T-shirt with a message: Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky in his evening address on 23 October 2024 - Image via Facebook
By Susann Witt-Stahl, Junge Welt, 27 Nov 2024 (p. 6). Translated by Helmut-Harry Loewen
The Western media establishment recently celebrated an appearance by the Ukrainian president in a T-shirt with the slogan "Make Russia Small Again" as a successful provocation. What was not reported anywhere is that Volodimir Zelensky used this Ukrainian version of Donald Trump's election slogan to promote a campaign of the same name by Bandera fascists in the Verkhovna Rada.
The incendiary slogan was issued by a temporary Special Commission to Support the Enslaved Peoples of Russia, which was set up in August 2023, and whose continuation was approved by parliament last week. In addition to MPs, including those from the ruling party Servants of the People, such as Oleg Dunda, Ukraine's Banderite "memory czar," Volodimir Vyatrovich, is also involved in an advisory capacity. The core mission of this working group is to show the “enslaved peoples” to Western partners as the “true Russian opposition” and to convince them of the need for a controlled dismantling of “the bloody empire,” as its initiator Yaroslav Yurchin from the Voice party explained on his Facebook account. He also named the recruitment of urgently needed supplies for the Ukrainian army from the “enslaved peoples” as a further goal.
The narrative of “enslaved peoples” was manufactured in myth factory of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). It was founded in Munich in 1946 by Yaroslav Stetsko, a leader of the Bandera wing of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) — with the assistance of influential German Nazis such as Gerhard von Mende — as the largest umbrella organisation of former Hitler collaborators worldwide, and is currently being rebuilt under the name Anti-Imperial Block of Nations.
Yurchin, also a member of the Group of Deputies for Interparliamentary Relations with Germany, was an activist with the Nationalist Youth Congress (NMK). As the journalist Moss Robeson has documented, the NMK is an openly antisemitic organisation of young fascists and a cadre training unit [Kaderschmiede] of the OUN-B, which in 2019 became the militant lead in the “resistance movement” against the implementation of the Minsk II agreement.
On 6 October 2022, the Verkhovna Rada had already adopted an appeal to the so-called international community for the “de-imperialisation of the Russian Federation and the decolonisation of the nations annexed and remaining within it.” In Kiev, Yurchyn and other representatives of the parliamentary special commission held various working meetings with the international leader of the OUN-B and ABN, Oleg Medunitsya, representatives of the “enslaved peoples,” and Western think tanks, as recorded on the website of the “bloc’,” Abn.org.ua. According to Yurchin, 82 MPs from all parliamentary groups participated in drafting a law that is ready for a decision and is intended to create the political foundations for an alliance with the “enslaved peoples.” In February, the Verkhovna Rada recognised the right of the Ingush to their own sovereign state through Ukraine.
The Ukrainian parliament is riddled with Banderists who have received mandates via the electoral lists of right-wing liberal parties and have been pushing ahead with the war against Russia unchecked since the complete ban on the opposition, which was endeavouring to achieve peace. For example, Andriy Lopushansky from the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (KUN), the party of the OUN-B in Ukraine, entered parliament in 2019 on Petro Poroshenko's European Solidarity list. KUN was established in 1992 on the initiative of Stetsko's wife Slava, who has been head of the ABN since his death and also of the OUN-B since 1991 and was the former President of the Verkhovna Rada in 1998. On the official social media channels of the Ukrainian parliament, Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko are honoured as “authors of the principles for the restoration of the Ukrainian state.” Last week, President Zelensky awarded a posthumous medal to the Australian Stefan Romaniv, long-time leader of the international OUN-B, Vice President of the ABN and the Ukrainian World Congress, who died in June.
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