking institutions controlled by him’.
‘It was established that during 2013-2020, Ihor Kolomoisky legalised more than half a billion hryvnias by withdrawing them abroad and using the infrastructure of banks under (his) control,’ SBU, which is controlled by Zelensky’s office, said in a statement.
The pretrial detention hearing was held behind closed doors, as requested by Kolomoisky, who reportedly did not want the media to take photos of him in the courtroom.
However, several Ukrainian media outlets took his photo during the proceedings. Kiev’s court eventually set bail at 509 million hryvnia, about the same as what he is accused of laundering.
Kolomoisky’s lawyers said they do not plan to post bail immediately and would seek to appeal the ruling.
On Saturday, in his nightly video address, Zelensky seemed to allude to Kolomoisky’s case saying there would be no return to ‘business as usual for those who plundered Ukraine and put themselves above the law.
‘Each of us feels that this will be a Ukraine with different rules,’ Zelensky said.
The oligarch billionaire entered Ukraine’s political scene in 2014, when he was appointed governor of the southeastern Dnepropetrovsk Region following the Western-backed coup in Kiev.
He was dismissed a year later over a conflict with then-Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko.
Then in February this year, Kolomoisky’s home in Dnipro was raided as part of a separate investigation into embezzlement and tax evasion at the country’s two largest oil companies which are partially owned by him.
Kolomoisky is also involved in Ukrainian media, television and banking. His TV channel had hosted Zelensky’s comedy series, ‘Servant of the People’, before he backed the former actor’s bid for the presidency.
In the meantime, according to a poll by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation think tank published at the beginning of August, some 77 per cent of Ukrainians think Zelensky is responsible for widespread corruption in the government and military administrations.
Zelensky himself is widely regarded as a member of Ukraine’s corrupt oligarchy, who has been trying to cover his tracks by launching an anti-corruption campaign in a vain attempt to change public opinion by separating himself from the pack.
Vitaly Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (ANTAC), a Ukrainian nongovernmental organisation that monitors graft, said Zelensky’s office is a mere humorous farce that is manipulating the Ukrainian public’s desire for justice.
In reality, Shabunin pointed out, Zelensky’s office is pursuing its own hidden agenda, which has nothing to do with the country’s omnipresent corruption.
Zelensky’s office’s true objectives are to protect Zelensky and other high-level government officials, while destroying all of Kiev’s political opponents, he said.
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