The best reply to this history illiterate Putin Parroting is here, by Dylan Combelick: https://medium.com/@dylan_combellick/yaroslav-hunka-the-polish-nazi-e7077476b47a But I’ll add some points Dylan doesn’t cover:
1. “playing with Nazis”: Mr. Dunn has told me he’s ready to vote for Trump and his promise to stop the war in 24 hours. So who’s playing with Nazis who threaten Jews for voting against him? This earns Mr. Dunn a diploma from Trump University.
2. A bit more fact-based perspective that exposes how Mr. Dunn is a history illiterate Putin Parrot who writes in this sequence: ready, fire, aim:
1. Bandera: certainly as execrable a fascist as Putin’s favorite fascist philosopher, Ilya Ilyin. But he spent most of the occupation in a German prison for advocating Ukrainian independence. And mass Ukrainian collaboration in the massacre at Babi Yar and the rest of the Ukrainian Shoah is an incontestable historical fact. But to write “to not know what his country was doing under the leadership of people like Bandera. He was surely aware of Bandera’s work with the Nazis” and “Bandera was a man who worked with the Nazis to exterminate people of the Jewish faith and almost 100,000 Poles” is utter nonsense, as Bandera’s Polish biographer makes clear:
“But Grzegorz Rossolinski’s biography of Bandera shows he was not an SS Holocaust collaborator because he was imprisoned by the Germans from January 1942 to September 28, 1944:
“Bandera was released by the Nazis on a pledge to support and cooperate with them, which he subsequently did as head of the new organisation he formed, the OUN-B (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists — Bandera).”
Collaboration in the Shoah from Sachsenhausen was hardly possible:
“It is difficult to reconstruct the exact date from which Bandera was kept in Zellenbau. The divergent accounts suggest that he was moved from Berlin to Sachsenhausen several times. Stets’ko wrote in 1967 that Bandera came to Zellenbau in January 1942.[1383] In an interview in 1950, Bandera said that he was held in Berlin by the Gestapo until 1943 and was then moved to Zellenbau.[1384] In an interrogation in 1956 in Munich, he stated that he was relocated from Berlin to Sachsenhausen in the winter of 1942–1943.[1385] Bandera’s prisoner number 72192 was assigned to him in October 1943. His prison card shows that he was released on 28 September 1944.”
Bandera and his brand of racialist Ukrainian nationalism were incubated in the Galizia and Volhynia part of Ukraine that was Austro-Hungarian before WWI and part of interwar Poland. There the Ukrainian language and cultural identity could be openly expressed and wasn’t forced underground, as in Tsarist and Bolshevik-ruled Ukraine. Here’s a nuanced analysis of the politics of the Bandera cult from a Ukrainian techie on Quora in 2019:
“If Zelensky really supported Bandera, it would mean his undoing. Zelensky is a comedian, speaking mostly Russian, and a Jew, they say. For Bandera those are enough reasons that Zelensky must not exist in Ukraine. As far as I remember the poll of early 2019 or late 2018, a bit more Ukrainian citizens dislike Bandera than like him. Bandera support never wins you majority of Center, South, and East of Ukraine. They never needed Bandera, he is nothing for them at best, rather an enemy. Most of my family, except one insane alcoholic, never said a good word about Bandera or his followers. More to it, to stand for Bandera means to be at odds with every neighbor country of Ukraine — what most Ukrainians need not. The more you support Bandera, the less votes you win in all-Ukrainian elections, as only in the West majority is really supportive of Bandera praisers.
Zelensky faces an impossible job: he tries to win support in different ends of Ukraine, which were and are antagonists in their political choices. He may say that he likes Bandera, but that will cost him votes, and if he really supported Bandera, he wouldn’t win the elections.
P.S. Disclaimer: I voted for Zelensky in presidential elections, but just to bring down Poroshenko. I don’t like Zelensky and I’m not going to vote for his party in the parliament elections.”
If I believed that Zelensky really supports Bandera, I wouldn’t vote for him in any case. What’s clear is that for a clear majority of Ukrainians and Ukrainian regions the Bandera cult is more of a deal-breaker than a deal-closer.
Ukraine’s Bandera problem is like America’s confederate statue problem. (from: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/guide-to-russian-useful-idiocy-e3b6fc9612aa)
3. Ukraine’s Nazi problem: 45% LePen voting France, Musso-mini governed Italy, Spain , MAGA cultish America and AfD-voting eastern Germany all have more Nazis. The far right in Ukraine got 2.19% of the vote in 2019. Swastika-tattoed Wagner founder Dmitry Utkin in his photo op with Putin shows who really has a Nazi problem.”
From Factcheck.org we can see how Ukraine’s Nazi problem is minimal compared to Germany, France, Italy and the USA:
“Since Ukraine regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, far-right, ultra-nationalist political groups have struggled to make much headway in Ukrainian politics.
“During much of Ukraine’s post-Soviet history, the radical right has remained on the political periphery, wielding little influence over national politics,” Melanie Mierzejewski-Voznyak wrote for “The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right,” which was published in 2018.
In the 30 years since Ukraine’s declaration of independence, Mierzejewski-Voznyak wrote, “its radical right’s national electoral support only rarely exceeded 3 percent of the popular vote. Radical right parties typically enjoyed just a few wins in single-mandate districts, and no far right candidate for president has ever secured more than 5 percent of the popular vote in an election.” The far right did, however, for the first time win a proportional share of the parliamentary government in 2012 when it won 10.4% of the popular vote. Since then, the far right’s share in parliamentary elections fell to 6% in 2014 and then to 2% in 2019.
“The claim that neo-Nazi or far-right groups hold any significant power in Ukraine is absurd,” Jared McBride, an adjunct history professor at UCLA whose work specializes in nationalist movements and mass violence and genocide in Russia and Ukraine, told us via email. “The most well-known far-right wing party, Svoboda (similar to say [Marine] Le Pen’s party or other corollaries in Europe) won 2.15 percent of the vote in 2019 election and holds one seat in the Rada — meaning they are politically irrelevant.” (Le Pen is the leader of the French far-right party the National Rally.)”
4. “large contingent of Ukrainians that fought Russia with the Nazis” — 150000 Ukrainians fought on the German side vs 6.5m who fought in the Red Army. There were more Ukrainians than Russians who died fighting the Germans. The Germans killed 8m Ukrainians, a far higher % of the population than in Russia. Most of the war and occupation was fought on Belarussian and Ukrainian land, not in Russia. Once again, Mr. Dunn is incapable of doing the most basic math, with a postage stamp counting for more than the 6.5m Ukrainians who fought on the Soviet side that had perpetrated the Holodomor genocide in Ukraine just a decade earlier. As always, proclamations of Russian victimhood at the hands of Ukrainian Nazis who will destroy it is a projection and a confession of Russia’s well-documented genocidal behavior in its non-Russian periphery.
As always, history, especially in eastern Europe, offers a choice between bad and worse, not good and bad. But unlike 1932–33 and 1941–45 Ukraine doesn’t stand alone, as Mr. Dunn would prefer.
