https://nypost.com/2020/07/10/white-lady-who-pulled-gun-on-black-woman-says-she-feared-for-her-life/

White woman who pulled gun on black family says she feared for her life

The white woman who was arrested after pointing a gun at a black woman and her daughter during an argument in a Chipotle parking lot says she did it because she feared for her life, according to a report Friday.

In the first time since footage of the heated confrontation surfaced, Jillian Wuestenberg spoke out about pulling the firearm — saying she felt threatened because the duo blocked her from leaving a Michigan Chipotle, according to 7 Action News.

“Within moments, a second or two, I had multiple people within two feet of me and I just remember thinking, ‘I am not going home tonight,’” Jillian, 32, tearfully told the local station.

“It’s scary…The more I see [the video] the more I realize I’m more afraid of that situation now than I was then.”

Asked why she felt the need to load a bullet into the gun’s chamber, she said, “That meant I am about to die and I don’t want to die.”

The tense encounter erupted when Wuestenberg allegedly bumped into Takelia Hill’s 15-year-old daughter, Makayla Green, while leaving the restaurant in Lake Orion at around 6 p.m. on July 1.

The footage, which doesn’t show the alleged bump, picks up after the altercation spilled into the parking lot — and shows Hill and her daughter demand an apology, with the teen calling her “racist and ignorant.”

Wuestenberg and her husband, Eric, then get into their SUV and try to back out of the parking spot as Hill steps back before hitting the back window of the vehicle — claiming she thought the driver was going to hit them.

That’s when Wuestenberg hopped out of the car and pointed a loaded gun at the mother and daughter.

Both Wuestenbergs are each facing an assault charge — which Hill’s lawyer, Christopher Quinn, said is much-deserved.

“She was able to get into the vehicle,” Quinn told the station. “They were able to drive off. They didn’t choose to drive off. They actually almost hit my client with their van. And then jumped out like Bonnie and Clyde with guns pointed at them. They were going to make sure it was understood they were the ones in charge.”

In the interview, Wuestenberg also said she didn’t think twice about pulling the weapon because she has experience with firearms.

“I grew up around lots of handguns, lots of rifles,” she said. “They are just an everyday part of life. It was just something that was there.”

https://nypost.com/2020/07/02/white-woman-pulls-gun-on-black-woman-daughter-in-michigan-parking-lot/

http://johnhelmer.net/in-the-canadian-cartoon-dudley-do-right-can-do-no-wrong-snidely-whiplash-no-good-in-real-life-can-robert-fife-david-walmsley-terry-glavin-alan-freeman-and-scott-gilmore-save-the-galicia-gang/

This is not a story about the past, nor about blaming the crimes of the fathers and grandfathers on their sons and daughters, or granddaughters.

This is a story of the moment when the crimes of the past and the criminal intent today turn out to be the same thing: Russian-hating today is a race crime, just as Jew-hating and Pole-hating were crimes, and still are. No Canadian foreign minister or member of parliament, no Canadian Mountie, no Dudley Do-Right should be culpable of such crimes.

Chrystia Freeland (lead image, left), Canada’s Foreign Minister, stands for the same race hatred as her grandfather, Michael Chomiak (centre) stood for. He profited from his crimes by the theft of property belonging to Jews in Cracow and Chelm, the two towns where Chomiak ran newspapers on behalf of Emil Gassner, head of press for the German administration of occupied Poland known as the Generalgouvernement (German) and Generalne Gubernatorstwo (Polish), with headquarters in Cracow.

Chomiak moved west with Gassner and the retreating German Army, continuing his Cracow publication from Vienna until he moved to Bavaria. There he found employment with US Arrmy Intelligence, becoming an operative in clandestine US military and propaganda operations against the Soviet government in Kiev and Moscow.

Freeland continues those operations today, with Canadian government resources. She profits personally by attracting votes for her parliamentary election, and popularity ratings as a wannabe prime minister by cultivating the same Galician view of Russians, Poles, Jews – they don’t belong in the country her grandfather tried to cleanse with murder, and she is trying to cleanse with Canadian Government arms, combat trainers, and Canadian Government bank loans totalling $400 million.

Chomiak went on with his Great Galicia campaign after he left employment by the German Army for employment by the US Army. He continued the campaign when he moved to Canada. He and Freeland never believed for a minute, nor can Freeland say now, that Galicia isn’t the Ukraine; that Ukraine cannot be Greater Galicia; or that no Polish territory belongs to Galicia or to Ukraine. The Polish Government will shortly request officially that Freeland clarify herself on these points.

>>10369691

>http://johnhelmer.net/in-the-canadian-cartoon-dudley-do-right-can-do-no-wrong-snidely-whiplash-no-good-in-real-life-can-robert-fife-david-walmsley-terry-glavin-alan-freeman-and-scott-gilmore-save-the-galicia-gang/

US Army Intelligence and Canadian immigration files, compiled between 1945 and 1950, will in due course confirm the truth about Chomiak’s war against the Russians, Poles, and Jews. It is already clear that Freeland has lied about that repeatedly. Calling me names, and characterizing others (Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Americans) investigating Freeland as pro-Russians, disinformation agents, Kremlin stooges, and Putin trolls is Exhibit No. 1 in the case for the prosecution of the race hate crime which Freeland is trying to cover up.

Freeland’s new defence to the lying about Chomiak, which she has persuaded her supporters in the Canadian media and in the Canadian political establishment to endorse, is that Chomiak was compelled to “collaborate”, while secretly he aided the Ukrainian resistance. This too is a lie. Polish government investigations are under way; the Jewish Holocaust Museum files already show that the only Ukrainians Chomiak assisted were even more motivated by race hatred and blood lust than the German Army and the Generalgouvernement.

>>10369699

Salad days for Chomiak (rear row, left) with a German officer and other officials of the Generalgouvernement in Cracow. The source for the photograph is given as this interview with a Ukrainian-Canadian, Alex Boykowich, reported here: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Canadian-Foreign-Minister-Scapegoats-Russian-Hackers-for-Exposing-Nazi-Grandfather-20170309-0015.html Boykowich says he got this photograph (and the one above) from the Chomiak Collection of papers in the Alberta province archives, accession number #85.191. http://www.archives.gov.ua/Eng/canada.php No other publication by Boykowich has been located.

Canadian Foreign Minister Scapegoats Russian Hackers for Exposing Nazi Grandfather

While Foreign Affairs Minister Chyrstia Freeland dismissed the news as Russian propaganda, it was actually Ukrainian Canadians that unearthed the information.

To say Canada’s “star diplomat,” Chyrstia Freeland, has skeletons in her closet, is a grave understatement. The country’s foreign affairs minister had a Nazi collaborator as grandfather — a fact she knew for decades, but didn't stop her from peddling her way to a top government post.

As the revelation came to light this week, Freeland has dismissed the facts as part of a “Russian disinformation campaign,” raising questions among some about the prospects for Canada’s role in Ukraine. On Monday, Canada extended its military training mission to the Eastern European nation, supporting a government that has ties to extreme, far-right nationalist elements and anti-Semitic militias.

While Freeland dismissed the news as Russian propaganda, it was actually Ukrainian Canadians that unearthed the information by digging through provincial archives in Edmonton, Alberta. Alex Boykowich and his colleague, through their own independent research, found that Michael Chomiak, Freeland’s maternal Ukrainian grandfather, was chief editor of a Nazi newspaper in Krakow, Poland called Krakivski Visti, which translate to Krakow News. In his post, Chomiak published anti-Jewish diatribes that supported the Nazi's regime of terror that later became known as the Holocaust.

“We saw photographs of Chomiak with Nazi officials, swastikas with Ukrainian nationalist symbols,” Boykowich, a member of the Communist Party of Canada, told teleSUR.

He explained that he and his colleague became interested in Freeland after the media gave undue attention to the rising diplomat. They began researching about her in December 2016, before Freeland was offered post as foreign minister in January, as Boykowich — of Ukrainian heritage — became intrigued to learn that Freeland, too, was Ukrainian.

“We found a profile of her that said her mother was born in a camp for displaced peoples in Germany,” Boykowich explained, adding that there were only two reasons Ukrainians would be in Germany at that time: if they were enslaved laborers or Nazi collaborators.

Pouring through the archives’ 25 boxes on Chomiak, they discovered his bonafide links with the ethno-supremacist movement.

Krakivski Visti was established by the German army and was supervised by Nazi intelligence, after it was taken away from its Jewish owner Moishe Kafner, who later died in the Belsen concentration camp in 1942. Like many publications at that time that were seized by Nazis from their Jewish owners, the paper functioned as a Nazi propaganda outlet.

>>10369726

>Canadian Foreign Minister Scapegoats Russian Hackers for Exposing Nazi Grandfather

<https://web.archive.org/web/20170309223113/http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Canadian-Foreign-Minister-Scapegoats-Russian-Hackers-for-Exposing-Nazi-Grandfather-20170309-0015.html

“The editorial boards carried out a policy of soliciting Ukrainian support for the German cause,” the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum states about Krakivski Visti and a similar newspaper, Lvivski Visti. “It was typical, within these publications, to not to give any accounts of the German genocidal policy, and largely, the editions resorted to silencing the mass killing of Jews in Galicia. Ukrainian newspapers presented the Jewish Question in light of the official Nazi propaganda, corollary to the Jewish world conspiracy.”

Boykowich and his colleague surveyed files on Chomiak in the Province of Alberta's Ukraine Archival Records, discovering details of his role as editor. The files noted that Chomiak edited the paper first in Krakow, then in Vienna, Austria, where he fled from Poland with his Nazi colleagues as the Soviets advanced there.

“I don’t think it’s a secret. American officials have publicly said, and even (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel has publicly said, that there were efforts on the Russian side to destabilize Western democracies, and I think it shouldn’t come as a surprise if these same efforts were used against Canada,” she said.

At the conference, she evaded questions about her grandfather being a Nazi collaborator.

What perhaps is most befuddling, however, is the fact that, over the years, Freeland has touted the narrative that her grandfather was a political refugee from Soviet-occupied Ukraine, describing him as simply a “journalist and lawyer” before World War II. According to a report by Canada's The Globe and Mail, Freeland knew about her father's Nazi connections and position at the newspaper.

Boykowich confirmed through his archival research that Chomiak harbored the same politics even after he arrived in Canada.

“He read (other Nazi papers), fascist ones that had anti-Semitic columns,” he told teleSUR.

Conservatives in Canada have come to Freeland's defense, parroting her Russian propaganda line.

“It is unacceptable. It seems they are trying smear a minister with historical detail that has probably been misrepresented,” Conservative foreign affairs critic Peter Kent said, as reported by The Globe and Mail. “It is unfair and it is typical of what we have seen in other countries and it has nothing to do with her ability to represent Canada.”

Ukrainian nationalists in Canada have come to her defense too, also blaming Russia for the information being revealed.

“It is the continued Russian modus operandi that they have. Fake news, disinformation and targeting different individuals,” said Paul Grod, president of the Canadian Ukrainian Congress, a close confidante of Freeland, who has also made statements in the past skeptical of the Holocaust. “It is just so outlandish when you hear some of these allegations — whether they are directed at minister Freeland or others.”

In response to the revelations, a spokesman for the Russian embassy in Ottawa, Kirill Kalinin, denied Russian involvement, adding, “While we cannot deny or confirm particular news stories, it’s our principled position that Nazism and Nazi collaborators, their hateful ideology, that took tens of millions lives, must be unanimously condemned.”

For Boykowich, the reality that the directorate of Canadian foreign policy is supporting the armed forces of a fascist regime, should not be disconnected from Freeland’s family’s history.

“This shows the ideological connection that carries on,” he warned. “Chomiak supported Nazis then, and (Freeland) too is supporting Nazis in Ukraine. The purpose of that support, from Nazi Germany, to the Cold War, to today, is the same: imperial aggression against Russia.”

>>10369728

>“This shows the ideological connection that carries on,” he warned. “Chomiak supported Nazis then, and (Freeland) too is supporting Nazis in Ukraine. The purpose of that support, from Nazi Germany, to the Cold War, to today, is the same: imperial aggression against Russia.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion#Neo-Nazism

>>10369761

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion

US lifts ban on funding ‘neo-Nazi’ Ukrainian militia

https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/US-lifts-ban-on-funding-neo-Nazi-Ukrainian-militia-441884

Congress bans arms to Ukraine militia linked to neo-Nazis

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/380483-congress-bans-arms-to-controversial-ukrainian-militia-linked-to-neo-nazis

>>10369782

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fukrainian%2Ffeatures-russian-44110741

Anti-Semitism or Manipulation: Is Oppression of Jews Increasing in Ukraine?

May 14, 2018

The Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities denies the growth of anti-Semitism in Ukraine, although several high-profile scandals have flared up around this in the past few weeks.

This weekend, an "anti-Semitic scandal" broke out in Ukraine, to which the Foreign Ministry was forced to react: the media wrote that the Ukrainian consul in Hamburg allegedly allowed himself anti-Semitic statements on social networks several years ago.

At the end of April 2018, a statement by 53 US congressmen appeared in the press , who expressed concern about the alleged growth of anti-Semitism in Ukraine and Poland.

The Americans even argued that there is Holocaust denial at the state level in Ukraine.

During a rally in Odessa in early May, Tatiana Soykina, leader of the local Right Sector cell, made a statement that was immediately called anti-Semitic.

Are anti-Semitic sentiments really on the rise in Ukraine recently, or are the scandals the result of political exaggeration and manipulation?

Congressional letter

The reason for the letter of American congressmen about anti-Semitism in Poland and Ukraine was the law adopted in Warsaw. Among other things, it provides for punishment for accusing Poles of participating in the Holocaust.

However, a significant part of the attention in the document is paid to Ukraine.

As the congressmen pointed out, anti-Semitic sentiments are growing in Ukraine, and the state is taking steps to deny the Holocaust.

The congressmen also drew attention to the activities of the Azov battalion, which is now part of the National Guard - allegedly it was its members who demonstrated the Nazi salute during the marches in honor of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

The congressmen also recalled that due to the specifics of the Azov battalion, the US authorities have forbidden to help this unit at the expense of American funds.

Director of the Institute of National Remembrance Vladimir Vyatrovich called this letter "a mixture of incompetence and deliberate distortion of information, a mixture of truth and lies."

If the reaction of Vyatrovich, who is often accused of defending the memory of UPA fighters, was predictable, then the very harsh statement of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine (VAAD) could surprise.

On May 9, the presidium of the VAAD issued a letter in which it actually accused the congressmen of an unfounded anti-Ukrainian attack, which is "used in Russia's hybrid information war against Ukraine."

"The letter signed by the congressmen contains allegations and accusations that are not true," says a statement from the WAAD, headed by renowned human rights activist Joseph Zisels.

The organization claims that in Ukraine, in the post-Soviet space, the memory of the Holocaust is better preserved, and the state is increasingly "getting involved in this process," especially at the local level.

Representatives of Jewish organizations also disagree with the statement that the UPA is "Nazi collaborators."

"In fact, there is no state-supported denial of the Holocaust and the glorification of the Nazis in Ukraine, a significant increase in anti-Semitism has not been recorded in Ukraine - for almost two years now, not a single incident related to anti-Semitic violence has been recorded in the country," the VAAD concluded.

The organization also noted that their monitoring and analysis of anti-Semitic incidents has been the basis for the reports of the US State Department and the OSCE for 15 years.

>>10369795

>https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fukrainian%2Ffeatures-russian-44110741

Anti-Semitism and diplomats

On May 12, the well-known blogger Anatoly Shariy, who even before the Euromaidan left Ukraine due to criminal prosecution, published information that the consul of Ukraine in Hamburg Vasily Marushchinets allowed himself anti-Semitic statements on social networks several years ago.

One entry was allegedly in 2013, and another in 2015. Currently, there are no messages to which the journalist referred.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavel Klimkin immediately reacted to these accusations.

"There can be no place for anti-Semites and those who incite interethnic strife either in a civilized society or in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine begins disciplinary proceedings. We will thoroughly understand all the details," Mr. Klimkin wrote on his Twitter page on May 13 …

Power and oligarchs

Quite often, scandals around anti-Semitism arise in Ukraine, connected with accusations of the authorities or oligarchs.

Such a case recently occurred in Odessa, where the head of the local cell of the Right Sector, Tatiana Soykina, publicly stated that Ukraine would belong to Ukrainians, "not Jews. No - to the oligarchy, Glory to Ukraine."

The fact is that in Ukraine some of the country's richest oligarchs are Jews, and radical Ukrainians often associate their nationalities and financial situation with the poverty of the population.

The head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov immediately reacted to this statement by Ms. Soikina.

He said that public anti-Semitic calls in Ukraine are unacceptable. Avakov called it "the cave Middle Ages", and the police opened a criminal case on this statement.

Subsequently, Soykina apologized for her words, and also explained her understanding of the problem.

The nationalists, they say, distinguish between the concepts of "Jews" - they are, according to her, representatives of oligarchic clans that plunder Ukraine, and "Jews" are representatives of a friendly nation who are fighting with them for Ukraine.

She also recalled that the "Right Sector" of the Odessa region supported the appointment of the famous cultural figure of Jewish origin Alexander Roitburd as director of the Odessa Art Museum.

The "Right Sector" also recalled that they have always condemned acts of vandalism against monuments to the victims of the Holocaust, and among the members of the organization there are many Jews.

In addition, Ukrainian and foreign journalists often draw attention to the fact that the Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Groysman is of Jewish origin.

Some journalists and activists sometimes hint that the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko may also be of Jewish origin.

Although this is unverified and unconfirmed information, critics of the president often talk about it, and sometimes it escalates into high-profile political scandals.

In particular, this happened in the fall of 2017 with the press secretary of Mikheil Saakashvili, Daria Chizh. In a Facebook post, she hinted at the president's alleged Jewish origins, pointing out the "Waltzman particle" in Poroshenko's character.

Saakashvili then publicly condemned the statements of his speaker and said that he had removed her from work. Ms Chyzh herself removed the post and stated that some had mistakenly regarded it as "anti-Semitic."

During many protests in Kiev in recent years, some of the protesters expressed certain anti-Semitic slogans, allegedly linking them with the Jewish origin of the authorities and Ukrainian oligarchs.

>>10369810

>https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fukrainian%2Ffeatures-russian-44110741

Azov and the Jews

Despite the loud accusations against Azov and other nationalist organizations regarding anti-Semitism, representatives of the Jewish community of Ukraine serve and help them.

One of the most famous examples is Natan Khazin , the commander of the so-called "Jewish hundred" during the Euromaidan.

He claimed that he had not seen significant manifestations of anti-Semitism during the Maidan.

He himself and his associates jokingly called themselves "Judeo-Bandera", and also stylized the red and black flag of the UPA, adding the Star of David to it.

It is significant that Mr. Khazin himself called himself one of the founders of the Azov battalion.

Since the beginning of the war in Donbass, he has been actively helping the Ukrainian military as a volunteer.

It is also known that in the Ukrainian volunteer army, created on the basis of the "Right Sector" in the Donbas, there was a separate Jewish unit .

It included about 20 fighters of Jewish origin, who even set up their own field synagogue.

"It is impossible to say that anti-Semitism does not exist in Ukraine at all, but the level that they talk about in the West does not correspond to reality," Natan Khazin told BBC News Ukraine.

He notes that everyday anti-Semitism was, is and will be, this should be admitted, but its level "cannot be compared with what is happening in this area in Europe."

“I can say that, despite the difficult situation in Ukraine and the war, the level of anti-Semitism is not growing. Someone in the West simply does not understand the real state of affairs in Ukraine in this area,” said Mr. Khazin.

Against this background, a study by the American Pew Research Center was indicative . The researchers asked the residents of Central and Eastern Europe if they want to see Jews as citizens of their state.

Among all the countries surveyed, the level of negative perception of Jews in Ukraine was the lowest - 5%.

For example, in Russia this figure was 14%, in Poland - 18%, and in Romania - 23%.

>>10369802

>https://twitter.com/colbertlateshow/status/1296629892361199617

>>10369691

>Galicia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia

>>10369887

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2010/02/24/a-fascist-hero-in-democratic-kiev/

A Fascist Hero in Democratic Kiev

The incoming Ukrainian president will have to turn some attention to history, because the outgoing one has just made a hero of a long-dead Ukrainian fascist. By conferring the highest state honor of “Hero of Ukraine” upon Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) on January 22, Viktor Yushchenko provoked protests from the chief rabbi of Ukraine, the president of Poland, and many of his own citizens. It is no wonder. Bandera aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities. During World War II, his followers killed many Poles and Jews. Why would President Yushchenko, the leader of the democratic Orange Revolution, wish to rehabilitate such a figure? Bandera, who spent years in Polish and Nazi confinement, and died at the hands of the Soviet KGB, is for some Ukrainians a symbol of the struggle for independence during the twentieth century.

Born in 1909, Bandera matured at a time when the cause of national self-determination had triumphed in much of eastern Europe, but not in Ukraine. The lands of today’s Ukraine had been divided between the Russian Empire and the Habsburg monarchy when World War I began, and were divided again between the new Soviet Union and newly independent Poland when the bloodshed ceased. The Soviets defeated one Ukrainian army, the Poles another. Ukrainians thus became the largest national minority in both the Soviet Union and Poland. With time, most Ukrainian political parties in Poland reconciled themselves to Polish statehood. The Ukrainian Military Organization, however, formed of Ukrainian veterans in Poland, followed the movement that sought to change the boundaries of Europe: fascism. With Benito Mussolini, who came to power in 1922 in Italy, as their model, they mounted a number of failed assassination attempts on Polish politicians.

By the time the Ukrainian Military Organization became the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), in 1929, a younger generation was dominant. Young terrorists such as Stepan Bandera were formed not by the prewar empires, but by fascist ideology and the experience of national discrimination in Poland. In the 1920s the Polish authorities had closed Ukrainian schools and ignored Poland’s promise to provide for Ukrainian national autonomy. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, as a new Polish government sought reconciliation with its five million Ukrainian citizens, Ukrainian nationalists acted decisively to prevent any compromise settlement. Bandera was one of the main organizers of terror campaigns intended to prevent Ukrainians from accepting the Polish government by provoking Polish retaliation. The main targets of their assassination attempts were Ukrainians and Poles who wished to work together. The OUN assassinated the leading advocate of Ukrainian-Polish rapprochement, Tadeusz Holówko, in his sanatorium bed. They also sought (but failed) to kill Henryk Józewski, who was implementing a policy of national concessions to Ukrainians in Poland.

>>10369905

>https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2010/02/24/a-fascist-hero-in-democratic-kiev/

Bandera and his fellow Ukrainian nationalists were aware of the far greater repressions on the Soviet side of the border, where far more Ukrainians lived; given the effectiveness of the Soviet secret police, however, they could only act within Poland. They did nevertheless react to Josif Stalin’s deliberate starvation of millions of peasants in Soviet Ukraine in 1933. Bandera was probably involved in planning the revenge assassination of a Soviet diplomat in Poland late that year. Ukrainian nationalists hoped to use the trial of the young Ukrainian who carried out the assassination as a forum to spread the news of the famine, but Polish authorities did not allow this. Ukrainian nationalists (and many other Ukrainians in Poland and elsewhere) were embittered by the failure of the west to respond to the mass death in the USSR. 1933 was also the year when Hitler took power in Germany. Bandera and other Ukrainian nationalists saw the Nazis as the only power that could destroy both of their oppressors, Poland and the Soviet Union. OUN activists were in contact with German military intelligence.

In June 1934, the OUN assassinated Bronislaw Pieracki, the Polish minister of internal affairs, when he began to negotiate with moderate Ukrainian groups in Poland. For his part in organizing the murder, Bandera was sentenced to death—commuted to life imprisonment–-in January 1936. He was released from prison when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, and now sought to bring the OUN under his own command. Instead, it split into two factions, with Bandera commanding the more radical, known as the OUN-Bandera or OUN-B.

Bandera was active in a time and place where violence was very practicable, but where the chances that it would lead to Ukrainian national independence were minimal. His followers fell ever further into the maelstrom of violence on the eastern front, without thereby creating a Ukrainian state. The Germans did destroy Poland in 1939, as the Ukrainian nationalists had hoped; and they tried to destroy the Soviet Union in 1941. When the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union that June, they were joined by the armies of Hungary, Romania, Italy, and Slovakia, as well as small contingents of Ukrainian volunteers associated with the OUN-B. Some of these Ukrainian nationalists helped the Germans to organize murderous pogroms of Jews. In so doing, they were advancing a German policy, but one that was consistent with their own program of ethnic purity, and their own identification of Jews with Soviet tyranny.

Ukrainian nationalist political goals, however, were not identical with Hitler’s. In June 1941, supporters of Bandera declared independence for a Ukrainian state, while promising cooperation with Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler was not interested in Ukrainian independence on these or any terms, and eventually had most of the leadership of the OUN-B arrested. Bandera himself was incarcerated in Berlin and then in the camp at Sachsenhausen. Like other east European nationalists of stature, he was being held in reserve for some future contingency when he might be useful to the Nazis.

>>10369909

>https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2010/02/24/a-fascist-hero-in-democratic-kiev/

Bandera was still in the German camp at Sachsenhausen, and without influence, when his group took command of a partisan army in early 1943. As the tide turned against the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad, Ukrainians who had served the Germans as auxiliary policemen left the German service and went into the forest. Among their duties as policemen had been the mass killing of west Ukrainian Jews. These Ukrainians, some of them members of the OUN-B, formed the core of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (or UPA), which declared itself against both the existing German occupation and the coming Soviet one. Two leaders of Bandera’s organization, Mykola Lebed’ and Roman Shukhevych, brought the UPA under the control of the OUN-B.

Under their command, the UPA undertook to ethnically cleanse western Ukraine of Poles in 1943 and 1944. UPA partisans murdered tens of thousands of Poles, most of them women and children. Some Jews who had taken shelter with Polish families were also killed. Poles (and a few surviving Jews) fled the countryside, controlled by the UPA, to the towns, controlled by the Germans. Those who survived formed self-defense organizations, or joined the German police (replacing the Ukrainians) or the Soviet partisans who were fighting against the UPA. In all of these conflicts Poles took revenge on Ukrainian civilians. The UPA, for that matter, probably killed as many Ukrainians as it did Poles, since it regarded people who did not adhere to its own brand of nationalism as traitors.

After the Red Army drove the Germans from Ukraine in summer 1944, the UPA engaged Soviet forces in large-scale partisan war. In late 1944 the Germans released Bandera from Sachsenhausen, and he considered returning to Ukraine. His fellow Ukrainian nationalists dissuaded him from doing so, on the ground that he was too valuable as a symbol of the struggle and should not risk his life. Meanwhile thousands of Ukrainians died fighting for independence under his name. No other underground force resisted the Soviets for as long as the UPA, or caused such losses. By the end of the 1940s, however, the Soviets prevailed, having killed more than a hundred thousand Ukrainians, and deported many more to Siberia. If Soviet counts are reliable, Ukrainian nationalists suffered more mortal casualties fighting communist rule than did the US Army in the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.

It is this legacy of sacrifice that many in western Ukraine today associate with Bandera, and do not wish to be forgotten. The UPA also fought on the Polish side of the border, resisting a Polish communist regime there that was deporting Ukrainians from their homeland. Many people who joined the UPA in both the Soviet Union and communist Poland did so after the war, in self-defense, and took no part in the earlier murder campaigns. As the Cold War began, some OUN-B members and UPA fighters were recruited by British and American intelligence, and then dropped by parachute in doomed missions across the Soviet border. Soviet and Polish communists, having consolidated their rule by the late 1940s, demonized the OUN and the Ukrainian partisans as “German-Ukrainian fascists,” a characterization accurate enough to serve as enduring and effective propaganda both within and without the Soviet Union. Bandera himself remained in Germany after the war, a leading figure in the fractious milieu of Ukrainian nationalists in Munich. He remained faithful to the idea of a fascist Ukraine until assassinated by the KGB in 1959.

>>10369914

>https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2010/02/24/a-fascist-hero-in-democratic-kiev/

Fascism never had a significant influence in eastern and central Ukraine, and was only important in west Ukrainian political life in the very special circumstances of World War II and the partisan war against Soviet power, when terrorists with underground experience enjoyed a natural advantage. Nevertheless, Bandera is associated with a certain alternative history of the country, one which is beyond the reach of Russia and the Soviet Union. Bandera was born in the Habsburg monarchy rather than the Russian Empire, and his movement arose in Poland rather than the Soviet Union. These lands only became part of the Soviet Union as a result of World War II. Ukrainian nationalists from this region believed that they were taking part in a larger European movement, and they were right. The recovery from fascist ideology in southern, central, and western Europe took place only after World War II, in circumstances of American occupation and prosperity. For many people in western Ukraine, the triumphant westward march of the Red Army through their homeland was not so much a liberation as the beginning of another occupation, Soviet after Polish and German. The UPA was the only hope for national self-defense.

This is one telling of Ukrainian history, but it is not the dominant one. Yushchenko was soundly defeated in the first round of the presidential elections, perhaps in some measure because far more Ukrainians identify with the Red Army than with nationalist partisans from western Ukraine. Bandera was burned in effigy in Odessa after he was named a hero; even his statue in west Ukrainian Lviv, erected by city authorities in 2007, was under guard during the election campaign. For Yushchenko, who is not a west Ukrainian, the embrace of Bandera was part of a more general attempt to distance Ukraine from the legacy of Stalinism. As everyone who is interested in the history of Soviet Ukraine knows, from Vladimir Putin in Moscow to Ukrainian nationalist emigrants in Toronto, partisans fighting under Bandera’s name resisted the imposition of Stalinist rule with enormous determination. Thus there seems to be a certain binary political logic to Yushchenko’s decision: to glorify Bandera is to reject Stalin and to reject any pretension from Moscow to power over Ukraine.

Consistent as the rehabilitation of Bandera might be with the ideological competition of the mid-twentieth century, it makes little ethical sense today. Yushchenko, who praised the recent Kiev court verdict condemning Stalin for genocide, regards as a hero a man whose political program called for ethnic purity and whose followers took part in the ethnic cleansing of Poles and, in some cases, in the Holocaust. Bandera opposed Stalin, but that does not mean that the two men were entirely different. In their struggle for Ukraine, we see the triumph of the principle, common to fascists and communists, that political transformation sanctifies violence. It was precisely this legacy that east European revolutionaries seemed to have overcome in the past thirty years, from the Solidarity movement in Poland of 1980 through the Ukrainian presidential elections of 2005. It was then, during the Orange Revolution, that peaceful demonstrations for free and fair elections brought Yushchenko the presidency. In embracing Bandera as he leaves office, Yushchenko has cast a shadow over his own political legacy.

>>10369915

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yushchenko#TCDD_poisoning

https://web.archive.org/web/20050205093638/https://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/28/60minutes/main670103.shtml

Yushchenko: 'Live And Carry On'

Jan. 30, 2005

(CBS) It's a plot straight out of spy novel. A presidential candidate in the heart of Europe is stricken by a mystery poison that disfigures his face and nearly kills him.

But this is no fiction. It’s the story of how Ukraine’s new president, Viktor Yushchenko, triumphed over his country’s authoritarian rulers, while leading a massive people-power revolution.

For the first time since his inauguration, Yushchenko tells his incredible story to CNN's Christiane Amanpour, on assignment for 60 Minutes.

In Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, the walls of St. Michael's Monastery of the Golden Domes resonate with a painful history. Demolished by Stalin’s henchmen, this 12th century cathedral has been rebuilt from scratch, a task almost as monumental as the one faced by Yushchenko, Ukraine’s new president.

"It's a huge responsibility," says Yushchenko. "Ukrainians have dreamt of being free for centuries. So no one expected we'd come so close to dictatorship."

And that might have happened if the plot to poison Yushchenko had succeeded. It has completely disfigured him.

"You challenged people about your face," says Amanpour. "You said that your face is everything that is wrong with Ukraine. What do you mean by that?"

"People cry when they see my face, but my country has also been disfigured," says Yushchenko. "Now, we’ll bring both back to health."

How does he deal with his disfigurement now? "This Yushchenko," he says, "I'm still not used to."

Six months ago, when he began his campaign to unseat Ukraine's authoritarian rulers, did he have any idea that it would be so difficult and that he would go through such personal hardship?

"I know what kind of country I live in, and who’s in charge of the government," says Yushchenko. "But I didn’t think they’d be cynical enough to poison me."

Ignored by Ukraine’s highly controlled media, Yushchenko’s grassroots campaign against government corruption was somehow starting to catch on. He barnstormed the country with his American-born wife, Katherine, often at his side.

"He was a great threat to the old system, where there was a great deal of corruption, where people were making millions, if not billions," says Katherine, whose parents were Ukrainian immigrants to Chicago.

She was used to straddling two worlds, but nothing prepared her for Ukraine's poisoned politics.

"The whole purpose of what they did, I believe now, was to keep him out of the campaign, to knock him out," says Katherine. "They tried to destroy him politically, and I always feared that when they were not successful, they would try to then do something physically."

She also feared that something would happen to her family. And then, suddenly it did. On Sept. 6, Yushchenko fell critically ill, and no one in Ukraine could explain why.

"It was a very, very, very difficult situation," says Katherine. "Many of the doctors told us that they were, that they just had never experienced somebody having so much pain for so many unknown reasons."

He had symptoms like a swollen pancreas, stomach ulcers, and a crippling backache. His family rushed him to a clinic in Austria, but Dr. Michael Zimpfer was just as baffled by his seemingly unrelated symptoms.

"That made us suspicious," says Zimpfer. "We inform the patient that we never saw an identical clinical picture before, and we suspect, don’t know yet, but we suspect that there might be an act of bio-terrorism or poisoning behind that."

The doctors struggled to save his life, but they couldn’t keep him in bed for long. Eight days later, Yushchenko insisted on going home with tubes dripping painkillers inserted right into his spine.

Did Katherine ever try to dissuade him? "He knew he had to go forward and there was no turning back," she says.

Three days after returning to Kiev, Yushchenko faced down his political enemies in parliament. They had mockingly attributed his mystery illness to bad sushi or excessive drinking. But no could explain why his face was so horribly swollen.

"Look at my face, this is a fraction of the problems I’ve had," said Yushchenko in parliament. "This isn’t a problem of cuisine; we’re talking about the Ukrainian political kitchen, where assassinations can be ordered. You know very well who the killer is. The government is the killer."

>>10369980

>https://web.archive.org/web/20050205093638/https://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/28/60minutes/main670103.shtml

But the government brushed off these allegations, until the hard proof came in. Three months after Yushchenko first fell ill, a lab in Amsterdam reported dioxin levels in his blood that was 6,000 times above normal.

"This is the highest we've ever seen, and one of the highest ever reported," says Bram Brouwer, who runs the lab. "And it fits very well with the symptoms that are now observed, with Mr. Yushchenko's face, the chloracne."

The evidence that Yushchenko was poisoned was now irrefutable. Dioxin, one of the world’s most toxic chemicals, was responsible for the scarring of his face and threatened his future with cancer. But the question remained. Who carried out this crime?

The attempt to eliminate Yushchenko is as Byzantine as Kiev’s skyline, filled with plots and potential villains. One theory is that he was poisoned by Ukraine’s security services, the old KGB, because just before he fell so gravely ill, he had been invited to dinner by the security chiefs.

Yushchenko and his hosts shared crayfish, salad and a few beers, and ironically they had been meeting to discuss the death threats against him.

Ukraine’s security services deny they had anything to do with the poisoning. Their director had in fact been helping the Yushchenko camp.

Does Yushchenko know who did this to him? "I have no doubts this was by my opponents in the government, that's who would benefit the most from my death," says Yushchenko.

But there is still the question of how it was done. One way to solve it is to trace the poison. And some people in Yushchenko's camp think that it came from a Russian chemical weapons lab.

"Dioxin like this is produced in four or five military labs in Russia, America, and a few other countries," says Yushchenko. "Our security services have informed me how this material got into Ukraine, but that evidence is now with our general prosecutor, who eventually must answer this question."

They must also examine another plot on Yushchenko’s life. Ukraine’s security services say a powerful car bomb, targeting Yushchenko’s headquarters, was discovered during the presidential campaign. Two Russian nationals are being interrogated.

Spokesmen for the Russian security services would not comment on either case, but President Vladimir Putin’s role during the election remains controversial. He openly backed the handpicked successor of the previous regime, coming to Kiev twice to lend his support.

"President Putin supported your opponent during the election. How do you reconcile with him," asks Amanpour.

"I'll give him my hand, and l say, 'Vladimir Vladimirovich, let’s forget the past and think of the future,'" says Yushchenko.

This week he did just that, greeting Putin on his first trip abroad after his inauguration.

"Everyone now understands only Ukrainians have the right to choose Ukraine’s president," says Yushchenko. "Our president is not elected in Moscow, or anywhere else."

That became apparent when the previous regime tried to steal the presidential election through massive voting fraud. It triggered what became known as the Orange Revolution, a spontaneous revolt of outraged citizens who for weeks besieged their own capital

Democracy was finally taking root in a country where greed and corruption had become the rule of law.

When government troops lined up for what could have ended in an European-style Tiananmen Square, the people’s power of persuasion won the battle of the streets and Yushchenko and all those who had believed in him triumph in a bloodless revolution.

"The millions who came out on the street showed that they don’t want tyranny," says Yushchenko. "They want freedom."

But what a price for freedom he paid. "Everyone has paid a price," says Yushchenko.

"A lot of people asked me, 'How did you deal with it,' and my answer was always my husband’s alive. My children are alive, I'm alive," says Yushchenko's wife, Katherine. "It was such a small episode in a huge revolution. Generations of Ukrainians, you could say centuries of Ukrainians, have dreamed and have fought, and have died for a chance to be right where we are right now."

"When I heard that millions were praying for me, it went straight to my heart," says Yushchenko. "But I also felt an obligation to live. To die is not very original, but to live and carry on – that’s special."

>>10369990

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>>10370276

>https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8650207/amp/TWO-tropical-storms-threaten-Gulf-Coast-24-hours-week.html

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>https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/22158118

>>10370345

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