According to a 2016
report
compiled by the global accounting firm Ernst & Young, Ukraine tops
the European corruption league, and is one of the most corrupt countries
in the world, based on the perception of its citizens in a wide-ranging
poll. It is an onerous title the country has held each year since the
so-called Euromaidan movement toppled the presidency of Viktor
Yanukovych with the active support of Washington and its European
allies.
People will recall that one of the main justifications for forcing
the Ukrainian president from office back in 2014 was his alleged
corruption, with claims that he'd been engaged in the widespread
mismanagement of government funds and the disbursement of bribes. Yet
corruption at the highest levels of power in Ukraine was endemic prior
to Yanukovych's election to the presidency in 2010, while remaining
endemic since his forced departure.
A conflict that has slipped off the radar of the mainstream media
continues in eastern Ukraine at significant human and humanitarian cost.
In April 2017 the European Commission
revealed
the extent of the cost paid by those Ukrainians in the eastern part
of the country, who have steadfastly refused to recognize the writ of a
government that came to power with the active and violent
support of avowed neo-Nazis and fascists.
©
Sputnik/ Sergey Pivovarov
In a conflict in which 9,900 people have been killed and 23,246
injured, the EU Commission report reveals that an estimated 3.8 million
people in eastern Ukraine are in need of humanitarian aid. We've learned
that "damage to housing and critical civilian infrastructures,
particularly water supply and electricity systems is increasing.
Conflict affected resident population and internally displaced persons
(IDPs) face difficult access to health care and other essential
services, socio-economic exclusion, loss of income and livelihood and
suffer from psychological distress."
These are the bitter fruits of a conflict that the West helped
to bring about with the opportunistic and reckless support for violent
demonstrators, many of them neo-Nazis, in a part of the world where the
scars of the Second World War remain deep and raw over 70 years on.
Indeed, today, more than anywhere in Europe, including Germany, the
past and the present have merged to produce not so much historical
amnesia but an outbreak of historical revisionism when it comes to the
Nazi invasion and occupation of Ukraine (when it was part of the Soviet
Union), and the ensuing atrocities and orgy of murder unleashed by the
SS with the
participation of Ukrainian auxiliaries.
In an wide-ranging
interview
with the UK Morning Star newspaper, Petro Symonenko, leader of the
Communist Party of Ukraine, points out that "right across Ukraine there
is…a war between the ideologists of Hitler and the Nazi collaborators
of the OUN, and the anti-fascists, whose leaders have always been
Communists." Moreover Symonenko identifies the role of the coup
government's Institute of National Memory in ‘falsifying history and
promoting neonazism (sic) as state ideology."
What he is referring to with regard to the Kiev's Institute
of National Memory is a campaign it is engaged in to rewrite the history
of the Second World War, while sanctioning the eradication of monuments
and statues commemorating the role of the Red Army in liberating
Ukraine from the scourge of fascism at enormous human cost. It comes
as part of a narrative in which all things Russian are deemed abhorrent
and evil, an "eternal enemy and aggressor", regardless of the
indisputable ethnic and cultural bonds both countries share, stretching
all the way back to the 9
th century and the
Kievan Rus Federation out of which both Russia and Ukraine emerged.
The idea that a historical figure such as
Stepan Bandera,
the famed (infamous) Ukrainian nationalist who actively colluded and
collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation of Ukraine, is now
venerated and lauded as a patriot in anti-Russian parts of the country
is surely offensive, when considering the indisputable barbarity that
was visited on countless millions throughout the Soviet Union and
elsewhere in service to their monstrous creed and ideology.
Yet this is western Ukraine today, a repository of ultra nationalism
and fascism, driven by an irrational desire to destroy and substitute an
alternative history for actual history.
©
AP Photo/ Risto Bozovic
In supporting the 2014 coup in western Ukraine, and thereby
precipitating a civil war, the West created a monster. For not only has
the result been civil war, it has plunged relations between Russia and
Washington to the lowest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962,
when the world came the closest it ever has to nuclear Armageddon.
Today, three years after the coup in Kiev, there are thousands
of NATO troops on Russia's border, along with aircraft and a missile
defense shield in Romania. Cynics among us may be tempted to speculate
that this was part of the script all along, given Russia's recovery and
emergence as a strategic counterweight to Western hegemony in recent
years. But whatever the motives the catastrophic outcome cannot be
denied.
It is something to ponder that whereas during the Second World War
Russia and the West were united in a common struggle to defeat fascism,
in the second decade of the 21
st century the West is
supporting a country that, though not governed by fascists, is
undeniably infested by a recrudescence of fascism.
"As crimes pile up," Brecht reminds us, "they become invisible."
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
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The U.S. diplomat tasked with the job, Brett McGurk, 
