BY Annie LACROIX-RIZ

Annie Lacroix-Riz (born 18 October 1947) is a French historian, professor emeritus of modern history at the university Paris VII - Denis Diderot, specialist in the international relations in first half of the 20th century and collaboration. Her work concerns the political, economic and social history of the French Third Republic and Vichy Government, the relations between the Vatican and Reich, as well as the strategy of the political elites and economic French before and after the Second World War. She denounces contemporary history is under the influence of the world of finance. It appears that she bases her powerful analysis on documentation (secret and otherwise). Jules

Ukrainian Nazi Stepan Bandera, fighter with Hitler and mass executioner of tens of thousands of Jews and communist resistance fighters, becomes each day a little more the hero of the "democrats" of the West. When the media remember him, the media tamper with his story, transforming the executioner into a glorious nationalist; moreover in 1945 was he not an American agent? Which demonstrates that a paradise exists for the Nazis.

The Ukrainian War was launched by Russia after eight years of Ukrainian-Western aggression (2014-2022) against Russian-speaking Eastern Ukrainians. Their 14,000 dead, mostly civilians, had "interested" our major media as little as those of Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan and Syria, attacked since 1991 by the United States in a global quest for oil control and gas and other raw materials, under cover of NATO, subject to a single American command since its foundation (1950).

The Western coalition — which immediately ridiculed the official Russian goal of “denazification” announced in February 2022, in accordance with the “political principles” enshrined in the Protocol of the Potsdam Conference (August 1, 1945) — claims to act against Russia in the name of "democracy" (new name for the "Free World" of the Soviet era). As the war drags on, the “West” evolves the concept of “democracy” and “hides” the Ukrainian state’s reverence for its war and pre-war criminals.

Thus the West elevated the Ukrainian Nazi Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) as a hero of “Ukrainian independence”: a slight defect that the West forgave him as much as the post-Maidan Ukrainian “democracy”, the promotion of Nazi groups and the clubbing that billionaire Zelenski, a worthy successor to billionaire Poroshenko, administers to the Ukrainian people: destruction of the labor code, wages and salaries, and the banning of opposition parties and newspapers, demanded by the "investors" states-united.

Bandera has only become a “national hero” since the American “Orange Revolution” of 2004, and especially since the Maidan coup organized in February 2014 by Washington against an "intolerable" Ukrainian government, legal but pro-Russian. Its conductor, Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, neo-conservative Madonna of the National Endowment for Democracy (CIA branch) and compulsive Russophobe (and Sinophobe), has held her Ukrainian post since 1993, under Democratic or Republican (excluding the Trump presidency). She confessed on December 13, 2013 before the National Press Club, in a conference financed by the Chevron oil group, then on January 15, 2014 before the Senate Foreign Policy Committee, which the American government had, since the fall of the USSR, "spent five billion dollars" to make "democracy" triumph in Ukraine and that Chevron had signed on November 5 an agreement for ten billion dollars of investment for drilling that would put an end to the "country's dependence on Russia". Ms. Nuland, "cook" of the Maidan putschists, has since fabricated Ukrainian governments and presided, with the rest of the state apparatus, over the rearmament to the teeth of Ukraine, which Washington has de facto integrated into the operations of NATO since July 2021.

US intimacy with Ukrainian Nazism in general predated the fall of the USSR. Their interest in Ali Baba's Ukrainian treasure, like that of all imperialisms, has never ceased since the "opening up" of Tsarist Russia, which ceded to them its modern and concentrated economy, from banking to raw materials. As the Reich occupied the forefront of the Ukrainian scene for a long time, especially since the First World War, American banks accompanied those of the Reich in the interwar period. But to the secondary role then dictated by the German leader.

Because the Reich, the first power to recognize Russia in 1922, held the upper hand in Soviet Russia, which was treated as a pariah by the imperialist “international community”. Even in the Ukraine which Germany had snatched, in 1918 (until Germany's defeat in November), from Russia. (Ukraine) was assailed on all sides by fourteen imperialist powers from 1918 to 1920, until the Bolsheviks had reconquered it by 1920. Recognizing the Soviet state, Berlin recovered its capacity for nuisance there, "covered" by the Vatican: auxiliary to the Reich since the end of the 19th century and even more so since 1914, the Curia commissioned the German Catholic clergy to carry out military espionage in preparation for the new assault projected.

Nazi banderists in the pre-war period
It is in this context that Bandera grew up, a typical product of the Uniatism of Eastern Galicia (Western Ukraine), a weapon of war of the Roman Church against Orthodoxy since 1595-1596. Son of a Uniate priest, he was brought up like his peers in the fanatical hatred of Poles, Russians, Jews and other opponents, under the authority of Andreï Szepticky Uniate bishop of Lemberg (Lwow in Polish, Lvov in Russian, Lviv in Ukrainian) named bishop in 1900.

Russophobic, Polonophobic and shock anti-Semitic, Szepticky, like all his predecessors, had to convert Eastern Orthodox believes to Catholicism, a mission linked to the Germanic conquest. It was first in the service of Vienna, ruler of Eastern Galicia, then, Pius X preferring the powerful Hohenzollerns to the dying Habsburgs since 1907, the bishop Andreï Szepticky, until his death (November 1944), was part of the Drang nach Osten ("thrust towards the East”) of the Reich, imperial, “republican” and Hitlerian.

The Reich, which before 1914 financed "Ukrainian autonomy" against Russia, transformed Ukraine into a military stronghold during the First World War. Germany then increased the effort in eastern Galicia, transfered in 1921 by anti-Soviet France to reactionary Poland. "Ukrainian terrorist organization in Poland", 20 year old Stepan Bandera had founded with his faithful lieutenants Mykola Lebed and Yaroslav Stetsko. They participated in the anti-Soviet campaign on "the genocidal famine in Ukraine" described in 1987 by the photographer and Canadian trade unionist Douglas Tottle, a pioneer in the study of Ukrainian Nazism.

Launched by the Reich and the Vatican in the summer of 1933, that is to say after the excellent harvest of July had put an end to the scarcity or famine, used zealously by all their allies, including Poland, with Lwow as its center, ideologically prepared the conquest of Ukraine. Berlin and the Vatican had undertaken one of the two secret articles of the Reich Concordat of July 1933 to carry it out together.

The Banderists also rendered great service in Poland, not only against the Jews but also against the state. 

On June 15 1934 — the auspicious year of German attacks on heads of state and ministers — Bandera and Lebed assassinated the Polish Minister of the Interior, Bronisław Pieracki, with "delight", like his leaders, Pilsudski and Beck, in front of "the German friend. The OUN Nazis took on in Eastern Galicia — wrote Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe in 2014 in his landmark thesis on Bandera — the same role as the Croatian Ustashi of Ante Pavelitch, the Slovak Nazis of the Hlinka Party, the Iron Guards Romanians and other Eastern European Nazis: rich with Marks, they had all "adopted fascism, anti-Semitism, racial suprematism, the cult of war and a whole range of far-right values". In order not to offend its German “friends”, Warsaw commuted the death sentence of Bandera and Lebed, which was enacted (only) in 1936, to life imprisonment. The German occupier liberated them from the invasion of September 1939.

Banderite Nazis in World War II

Since then, the Uniate OUN, powerful in Slovak and Polish Ukraine (absent from Soviet Ukraine), was the lackey of the Reich. It was subdivided in 1939-1940 into OUN-M and OUN-B, led respectively by Andrei Melnik and by the Bandera-Lebed-Stetsko trio, divided only by their disagreement, on the surface, on "Ukrainian independence": Melnik n no longer talked about it, Bandera cherished by the verb “independence” which the Reich did not want to see at any price.

The two OUNs helped the Sipo-SD (the Gestapo) and the Abwehr to prepare the occupation of Poland, then of the USSR. Its members populated the "[German] police academies" of occupied Poland and increased their ravages after Barbarossa: alongside the Wehrmacht, they immediately liquidated 12,000 Jews in eastern Galicia, and did not stop. Auxiliaries of the Sipo-SD, they tortured and exterminated without respite with the blessing of the Uniate clerics, including Szepticky, who blessed the banderists of the 14th Legion of the Waffen SS Galicia (1943-1944) and elsewhere. In the Einsatzkommandos, prisons, concentration camps and elsewhere, the two OUNs massacred the "enemies of the Ukrainian nation": "unloyal" Ukrainians, Jews of all nationalities, non-Jewish Russians and Poles, including 100,000 people at Volhynia, a feat by Bandera that still disrupts the current (falsely) idyllic Warsaw-kyiv relationship.

In Poland and the USSR, until the complete Soviet liberation of the Ukraine (Lvov, July 1944), these champions of "ethnic cleansing" played in "the destruction of the Jews" the role of the "satellite states [of the Reich] by excellence” (Croatia and Slovakia) . The very secondary official conflict between Berlin and the Banderists over Ukrainian “independence” earned Bandera and Stetsko imprisonment in 1942 in an “honor camp” in Sachsenhausen (30 km from Berlin). Lebed, on the run, led the “Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army” (UPA) on their behalf: formed in 1942 from these auxiliary police forces of the Wehrmacht and the SS, the UPA killed common enemies.

Bandera and Stetsko were freed from their hotel "honor bunker in September 1944" they later told the CIA. In July 1944, a large part of the massacres had left the Ukraine in German vans. Berlin founded for its Ukrainian Nazis the “Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation” (UHVR), then, in November 1944, a “Ukrainian National Committee” with a Banderist majority. High proof of “national and anti-Nazi resistance”! The Soviet capture of Berlin rushed them to Munich, the historic center of internal Nazism and the expansion of the Deutschtum since the interwar period, which in the spring of 1945 became one of the capitals of the American occupation zone. Of the “250,000 Ukrainians” settled in 1947 “in Germany, Austria and Italy”, so-called “displaced persons”, “a large number were proven members or sympathizers of the OUN” [NAZIS].
The rest of the OUN-UPA criminals had remained in now Soviet Eastern Galicia where, clandestinely, they still massacred, under the leadership of their Uniate clerics: "in Western Ukraine", "tens of thousands" of them killed "35,000 cadres of the Soviet army and communist party oficial between 1945 and 1951", led by their foreign friends, no longer only Germans, but also Americans.

From the post-Stalingrad legend of the fight for national independence to the articles of Le Monde in January 2023
With the defeat of the Reich looming after Stalingrad, the OUN-UPA began to invent a “resistant” history: key to current Russophobic propaganda, this legend was spread throughout the “West” when the Bandera clique officially became “ally" against the USSR. Thus developed the myth of a “resistance of Ukrainian nationalists” as anti-Nazi as it was anti-Bolshevik, which is now maintained by the mainstream “Western” press.

Le Monde devoted January 7 and 8 to Bandera, two articles to this "naive hero of Ukrainian independence". The first, “Stepan Bandera, the glorified Ukrainian antihero after the Russian aggression” pushed the indulgence to such an extent that there was, perhaps in the face of numerous negative reactions, a second article. Its title was more truthful "War in Ukraine: the Bandera myth and the reality of a Nazi collaborator", not the content: Bandera "struggled by all means to liberate Ukraine from the successive yokes of Poland and Soviet Union ". He collaborated with “Nazi Germany” only for this noble objective which made him see in Hitler “a possible ally to launch the Ukrainian national revolution against the Soviet oppressor who had orchestrated, among other atrocities, the great famine of 1932- 1933, the Holodomor, killing 3 to 5 million Ukrainians. So he had plenty of excuses.

The two articles, riddled with big lies and lies of omission, make Bandera "a symbol of resistance and national unity", a complex and "contested" hero. This qualifier outraged Arno Klarsfeld (French Jewish actor) who is now alarmed by the “Western” glorification of the Ukrainian Nazis:

“Le Monde is becoming a biased and misleading newspaper: Bandera is not a “controversial” figure, he actively participated in the Holocaust. How would Le Monde qualify Goring? “controversial” too? shame for a serious newspaper !!! it is truly shameful. On March 15, 2014, the newspaper still admitted that the Maidan coup had put the Nazis in charge of Ukraine. Admittedly, with its Russophobia inherited from the organ of the Comité des Forges, Le Temps, its predecessor: “The Ukrainian far right, an unexpected target for Moscow. The visibility on Maidan of neo-Nazi, ultra-minority groups feeds Russian propaganda against the new power in kyiv”. So, justified or not?

Historical science had advanced as early as 1987, with Tottle on the "genocidal famine", on the massacres and on the scams of the OUN-OPA on its activities from 1929 to 1945. Rossolinski-Liebe, whose post-“Orange Revolution” in Ukraine threatened personal safety and banned lectures, completed the picture on outright criminal Bandera. The January 8 article in Le Monde mentions his thesis, without saying a word, and for good reason, about its content.

The Ukrainian-Nazi heroes of “national independence” were very important in the long preparations for the present American era of Ukraine. In their objective of world conquest, the United States included Russia in general, and Ukraine in particular, but had to be content here in the German era of “Europe” with a minor role. American finance capital had, since 1919, been associated with German capital in Eastern Europe. Its major press, including Hearst, a spokesman for German-American circles, took part in the campaign on “the genocidal famine in Ukraine” from 1935 – fifty years before the Reagan uproar on “Holodomor” (its new name) . The end of the Second World War sounded the hour, if not for the succession of the Reich, for collaboration with the heirs of the Reich with a view, in particular, to the conquest of Ukraine.

The American strategy of conquest of the whole of Europe was revealed between the territorial compromise of Yalta in February 1945, hated from the outset, and the definitive decision, in 1947-1948, to liquidate, not only the Soviet zone of influence, but the Soviet state as well. The task was given to Frank Wisner and George Kennan. Wisner, a Wall Street business lawyer, had been sent to Romania in 1944 by business lawyer Allen Dulles, head of OSS-Europe since November 1942, in Bern: a Soviet future had to be avoided for Ukraine — a champion of anti-Semitic massacres — by negotiating with Ukrainian elites who had been involved in it. Kennan, a diplomat, had spent his career, since 1931 in Riga (Latvia) then in various posts, fighting the USSR.

The State Department therefore entrusted this tandem, within the framework of the CIA (official successor to the OSS) founded in July 1947, with the application of directive 10/2 of the National Security Council of June 18, 1948 which prescribed the general liquidation of European socialism. A star of the Cold War, Kennan, reasonable since his retirement, unsuccessfully warned Washington against NATO's eastward expansion against Russia after 1991.

Ukraine occupied a central role in this line, and Washington relied on the experience of (Western) Germany, which had once again become an ally barely defeated (as after the Great War). Historian Christopher Simpson described as early as 1988 the incredible rescue-recycling by the OSS and its successors (“Strategic Services Unit” then CIA) of European, German and Ukrainian war criminals. Harry Rositzke, leader since 1945 in Munich of the "covert operations inside the USSR" of the Ukrainian Nazis - and a loyal agent who did not mention any names - confessed in 1985: "We knew perfectly well what we were doing. . The basis of the job was to use any trash as long as it was anti-communist.” The American historians Breitman and Goda, specialists in the "Shoah" regular collaborators of the Department of State, completed the file in 2010.

Washington badly needed the Vatican, which, as a rescuer of war criminals en masse via the European clergy, maintained its collaboration with the heirs of the Reich but adapted it to its alignment with the United States, masters of "Western Europe" and great donors (for domestic, Italian, and international use). The Curia continued to manage its Uniate breeding ground in Lvov, via prelates and underground priests. Szepticky, who died in November 1944, had been succeeded by Banderite leader Ivan Bucko, former “auxiliary bishop of Lvov” (since 1929), associated with the preparations for Barbarossa and then with the failed “re-Christianization” of the Russians. In the summer of 1945, Washington accepted this "Vatican expert on Ukrainian questions [of] radically anti-Russian opinions", as "apostolic visitor of the Ruthenians (Slavs) of the army of Ukraine" (the OUN-UPA), head, at Rome, until 1971, “Ukrainians in Western Europe”.

From July 1944, just before the entry of the Red Army into Lvov, the massacres of the “Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council” (UHVR) had, including prelates, dealt, under the Roman wing, “with Western governments”.

The British and American allies-rivals collaborated with the groups led, on the one hand, by Bandera-Stetsko (80% of the Ukrainian personnel of the "displaced persons camps in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, the United States and other western countries at the end of the 1940s") and, on the other hand, by Lebed and the Uniate prelate Ivan Hrinioch, liaison officer with the Vatican.

In May 1945 the Americans had picked up and installed, very close to Munich, as chief spy, the Nazi general (member of the NSDAP) of the Wehrmacht Reinhard Gehlen: chief of "German military intelligence on the Eastern front" in the occupied USSR (Fremde Heere Ost, FHO), Gehlen, responsible for the "interrogations", had directed Soviet collaborators from all the occupied regions, including Ukraine, and had been building the Vlassov army since 1942. These Red Army soldiers who joined the Wehrmacht so as not to perish formed criminal gangs which rendered, in the USSR and even against the French resistance fighters in 1943-1944, the same services as the Uniate Nazis. Gehlen, a major war criminal, received immense responsibilities in 1945: intelligence espionage and aggression against the USSR, but also anti-communist action in the American zone. Adenauer, who appreciated him so much, entrusted him with his secret services when the FRG was founded in the autumn of 1949: the great Nazi Gehlen therefore headed the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) until his retirement in 1968. Given the German experience acquired since the 1930s, its contribution to Ukraine was decisive. Surrounded exclusively by former Nazis, including his former assistants in the occupied USSR, Gehlen therefore maintained the German-Ukrainian collaboration without interruption.
London and Washington collaborated and competed in the use of Bandera and his minions. Washington was more discreet but let the banderists (majority) and other members of the OUN reconstitute themselves in Munich and around. The allies-rivals refused under all pretexts to deliver Bandera and other Ukrainian war criminals "refugees" to the USSR, which had been asking for them since the beginning of 1946 for trial. The Americans helped Bandera to settle in Munich from August 1945, forged identity papers for him (in the name of Stefan Popel) and other false documents, including one of "interned in the Nazi concentration camps of September 15 1941 to May 6, 1945 [and] released from Mauthausen concentration camp” one of the legends of today’s “Western” press. They housed him and provided him with many facilities, including a set of journalist cards, including for a “French” newspaper.

The CIA assigned Gehlen and his BND to “deal with” the compromised Bandera, serving military “operations” in Ukraine – still classified. Bandera reported directly to Heinz Danko Herre, Gehlen's former second in the Fremde Heere Ost assigned among other things to the Vlassov army and who, "Gehlen's main adviser" at the BND, adored Bandera: "we have known him for about 20 years , and he has more than half a million supporters in and outside Germany. Washington dragged out the application for a visa to stay in the United States submitted by Bandera since 1955, but the BND wanted to put its dear Bandera in direct contact with the Ukrainian Nazis of America, immigrants by the tens of thousands since the end of the 1940s. : the complicity between the CIA and the American Department of Justice made it possible to violate the law prohibiting immigration to the Nazis. “The Munich CIA officials” finally accepted “the granting of the [said] visa in 1959”, but Bandera could not reach the United States: a KGB agent executed him in Munich, on October 15, 1959, "the Soviets having decided that they could not afford the resurrection of the alliance between German espionage and Ukrainian fanatics" (Breitman and Goda). This is why the current “national hero” of “independent” Ukraine did not extend his activities across the Atlantic.

Washington had continued, still in collaboration with the BND, its works in and around Ukraine, particularly in Czechoslovakia, "the CIA providing money, supplies, training, radio facilities and the parachuting of trained agents" of the UPA. In the United States itself, the CIA promoted other Banderist allies as heralds of Ukrainian "democracy", such as Mykola Lebed, "notorious sadist and collaborator of the Germans", who had contacted Allen Dulles in Bern at the beginning of 1945: she made immigrate this "leader responsible for 'mass murders of Ukrainians, Poles and Jews'", denounced by immigrants from Eastern Europe, installed him in New York as a "permanent resident", then naturalized this leader of "Ukrainian national" propaganda in the United States. Since 1955, “leaflets were flown over Ukraine, and radio broadcasts called Nova Ukraina were broadcast from Athens for Ukrainian consumption.” All NATO countries were mobilized for this purpose.

When the Hungarian fiasco of November 1956 had stopped military action in Eastern Europe (and driven the obsessional Wisnan Ber to madness), a so-called "non-profit association" flourished (financed, like the rest, by the CIA), called Prolog, charged with flooding Ukraine with anti-Soviet propaganda. Hrinioch, Lebed's second, directed its Munich branch, the "Ukrainische Gesellschaft für Auslandsstudien" (Ukrainian Society for Foreign Studies). In “1957, Prolog broadcast 1,200 radio programs for 70 hours a month, and distributed 200,000 newspapers and 5,000 leaflets. She organized the distribution of “books by nationalist Ukrainian writers and poets”, including in Soviet Ukraine, “until the end of the Cold War”. It "financed the travel of Ukrainian students and scholars to university conferences, international youth festivals" and other events: on their return, the grantees reported to the CIA. Prolog was the only “through CIA operations to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and its forty million Ukrainian citizens. »

In the 1960s, American banderists, including Lebed, made their public conversion to philo-Semitism, systematically denouncing "the Soviets for their anti-Semitism", a very fashionable theme these days. The Polish-American Catholic aristocrat Zbigniew Brzezinski, a pillar since the 1950s of the permanent subversion of the USSR and the Ukraine-Russia split, advocated in 1977, as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, the extension of this wonderful program. In the 1980s, between Carter and Ronald Reagan, Prolog branched out into “other Soviet nationalities, which included Jewish Soviet dissidents, supreme irony,” according to Breitman and Goda. Brilliant tactic, after decades of hostility or indifference to European Jews, since “Western” propaganda transformed a USSR once hated as Judeo-Bolshevik into a symbol of anti-Semitism.

The American-German-Ukrainian-Nazi operations against the USSR and Eastern Europe, named "Cartel" then "Aerodynamic" then, in the 1980s, "Qrdynamic", "Pddynamic" and "Qrplumb" had never ceased . Breitman and Goda's study ended in 1990, "on the verge of collapse" of the USSR: everything was then ready, in Ukraine, for the next phase, managed by Ms. Nuland and her ilk.

Annie LACROIX-RIZ

* Annie Lacroix-Riz, associate professor of history, doctor of letters, professor emeritus of contemporary history at the University of Paris VII - Denis Diderot, is a specialist in international relations in the first half of the 20th century.

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Michael Warren Davis
Jan 28, 2023

It has been almost a year since Russia launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine. For many of our friends in Eastern Europe, I’m sure it feels like a lifetime. 

Still, it’s easy to forget that this conflict really began in 2014, when separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk declared their independence from Kiev. (Then, as now, the separatists were backed by Moscow.)  That same year, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. 

Since Russia invaded Ukraine’s core territory last year, Kiev and its allies have been adamant on one point: Whatever else happens in the course of this war, they will not accept the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk. Now, Kiev is upping the ante. Last week the New York Times reported that the United States may supply Ukraine with arms to retake Crimea as well.

We can argue about whether that goal is feasible, or even possible. But we should be absolutely clear about one thing: If Ukraine retakes Crimea—or Luhansk, or Donetsk—they will do so, not as liberators, but as conquerors.

Long before Russia invaded Ukraine, it was clear that Crimeans themselves overwhelmingly desired to join Russia. An official 1994 referendum found that nearly 80 percent of Crimeans desired greater regional autonomy. That same year, however, Yuriy Meshkov was elected President of Crimea with 72 percent of the vote. His campaign had only one major plank: unity with Russia.

The government in Kiev responded to the referendum, not by granting more autonomy to Crimea, but by scrapping their constitution, taking away whatever autonomy they once had. Ukraine also abolished the office of President of Crimea, arrested Meshkov, and exiled him to Russia.

If anything, Ukraine’s crackdown on Crimea increased locals’ desire to join Russia. A 2014 referendum found that 96 percent of the public supported the annexation. The results were understandably disputed, given that Russian troops had already begun to occupy Crimea. But when Gallup conducted a poll the following year, they found that over 80 percent of respondents felt the referendum was accurate. 

Again: The overwhelming majority of Crimeans want to be part of Russia.

The same is true of Luhansk and Donetsk. In 2019, the Kyiv Post, a pro-Western newspaper, found that just five percent of residents hoped Ukraine would retake the region. And while the separatist armies are officially fighting for independence, that outcome is desired by only sixteen percent of the public. A majority—over 60 percent—want to join the Russian Federation.

Really, this isn’t at all surprising. Crimea and the Donbas (the easternmost part of Ukraine, which contains Donetsk and Luhansk) are ethnically Russian. They speak Russian. Most of them are Russian Orthodox Christians. Historically, those regions belonged to the Russian Empire. Its sons fought in the Russian Army. They were loyal to the Russian tsar. Now, they would rather be part of Russia again. Is that really so surprising?

More to the point, why should we stop them?

Kiev would point out that the 1994 Budapest Memorandum—to which Moscow was a party—guarantees that these regions belong to the Republic of Ukraine. And that’s true. But what about their right to self-determination?  Don’t the people of Crimea and Donbas get a say?

You would think any objective observer would say that the Memorandum was a bad idea. If the local populations want to be part of Russia, they shouldn’t be forced to join Ukraine. 

Put it this way:  Imagine if the United States signed a treaty saying that Mexico could occupy Texas. The majority of Texans oppose the treaty. They do not want to be Mexican. They don’t speak Spanish. Culturally, they’re American. They’ve always considered themselves American. They fought in the U. S. Army—as did their fathers, and their grandfathers, and their great-grandfathers. 

True: Historically, Texas was part of Mexico. But that was back when Mexico was rather an ill-defined concept. And, anyway, they’ve been part of the United States for much longer. 

Now say that Texans were taking up arms in a bid to rejoin the United States, and Washington was backing them up. Would there be any sense in starting a new World War to defend Mexico’s claim to Texas?  

And if Mexico went to war with the United States to assert that claim, would they be considered liberators—or conquerors?

Let’s recap. For nearly ten years, Ukraine has been fighting to suppress these popular revolts in Crimea and the Donbas. What should the United States do?  

A realist would argue that we should do nothing. This is an Eastern European dispute. It’s none of our business. 

Presumably, an idealist—a believer in nation-building, “Wars of Democracy,” etc.—would argue that we should back Russia’s claim to Crimea and the Donbas. The people of those regions want to be Russian. They are Russian, in every sense except their nationality. Kiev should not force them to remain under its jurisdiction.

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