Bellingcat is a Netherlands-based investigative research group that received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout that promotes propaganda denigrating U.S. enemies and defending U.S.-NATO foreign policy.
On June 6, one of its researchers, Michael Colborne, provided a tortured defense essentially of the adoption of Nazi insignia by Ukrainian soldiers on their uniforms, raising concern only about the public relations effects.
Colborne was quoted in The New York Times stating, “what worries me, in the Ukrainian context, is that people in Ukraine who are in leadership positions, either they don’t or they’re not willing to acknowledge and understand how these symbols are viewed outside of Ukraine. I think Ukrainians need to increasingly realize that these images undermine support for the country.”[1]
In short, the use of Nazi symbols is not wrong or worrying in and of itself; the only problem is the potential PR damage arising from it, which could undermine support for the war effort.
Can you imagine, during World War II, a researcher making a similar statement about Nazi storm troopers during Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union?
If he did, he would likely be condemned as a Nazi apologist since he nowhere expressed revulsion for the men wearing uniforms with Nazi insignia; he was only worried about their public image in the West because he wanted them to succeed and to sustain Western support.
Colborne’s quote was part of a New York Times article by Thomas Gibbons-Neff entitled “Kyiv Walks Fine Line as Fighters Embrace Use of Nazi Symbols.”
The article acknowledged wide use of Nazi symbols on Ukrainian military uniforms but claimed that the Ukrainian government was fighting to contain the “fringe far right movement” whose “members proudly wore the Nazi symbols.”[2]
The claim that the Ukrainian government was actually trying to contain these forces is undercut in the Times article itself, as it pointed to a) widespread use of such symbols; and b) the fact that in April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted photographs on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as the Totenkopf, or Death Head, which originated with a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.[3]
The soldier wearing it was a member of the Da Vinci Wolves, the paramilitary arm of Ukraine’s Right Sector that has committed large-scale atrocities in the Donbas since 2014, including torture and executions.
Its commander received a hero’s funeral by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after he was killed in Mariupol last year, undercutting the narative that these groups are on the fringe.
That the Twitter photo was not an aberration is further indicated by the fact that last month, according to the Times, Ukraine’s state emergency services agency posted on Instagram a photograph of an emergency worker wearing a Black Sun symbol, also known as Sonnenrad, that appeared in the castle of Heinrich Himmler, director of the Nazi SS Gestapo.
In November, during a meeting with Times reporters near the front line, a Ukrainian press officer wore a Totenkopf variation made by a company called R3ICH (pronounced “Reich”).
The Times’s claim that the Ukrainian government was opposed to such symbols and trying to contain the “fringe far right” was undercut further when the war first began in 2014: Then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko posted on his Facebook page a photo that he took with a Ukrainian Army unit whose members had sewn the Totenkopf badge onto their uniforms.
The use of these symbols should not ultimately be concerning strictly from a public relations viewpoint but from a moral one, and provoke growth of a large-scale movement in Western countries to cut off military aid to Ukraine and push for a negotiated settlement that ends the war.
For years, the public was told that the U.S. was arming moderate rebels in Syria—though it was eventually acknowledged that there were no moderates and that the U.S. was arming jihadist extremists.
Similarly, with regard to Ukraine, the public is being told that U.S. weapons are going to moderates, when the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion has been pictured using Western weapons.
Last month, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu displayed images of two severely damaged armored vehicles that looked like they came from the U.S. after a May 22 cross-border raid into Belgorod by the Russian Volunteer Corps of neo-Nazi Denis Kapustin (aka Nikitin).
Nikitin claimed that his group had recovered military vehicles that somebody else had stolen from the Ukrainian military—meaning that U.S. military equipment is reaching the most extreme elements in the Ukrainian Army one way or another.[4]
The Times’s Liberal Luminary Champions a Nazi-Infested Army
Liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman ironically published an op-ed championing U.S. military aid to Ukraine in the same edition that Gibbons-Neff’s piece was run.
Krugman timed his piece to coincide with the 79th anniversary of the D-Day landing, a turning point after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in the defeat of the Nazi army during World War II.
Krugman wrote that the anniversary of D-Day “seems especially evocative this year as we await the moral equivalent of D-Day, coming any day now when Ukraine begins its long-awaited counter-attack against Russian invaders.”[5]
Krugman concedes, like Colborne, that Ukraine “does have a far-right movement, including paramilitary groups that have played a part in its war,” but says that these elements “don’t create any equivalence between the two sides in this war. Ukraine is an imperfect but real democracy, hoping to join the larger democratic community. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a malevolent actor and friends of freedom everywhere have to hope it will be thoroughly defeated.”[6]
Krugman’s black-and-white view is complicated by the fact that it is Ukraine’s government that has banned twelve opposition parties, including the Communist Party, which is legal in Russia.
Ukraine also has many more political prisoners than Russia per capita with jails full of dissidents, and has employed a war strategy straight out of the Nazi playbook in bombing critical infrastructure, dams, and pipelines in an attempt to deprive people of water and cripple the Russian economy.
Krugman expresses his wish that the citizens of Western democracies were “more fully committed to Ukrainian victory” and that “some of those who oppose Western aid just don’t see the moral equivalence with World War II.”[7]
It is Krugman, however, who is blind to the fact that Russians are again fighting Nazi groups, and the U.S. and Western countries, shamefully, are on the side of the bad guys this time.