![\"How](\"https:\/\/ci5.googleusercontent.com\/proxy\/uv7I7o0FZjjE8s6ellK9DgxoYz2_dm0_8ltprQiDg8eLrj48MXXbAKQtkwkasRzQ7S3y0XNjL44AfQh2Gt5sebKi-vsvJjcR4-9-V3gGFKC9UyEhw6EWa5BSEH2bFw=s0-d-e1-ft#https:\/\/cdni.russiatoday.com\/files\/2022.05\/xxs\/627b8265203027383f7ba625.jpg\")
<\/div>\n\u00a9 Getty Images \/ Atit Phetmuangtong \/ EyeEm<\/h5>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\nTroops\u00a0shot in the legs screaming in pain. Others dying from blood loss and shock. With\u00a0no one around to provide medical assistance. A Russian soldier\u00a0crucified<\/a>\u00a0on an anti-tank barrier, chained to a metal \u2018hedgehog\u2019 and then burned alive\u2026<\/p>\nFor many, graphic\u00a0footage<\/a>\u00a0of Russian servicemen tortured and killed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and nationalist battalions, came as a real shock. But this did not surprise those who are familiar with the \u2018traditions\u2019 of Ukraine\u2019s \u2018fighters for national freedom\u2019, as they have more than a century of history in this sort of thing.<\/p>\nEurope\u2019sFirst\u00a0Concentration\u00a0Ca
The first concentration camps in Europe \u2013 Terezin and Thalerhof \u2013 were established in Austria-Hungary in the fall of 1914, not to hold prisoners of war, but the empire\u2019s own citizens. This is how Vienna, then the \u2018sick man of Europe\u2019, tried to protect its eastern border areas from members of its\u00a0population which sympathized with neighboring Russia. Fighting between the two countries had broken out just before the beginning of the First World War. Austria-Hungary\u2019s last emperor, Charles I,\u00a0confessed<\/a>\u00a0in his edict of May 7, 1917,\u00a0\u201cAll the arrested Russians are innocent, but they were detained to prevent them becoming guilty.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nPeople from Galicia who did not want to call themselves Ukrainians, as the Austrian authorities insisted, and continued to use the name \u2018Rusyns\u2019, were arrested and incarcerated in two places \u2013 in a garrison fortress in Terezin and in a valley near Graz, the capital of Styria. While the prisoners in Terezin were held in the vaults and dungeons of the fortress, with the support of local Czechs, the concentration camp later known as Thalerhof was little more than a bare field fenced in with barbed wire.<\/p>\n
Today, most of Galicia is in Western Ukraine and the largest city is Lviv, which was known as Lemberg by the Austrians and Lvov by the Soviets and Polish.<\/p>\n
The initial prisoners were brought there in September of 1915, and the first barracks began to be built only at the beginning of the following year. Prior to that, the people were forced to lie in the open in the rain and cold. According to US Congressman Joseph McCormick, the prisoners were often beaten and tortured. (Terrorism in Bohemia; Medill McCormick Gets Details of Austrian Cruelty<\/em>. \u2018New York Times\u2019, December 16, 1917)<\/p>\nAccording to the memoirs of those who survived the inhumane conditions (about 20,000 prisoners passed through the camp), 3,800 people were executed in the first half of 1915 alone, and 3,000 people died from the horrific conditions and diseases in a year and a half. Vasily Varvik, a writer, poet, literary critic, and historian who endured\u00a0Thalerhof\u2019s hell describes the atrocities in the internment camp as follows: \u201cIn order to intimidate people, to prove their power over us, the prison authorities drove poles into the ground all over Thalerhof Square, on which brutally beaten martyrs often hung in unspoken torment.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nWhat do the Ukrainians have to do with it? The fact is that Ukrainian nationalists were specially recruited to guard the Thalerhof camp. According to numerous testimonies, the arrested, which comprised nearly the entire Russian intelligentsia of Galicia and thousands of peasants, were also escorted to the camp by the Ukrainians.<\/p>\n
Indeed, descriptions given in the\u00a0Thalerhof Almanac<\/a>\u00a0detail how\u00a0Ukrainian\u00a0Sichoviki<\/em>\u00a0in the Carpathian village of Lavochnoye tried to bayonet the prisoners, among whom there was not a single Russian, but only their fellow Galicians.<\/p>\nIt was the Ukrainian nationalists who were the concentration camp guards\u2019 cruelest torturers and murderers.\u00a0\u201cIn the end, the atrocities committed by the Germans do not equate to the victimization of your own people. A soulless German could not get his iron boots so deeply into the soul of a Slavonic Rusyn as well as a Rusyn who called himself a Ukrainian,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0wrote Vasily Varvik.<\/p>\nFrom the Volyn Massacre to 1954<\/h3>\n
At the end of February 1943, the \u2018revolutionary\u2019 wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUP), headed by the current idol of many Ukrainians, Stepan Bandera, decided to create the so-called \u2018Ukrainian Insurgent Army\u2019 (UPA) to \u2018fight the advancing Red Army\u2019, which was driving the Nazis from the country. But the first detachments that emerged in March and April, of the same year, began to fight not the Soviets, whose troops were still waiting for the Nazis to strike near Kursk, but Polish peasants in territory that had belonged to Warsaw up until 1939. These events, which lasted for more than six months, were called the \u2018Volyn Massacre\u2019. UPA detachments and units from the SS Galicia division, which was made up of locals from the eponymous area, killed from 40,000 to 200,000 people, according to various estimates. The Polish Sejm and Senate put the number of victims at approximately 100,000 people, and July 11 is recognized as a \u2018National Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Genocide of Polish Citizens by Ukrainian Nationalists\u2019<\/p>\n
\n![\"RT\"](\"https:\/\/ci6.googleusercontent.com\/proxy\/Kj18cm0xJYgX0fWcGSKHXb3yucS1Hegi4JaQV8NqUGwiFIC94M30i8m87HTIzC18r9b8zBu6S5Etkp03qru1TlQh980klZVvrzq9EkaTye5mKZRjFvtY9Es19iYpgs_iLNtu=s0-d-e1-ft#https:\/\/cdni.russiatoday.com\/files\/2022.05\/original\/627b80cf2030275d57431723.jpg\")
Corpses of Polish victims of the massacre brought for identification and burial, March 26, 1943. \u00a9 Wikipedia<\/span><\/h5>\n<\/div>\nThe Polish \u2018Association of Memory of Victims of Crimes of Ukrainian Nationalists\u2019 (Stowarzyszenie Upami<\/em>\u0119<\/em>tnienia Ofiar Zbrodni Ukrai<\/em>\u0144<\/em>skich Nacjonalist<\/em>\u00f3<\/em>w<\/em>\u00a0(SUOZUN)) is engaged in reconstructing the course of events surrounding the Volyn Massacre. The materials collected by SUOZUN reveal shocking details with respect to the cruelty with which Ukrainian nationalists dealt with even babies and pregnant women. Polish researchers have uncovered 135 methods of torture and murder practiced by Ukrainian nationalists. Among them are:<\/p>\n\n- Running children through with stakes<\/li>\n
- Cutting a person\u2019s throat and pulling their tongue out through the hole<\/li>\n
- Sawing a person\u2019s torso in half with a carpenter\u2019s saw<\/li>\n
- Cutting open the belly of a woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy, removing the fetus, and replacing it with a live cat, before sewing up her abdomen.<\/li>\n
- Cutting open a pregnant women\u2019s abdomen and pouring in broken glass<\/li>\n
- Nailing a small child to a door.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
According to Polish historians, it came to the point that even the German butchers, having been shocked by these atrocities, began to protect the Poles from the Ukrainian\u00a0Sokirniki<\/em>\u00a0(from the Ukrainian word\u00a0sokira<\/em>, meaning \u2018axe\u2019).<\/p>\nAll this, including the ingenuity employed in conducting torture and executions, continued after the Nazis had been expelled from Ukraine. Only now the victims of the nationalists were citizens of Soviet Ukraine \u2013 specialists like agronomists, engineers, doctors, and teachers who had been sent from the eastern part of the republic to restore western Ukraine after the war. Though the vast majority of these were ethnic Ukrainians, the nationalists killed not only them, but even their own fellow villagers who had cooperated with the Soviets.<\/p>\n
These acts were carried out in accordance with\u00a0instructions<\/a>\u00a0given by the head of the UPA and former Wehrmacht hauptman Roman Shukhevich, who is now an idol for many Ukrainians:\u00a0\u201cThe OUN should act so that all those who recognized the Soviet government are destroyed. Not intimidated, but physically destroyed! Do not be afraid that people will curse us for cruelty. Let half of the 40 million Ukrainian population remain \u2013 there is nothing terrible in this,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0he wrote. (Tchaikovsky A., Nevidoma viina, K., 1994, p. 224). According to the KGB of the USSR, in 1944\u20131953, the irretrievable losses of the Soviet side were 30,676 people. Among them are 697 employees of state security agencies, 1,864 employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 3,199 military personnel, 2,590 fighters of destruction battalions; 2,732 – representatives of authorities, 251 communists, 207 Komsomol workers, 314 – chairmen of collective farms, 15,355 collective farmers and peasants, 676 workers, 1,931 – representatives of the intelligentsia, 860 – children, old people and housewives.<\/p>\nMaidan of Hate<\/h3>\n
With the return of the nationalists to Ukraine\u2019s political scene, after the Soviet collapse, the violence resumed as well. The existence of torture rooms in Kiev City Hall, which was seized by \u2018peaceful protesters\u2019 at the end of 2013, has been\u00a0reported.<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/unnamed-1024x681.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\nAnti-government protesters clash with police in Independence Square on February 19, 2014 in Kiev, Ukraine. \u00a9 Alexander Koerner \/ Getty Images<\/span><\/h5>\n<\/div>\nA lot of video footage from the \u2018Revolution of Dignity\u2019 has been preserved showing the bullying captured police officers suffered at the hands of \u2018peaceful protesters\u2019. Some doctors working on the Maidan had to\u00a0protect<\/a>\u00a0wounded officers that had been captured from being massacred.\u00a0Shots<\/a>\u00a0from the Hromadske.tv TV channel also captured a Maidan medic categorically prohibiting people from calling an ambulance for a policeman who had lost an eye on the grounds that he served in the Berkut special unit, which was trying to suppress the uprising.<\/p>\nHere is how Kiev journalist Sergey Rulev\u00a0describes<\/a>\u00a0his experience in the torture chamber:\u00a0\u201cFour people beat me. There was a woman in a headscarf with them, who kicked me in the groin without saying a word. Then they dragged me to the occupied Ministry of Agriculture, where they searched me, took away my documents, a press pass, accreditation to the Verkhovna Rada, business cards, two phones, and two cameras. When they dragged me back to Khreshchatyk, I started screaming and calling for help. I fell to the ground and was kicked again, but no one reacted. At about 12:00, I was dragged into the burned-out House of Trade Unions. In the lobby, I was immediately beaten up. In the courtyard, unknown people in camouflage fatigues bound my hands, stripped me to my underwear, and continued to beat me\u2026 After that, the four of them pinned me to the floor, injected something into my arm again, and said, \u2018Now you\u2019re going to talk to us, bitch! Which special services do you work for?\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nOnce he was tied up, an unknown woman began to rip out Sergey\u2019s nails with pliers. Subsequently, he identified this sadist as Amina Okuyeva, a medic in the \u20188th hundred\u2019 Maidan Self-Defense unit, who later\u00a0fought<\/a>\u00a0in the \u2018ATO (Anti-Terrorist Operation) Zone\u2019 as part of the neo-Nazi Kiev-2 and Dzhokhar Dudayev Battalions. She was\u00a0awarded<\/a>\u00a0the title People\u2019s Hero of Ukraine for her efforts.<\/p>\nThe Ukrainian State and the Nazis<\/h3>\n
It would be surprising if the Ukrainian nationalists, who were part of the troops operating in the so-called \u2018Anti-Terrorist Operation\u2019 (ATO) in the east of Ukraine, were to abandon their propensity for violence and stop bullying, torturing, and murdering their enemies, as this is the legacy of the totalitarian ideologies they have inherited from the last century. Andrei Ilyenko, a member of the neo-Nazi Svoboda party who is one of Ukrainian nationalism\u2019s modern ideologists, admits,\u00a0\u201cItalian fascism, German nationalism, Croatian Ustashism, authentic Ukrainian nationalism, Spanish Falangism, and other integral movements doubtlessly share a single ideological basis.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0(Patriot of Ukraine organization,\u00a0Ukrainian Social Nationalism: a collection of ideological works and program documents<\/em>, Kharkov \u2013 2007).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/unnamed-1-1024x619.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\nYoung participants in a nationalist march marking Stepan Bandera’s 109th birthday, in Lviv. \u00a9 Sputnik \/ Stringer<\/span><\/h5>\n<\/div>\nAnd this has not happened. Literally from the first days of the \u2018Anti-Terrorist Operation\u2019, information began to arrive about atrocities committed by nationalist battalions in the Donbass. After all, in addition to radical nationalists brought up to hate everything Russian, many of the participants were criminals convicted of violent crimes. Usurper Oleksandr Turchynov, who does not hide the fact that he\u00a0threatened<\/a>\u00a0MPs with physical violence if they did not vote for his appointment as acting president,\u00a0recalled<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cI remember one meeting at the front with volunteer units where one of those present, who was covered in tattoos, asked: \u2018Boss, will there be amnesty or not? The guys are interested in us there.\u2019 I asked, \u2018What do they want with you?\u2019 \u2018Well, for stuff like… murder, robbery…\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nThe crimes committed by nationalist battalion members went \u2018unnoticed\u2019 by the authorities for a long time, but when international human rights organizations began to scream about the most egregious cases, some facts regarding their atrocities finally reached the courts. Several leaders from the nationalist Aidar Battalion were convicted. For example, they created a prison in a sausage shop\u2019s smokehouse and\u00a0placed<\/a>\u00a0prisoners there in unheated cells measuring 80×150 cm, where people had to crouch for several months.<\/p>\nA lot of people got away with serious crimes on the grounds that they were \u2018Patriots of Ukraine\u2019, and this was shown to be a government policy in practice. For example, Sergey Sternenko, a nationalist from Maidan\u2019s Right Sector, escaped punishment for\u00a0protecting drug trafficking<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0murder<\/a>\u00a0on the basis of \u2018patriotism\u2019. Though Sternenko was sentenced to a prison term of 7 years and 3 months for abducting a pro-Russian deputy from Odessa named Sergey Shcherbich, his punishment was\u00a0reduced<\/a>\u00a0to one year of probation after just three months. Given this policy, it is not surprising that none of the participants in burning 49 people alive in the Odessa House of Trade Unions on May 2, 2014, have yet been brought to justice.<\/p>\nCriminal cases have been initiated against Ukrainian nationalist Nikolay Kokhanovsky more than once. This ATO participant and OUN battalion commander is also a member of the Azov Regiment, which has been\u00a0recognized<\/a>\u00a0by the US Congress as a neo-Nazi organization. He has been accused of attacking opposition TV channels, Moscow Patriarchate churches, Russian diplomatic missions, and Russian banks, as well as committing an\u00a0armed assault<\/a>\u00a0on a nationalist like himself without a weapons permit. After his supporters\u00a0smashed up<\/a>\u00a0the court, Kokhanovsky was set free.<\/p>\nPerhaps the most horrific crime committed by Ukrainian nationalists was the creation of a\u00a0prison<\/a>\u00a0in the refrigerator at the airport in Mariupol in June of 2014, which the jailers called the \u2018library\u2019. There, Mariupol residents were subjected to beatings, death by torture, and rape for even the suspicion of harboring sympathies for Russia or the unrecognized eastern republics. The \u2018library\u2019 was headed by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), whose chief, Valentin Nalivaichenko, was a friend of the leader of the Right Sector, Dmitry Yarosh. And Nalivaichenko\u2019s assistant, Yuri Mikhalchishin, a member of the nationalist Svoboda party who goes by the pseudonym \u2018Nahtigal88\u2019 (in honor of a sabotage battalion that was part of the Third Reich\u2019s counterintelligence division and the letters \u2018NN\u2019 denoting Heil Hitler), was responsible for the ideology of the special service. Mikhalchishin openly asserts that\u00a0Mein Kampf<\/em>\u00a0has been his guidebook<\/a>\u00a0since the age of 16. After being dismissed from the SBU, he went to fight as part of the Azov Regiment.<\/p>\n***<\/p>\n
The ideology of racial superiority has a long criminal history grounded in hate. When its bearers get their hands on power, national pride invariably turns into ruthless violence, and the radicals reveal their willingness to employ bestial cruelty and exterminate \u2018outsiders\u2019. The true foundations of their worldview will be seen more than once until this lesson in history is finally learned.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nBy\u00a0<\/em>Olga Sukharevskaya,\u00a0ex-Ukrainian diplomat<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=116644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116644\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=116644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=116644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=116644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Troops\u00a0shot in the legs screaming in pain. Others dying from blood loss and shock. With\u00a0no one around to provide medical assistance. A Russian soldier\u00a0crucified<\/a>\u00a0on an anti-tank barrier, chained to a metal \u2018hedgehog\u2019 and then burned alive\u2026<\/p>\n For many, graphic\u00a0footage<\/a>\u00a0of Russian servicemen tortured and killed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and nationalist battalions, came as a real shock. But this did not surprise those who are familiar with the \u2018traditions\u2019 of Ukraine\u2019s \u2018fighters for national freedom\u2019, as they have more than a century of history in this sort of thing.<\/p>\n The first concentration camps in Europe \u2013 Terezin and Thalerhof \u2013 were established in Austria-Hungary in the fall of 1914, not to hold prisoners of war, but the empire\u2019s own citizens. This is how Vienna, then the \u2018sick man of Europe\u2019, tried to protect its eastern border areas from members of its\u00a0population which sympathized with neighboring Russia. Fighting between the two countries had broken out just before the beginning of the First World War. Austria-Hungary\u2019s last emperor, Charles I,\u00a0confessed<\/a>\u00a0in his edict of May 7, 1917,\u00a0\u201cAll the arrested Russians are innocent, but they were detained to prevent them becoming guilty.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n People from Galicia who did not want to call themselves Ukrainians, as the Austrian authorities insisted, and continued to use the name \u2018Rusyns\u2019, were arrested and incarcerated in two places \u2013 in a garrison fortress in Terezin and in a valley near Graz, the capital of Styria. While the prisoners in Terezin were held in the vaults and dungeons of the fortress, with the support of local Czechs, the concentration camp later known as Thalerhof was little more than a bare field fenced in with barbed wire.<\/p>\n Today, most of Galicia is in Western Ukraine and the largest city is Lviv, which was known as Lemberg by the Austrians and Lvov by the Soviets and Polish.<\/p>\n The initial prisoners were brought there in September of 1915, and the first barracks began to be built only at the beginning of the following year. Prior to that, the people were forced to lie in the open in the rain and cold. According to US Congressman Joseph McCormick, the prisoners were often beaten and tortured. (Terrorism in Bohemia; Medill McCormick Gets Details of Austrian Cruelty<\/em>. \u2018New York Times\u2019, December 16, 1917)<\/p>\n According to the memoirs of those who survived the inhumane conditions (about 20,000 prisoners passed through the camp), 3,800 people were executed in the first half of 1915 alone, and 3,000 people died from the horrific conditions and diseases in a year and a half. Vasily Varvik, a writer, poet, literary critic, and historian who endured\u00a0Thalerhof\u2019s hell describes the atrocities in the internment camp as follows: \u201cIn order to intimidate people, to prove their power over us, the prison authorities drove poles into the ground all over Thalerhof Square, on which brutally beaten martyrs often hung in unspoken torment.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n What do the Ukrainians have to do with it? The fact is that Ukrainian nationalists were specially recruited to guard the Thalerhof camp. According to numerous testimonies, the arrested, which comprised nearly the entire Russian intelligentsia of Galicia and thousands of peasants, were also escorted to the camp by the Ukrainians.<\/p>\n Indeed, descriptions given in the\u00a0Thalerhof Almanac<\/a>\u00a0detail how\u00a0Ukrainian\u00a0Sichoviki<\/em>\u00a0in the Carpathian village of Lavochnoye tried to bayonet the prisoners, among whom there was not a single Russian, but only their fellow Galicians.<\/p>\n It was the Ukrainian nationalists who were the concentration camp guards\u2019 cruelest torturers and murderers.\u00a0\u201cIn the end, the atrocities committed by the Germans do not equate to the victimization of your own people. A soulless German could not get his iron boots so deeply into the soul of a Slavonic Rusyn as well as a Rusyn who called himself a Ukrainian,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0wrote Vasily Varvik.<\/p>\n At the end of February 1943, the \u2018revolutionary\u2019 wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUP), headed by the current idol of many Ukrainians, Stepan Bandera, decided to create the so-called \u2018Ukrainian Insurgent Army\u2019 (UPA) to \u2018fight the advancing Red Army\u2019, which was driving the Nazis from the country. But the first detachments that emerged in March and April, of the same year, began to fight not the Soviets, whose troops were still waiting for the Nazis to strike near Kursk, but Polish peasants in territory that had belonged to Warsaw up until 1939. These events, which lasted for more than six months, were called the \u2018Volyn Massacre\u2019. UPA detachments and units from the SS Galicia division, which was made up of locals from the eponymous area, killed from 40,000 to 200,000 people, according to various estimates. The Polish Sejm and Senate put the number of victims at approximately 100,000 people, and July 11 is recognized as a \u2018National Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Genocide of Polish Citizens by Ukrainian Nationalists\u2019<\/p>\n The Polish \u2018Association of Memory of Victims of Crimes of Ukrainian Nationalists\u2019 (Stowarzyszenie Upami<\/em>\u0119<\/em>tnienia Ofiar Zbrodni Ukrai<\/em>\u0144<\/em>skich Nacjonalist<\/em>\u00f3<\/em>w<\/em>\u00a0(SUOZUN)) is engaged in reconstructing the course of events surrounding the Volyn Massacre. The materials collected by SUOZUN reveal shocking details with respect to the cruelty with which Ukrainian nationalists dealt with even babies and pregnant women. Polish researchers have uncovered 135 methods of torture and murder practiced by Ukrainian nationalists. Among them are:<\/p>\n According to Polish historians, it came to the point that even the German butchers, having been shocked by these atrocities, began to protect the Poles from the Ukrainian\u00a0Sokirniki<\/em>\u00a0(from the Ukrainian word\u00a0sokira<\/em>, meaning \u2018axe\u2019).<\/p>\n All this, including the ingenuity employed in conducting torture and executions, continued after the Nazis had been expelled from Ukraine. Only now the victims of the nationalists were citizens of Soviet Ukraine \u2013 specialists like agronomists, engineers, doctors, and teachers who had been sent from the eastern part of the republic to restore western Ukraine after the war. Though the vast majority of these were ethnic Ukrainians, the nationalists killed not only them, but even their own fellow villagers who had cooperated with the Soviets.<\/p>\n These acts were carried out in accordance with\u00a0instructions<\/a>\u00a0given by the head of the UPA and former Wehrmacht hauptman Roman Shukhevich, who is now an idol for many Ukrainians:\u00a0\u201cThe OUN should act so that all those who recognized the Soviet government are destroyed. Not intimidated, but physically destroyed! Do not be afraid that people will curse us for cruelty. Let half of the 40 million Ukrainian population remain \u2013 there is nothing terrible in this,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0he wrote. (Tchaikovsky A., Nevidoma viina, K., 1994, p. 224). According to the KGB of the USSR, in 1944\u20131953, the irretrievable losses of the Soviet side were 30,676 people. Among them are 697 employees of state security agencies, 1,864 employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 3,199 military personnel, 2,590 fighters of destruction battalions; 2,732 – representatives of authorities, 251 communists, 207 Komsomol workers, 314 – chairmen of collective farms, 15,355 collective farmers and peasants, 676 workers, 1,931 – representatives of the intelligentsia, 860 – children, old people and housewives.<\/p>\n With the return of the nationalists to Ukraine\u2019s political scene, after the Soviet collapse, the violence resumed as well. The existence of torture rooms in Kiev City Hall, which was seized by \u2018peaceful protesters\u2019 at the end of 2013, has been\u00a0reported.<\/a><\/p>\n A lot of video footage from the \u2018Revolution of Dignity\u2019 has been preserved showing the bullying captured police officers suffered at the hands of \u2018peaceful protesters\u2019. Some doctors working on the Maidan had to\u00a0protect<\/a>\u00a0wounded officers that had been captured from being massacred.\u00a0Shots<\/a>\u00a0from the Hromadske.tv TV channel also captured a Maidan medic categorically prohibiting people from calling an ambulance for a policeman who had lost an eye on the grounds that he served in the Berkut special unit, which was trying to suppress the uprising.<\/p>\n Here is how Kiev journalist Sergey Rulev\u00a0describes<\/a>\u00a0his experience in the torture chamber:\u00a0\u201cFour people beat me. There was a woman in a headscarf with them, who kicked me in the groin without saying a word. Then they dragged me to the occupied Ministry of Agriculture, where they searched me, took away my documents, a press pass, accreditation to the Verkhovna Rada, business cards, two phones, and two cameras. When they dragged me back to Khreshchatyk, I started screaming and calling for help. I fell to the ground and was kicked again, but no one reacted. At about 12:00, I was dragged into the burned-out House of Trade Unions. In the lobby, I was immediately beaten up. In the courtyard, unknown people in camouflage fatigues bound my hands, stripped me to my underwear, and continued to beat me\u2026 After that, the four of them pinned me to the floor, injected something into my arm again, and said, \u2018Now you\u2019re going to talk to us, bitch! Which special services do you work for?\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Once he was tied up, an unknown woman began to rip out Sergey\u2019s nails with pliers. Subsequently, he identified this sadist as Amina Okuyeva, a medic in the \u20188th hundred\u2019 Maidan Self-Defense unit, who later\u00a0fought<\/a>\u00a0in the \u2018ATO (Anti-Terrorist Operation) Zone\u2019 as part of the neo-Nazi Kiev-2 and Dzhokhar Dudayev Battalions. She was\u00a0awarded<\/a>\u00a0the title People\u2019s Hero of Ukraine for her efforts.<\/p>\n It would be surprising if the Ukrainian nationalists, who were part of the troops operating in the so-called \u2018Anti-Terrorist Operation\u2019 (ATO) in the east of Ukraine, were to abandon their propensity for violence and stop bullying, torturing, and murdering their enemies, as this is the legacy of the totalitarian ideologies they have inherited from the last century. Andrei Ilyenko, a member of the neo-Nazi Svoboda party who is one of Ukrainian nationalism\u2019s modern ideologists, admits,\u00a0\u201cItalian fascism, German nationalism, Croatian Ustashism, authentic Ukrainian nationalism, Spanish Falangism, and other integral movements doubtlessly share a single ideological basis.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0(Patriot of Ukraine organization,\u00a0Ukrainian Social Nationalism: a collection of ideological works and program documents<\/em>, Kharkov \u2013 2007).<\/p>\n And this has not happened. Literally from the first days of the \u2018Anti-Terrorist Operation\u2019, information began to arrive about atrocities committed by nationalist battalions in the Donbass. After all, in addition to radical nationalists brought up to hate everything Russian, many of the participants were criminals convicted of violent crimes. Usurper Oleksandr Turchynov, who does not hide the fact that he\u00a0threatened<\/a>\u00a0MPs with physical violence if they did not vote for his appointment as acting president,\u00a0recalled<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cI remember one meeting at the front with volunteer units where one of those present, who was covered in tattoos, asked: \u2018Boss, will there be amnesty or not? The guys are interested in us there.\u2019 I asked, \u2018What do they want with you?\u2019 \u2018Well, for stuff like… murder, robbery…\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The crimes committed by nationalist battalion members went \u2018unnoticed\u2019 by the authorities for a long time, but when international human rights organizations began to scream about the most egregious cases, some facts regarding their atrocities finally reached the courts. Several leaders from the nationalist Aidar Battalion were convicted. For example, they created a prison in a sausage shop\u2019s smokehouse and\u00a0placed<\/a>\u00a0prisoners there in unheated cells measuring 80×150 cm, where people had to crouch for several months.<\/p>\n A lot of people got away with serious crimes on the grounds that they were \u2018Patriots of Ukraine\u2019, and this was shown to be a government policy in practice. For example, Sergey Sternenko, a nationalist from Maidan\u2019s Right Sector, escaped punishment for\u00a0protecting drug trafficking<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0murder<\/a>\u00a0on the basis of \u2018patriotism\u2019. Though Sternenko was sentenced to a prison term of 7 years and 3 months for abducting a pro-Russian deputy from Odessa named Sergey Shcherbich, his punishment was\u00a0reduced<\/a>\u00a0to one year of probation after just three months. Given this policy, it is not surprising that none of the participants in burning 49 people alive in the Odessa House of Trade Unions on May 2, 2014, have yet been brought to justice.<\/p>\n Criminal cases have been initiated against Ukrainian nationalist Nikolay Kokhanovsky more than once. This ATO participant and OUN battalion commander is also a member of the Azov Regiment, which has been\u00a0recognized<\/a>\u00a0by the US Congress as a neo-Nazi organization. He has been accused of attacking opposition TV channels, Moscow Patriarchate churches, Russian diplomatic missions, and Russian banks, as well as committing an\u00a0armed assault<\/a>\u00a0on a nationalist like himself without a weapons permit. After his supporters\u00a0smashed up<\/a>\u00a0the court, Kokhanovsky was set free.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most horrific crime committed by Ukrainian nationalists was the creation of a\u00a0prison<\/a>\u00a0in the refrigerator at the airport in Mariupol in June of 2014, which the jailers called the \u2018library\u2019. There, Mariupol residents were subjected to beatings, death by torture, and rape for even the suspicion of harboring sympathies for Russia or the unrecognized eastern republics. The \u2018library\u2019 was headed by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), whose chief, Valentin Nalivaichenko, was a friend of the leader of the Right Sector, Dmitry Yarosh. And Nalivaichenko\u2019s assistant, Yuri Mikhalchishin, a member of the nationalist Svoboda party who goes by the pseudonym \u2018Nahtigal88\u2019 (in honor of a sabotage battalion that was part of the Third Reich\u2019s counterintelligence division and the letters \u2018NN\u2019 denoting Heil Hitler), was responsible for the ideology of the special service. Mikhalchishin openly asserts that\u00a0Mein Kampf<\/em>\u00a0has been his guidebook<\/a>\u00a0since the age of 16. After being dismissed from the SBU, he went to fight as part of the Azov Regiment.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n The ideology of racial superiority has a long criminal history grounded in hate. When its bearers get their hands on power, national pride invariably turns into ruthless violence, and the radicals reveal their willingness to employ bestial cruelty and exterminate \u2018outsiders\u2019. The true foundations of their worldview will be seen more than once until this lesson in history is finally learned.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n By\u00a0<\/em>Olga Sukharevskaya,\u00a0ex-Ukrainian diplomat<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=116644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116644\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=116644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=116644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=116644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Europe\u2019sFirst\u00a0Concentration\u00a0Ca
From the Volyn Massacre to 1954<\/h3>\n
Corpses of Polish victims of the massacre brought for identification and burial, March 26, 1943. \u00a9 Wikipedia<\/span><\/h5>\n<\/div>\n\n
Maidan of Hate<\/h3>\n
<\/p>\nAnti-government protesters clash with police in Independence Square on February 19, 2014 in Kiev, Ukraine. \u00a9 Alexander Koerner \/ Getty Images<\/span><\/h5>\n<\/div>\n
The Ukrainian State and the Nazis<\/h3>\n
<\/p>\nYoung participants in a nationalist march marking Stepan Bandera’s 109th birthday, in Lviv. \u00a9 Sputnik \/ Stringer<\/span><\/h5>\n<\/div>\n