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After opening the door to foreigners, the Ukrainian army has become a plum assignment for clout-chasing mercenaries the world over. Battlefield influencers can gain a significant following and the financial rewards that come with it, by touring the ruins of Ukraine with a camera in hand. The Ukrainian regime not only allows but encourages this as the resulting propaganda is a potent weapon for recruitment and the maintenance of public interest in the conflict.
Much of this work is carried out through the pre-existing networks established by Ukraine’s far right. In their 8-year campaign of terror and genocide in Donbass, the fascist militias have honed a fine edge to their internet propaganda. A western face with a large following amplifies propaganda that was previously only seen on Ukrainian language telegram to the entire world. Even mainstream press outlets are now in on the act, acting as shills for proud fascist war criminals.
One of the many mercenaries involved in this bloody performance is James Vasquez, a former US Army soldier from Connecticut. James fills his timeline daily with content to broadcast to his nearly 400,000 followers. Vasquez even has sponsors and NFTs, never missing an opportunity to tag his favorite gear manufacturers and always making sure logos are front and center in his photos.
An example of James’ shilling skills. Source: thehour.com
While James profits, Ukraine bleeds. To get his content, James runs with butchers who would make Oskar Dierlwagner proud, men so criminal that even the Kiev regime tried, convicted, and imprisoned them. Among James’ comrades are those convicted of torture, murder, and raping children to death. At least one of them is guilty of all three.
These maniacs and their grifter allies are the engines of the propaganda machine valorizing fascism in Ukraine today.
Mid-Life Crisis Mercenary
James Vasquez with his ex-wife. Source: NYPost
While many men in their late 40s attempt to reclaim their youth with a motorcycle, James Vasquez does it by killing people. The past he wants to reclaim is somewhat murky. His status as a veteran is unquestioned, although he has remained quiet about the details.
His ex-wife claims that James joined the army right after 9/11, and James repeatedly denies having been to Afghanistan. James’ friend, former USMC Lt. Col. Rip Rawlings insists James was a combat veteran, which would hint at deployment to Iraq, but James himself considers the question to be off limits.
While James stays quiet, his friend Rip never shuts up. Rip commanded the 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion from 2006 to 2008 during a particularly brutal phase of Operation Iraqi “Freedom”, America’s illegal, bloody and unjustifiable war on Iraq.
During Rip’s time in the country, his unit was involved in Counter Insurgency warfare in the al-Anbar province. COIN warfare, just like the “security warfare” of the 1940s, was little more than a euphemism for state-sponsored terrorism.
During the Anbar campaign, there were many well-publicized instances of rape, murder, torture, and illegal detention of Iraqis by US Forces. What is less known is that countless Iraqi civilians were simply murdered at checkpoints and during so-called “Escalation of Force” incidents, where American troops were allowed to fire at any Iraqi they deemed suspicious, an echo of the free fire zones in Vietnam. American forces routinely attacked civilian targets such as hospitals and weddings and were unapologetic about their use of white phosphorus on civilian targets.
Abeer Qassim Hamza age 7, before she was assaulted and murdered by James’ brothers in arms
Children killed in a 2006 airstrike
Ali Shalal al-Qaisi under electrical torture by James’ comrades at Abu Ghraib. He was later released due to a lack of evidence of any wrongdoing
It is likely we will never know if James had any direct role in the illegal invasion. While it is tempting to think of him as a front-line killer, the reality may be far more mundane. Perhaps James sat behind a desk and shuffled papers while he read about all the atrocities, seething at the fact that he wasn’t the one behind the trigger or hooking up the electrical cables to the prisoner. Whatever the case may be, he leaped at the chance to kill again, this time for an even worse cause.
What matters more than his background is who James Vasquez has now become. A philandering, clout-chasing mercenary eager to profit from the devastation of a country and its people.
James announced his plan to leave for Ukraine on the first day of the war, February 24th, 2022. He made it to Ukraine in March and quickly got to work. By the 24th of March, he was bragging about how he had destroyed 7 Russian tanks after hours in combat. Before long, James was capturing Russians by the hundred and liberating towns. Despite a complete lack of evidence, tales of his exploits fall on the enraptured ear of a credulous press.
It's almost too easy for James. All this strenuous combat never seems to muss his trademark gel spiked hair. He is always clean with a perfect five o’clock shadow and in new, spotless clothes and equipment which remain such no matter how much fighting he has done. No matter how many Russian shells fall on his position, he never so much as scratches his kneepads.
Rather than the ragged, filthy creature that emerges dazed and confused from a genuine battlefield, James Vasquez looks like a model at a 5.11 photoshoot and likely comes no closer to combat.
James after a long day of “combat”
James is heavily involved in “charity” and “humanitarian” work with other grifters in the region, such as ex-Green Beret Ryan Hendrickson, whose 7th Special Forces Group was heavily involved in the torture and murder of detainees in Afghanistan. Given the behavior of these thugs even when outside the “sandbox” and the rampant, unchecked criminality of US special forces, these war crimes are likely only the tip of the iceberg.
Hendrickson was seriously injured by a landmine in Afghanistan and sadly recovered from his injuries to return to service. Now that he’s retired, Ryan uses the injury he sustained while torturing and murdering innocent people as a part of his grift, making a fortune from regaling the far right with stories of a wounded soldier overcoming the odds to rejoin his death squad.
James is also now involved with fascist propagandist Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, a “journalist” embedded with the Kraken unit of Azov. Kraken is a terrorist gang of brazen war criminals, posting dozens of photos and videos of horrendous torture on their social media. One of Kraken’s founders is Sergey “Botsman” Korotikh a neo-Nazi mercenary who, despite Sarah’s insistence that he is not a Nazi, was best known for decapitating an innocent construction worker in front of a Swastika before arriving in Ukraine in 2014.
James is effusive in the praise for his Ukrainian comrades. They are brave warriors, liberators, and the best not just of military valor, but of all of humanity. James gushes about the honor of serving with such fine men as he posts endless streams of well-shot, posed, and professionally edited photos and videos to Twitter. The operation went well until his editors eventually missed a frame and more astute viewers quickly noticed something disturbing about James’ brave, honorable comrades.
Source: NYPost
Poking out above the magazine pouch of one of these extraordinary men was the logo of the infamous neo-Nazi reprisal battalion STP “Tornado”, a unit responsible beyond any doubt for some of the most shocking atrocities imaginable.
The aftermath of the neo-Nazi attack on the Odessa House of Trade Unions, 2014
While cities like Odessa and Kharkov burned and bled under the Maidan’s reign of terror, the Russian-speaking east rose to resist. Russian communities, led by politicians from the democratically elected Party of Regions, rejected the Kiev regime and declared independence. Militias formed, at first ad-hoc and lightly armed, but they rapidly grew larger and more sophisticated as time went on. Avakov’s first response was to send in the Army, which nearly doomed the Kiev regime.
When ordered to shoot their families, friends, and countrymen, the rank-and-file soldiers revolted. 70% of the Ukrainian army deserted, and a significant portion of those defected to join the militias they had been ordered to destroy. This became the backbone of the L/DPR armed forces which would successfully resist the fascist incursions from then on.
Now with the specter of counter-revolution and defeat looming over the Kiev regime, Avakov went back to the old bag of tricks he used to conquer Kharkov, first as a mafia don and then as a regional administrator. On April 15th, 2014, Avakov formed the Special Tasks Patrol police, deputizing the now vast array of Nazis who infested Ukraine. Many of these groups would become infamous in the 8 years that followed, most notably the group of soccer hooligans turned neo-Nazis under the command of Andrei Biletsky. Then known as “Patriot of Ukraine”, they took on the name Azov when deputized.
It was from this blood-soaked ground that STP Tornado emerged, founded in September 2014 by Oleg Lyasho, a deputy of the Rada for the “Radical Party” and led by neo-Nazi gangster Ruslan Onishenko. Lacking the financial backing of the rest of the STPs, Tornado went all out to get noticed, launching an operation to retake Onishenko’s hometown of Torez in the hopes of impressing an oligarch with deep pockets.
Ruslan Onishenko
On the 23rd of May, 2014, Onishenko gathered a small crew and launched an
on the Torez city council building with assault rifles, machine guns, and grenades. In the resulting firefight, two people were killed before the return fire forced Onishenko to flee. Although The attack failed, it was enough to convince Avakov and his protégé, death squad commander Anton Gerashenko to support the unit under the name Shakhtyorsk.
The STPs have a wide-ranging mandate allowing them to arrest, torture, and execute suspected terrorists and dissidents. Their powers of asset seizure are nearly unlimited, which has allowed them to loot a considerable fortune from the people of the Donbass. Sarah’s friend Botsman, for example, amassed a fortune of over 1 million Euros in a few months and used his spoils to buy a fighter jet. Even when the STPs do break what few rules exist, very few of them ever face any discipline.
Even in this context, Tornado is considered among the most brutal and sadistic butchers in the entire region. Tornado were notorious for enslaving their victims, using the slaves as human shields, as forced laborers, and as sex slaves. Robbery, torture, and violent sexual sadism are trademarks of the unit, and several of its members have even taken photos of themselves raping and sexually assaulting children and their mothers. Many of Tornado’s victims have never been found, tortured to death in the basements of hospitals and schools which the Nazis favor for their bases, then buried where they died.
Onishenko awarded a medal
Eventually, the crimes became so frequent and so vile that even the Ukrainian regime was forced to act. At first, death squad commander Anton Gerashenko attempted to rebrand the unit, rolling some of Shakhtyorsk’s soldiers into a new STP “Santa Maria” along with personnel from Azov and Aidar. The rest were used to replenish the losses of other STPs. However, the Shakhtyorsk fighters were so brutal and incompetent that these efforts failed. Santa Maria fell apart due to infighting, and the worst of its thugs moved on to the new volunteer unit Tornado.
If anything, this made the situation even worse. Tornado continued its crimes unabated until pressure from the local community finally forced Arsen Avakov to arrest and disband Tornado in 2015. Tornado greeted the announcement with snipers on the roof of their headquarters, clearly preparing to resist their disbandment by force. The situation was eventually defused, and Tornado stood down.
Tornado at their trial
12 of Tornado’s worst criminals stood trial. In bizarre, closed-door trials which were often interrupted by fights, threats, and attacks on guards, all of them were found guilty. The rest were dispersed into other STPs, free to continue raping Donbass. There is
from the trial of prisoners recounting horrendous acts of torture and one name rings out, over and over.
“Mujahid”
The Nazi Jihadi
“Without torture, life would not be worth living. Nothing raises your vitality as when you’re holding someone’s life”-Daniil “Mujahid” Lyashuk
Daniil Lyashuk could be the strangest Nazi in all of Ukraine. He was born in Belarus and claims Chechen and Ukrainian Tatar heritage. Before he became infamous as a Nazi terrorist, Daniil was well known in the Brest neo-Nazi
scene as a fierce and dedicated street fighter. He moved to Sevastopol in 2012 where he started rapping under the name
.
In an interview with Radio Svoboda, this is how one of his friends described Danil’s music:
"He even invented a new genre for himself: hate-hop. From the English "hate". This is the hate genre in music. He didn't do cute hip-hop about relationships or sitting in doorways with alcohol. All his songs were based on hatred. Hatred for everything, starting with football songs, how they go into battle with bare fists, ending with some kind of wild ritual Satanism. They weren't aimed at anyone in particular. It was just evil music "
For much of his life, he seemed to follow the bizarre hybrid of Slavic and Germanic paganism common among eastern European neo-Nazis, covering his body with runic and swastika tattoos, and often wearing clothes from pagan neo-Nazi designers. His obsession with Nazism and Germanic Paganism likely comes from his grandfather who was in the SS during WW2. Seemingly out of the blue, he dropped it all in 2014 and turned hard in another direction.
He converted to Islam, changed his last name to al-Takbir, and became an admirer of Daesh. This was where he earned his callsign “Mujahid.” Like his heroes in the levant, Daniil is tech savvy and a master of both torture and propaganda. He poses for shirtless Instagram photoshoots and seemingly endless Tiktok videos by day then rapes and tortures prisoners to death by night. Daniil has no issues reconciling his still ardent neo-Nazism with his new faith in Wahhabi Islam.
Ukrainian Mujahidin Source: The CIA
Daniil is perhaps the most bloodthirsty sadist in an organization full of them. He was notorious for coming up with new, ever more vile ways to torture and murder people. Sexual violence is one of his trademarks, he is a sadistic rapist and takes great joy in forcing people to rape each other.
At his trial, one of Daniil’s creations was laid out in detail. A survivor, testifying under the name Shevchenko to protect his identity recounted a day when a man called Palchik was brought to his cell.
Shevchenko had to watch as Palchik was savagely beaten with electrical batons by Mujahid and another terrorist named Bison. Once their batons were discharged, Mujahid forced Shevchenko to rape Palchik at gunpoint. Daniil and Ruslan Onishenko gleefully called the action from across the cell and took both photos and videos for their social media.
Shevchenko was then beaten and thrown into a freezing cell, just for good measure.
When Tornado was disbanded, a heavily armed Mujahid and several other Tornado fighters took off on their own, leading police on a weeklong chase through Ukraine. Mujahid and his comrades were finally cornered at a resort outside Kiev, where they were convinced to surrender after a tense standoff. The hunt for Mujahid drew considerable attention from the Ukrainian press, and when he was finally arrested the police released a statement.
“In a hotel complex on the Obukhovskaya highway near Kiev, on the evening of September 9, the most dangerous and violent of all the suspected fighters of the Tornado company, nicknamed "Mujahid", was found and detained... With extreme cynicism and audacity, brutality and ruthlessness, he committed the most brutal tortures of the local population of the Luhansk region, organized and took direct part in the rape of detainees, whom he, along with other suspects, abducted for selfish reasons”- Anatoly Matios, chief military prosecutor of Ukraine
Daniil, in his police uniform.
Daniil was sentenced to 10 years in prison. A ridiculously lenient sentence for his crimes, but still more than most of his comrades. He served fewer than 5 years before he was pardoned by Volodymyr Zelensky, armed with American weapons, and sent to the front lines to fight alongside James Vasquez.
The twisted thread of hate
“War is a form of terrorism. I know there are people who don't like to equate-- what was done-- you know on September 11th, 2001, they don't like to equate that with a war that the United States engaged in. Sure, they're different. But they're not different in the-- in the fundamental principal that drives the terrorists and that is, they're saying, we're going to kill a lot of people but it will be worth it. We're trying to do something. We're trying to accomplish something. They-- the terrorists are not killing people just for the sake of killing people, they have some end in mind. To show that the American empire is vulnerable or to make some point about American policy in the Middle East. But they have an end in mind. We are doing the same thing. I mean, as I say, the details are different, but we are willing to kill a lot of people for some political end that we have declared.”-Howard Zinn
Daniil Lyashuk did not come out of the womb as Mujahid the Nazi terrorist. He was radicalized by his environment and turned from a young man with an interest in music and sports into a bloodthirsty monster so vile that even dyed-in-the-wool fascist murderers could not tolerate his crimes.
It did not have to be this way. Not so long ago, the Ukrainian SSR was peaceful and prosperous. Daniil’s former home of Sevastopol was the crown jewel of Crimea with warm weather, lovely beaches, and a beautiful sea bringing millions of Soviet workers to the resorts and spas that dot the area. Long-serving Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, a Ukrainian by birth, kept a Dacha there and was often seen boating and fishing in the rich turquoise seas.
In a different time, Daniil would have perhaps attended one of the world-class art schools in the region, where his love of poetry and music could be nurtured and turned towards the betterment of humanity. Or maybe he would have been an athlete, channeling his talent as a fighter into something productive in one of the many Soviet sporting or martial arts programs offered, free of charge, to all citizens.
If the winds of history had blown a bit differently, we would not be talking about Mujahid the terrorist, but Daniil Lyashuk the poet, the musician, or even the Olympic boxer. Sadly, a small group of powerful men far away from Sevastopol conspired to cheat Daniil of this future.
On the 25th of December, 1991, the USSR was illegally dissolved against the will of its people. It was the culmination of years of betrayal from factions inside the CPSU and external pressure. Overnight, the state which had provided everything for its 300 million citizens for decades vanished into thin air.
In the anarchy which ensued, millions died from deprivation, violence, and drug abuse. A nation of scientists, artists, cosmonauts, and engineers was reduced to crime and prostitution to survive. Gangsters and western bankers looted the corpse of the nation while its people starved to death.
Kiev prostitute Natasha, age 16 (fur coat), comforted by her boyfriend after she was beaten by pimps for getting pregnant. The child in black is huffing glue. Source: Irish Sun 2017.
Ukraine was hit especially hard. Even when the USSR was months from collapse in 1991, its HDI was ranked 22nd in the world. Once the west “freed” the region, it would never again be so high.
On the 10th anniversary of Ukraine’s “independence” in 2001, it had fallen to 65th. When the data was last published in 2019, Ukraine was 74th below Mexico, Albania, and Sri Lanka. Even Cuba and Iran, crushed under the weight of American sanctions, manage to provide a better life for their citizens. By 2017, after 25 years of Capitalist “freedom”, a staggering 10% of Ukraine’s children were homeless. This amounts to around 800,000 homeless children in a nation of 40 million, a number almost double that of the United States entire homeless population.
Had this happened anywhere else, it would have been called what it was, genocide.
Not everyone suffered during this time. Some people became very rich. Daniil’s future commander Arsen Avakov made a fortune exploiting the desperate Soviet people in the early 90s, then hired an army of angry young gangsters like Daniil to protect his loot. This was sadly typical throughout the former Soviet Union.
The primary benefactor of this horrendous crime was the western capitalists. The GDP of Ukraine still sits 21% below that of 1991 and over 90% below that of 1971. This wealth did not vanish, it was stolen by American and European bankers. It is for their benefit that children like Natasha are beaten by pimps and people like Daniil fight and kill each other both on the streets and on the battlefield.
After all the meat was picked from the bones of the USSR and Yugoslavia, the American ruling class needed new victims. They would find it in the oil-rich land of Iraq, already too weak from a decade of sanctions to resist. The vultures of American capital feasted once more on the remnants of a nation and its people to the tune of 5 trillion dollars.
It is here, in Iraq, where the thread that stitches all our characters together is most clearly visible. During the widespread campaign of torture and detention which accompanied America’s illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, one of the many people caught in the net was a man named Ibrahim al-Samarrai, better known by his nom de guerre of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Before America’s illegal war, al-Samarri was a nobody. He was the son of a farmer who became a preacher after his grades kept him out of law school. He lived in a small room attached to a Baghdad Mosque where he led prayer groups and taught the Qur’an to children. Those who knew al-Samarri said he was shy and a committed pacifist.
All of that changed when men like James Vasquez and Rip Rawlings came to Iraq.
Despite the collective amnesia from the western press, over 1 million innocent people died in America’s 15-year war against a nation and its people who had no connection whatsoever to the attacks which spurred James to join the army. It will never be known how many were tortured and brutalized in the diabolic black sites operated by the Pentagon and CIA, nor the number killed due to America’s intentional destabilization of the region.
American forces dropped more bombs on Baghdad in a single night than have impacted Kiev in the entire 6 months of the 2022 war, while American corporations profited hand over fist from the slaughter and botched attempts to rebuild. The bandits in uniform even stole Iraq’s gold reserve, further impoverishing a country already crushed by a decade of sanctions that killed millions.
al-Samarri was arrested in 2004, held without charges, and tortured by US forces at Camp Bucca. Camp Bucca was the Pentagon’s new “model detention facility”, designed to wash away the crimes of Abu Gharib. If this was ever a genuine plan, it failed utterly.
The horrors al-Samarri suffered at Camp Bucca turned a shy priest so committed to pacifism that he had done nothing even after US forces killed his brother and starved his country for over a decade into one of the most notorious terrorists to have ever lived and the man who would found Daesh, the very same organization Daniil “Mujahid” al-Takbir now admires so much.
American imperialism echoes from Anbar to Donbass
Both al-Takbir and al-Baghdadi were radicalized due to the monstrous hand of American imperialism. These men and all their victims could be living in peace were it not for the jagged maw of American capitalism demanding an endless supply of blood and death to satiate its hunger for profit.
For decades all around the world, the story has been the same. In Vietnam, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Yugoslavia, the USSR, Iraq and so many more, the violence of men like James Vasquez has begotten the violence of men like al-Baghdadi and al-Takbir. After the vampires of Wall Street drink their fill, the ragged survivors are left to kill each other over the scraps. This is the “rules-based international order” which American capital kills for. Their law is nothing more than the law of the jungle.
Perhaps Lyashuk and Vasquez’s meeting was destiny. The fates of these two men have been tied together with the thread of American imperialism long before either was born. James and Danil are more than blood-drunk comrades chasing clout on the battlefield. In a sense, they are father and son, reunited at last to kill again.
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Donbass Devushka@DonbassDevushka
December 06, 2022
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The Space Race
We all heard about it, it was that time when Capitalism was pitted against Communism, Atheism versus God-fearing people, the economic powers of the West versus the ingenuity of the East, and in the very end, Capitalism prevailed over the thoughts of Marx and Lenin and the Communist camp, and it was here that the American dollar sign was proven to be supreme against the repressive Russian ruble.
But is that truly the case? or a distorted view through broken lens?
We have to agree on some things, first, there is no such thing as a "one-man scientific race", for ever since Man learned how to write and read, knowledge was passed down from one mind to another, and from that, the newer, younger generation improved on the thoughts and the creations of the old one, Newton improved on the theory of gravity from the ideas of Kepler, Marco Polo over his Chinese companions, knowledge is not exclusive to a singular nation or creed, but it is a common thing between all of mankind, to simply put it, science is dynamic, it does not care for your beliefs or status, only the quality of your mind.
Secondly, both the United States and the USSR contributed massively to humanity through their "Space Race", and while the United States, a country that mostly came out of the second World War unscathed, with a strong economy, and thousands of foreign specialists , essentially guaranteeing a head start in any sort of missile-related race, the USSR had nothing but the works of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a 19th century theorist, and considering the USSR came out of the second world war in a sorry state, it is only a miracle that 12 years later they would put the first satellite in space, and not their Capitalist foes, who were intact and had aced every material standard to essentially guarantee a victory from the get-go.
But as fate had it, the Soviets launched the first satellite, and almost all of the milestones that could be attained in space was reached first by the Soviets, first animal in space, first launch beyond Earth’s orbit, first probe to reach the moon, first spacecraft to be sent to Venus, and the best for last, first man in space, Yuri Gagarin! there would also be others, first woman in space, first spacewalk, first group flight of spaceships, first non-single space flight, first soft landing on the moon, first flight of animals AROUND the moon…
America? First man on moon? Okay, cool, but even if we go by a quantitative and qualitative standard, the Soviets contributed much more than the Americans ever did, where is this victory that the Americans claim to have?
The Space Race was also not a race to the Moon from the get-go, but only because America, to put it bluntly, got clapped in everything else, did they then decide to try and reach for the Moon.
Sergei Korolev is a one-man version of NASA, and this is who I referred to when I talked about ingenuity of the East, the Soviet space program had 5 times less funding than the American ones, yet you would not have guessed that considering all the feats I just mentioned.
But alas, the Soviets would never reach the moon, due to infighting, Korolev refused to use anything but his beloved R-7s, which were definitely not able to go to the moon, for they carried 15 times less cargo than the missiles the Americans had to use, and they barely made it!
And do not even get me started on Valentin Glushko, he purposefully sabotaged the missiles for the N-1, how he was not prosecuted is beyond me, but may that article serve a lesson to you, my reader, never, ever, let pettiness and jealousy get in the way of work or have it cause infighting, for this is exactly what your opponent would want.
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Donbass Devushka@DonbassDevushka
December 06, 2022
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The Gambler
The tale of a Vegas gambler, failed politician, and professional Nazi groupie
The war in Ukraine has been a bonanza for grifters. From mercenaries and gun runners to OSINT and journalists, a bottomless well of western financing combined with a firehose stream of information both true and false has created a perfect environment for war profiteering. The need to produce staggering amounts of propaganda means anyone shameless enough to toe the line will profit enormously. This has been a clarion call for a colorful cast of characters who have descended on Ukraine, willing to roll the dice in search of fame and fortune from the suffering of others.
One of the most flagrant of these is a journalist by the name of Sarah Ashton-Cirillo. A former real estate speculator and competitive poker played turned failed politician, who’s previous attempts at journalism involved little more than a weekend party with Las Vegas proud boys, Sarah is now the chief mouthpiece for some of the most brutal and prolific Nazi murderers since the time of the Waffen SS.
Know when to fold ‘em
In retrospect, it is easy to see why Sarah fits in so well with the Nazi mercenaries infesting Ukraine. Despite describing herself as a “left libertarian”, Sarah’s actions reveal a woman who is little more than a political mercenary, jumping between wildly disparate causes at the drop of a hat in pursuit of fame.
As late as 2021, Sarah worked as a campaign consultant with the Clark County, Nevada GOP. She obviously had a talent for the job, as 2 out of her 3 candidates won. She marketed herself as a “unicorn”, to enhance her mystique, and therefore her prestige.
Sarah was seen as a unicorn because she is trans. For several years, she played up her status as a trans Republican to further her career, and the Nevada GOP was eager to use her as a token to give them the appearance of egalitarianism even as they enacted monstrous anti-trans laws which have led to death and suffering for people like Sarah.
While Sarah frames this as some grand infiltration of the Republican Party, she was none the less helping them win.
At around the same time, Sarah was carrying out a bizarre “sting operation” on the Nevada GOP. She utilized her connections within the party to get close to party officials who she claims were seeking to overturn the 2020 Presidential election. Sarah knew exactly what to do, reaching out to a group of Vegas Proud Boys she was already familiar with. Sarah and the fascists spent a weekend in her hotel suite, where they hatched their plans to overturn the election, no doubt among other activities. Sarah aspired to reveal this plot as a part of a planned book exposing the crimes of the Nevada GOP.
Rudolfo “Rudy” Clai (right), one of Sarah’s proud boy friends
The Proud Boys accomplished very little, picketing an election commission building for a time before they went home. Sarah accomplished even less. Despite her best efforts, absolutely nothing happened to anyone involved in her sting operation, all of whom are still employed by the state GOP. She even claims to have gone to the FBI, who were no doubt confused why she wanted them to arrest their own agents.
Despite this, her work received bizarrely fawning reviews from the press, such as this Daily Beast article which goes so far as to call a person ranked #79,852 a “top flight poker player.”
After burning all her bridges with the state GOP, Sarah was also expelled from the Nevada DSA. Sarah claims that this was some grand chekist crusade against her and free speech, however the reality is much simpler. Between her associations with the Nevada GOP, Proud Boys and other far right activists and her constant attacks on the DSA and it’s members, their hand was forced. A party which gladly admits intelligence agents, police, and arms dealers into it’s ranks viewed Sarah an unacceptable risk to the party.
Now having destroyed any hope of support from either left or right, Sarah decided to run for office, launching a bid for Las Vegas City Council against the far right Michele Fiore.
Source: Her campaign website
Sarah went all out, claiming to have released copious information on Fiore’s financial improprieties to the FBI. Once again, she received fawning coverage in the press, taking ample opportunity to plug her of yet unreleased book about her “infiltration” of the far right. In her own mind, she was a crusading anti-fascist warrior who took down the Nevada GOP, the Proud Boys and would now slay one of Trump’s fiercest dragons.
As usual, Sarah’s fantasy was not tethered to material reality. Sarah’s revelation that the GOP was working with Proud Boys had about as much impact as revealing the Pope is Catholic. Her document dumps to the FBI did nothing to either the GOP or Fiore, who remains a city councilwoman.
Sarah dropped out of the election in October, ostensibly to focus on her career as a “journalist” on her new website political.tips. She dished petty dirt on the Nevada GOP until March of 2022, when she travelled to Ukraine, alongside her friend Vic Harkness. Harkness had previously worked as a hacker for DSTL, the British equivalent of DARPA. It is unclear when Harkness and Sarah met and how close they are, but Harkness’ skills and connections may explain why so many doors opened so quickly for Sarah.
Know when to walk away
Sarah hit the ground running in Ukraine. Almost immediately after arriving, she was given press credentials and wormed her way into Kharkov branch of the infamous neo-Nazi Azov battalion. Specifically, she appears to be embedded with Kraken, a unit formed in the spring of 2021. By April, she was already privy to Kraken operations the day they happened, such as when she broke the arrest of Chilean MRA Gonzalo Lira.
While she was the first journalist on the story, she was quietly beaten to the punch by one of her comrades, the infamous neo-Nazi mercenary, police chief and Azov special forces commander Sergey “Botsman” Korotikh. Never a man to miss out on the spotlight, Botsman couldn’t help himself and spilled the beans on twitter before Sarah could.
Source: Sergey’s now deleted Twitter.
Prior to joining Azov in 2014, Sergey was best known for his time leading the National Socialist Society, a Russian neo-Nazi gang. During his 6-year rule, Botsman and the NSO racked up dozens of murders and hundreds of millions of rubles in profit from extortion, arms trafficking, robbery, smuggling and kidnapping.
Botsman’s crowning achievement was the 2007 kidnapping and murder of Shamil Odamanov, an innocent construction worker who Botsman decapitated with a dull knife in front of a Swastika flag. Sergey held the severed head aloft for the benefit of the camera before another unidentified victim was shot in the back of the head and thrown into a pit along with Shamil’s headless body. As far as anyone knows, the two men were chosen at random, kidnapped off the streets and murdered simply because of their race.
Sarah’s comrade filmed the atrocity and proudly posted it to liveleak, along with a manifesto.
A man Sarah claims is not a Nazi approaches the camera
“Our party is the militant vanguard of the National Socialist struggle.
1. We announce the beginning of the armed struggle of our party against the black colonists and those who support them from the ranks of the officials of the Russian Federation.
2. We consider it necessary to evict all Caucasians (Muslims) and Asians from Russian territory.
3. We consider it necessary to grant independence to all Caucasian republics (including Chechnya), along with the eviction of the entire Caucasian population of Russia.
4. We demand the release of all Russian National Socialists convicted in recent years who are imprisoned now, and an end to the persecution of Maksim Martsinkevich.
4. We demand the resignation of president putin (in the text with a small letter) and transfer all power in the country to the National Socialist Government, which should be formed by Dmitry Rumyantsev, the leader of the National Socialist Society of Russia.
5. We are an independent militant wing of the National Socialist Society (N.S.S.), and we recognize the political leadership of the National Socialist Society.
6. We will not stop our struggle until power in the country passes to the National Socialist government.”
The video, called “The Execution of a Dag and a Tajik,” spread like wildfire across the internet and eventually led to the NSO’s downfall. After public outcry from the murders forced Russian police to act, Botsman turned snitch to save his own skin. He ratted out his entire organization leading to a total of 27 murder charges and life imprisonment for every NSO member. After this, Sergey fled Russia and worked as a mercenary for years before returning to Ukraine to co-found Azov at the invitation of interior minister Arsen Avakov.
The other Nazi Botsman mentioned in his twitter posts is a man named Sergey “Chili” Velichko. Chili is one of the most prolific butchers in the war, a brazen and unrepentant war criminal who fills his social media with the evidence of his crimes.
Chile Source: viraltab
Formerly a soccer hooligan like most of Azov, Chili has been an active neo-Nazi since at least 2014, when he threw Molotov cocktails at trade unionists on the front line of the Maidan coup. Chili was among the first generation of Azov and was quickly taken under the wing of the much more experienced Botsman. He has done his teacher proud, earning a reputation as one of Azov’s most bloodthirsty killers.
It was Chili who was responsible for the infamous kneecapping video which circulated on social media. Filmed at a dairy farm near Kharkov where Kraken brings victims to torture and murder, several Russian POWs were pushed out of a van and shot in the legs by Chili, who then gloats for the camera as he films their suffering. Off camera, the POWs were further brutalized and mutilated, Chili gouged out their eyes and cut off all their fingers before he murdered them.
Sadly, these men were far from the only ones to meet such a grisly fate at Chili’s dairy farm. His Instagram was a testament to the ubiquity of these crimes before he finally deleted it a few months ago.
None of this has dissuaded Sarah, of course. She continues to give unwavering support to Azov and Kraken and as of the time of this article’s publication is still embedded with the neo-Nazi unit. Nor has it stopped Sarah’s increasingly influential backers from expanding their proliferation of her Nazi propaganda.
Know when to run
In Ukraine, Sarah has finally found the fame and fortune she was so desperately seeking before. She has once again found a niche as a “unicorn” working to launder the reputation of her Nazi friends. This time, however, she has help.
Sarah has caught the eye of mainstream outlets, such as the long running and influential Canadian LGBTQ magazine Xtra, which published this profile of Sarah on July 27th. While it appears to be the sort of puff piece she is used to, a closer examination shows this article to be particularly insidious.
The author, right wing journalist Adam Zivo, is an employee of the NATO Association of Canada. He serves as a propagandist for NATO, working to pink wash the reputation of an alliance which has a long and continuing history of funding the murderous fascists who have stood against the advancement of LGBTQ rights.
Zivo is something of a kindred spirit to Sarah, appropriating the language and aesthetics of progressives in support of the far right. No longer content to simply defend Kyle Rittenhouse, attack the homeless or carry water for apartheid Israel, Zevo now uses the language of the so called “social justice warriors” he despises to defend NATO’s pet Nazis.
For her part, Sarah, who still markets herself as a “progressive” has let the mask drop entirely. In the fertile ground of post-Maidan Ukraine, she has expanded her horizons, doing interviews with all sorts of fascists, including one where she feted a Rhodesian mercenary and defended apartheid on twitter. The outrage from this interview was such that it became one of the few Sarah ever deleted. Unfortunately for her, her Rhodesian friend is not quite as canny. When pressed, the former gambler doubled down.
Sarah telling us what she REALLY thinks
Despite her previous statements to the contrary, it seems black lives matter to Sarah only exactly as much as necessary to advance her career. Perhaps when she said people should be held accountable for systematic racism, she made an exception for the soldiers fighting to preserve it.
To further solidify her fascist bona fides Sarah proudly wears a patch depicting the flag of the fascist Ukranian Insurgent Army (UPA) on her body armor when her propaganda work takes her near the front lines. The UPA was founded and led by Nazi collaborator and Holocaust perpetrator Roman Shukhevych. Sarah loves their flag so much she joked that she would de-transition for a fellow journalist who posted it on twitter.
Sarah with the emblem of the UPA on her vest Source: Her substack
Sarah’s perspective no doubt differs from the hundreds of thousands of innocent people murdered by the terrorists who marched under that flag. In Lviv, Sarah patroled the same streets searching for “saboteurs” that the infamous Nachtigall battalion under the command of Shukhevych washed with the blood of their victims in 1941.
In 1941, Lviv was a majority Polish city, with a sizable plurality of over 100,000 Jews. Many of them were refugees fleeing from the Nazi and Banderite terror that gripped Eastern Europe. The men who marched under Sarah’s beloved flag entered the city with specific orders to change that. They carried out their orders with gusto, murdering Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Communists and any other undesirables they could get their hands on as the leaders of the OUN pledged alliegance to Adolf Hitler in the castle above the city.
“Don’t throw away your weapons yet. Take them up. Destroy the enemy. … Moscow, the Hungarians, the Jews—these are your enemies. Destroy them.”-OUN propaganda pamphlet from Lviv, 1941.
By the time the Red Army liberated Lviv in 1944, between 800 to 2000 of the city’s Jews remained alive. They survived because they took refuge in the sewers, forced to live like rats in the filth rather than face the hammers, axes and garottes of Shukhevych’s fascist maniacs.
Jews prior to execution in Lviv, 1941. Source: Yad Vashem
Indeed, in Lviv, the Nazis had to restrain the nationalists in order to carry out the orderly and methodical extermination favored by the Einsatzgruppen. After the Einsatzgruppen moved on, the nationalists returned to hack Jews to pieces with farming implements in a massacre they dedicated to the memory of slain fascist leader Simon Pelitura.
Extreme brutality was the calling card of all units led by Shukhevych. In the Volnhya region of Poland, Shukhevych’s men carried out a campaign of genocide lasting for years, during which over 100,000 Polish civilians were murdered.
The apotheosis of this slaughter was known as “Bloody Sunday” in which the UPA, marching under the very same red and black flag Sarah is so proud of, attacked 100 Polish settlements simultaneously. 8000 civilians were massacred in less than 24 hours, many of them burned alive or shot dead inside their churches while attending mass. Any who escaped were hunted down and butchered with hammers, axes and knives. Children were captured alive when possible, and hanged from the trees lining the roads. Sarah’s heroes were so proud of their crimes that they proudly raised the red and black flag and erected a banner declaring this “the road to an Independent Ukraine.”
“We had a heavy machine gun (Russian) and two small calibre mortars. At nigh we prepared ourselves and on the next day the whole gang, including me, attacked a Polish church, in which a mass was under way; some 200 hundred people were there, [including] elders and small children. The church was surrounded and the killing started, we fired from the machine gun through the main entrance and windows, as a result killing many people and children; those who were trying to escape were chased and killed. Then, a pogrom of individual families started, in which I also participated”. -Iwain Hryn, a former UPA fighter, describing the massacre in court testimony.
This was not an isolated incident. As part of their intentional campaign of genocide, the UPA made a point of targeting children to ensure Volhynia could never be repopulated by the hated Poles. Sadly, in most cases the victims are still unknown, their very existence wiped out by Sarah’s heroes. However, in a few cases we can put names to the mutilated corpses.
Here we have Janusz and Marek Mekela from Gvyadowski. Janusz was 3 years old, and his brother Marek was 2. Both were beaten with such savagery that their arms and legs were broken. Sarah’s heroes then finished them off with bayonets and didn’t even bother to bury their tiny bodies.
In the middle lies Stasya Stefanyak, a 5-year-old girl who was beaten, raped and disemboweled by the UPA. She was still alive as the knife entered her belly. It is likely that the the red and black flag which Sarah is so proud of is one of the last things they saw before they died.
These are but a few of the people brutally murdered by Sarah’s heroes during their reign of terror. It seems, therefore, that Sarah’s concern for the welfare of children is selective at best.
Every hand is a winner
Now we are left with one final question.
Does Sarah actually believe any of this, or is she simply a grifter playing out the thread to it’s conclusion before she cashes in her chips?
To me, it makes no difference. Actions speak louder than words and Sarah has put in a staggering amount of work towards furthering the cause of the far right both at home and abroad, even if she claims to be doing the opposite.
In the absence of any real ideology, people like Sarah must cling to symbols. She constantly defends the honor of her Nazi friends by playing up their alleged tolerance for LGBTQ rights as if their monstrous atrocities can be erased with a rainbow sticker.
This belies a serious lack of historical knowledge and the complete absence of any framework to analyze it with. Sarah is not a brave activist or a daring journalist, but rather a nihilist and a mercenary. I do not believe Sarah is a fascist, or a socialist, or much of anything beyond a gambler trying to bluff her way to fortune. This does not make her innocent. If anything, it makes her even worse than the Nazis she admires. Men like Botsman, Chili and Roman Shukhevych are not afraid to stand even to the death for what they believe in, no matter how terrible.
Sarah, however, will not just say anything, but she will become anyone she needs to further her goals. She can be a crusading anti-fascist one moment, and a fascist propagandist the next if she believes it will make her famous. She is willing to sell out “friends”, comrades and even her fellow trans people if it keeps the spotlight on her for even a moment longer. Absolutely nothing matters in her journey to the top, just as long as she arrives at the destination with her pockets lined and her name in the headline.
Like a card cheat Sarah uses subterfuge to hide her real intentions, trying to stack the deck in her favor while the dealer is distracted. As is fitting from the woman once ranked #80,000 in the world, her clumsy attempts cannot fool anyone who is paying attention. The truly worrying thing is I do not think she realizes this, rather, she believes that she is actually the top flight poker player she thinks she is.
As is usual, Sarah’s fantasies are not tethered to material reality.
While I hold Sarah in the highest possible contempt, I hope she realizes before it’s too late that the stakes in this game are far higher than she knows. At this table, you play with nothing less than your life. A day will come when her Nazi friends decide to call her bluff and cash in her chips one way or another.
While her skills as a poker player are lacking, we can only hope she folds before that day comes.
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Donbass Devushka@DonbassDevushka
December 06, 2022
How the Good Guys won:
Review of Soviet Counterinsurgency by Alexander Statiev
In 1939 as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the USSR acquired further territories to the west of its September 1939 borders. Except in western Belarus, most people received Soviet power with at best reluctance and dread and often outright hostility. In the three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and western Ukraine there were active groups – from the OUN in western Ukraine and the former state apparatus in the Baltics – which stirred up Nationalist resistance to and subversion of Soviet power. These same forces were granted power and resources after June 1941 as they proactively collaborated with the Germans, receiving training and arms from them as they participated in local collaborationist administration and especially armed formations. The Soviets therefore confronted the problem of how, after June 1944 as they retook these territories from the Germans to resecure them in the face of nationalist insurgencies.
Alexander Statiev provides the answer. The Communists had experience in counterinsurgency practice from the Civil War. In the Civil War the Bolsheviks were very inexperienced but learned from their mistakes and had a set of policies that senior Party leaders – those who had survived Stalin’s Great Terror at least – had learned were effective. In the Civil War the Bolsheviks had used land reform and dividing the rural population as a means of creating winners and losers from their policies and so creating a support base, even if often narrow, for their actions among so called middle peasants and poor peasants. The Bolsheviks also had practiced brutality and ruthlessness not just against the insurgents but the civilian population but tempered it with mercy in not only offering but honouring amnesties to rebels against their rule who surrendered and were not leaders of a rebellion. The Bolsheviks practiced deportation of hostile populations outside of a rebellious zone to cut off any rebels from a support base that could provide them with food, intelligence and the possibility of blending in among seemingly passive civilians. Finally the Communists had learned that empowering some in rebellious regions to take responsibility for guarding their communities against rebels, under close Party supervision and leadership, could give many in rebellious communities a stake in the survival of the regime through their own actions in destroying members of their own community who went against the authorities.
Crucially, the Communists not only learned from and refined these policies after the end of the Civil War but added to them. Statiev also makes clear that the Communists as they pursued counterinsurgency were very much guided and indeed sometimes blinded by ideology. Confronting insurgency in the western lands of the Soviet Union the Soviets after 1944 were not cynical in insisting that the rebellion was powered by what they called Kulaks or rich peasants and ‘bourgeois nationalists’ – middle class professionals from before 1940 and small business owners who regarded themselves as representatives of the ‘true’ nation – to the contrary from Stalin downward this was a matter of belief in the Party. Such belief guided how the Communists would wage counterinsurgency. It allowed them to seize and exploit certain divisions and opportunities to defeat the insurgency but in other cases exacerbated the rebellion needlessly beyond where it need have gone had a different route been chosen. Despite these ideological blinders, the Communists succeeded in effectively extirpating every insurgency they confronted. And they did not do it through overwhelming firepower, terror and force. To the contrary, the practice of Soviet Communist, indeed Stalinist, counterinsurgency was less sanguinary than one might imagine if one were to rely on western histories often influenced by extremely biased and self-interested ‘bourgeois nationalists’ self-pitying narratives.
None of the insurgent groups the Communists confronted could meaningfully be described as politically democratic or liberal. To the contrary the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) as well as the smaller groups in Latvia and Estonia all had their roots in armed formations that had been formed by collaborationist administrations from 1941-1943. The insurgents had not just benefited from German arms and German training, they shared Nazi ideology. The Estonian Omakaitse nationalist militia for example had summarily executed more people than the NKVD before the end of June 1941 and later participated in and often initiated wholesale massacres of Jews. Later, the Omakaitse were deployed to ‘anti-partisan’ actions through the Baltic republics, Belarus and into Russia itself in the Pskov oblast. These actions were often little more than murder expeditions as anyone in the zone of operations was considered an enemy and killed. Although Lithuania is the one Baltic country that did not create an SS unit, they scarcely needed to. In June and July 1941, 7,800 Jews were killed in the Kaunas region alone by the Lithuanians without any instigation from the Germans. 20 Lithuanian police battalions participated directly in the Holocaust and it was these men who – along with their compatriots – formed the core of the armed guerrillas who resisted returning Soviet power. The OUN – you can read about that in my review of Bandera.
The Guerrillas had a popular basis of support but they had a few weaknesses. Their hopes for ejecting Soviet power were on the basis of a new round of war between the Soviet Union and the western powers. More war was the last thing most people in the western lands of the Soviet Union wanted. This gave Soviet power one great advantage, people were exhausted and had seen a lot of blood and horror. Even though they did not trust and often feared and hated Soviet power, they were ready to submit so long as in return for their submission and lip service to Soviet power they were left in peace. The guerrillas, despite their sympathy for them, were denying them that peace. Second, the guerrillas were often arrogant and brutal. Anyone who took up positions of responsibility in the Soviet administration, whether school teacher, collective farm director, Komsomol youth organizer, was often a target and those people were not just killed but brutally murdered by the guerrillas. The UPA for example would murder entire families of ‘traitors’ including children. In one instance in June 1948 a horrified MVD patrol discovered a pile of human legs of people dismembered by the UPA as ‘traitors’ only a few of the dead could be identified. This brutality gave people reason to fear and hate the guerrillas and this in turn gave the Soviets openings.
The Soviets first broke down the initially very large and substantial armed formations they confronted. Second echelon Red Army units and NKVD security divisions combed the countryside and forests for large guerrilla formations and destroyed them. Often this was fairly easy as the guerrillas were initially – in all instances – confident of their superiority against the Soviets and so readily operated in large formations that were fairly easy to track, pin and destroy. Often, particularly in Ukraine, the guerrillas would attack Soviet formations themselves only to be utterly destroyed or suffer very heavy casualties. In all instances where the guerrillas attempted to set up urban cells, these were very quickly tracked and dismantled by the NKVD and later (after 1946) the MGB and MVD. In Lithuania’s case the urban cells were dismantled by early 1946 and while it took longer in Ukraine – it was only because of the persistence of attempts by OUN-UPA to establish cells that it took longer. Their effectiveness was always minimal.
Once the guerrillas recognized though that they stood no chance in open combat against either the Red Army or the NKVD they split into smaller, harder to track mobile units, or more often blended in among the local population and this is where the rest of Soviet tactics came into effect.
As the insurgencies were primarily rural based Soviet agricultural policy became particularly relevant to dividing rural communities and creating a group who supported Soviet power and a group which opposed it. Before collectivization the Soviets first redistributed land from large landowners, the Churches, and the class of wealthier peasants called Kulaks and distributed it to poorer peasants. The Kulaks often did not just have their land taken from them, they were officially harassed, shown no latitude or mercy for failing to fulfil delivery quotas to the state and were often immediately suspected of hiding guerrillas. This turned any potentially neutral Kulaks into either passive opponents of Soviet power, supporters of the guerrillas or even into guerrillas. Initially this fueled the insurgency and added to its manpower. It meant that the Soviet insistence they were fighting a Kulak and bourgeois nationalist set of guerrillas turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy but this also meant the other methods employed became – perversely after the security situation initially deteriorated – much more effective as the categories of the population the Soviets wanted to target were more or less the correct categories to target. Collectivization though mitigated against whatever advantages the Soviets gained from land redistribution. Even poorer peasants soon expected to lose their land to the moment when collectivization occurred. But even then collectivization created its own set of winners and losers both to continue dividing rural communities and to concentrate the rural population into larger but more easily observed and policed communities. Overall land reform and collectivization were less successful at defusing the source of the insurgency than in helping mould the insurgency into a more recognizably class based warfare and dividing rural communities enough that they were never able to fully unite against Soviet power.
The Soviets also formed so called ‘destruction battalions’ which were lightly armed formations that had the power to patrol near their own communities, to enforce certain aspects of the law and to protect their communities from guerrilla raids. The Soviets were aware that the majority ethnic groups were usually unreliable. As such minority ethnic groups and Party members often were very highly represented in these ‘destruction battalions.’ This meant that many of these battalions were made up of people who had the most to lose should the Soviet regime fail against the guerrillas. Still, it would be erroneous to say that ‘traitorous’ ethnic minorities and Communists destroyed the ‘good and patriotic’ guerrillas. Most members of the ‘destruction battalions’ were neither ethnic minorities nor Communists, but farmers – often poor or middle peasants from the majority ethnic group. Initially they were poorly trained. Some were easily defeated by the much better trained guerrillas. Some in western Ukraine defected to the guerrillas. But most were either effective and loyal or ineffective but loyal. Once the war ended and demobilized Red Army soldiers were incorporated, their effectiveness improved and the authorities were able to devote more time to training them, further improving their effectiveness. These ‘destruction battalions’ were the primary force after late 1945 which fought the guerrillas. The worker’s militia and MVD troops were spread too thin to engage regularly. The destruction battalions, knowing that there was no future for them if Soviet power should fail – and also wanting to ascend the Soviet hierarchy – fought with determination and often identified guerrilla agents and undercover guerrillas and either wound them up themselves or called in the MVD or MGB to begin an investigation liquidate the guerrillas. As the quality of the destruction battalions improved the guerrillas found themselves more and more isolated from the rural population and resources and so became more and more ragged and desperate – indeed more and more resembling the epithet the Soviets applied to them ‘Bandits.’
The Soviets did not use armed force alone to isolate the guerrillas from the local population. Deportations were a key instrument of Soviet policy. Statiev shows that far from being an indiscriminate tool of repression whereby ‘good’ ethnic majorities were ‘replaced’ with ‘foreign’ Russians, deportations were targeted on a class basis and a political basis. The families of guerrillas and guerrilla sympathizers were subject to deportation orders – usually deportation to a remote corner of the Soviet Union, and not always Siberia. In cases where entire communities had supported the guerrillas they would be split up and deported throughout the Soviet Union. The threat of being uprooted and deported was often enough to make people either urge their guerrilla relatives to surrender, to turn their guerrilla friends and family into the custody of the MVD and workers’ militia – or for guerrillas themselves to turn themselves in either to be with their families in deportation or in the hope they could spare their families from deportation. Where deportation actions were carried out this cut off guerrillas from sympathy, support and resources and further strangled them and their recruiting base leaving more and more a population that was hostile – and one which benefited from moving into the houses and using the land of the deportees. For the deportess themselves while some never gave up their cause, others found the experience of deportation both demoralising but also the fact that the local on their arrival often viewed them with suspicion if not complete disdain as further social isolating factor to reinforce the idea that resisting Soviet power was futile, dangerous and they were an isolated, irrelevant and truly despised minority.
Deportations were effective because Soviet policy was tempered with mercy. The Stalinist regime, which had a deserved reputation for brutality and promising those who confessed to crimes mercy only to betray them and murder them was much less murderous and treacherous than it had been in the 1930s. As in the Civil War, guerrillas who surrendered during an amnesty were not only allowed to surrender, they were often – depending on their rank – let go free with the promise not to aid the guerrillas, albeit they would be subject to much closer workers’ militia and MVD supervision. If the guerrilla who surrendered was middle ranking they would be expected to perform acts which demonstrated their loyalty to Soviet power and burned their bridges definitively by turning in – or indeed turning on their former comrades. Some guerrillas who came in during amnesties became members of destruction battalions and brought their knowledge of guerrilla operating procedures to assisting the destruction battalion militia in detecting and defeating guerrillas. Others became commandos or operatives for the MGB or MVD which went hunting for guerrilla units and fought them. Once these former guerrillas had done this though, they were free and, having turned themselves in, their families and friends were spared deportation. This honouring of amnesties made the prospect of surrender very tempting for many guerrillas. It is why the SB of the UPA punished those who spoke of surrender or who had surrendered not just with execution but very brutal and often sadistic executions to keep guerrillas fighting to the bitte end. The contrast between Soviet mercy and guerrilla brutality though encouraged more to accept offers of amnesty and turn on their former comrades to get back to living a normal life.
Still there was work to be done in the midst of all this by the MVD. The NKVD (and after March 1946 the MVD) and MGB were always the primary all-Union power organs devoted to extirpating insurgency. In contrast to western practices – the trouble zones were not flooded with MVD and MGB personnel. To the contrary, despite being slightly reinforced, the MVD and MGB were stretched thin and expected to make due with what they had. For the MVD this meant only 34,000 men were devoted to western Ukraine. This notwithstanding both security organs made excellent use of what they had. In addition to setting up networks of agents in the villages, providing mobile motorised patrols to quickly close in on large groups of guerrillas the MVD and MGB both set about penetrating the guerrillas with agents and tearing them apart from within. As mentioned, amnestied mid-ranking guerrillas or guerrillas who were members of the SB often had to undertake dangerous work on behalf of Soviet power to earn their pardon. This meant often they returned to their guerrilla units after the MVD concocted an escape that seemed violent but in fact was not. This did not always work. Mistrustful guerrillas would often kill the returnee outright or the amnestied guerrilla would betray his word to Soviet power. Most often though it did and the MVD and MGB gained valuable information about the guerrillas. These agents helped the Soviets pull the guerrillas apart from the inside. The MVD and MGB also often devised ingenious schemes to get the guerrillas to reveal themselves and mind up huge segments of the guerrilla network in one swoop. The results were that the guerrillas save a brief period in early 1946 and only in western Ukraine constantly found themselves on the backfoot against the security forces. The paranoia the effectiveness of the MVD and MGB induced also further heightened mistrust and hysteria in guerrilla ranks, making offers of amnesty from the Soviet authorities all the more tempting.
Finally, the Soviets, unlike during the Civil War, used the Churches as active instruments of policy. Though official harassment did not end, Stalin was both impressed by and grateful to the Russian Orthodox Church for giving his government support during the Great Patriotic War. In return Stalin restored some of the buildings and lands to the Church and even allowed the reopening of some seminaries and reduced harassment against believers. The Orthodox Church in turn assisted in the borderlands by moving against rivals and helping wind up the Greek Catholic Church and absorbing its buildings and properties as well as bringing Ukrainian Orthodox dioceses and bishoprics more firmly under the control of the Moscow Patriarchate. The Church preached in favour of Soviet power and against the guerrillas, denouncing their actions as sinful, un-Christian, and futile. This shook many in the still faithful peasant communities and even guerrillas and helped weaken morale while also demonstrating that Soviet power had moderated somewhat compared to its earlier days. In the Baltics where the Catholic and Protestant religions were more dominant, the churches were less willing to subordinate themselves and consequently Soviet policy was far more anti-clerical.
Overall, what are we to make of it? Statiev does not shy away from detailing Soviet brutality and Soviet crimes, but he points out they were exceptional, not the norm, and very often punished with demotions, firings or even prison sentences for the guilty. Depending on the severity of the crime, some abuses of power were punished with execution. Still others were not and were protected and this undermined Soviet power and the counterinsurgency strategy but never so severely as to appreciably increase support for the guerrillas. Even more astonishing, to me at least, Statiev concludes that Soviet counterinsurgency was lower key, lower cost, less firepower intensive and far less brutal overall than the counterinsurgencies of not just Western backed authoritarian regimes (think Guatemala) but also Western democratic regimes who have used heavy firepower, deportations, torture, death squads in their own counterinsurgency efforts. Soviet counterinsurgency had its problems and imperfections. In part Marxism-Leninism strengthened counterinsurgency conceptions and practices but in other ways constrained it. Nevertheless, it was effective. The Soviets won. OUN-UPA, and the remnants of the armed collaborationists in the Baltics were defeated and the areas won for Soviet power.
So then, I highly recommend this book. In addition to be highly readable, the product of a near decade of indefatigable research, it dispels a lot of myths about the practices of the Stalinist regime, highlights that a lot of the horror stories of brutality and mass death are mistaken or exaggerated. It gives a more complete picture of an often ill studied and unknown aspect of WWII and Soviet history. It also shows that in the past, against ruthless, trained and committed enemies, the good guys won. They can win again.
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