Part of interview with Interview with Jacques Baud, conducted by Thomas Kaiser. https://mronline.org/2022/03/31/the-policy-of-the-usa-has-always-been-to-prevent-germany-and-russia-from-cooperating-more-closely/
Where does right-wing extremism come from?
JB: Its origins date back to the 1930s. After the years of extreme famine, which went down in history as the Holodomor, a resistance to Soviet power emerged. To finance the modernization of the USSR, Stalin had confiscated the harvests, causing unprecedented famines. The NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB (that was at the same time the Ministry of Interior and the Security establishment), implemented this policy. The NKVD was organized on a territorial basis and in Ukraine there were many Jews in the higher command positions. As a result, everything got a little mixed up: hatred of Communists, hatred of Russians and hatred of Jews. The first extreme right-wing groups date from this time, and they still exist. During World War II, the Germans needed these groups, such as Stepan Bandera’s OUN, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and others to fight in the Soviet rear areas. At that time, the Third Reich forces were seen as liberators, such as the 2nd SS armoured division, “Das Reich”, which had liberated Kharkov from the Soviets in 1943, and which is still celebrated in Ukraine today. The geographical epicentre of this extreme right-wing resistance was in Lvov, today Lviv, in Galicia. This region even had its “own” 14th Panzer Grenadier Division SS “Galizien”, an SS division composed entirely of Ukrainians.
The OUN was formed during the Second World War and survived the Soviet period?
JB: After the Second World War, the enemy was the Soviet Union. The USSR had not succeeded in completely eliminating these anti-Soviet movements during the war. The United States, France, and Great Britain realized that the OUN could be useful and supported it to fight against the USSR with sabotage and weapons. Until the early 1960s, Ukrainian insurgents were supported by the Western through clandestine operations such as Aerodynamic, Valuable, Minos, Capacho and others. Since that time, Ukraine has maintained a close relationship with the West and NATO. Today, it is the weakness of the Ukrainian army that has led to the use of fanatical troops. I think that the term neo-Nazis is not entirely accurate. They have very similar ideas, they carry their symbols, they are violent and anti-Semitic, but they are not really guided by a doctrine or a political project.
After 2014, two agreements were agreed to pacify the situation in Ukraine. What is the significance of the agreements in the context of the current dispute?
JB: Yes, this is important to understand, because the non-compliance with these two agreements basically led to today’s war. Since 2014, there was supposedly a solution to the conflict, the Minsk agreements. By September 2014, it was clear that the Ukrainian military was unable to manage the conflict, even though it was advised by NATO. It was regularly failing. That is why it had to commit to the Minsk I agreements in September 2014. This was an agreement between the Ukrainian government and representatives of the two self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, with European and Russian guarantors.
What happened after Yanukovych, the democratically elected president, was overthrown?
JB: The new provisional government–that emerged from the nationalist extreme right coup–immediately, as its first official act, changed the law on official languages in Ukraine. This shows that the coup had nothing to do with democracy but was the product of ultra-nationalists who organized the uprising. This legal change triggered a storm in the Russian-speaking regions. Large demonstrations were organized in all cities of the Russian-speaking south, in Odessa, Mariupol, Donetsk, Lugansk, Crimea, etc. The Ukrainian authorities reacted in a very massive and brutal way, calling in the military. Autonomous republics were briefly proclaimed in Odessa, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Lugansk and Donetsk. They were fought with extreme brutality and two remained eventually: Donetsk and Lugansk, which proclaimed themselves autonomous republics.
How did they legitimize their status?
JB: They held referendums in May 2014, to have autonomy, and that is very, very important. If you look at our media in the last few months, they only talk about “separatists”. But this has been a total lie for eight years: they always talked about separatists, but this is false, because the referendum mentioned very clearly an autonomy within Ukraine. These republics wanted some sort of Swiss solution, so to speak. After the people accepted autonomy, the authorities asked for recognition of the republics by Russia, but Putin’s government refused.