There’s nothing to fear from acknowledging Ukraine for what it was and, to some extent, remains.
There’s lots of embarrassment over the fact that the Canadian parliament stood up and cheered a Ukrainian WWII veteran who fought in the Waffen SS. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau is being harassed about this. Everyone is upset.
Our own Jim Geraghty writes:
As if the embarrassment wasn’t bad enough, Canada just handed Russia more easy fodder for propaganda that the Ukrainians are the real Nazis, and that the dictator who’s breaking treaties, hinting at global conspiracies involving Jews, and constantly bombing civilians — the dictator who has kidnapped at least 19,000 children — is the real hero of this war.
I mean, I understand why it’s embarrassing, but it’s not more embarrassing than the ongoing reality. There’s been a consistent “hush up” tone about this subject as if talking about it legitimates Putin’s war. It doesn’t, of course. And the facts don’t oblige you to take my view that we should limit our support of Ukraine. So can we get real for a minute?
Ukrainian nationalists in the 1930s sided with Hitler against Stalin. Most of them did so for the same reason everyone in WWII, including us, sided with one mass-murdering dictatorship or another: our immediate self-interest. In the 1920s, the new Polish state stripped Ukraine of some of its territory in expansionist wars. And then the Soviet regime committed horrific crimes against Ukrainians in the 1930s, imposing on them a famine unlike any other in history. Of course many Ukrainian nationalists greeted the Germans as liberators. Some, however, like the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, really bought into the whole ideology, including its genocidal fondness for ethnic purity and antisemitism.
Ever since, there has been a strain of Ukrainian nationalism that honors its Nazi Waffen SS heroes. Because Canada took in a lot of Ukrainian immigrants in the middle of the 20th century, it’s the only country in North America to have a lot of monuments to Waffen SS veterans, bedecked in all the creepy angular symbols that we associate with fascism. So, forgive me for rolling my eyes at the sudden surprise that a WWII-era fighter for Ukraine turns out to have been a Waffen man.
Even though Hitler had a monstrously low view of his Ukrainian collaborators and eventually turned on them, this strain of ethno-nationalism has persisted in Ukraine up to the present day. Ultra-nationalists have not been winning significant victories in parliament, but their paramilitaries have a persuasive power of their own. Russia doesn’t need Canada’s parliament to convince Russians that there are Nazis in Ukraine. The Duma in Kyiv honored Bandera earlier this year, angering Poland. The Azov battalion has worn Wolfsangel symbols, and other Ukrainian units wear Sonnenrads. The United States used to have rules forbidding the Ukrainian government from providing those groups with Western arms because of their noxious politics and fear that they would sell them. Those rules are not being carefully followed during the exigencies of war.
And even if that weren’t true, there would still be more than a million Ukrainian refugees, nearly a third of the total number according to some estimates, who’ve chosen to settle in Russia for the duration of the war. These are the people most likely to be bearing tales in Russian media about what the neo-Nazi paramilitaries do in Ukraine. Those deeds can’t be justly attributed to the nation of Ukraine or even its government; Zelensky spent years trying to get control of the militias and re-establish the state’s monopoly on violence before the war. The war may help him do so. Many of Ukraine’s most extreme militia men were casualties in the battle for Mariupol.
I just think it looks silly to switch from treating this subject as taboo until the moment it hits the parliamentary floor. It’s as if people have been shielding their eyes for fear that they’ll see what Putin says they should see. Not everyone got to be Poland in WWII, maintaining a healthy and uncomplicated hatred for both the Hitlerite and Stalinist regimes throughout. There’s nothing to fear from acknowledging Ukraine for what it was and, to some extent, remains. Acknowledging the persistence of this strain of ultra-nationalism doesn’t change the fact that the bulk of Ukrainian nationalists are liberal, and their aspiration is to have a nation more integrated with Western institutions and norms. I think genuine curiosity and interest in Ukraine, as well as fearlessness about its history and its present-day problems, can only make our response to this crisis more astute.