The Origins of Ukraine’s Fascists & Why It Matters, w/ Historian Tarik Cyril Amar

hello everyone i'm rania kalak and this is dispatches as the furnace of war burns in ukraine we know that battles are taking place soldiers are dying towns and cities are being attacked millions of civilians are fleeing their homes and lives and dreams are being destroyed as for the battlefield once the war started we entered the fog of war this might be the worst covered war in modern history we have no idea who lost how many men in tanks and planes we have no idea who's really winning or losing either side's narrative could be true western news reports are heart-wrenching but they don't add to our understanding or knowledge they tell us that civilians are suffering and they appeal for more weapons only when the war is over will we slowly understand what took place after february 24th 2022 but even then without the benefit of understanding history we won't know why it happened the war in ukraine didn't begin this year but in 2014 and the narrative of those days is shrouded in mythology the west wants heroes and villains but they don't want their heroes to also be nazis so they forget the numerous reports and documentaries in mainstream western media about the radical extremist militias in ukraine and their control over the street in the 2014 coup to help make sense of it all and place this war and the ukrainian extreme right in its historical context i'm joined by tariq cyril omar a historian from germany who's currently associate professor of history at coach university in istanbul working on russian ukrainian and generally east european history he also speaks russian and ukrainian and has lived in ukraine for a total of five years three of which as the head of the center for urban history of east central europe in the city of la viv tariq welcome hi how are you i'm good and i'm so happy to have you on you know as i said in the introduction ukrainian nationalism has always been dangerously intertwined with fascism and your academic background includes writing on ukraine during world war ii so i think a good place to start would be can you discuss the origins of right-wing nationalism in ukraine and then we can uh talk more about today after we talk about history a little bit so yeah what are its origins yes so the origins of the the right-wing traditions of ukrainian nationalism right um i really go back to the period between the two world wars obviously you know among historians and others as well people like to play around with periodization and some people would probably suggest some earlier routes but i think the consensus isn't it's rightly that um it really starts between the two wars and um the most the single most imp for this type of modern right-wing nationalism that we are talking about now right and the single most important region for this is what is now western ukraine and that is a part of ukraine that after world war one to a large extent ends up in poland and under polish control and that disappointment of not having their national aspirations satisfied by the post-world war one order radicalizes the generation of ukrainian nationalists and as you can imagine once you're looking at the interval period you're also looking at a period in which in other countries extreme right politics including fascism and then nazism both belong of course together are on the rise so what you find within a certain amount of time it really works quite quickly is that these disappointed nationalists were not happy with what happened after world war one like many other nationalists in other places look around themselves and they start looking at the italian and then the german cases and they begin to feel inspired by that right and that's where you begin to get this really quite direct interaction with specifically italian fascism and then also german nazism and you know you also worked on ukraine under the soviets you've done work on that as well so i'm wondering if you could maybe give us an idea of the ukrainian experience uh under the soviet union and how ukraine fared uh during those times so the integration of ukraine into the soviet union is really an outcome most directly of the civil war that happens in the former russian empire after the russian revolution so we are talking about the civil war that sort of lasts of 1918 2021 these are usually the years given and um ukraine undergoes an extremely complicated history in this period with various warring factions with various foreign powers being active including very much at the beginning of the period still the austro-hungarians and the germans also been in the mix and in the end one cannot really recap here today this is extremely difficult history and complicated history but in the end the bolsheviks emerged victorious but one thing one has to understand about this is that while they have local support as other movements have as well it is the outcome of a struggle right so the soviet ukraine that emerges is in part something that comes from below but also it is very much something that is a result of the civil war and the result of fighting going that way and not another way so that once you have this soviet ukraine um you are looking at the state in which the bolsheviks for a number of years roughly speaking the 1920s uh practice a policy that they call um that that they call the rooting of soviet power and by that they mean that coordination right and that literally it's rooting of power and by that they mean that they want to find local support by finding uh by articulating their ideas in ukrainian through their version of ukrainian culture and so on i'm summarizing but that's the first bolshevik approach after the civil war and that policy then by the end of the 20s early 1930s is abandoned in the exchange for something much more authoritarian again the virtuous are never liberals but you know there are difference in the degree of authoritarianism that they practice and much less conciliatory towards these local forces that's an all-soviet phenomenon but ukraine is one of the most important places where this happens at the same time so you then see massive attacks on the ukrainian intelligentsia even on the ukrainian bolsheviks or the ukrainian party right purges and so on and of course more or less at the same time you also have the occurrence of the famine of 1932-33 which is a whole different chapter but for now let's just say that when you take all of this together the interval period under the soviet union for ukraine is initially after the civil war not as bad as you would imagine but turns into something very violent and tragic by around 1930 and then of course you already begin to enter sooner or later into the experience of world war ii which is again a different topic to talk about well let's talk about that because you know ukraine there seems to be a lot of revisionist history taking place uh in ukraine around world war ii the sort of resurrection a lot of these uh former or a lot of these you know ukrainian nationalists that collaborated with the nazis at the time being kind of glorified as heroes now so what did happen during world war ii in terms of those in ukraine who did collaborate with the nazis yes so um first of all you're absolutely right there is um a major sustained drive uh to embellish uh the history of this type of this period of ukrainian nationalism right when we're really specifically talking now about the period of the war let's date it 39 to 45 then of course inside that you have the war between strictly speaking the germans and the soviets 41 to 45 but those are the years we're talking about and you have now in ukraine and also outside ukraine um a very strong drive to pretend that ukrainian nationalism at the time uh was a force resisting both outside invaders equally right this is sort of a symmetry idea that these ukrainian nationalists stood up for ukraine and they stood up equally against the germans the nazis in other words and against the soviets who at this time were stalinists this is nonsense this is historic this is absolute nonsense this is not discussable actually although it's widespread in reality ukrainian nationalism during the war um tries to collaborate intensively with nazi germany the collaboration is less successful in quotation marks than the nationalists want because initially the germans are so arrogant that they're basically saying to these guys we don't need you right we don't want to share power with you but nevertheless even uh in spite of this initial falling out which happens in the summer of 1941 the story isn't over and what you will find is a very complicated pattern in which the ukrainian organized nationalists and the nazis are not at all the same thing but again and again ukrainian nationalists find or think that they share interests with the germans or that certain aspects of german rule can work in their favor if they know how to use it and that leads to [Music] partial collaboration in the holocaust again a topic that um as i know from a lot of personal experience some ukrainians even now just don't want to hear about and yet it is true it is simply a historical truth there is a partial cooperation between ukrainian nationalists and germans in the holocaust the ukrainian nationalists do not cause the holocaust the germans caused the holocaust right that's where the decisions are made but some of them enough of them to be serious problem as a legacy do participate and then others simply find it very attractive and like the results and we know this from some of the wartime writings they have their own tradition of anti-semitism which is not always exactly the same as what the nazis produce that's true if you delve into this very in very much detail you can see certainly um certain differences but it is close enough to make them cooperate and moreover you sometimes get cases where ukrainian nationalists even act proactively against jews on their own even in regions where germans are either not there yet or sin on the ground right this also occurs so um that is a great burden for those who try to produce this extremely whitewashed extremely embellished myth now in which these nationalists are these pure and simple and innocent heroes no they're not it's a much more complicated and a much darker story another thing that also of course happens is that they conduct their own massive ethnic cleansing campaign against ports and they do this very deliberately this is a planned operation um one of the best young historians who's worked on this is a guy called jared mcbride who's now in california he's researched this in great detail and what he shows you very clearly is that this apologetic idea that some people are spreading that this is just a grand malay you know the poles and the ukrainians it's war everything is cardic everybody somehow starts killing each other is not true that would be bad enough but it's not true it is a targeted planned deliberate operation by a political force and the political force that does this and wants this from 1943 onwards and into 1944 is precisely the organized ukrainian nationalists specifically those of the panderable so these are two big issues that cast enormous shadows over the history of world war ii ukrainian nationalism that in itself wouldn't be you know things like that happened unfortunately in a lot of places in europe right right exactly what makes this so virulent now and so disturbing is precisely the fact that there are such strong forces in and outside ukraine who simply don't want to acknowledge this this is the real issue right right no and it is it's incredibly disturbing and then you have kind of like a a western whitewashing uh as well of of the fact that these figures are being praised and held up and glorified but you're absolutely right i mean this happened all across europe the collaboration with the nazis for various local reasons um and in the case of ukraine it is interesting how it isn't discussed or addressed how there was these massacres of polls that were quite deliberate like you mentioned but you know i want to move around in history here i do want to go back to that but i'm curious if we can move towards i guess the 90s um to what extent can we blame do you think today's conflict on how ukraine became an independent country after the collapse of the soviet union or can we i don't know no it's a good question it's a very difficult question i think um let me think look um the fact that i i would put it the following way the fact that there is a crisis right that involves russia and ukraine um partly really does come out of the way not only how ukraine of how ukraine became independent at the end of the soviet union in 91 but i would say more generally how the soviet union dissolved and also what happened to russia at the time right so there are certain lines going back into the 90s and really specifically to 1991 if you want um but i would like to stress i think that can help you to an extent and this is not the whole picture but to an extent it can help you explain why there is some of the tension that now has taken this absolutely tragic turn right but i would resist an explanation that says you get from there to the war right to get to this war to this enormous bloodletting uh that that's a different story again and much that has to do with that is i think you have to look for roots of course in russia but you also have to look for roots in international politics that go beyond ukraine and russia to understand how you get from a set of difficult issues that would have created a lot of you know maybe debate complications tension some conflict to this horrific war which is a very important issue right that's true and i guess so just to be a little bit more specific here i guess this kind of isn't just this goes beyond ukraine and russia maybe not you know internationally but it's connected to that but you know when did the post-soviet right-wing nationalisms that we see today when did those emerge because it's not just in ukraine you have it in a lot of post-soviet countries yes um so i i think you can even frame this a little more widely very plausibly which is uh you can either look strictly at post-soviet countries so countries that literally once belonged to the soviet union where part of it the baltics ukraine but you can also of course look at countries that never belong to the soviet union but but were part of its sphere of its fear of control right so say that gives you poland or hungary right that's a different issue again but actually when you look at the rise of far-right discourse nationalist discourse nationalist revisionist history discourse right these places have a lot in common so it's not just the strictly post orbit it's a soul former if you use the old cold war term it's a whole area of the former soviet bloc in europe right where you find these phenomena and when did it begin um that i you know in a way some of it began uh even before the soviet union dissolved you know if if you look for instance just to give a specific example if you look at the history of polish anti-semitism right which plays a role even now polish anti-semitism is quite active during the communist period it's up and down and it depends on how it's articulated and sometimes the regime the communist regime actually tries to co-opt it at the end of the 1960s that's a particular virulent period for instance right so in part some of these things have never been entirely away they've been sort of underground or flowing along in their own little channels but it wasn't that they were completely repressed or that they had ceased to exist right the older traditions at work here the other thing is of course that there is a cultural history in the west ukrainian nationalism excellent example of that where you have a very strong cold war diaspora right and here you have to be very careful because i really don't want to stereotype the ukrainian diaspora which would be very unfair the ukrainian diaspora has a long history and some of it's actually very left-wing but what you see after the quote after the world um the second world war during the cold war is that politically and i would say to an extent in terms of discourse culturally right the ukrainian diaspora in north america especially and i mean canada and the united states but not only is really taking over by the right wing and to an extent even by the far right and that's a story that's still going on so when the soviet union collapses and ukraine becomes independent it also opens up to this diaspora that's organized yes well not all of them again i want to draw a distinction but getting their way back into ukraine and sort of it's almost like a time capsule bringing their sort of frozen right-wing politics back into 1990s ukraine however specifically to a question and here i'd like to focus on ukraine when does this get really virulent um the 90s i wouldn't say so not really i would say you would have to go into the 2000s and think about the so-called orange revolutions which happen uh oral revolution which happens in 2004-5 essentially right at the turn of the year then that doesn't yet lead to massive right-wing mobilization the way that 2013 has so it goes in these in these in the ukrainian case i would say inside ukraine it goes in these leaps right and what we've seen since 2014 is really quite unprecedented what we did have before already under presidents like yushchenko who came out of the orange revolution 2005 is um a very clear rise even a surge in this official history revisionism so for instance that's the period already when you see ukrainian state authorities saying oh let's make stefan bendera the head of this extremely problematic ukrainian nationalist organization the most important one of world war ii let's make that offer him an official hero right and when these sort of same for a guy who's shukhav which was a military commander and we could go and delete that but the history of that starts really after 2005 to really take off but what happens then after 2014 what has happened now is a different story again i would say yeah i know that's a really i know it's very complicated and you can't point to just one thing but that's a that's a really good uh explanation and you know just you mentioned stefan bandera we have so many names that we see people calling these various militias right-wing militias uh in ukraine you have you know and they're called neo-nazis they're called the extreme right sometimes they're called banderas so like what is the can you kind of just give us a layout right now today what is the current makeup of the different right-wing factions um we hear of the azov battalion a lot for example and what is their you know if not one but different ideological tendencies how would you describe them what's the proper terminology here yeah um [Music] let let me say something about myself and what would i do to to solve that problem or maybe just to sort of mitigate the problem i also just call it the far right and that's not because i think that's a very good term that's because i use it as an umbrella term because what you've pointed out is absolutely true um they have in common therefore right but there are also quite a lot of differences there's a bit of an ecosystem right now one thing about azov as one of the journalists who has worked intensively on us off over over the you know for several years now i think 2018 2016 is when he must have started uh michael corbon who is a canadian has just brought out a book in a fairly obscure publisher which is a shame because it's probably i haven't read it yet but it's probably an important book and what he said in an interview about azov strikes me as absolutely right which is that azov is by now by far the most important far-right force in ukraine it dwarfs the others right and in so far as there are others and there are others they have to sort of negotiate with us off and there are very few who still try to do their own thing even against azov that's very very hard by now azov is the biggest story here right but it's not alone you also have organizations such as uh they call themselves freikor there's one that actually calls it the frey corps eluding of course literally to extremely right-wing reactionary uh military units fighting in germany after they lost the war after they lost world war one and that played a role in the rise of nazis frey call to nazism yes there is a line right um frey corps you have tradition and order is another small organization you have something called capacion siege you have uh very obnoxious i mean they're all obnoxious but you have another way of blockchain's outfit called c14 right and i'm sure i haven't enumerated them all so it's it's quite it's quite a scene which is dominated by now by belzov right one thing we need to say here is that when i say azov azov is much more than the azov battalion the azov battalion is a military unit as we know uh with its own big problems i would say but um it's actually you know it's about 900 1000 people it's difficult to count because they're expanding apparently right now but it's not enormously large right at the same time as of as a whole and compass is now much much more than that it encompasses something called the national core and sometimes you find also the name national corpus which is a political party it encompasses a national militia it has a organizations it has an extremely virulent and nasty youth organization called the vutan juggen actually doesn't sound like an i don't know what that means i don't even know what that means but it sounds ominous it sounds awkward you know bhutan of course is a nordic god so you know nazis tend to be into nordic gods right and um and eugene is an illusion it's a german word for use but here it's an illusion clearly to hitler eugene right bhutan juvent i mean there's no two ways of thinking about this they're thinking hitler human and they love hitler in bhutan very very clearly i mean you make the others look moderate and they are moderate so there's a whole system here right um but what what is there for me the main question is to come back to you to your initial class what do we call them right i would say some of them are literally neo-nazis some of them very important i would describe as white supremacists that's a very strong line by now and that also has to do with the way that they're going international so it's a very important sort of bridge for them the white supremacist identity that they also have which of course neo-nazism white supremacists overlap anyhow right but if you want to sort of slice it some of them are sort of identitarians right some of them see themselves as you know i came across this wonderful term some of them used uh recently um national traditionalism and okay and believe me they mean it in a very national way and the traditions that they have in mind you know i i like tradition but i don't think they need the traditions it's not about food it's not about preserving foods yeah no absolutely you know so there are different thoughts um there are also different influences you know some of them for instance azov has been very strongly influenced by the french nouveau duat which is partly you know the nouveau the the new right the french movement that sort of has already existed for several decades now has played an enormously important role in the way that some of those people sort of the intellectuals of us of think about us off and what they're trying to do uh yeah it's quite the the makeup you have there and i guess when we hear you know everybody everybody in the west in the media saying oh it's just russian propaganda just russian propaganda but over the years even before this new war obviously these groups didn't just emerge now they've existed from before and the us was arming we know that the u.s has been arming the ukrainians for years and in particular in congress there were even bills that were put forth to prevent uh weapons from getting into the hands of the azov battalion because we know that weapons were getting into the hands of the azov battalion so when we do hear oh the us is arming neo-nazis in ukraine is that true or is that just russian propaganda how would you how would you frame that accusation no let me say one thing which is not a direct answer to a question i'll get back to it but it's related to it so i mean the biggest propaganda lie on the russian side right is the idea that russia has to come into what they call the nazi fire ukraine right right and you know it's it's it's almost banal but let's make it explicit that's a big fat lie right in many ways in which this is a lie but we can go on about this but once you're beyond this if anyone in the west reacts by saying because that's a big fat lie therefore there is no issue no special and disturbing issue with the ukrainian far right they are dead wrong absolutely wrong so that's the complication here right the russians are abusing this phenomenon and they're distorting it and they're doing all the things that we do in propaganda but the phenomenon underneath this is real and it's a threat most of all by the way to ukraine and ukrainians right so you're not doing ukraine a favor as some people think by being silent about this right so here's the problem half has the u.s your specific question ended up arming the far-right in ukraine for instance as of as you mentioned i think it was 2018 right i might get the year wrong but there was something like that yeah there was there was an intervention by congress taking the shape of law i think it should have made that impossible right um i have to say i i think they did the right thing i i'm glad they tried but i don't think it kind of worked because the situation in ukraine simply has been far too fluid for that you know as of by that time had been integrated as part of the interior ministry right the interior ministry not the ministry of defense interior ministry runs something called the national guard azov became i think already in 2014 officially a unit of the national guard or i should be precise the military arm right the airsoft battalion became a unit of the national guard now some people have abused this fact to argue um for instance anton sherhoftsov who is a much quoted expert on the ukrainian far right which i consider highly unreliable i think yes i'm sorry you know it's good to know well you know um and what he's doing he's basically saying again and again uh among other things on the atlantic council banner that you know what once these guys became officially a unit under the control of the interior ministries that means he literally accepts they they were politicized nonsense it's complete nonsense it's also well it was picked up by the financial times recently this insane quote and claim it's it's complete nonsense and it's also not the consensus of experts if you read michael colbourn if you read perhaps the the single best ukrainian expert on this alexi kuzmenko who's far too little known in the west and has done excellent work on the far right in ukraine it is very very clear that azov has not be politicized and it's a classical break the dark situation you know azov actually has probably colonized a part of the state it's not the state who has made azov an azov that's what happened here so of course um american lawmakers can try and i'm glad they tried to keep for instance javelins out of the hands of azov but recently during the war as you would expect we've seen a lot of visual evidence of azov fighters with javelins i mean what would happen in a war right and i'm sure it also was going on before the war and while uh you had attempts not to train us off people for instance at that famous center in your votive in western ukraine that base that the russians a few weeks ago attacked with cruise missiles which was the the most important nato training hub in ukraine literally training battalions one after the other for the ukraine and army so um yeah you can say officially we don't want us off people in this program but first of all somebody who really wants to get in finds a way in and his ukrainian friends will help and secondly the people you train may also transfer to us off they may work with us off there is you cannot create this sort of need separation right once you arm yes it's very likely that your arms also will end up with these more radical very radical forces and the reason is that the ukrainian state has not drawn a line right if the ukrainian state had said we don't want these people we demobilize them it's over we don't want a unit like that then maybe you would have a chance of doing that but since they're part of the de facto existing ukrainian military forces and the quite important part for years now how do you how do you cut them off of course you can't cut them off that's not realistic it's not happening yeah it's uh definitely magic thing like it's it's kind of like syria when they would say yeah we're just going to arm the moderates and then somehow weapons would just end up in the hands of al qaeda because at the end of the day whoever's the strongest force on the ground is going to be the one those weapons go to and if azov is one of the strongest forces which they seem to be they are very strong force on the ground in various places so weapons of course are going to end up in their hands there is no way to prevent that or like you said to neatly you know segregate who gets weapons and who doesn't right um yeah go ahead sorry if we wanted to i mean it gets even more complex right recently this uh young young sort of ukrainian researcher i just mentioned kuzmenko was great and people should really read the stuff he has said something very important i think in a newsweek article he he pointed out that look there's years of battalion which is this more or less discrete military force right there's one box and it says azov battalion and those are the guys in there and their equipment but there are also people who identify as azov movement remember they're much bigger than just the battalion who now are actually inside the territorial defense units right and once that happens there's of course absolutely no way of controlling for that secondly something that needs to be mentioned here as well is that um azov has made proactive efforts to infiltrate other parts of the ukrainian military very proactive conspiratorial right and the the shape this has taken is to work through um one of the main military academies of ukraine perhaps the single most important one where you know a lot of officers are produced which is in libya and what they've done is they've basically set up a cell structure under the name of a different organization that organization calls itself centuria they're the ones who describe themselves as national traditionalists and what they do first they did it quite openly they've been around for a few years and then they became quieter because they realized that they were too open but what they do is they try to find kindred minds among officers and people on the way to becoming officers and build sort of a network inside the military and then when they place their people commanding specific units once they graduate they literally so telegram and other social media go online they don't do it that openly anymore but they did for two or three years at the beginning and they send out a message and say if you're ukrainian soldier and you share our values which are very far right try to get to that unit because that's commanded by one of our guys you see where this is going right so you're building basically you're building these cells within the military and it's very deliberate it's very clear what they're doing they know exactly what they're up to it's not mere propaganda that's actually infiltration literally and again if you want to read up on this because manko wrote a report about it and and it's excellent right it's it's really very very clear it was so clear that then the next thing this is why i mentioned this actually the next thing that happens you get these people who are linked to us off through this secondary structure centuria and who are these officer recruits and then you have a program they say literally the british the canadian the germans are training ukrainian officers sometimes a lot sometimes a little sometimes it's a two-week class with like the germans of whichever the series which is the thing sometimes it's nine months at sandhurst in britain right and you have cases literally cases i'm sure we don't know all of them of precisely these centuria guys going through these programs so there you have it you have future offices of the ukrainian army who may go very far literally being trained by the prime military training institutions of the west of certain countries in the west of nato if you want and they don't know who they are even dealing with and when they were contacted after this report came out and asked you know are you looking at who you're actually training the answer was no we don't because that's the ukrainians do that right so basically the ukrainians didn't have control and maybe didn't want control and those western partners the germans the british and the canadians in this case were all like no it's not our job so oh my god that's unbelievable wow specific thing this has all been very well illustrated you know we know this this is clear you know it's i i wanted to ask you about the whitewashing of everything that you're describing because and you you've been tweeting about this quite a bit you even you even tweeted that the media is teaching us to love the ukrainian far right um and let me see so i was having trouble with stream yard but it looks like it's like working a little bit now so let me try to share this because i actually want to share these headlines if possible um here we go these are some mainstream media headlines uh basically this is the times uh and i'll just for those who are just listening to this as a podcast i'll read out the headline it says azov battalion quote we are patriots we're fighting the real nazis of the 21st century and then it goes on to say catherine phillip finds an elite battalion challenging its far-right reputation uh and and then you have um the financial times the headline says don't confuse patriotism and nazism uh ukraine's azov forces face scrutiny and then it goes on to say nationalist regiment with neo-nazi roots has been instrumental in the resistance to the russian invasion to russia's invasion and we've seen a lot of articles like this that are essentially you know trying to downplay uh what you know is clearly this like far-right ideology that these people abide by and i i don't want to show it now just because like i said stream yards being a little glitchy but there is i wanted to show this clip but i'll just kind of describe it there was this this al jazeera international uh report that was aired about one neo-nazi militia having an image problem that was how it was azov but basically like azov has an image problem and you have this reporter who's like sitting down with an azov commander or leader and is asking him like what are you gonna do about your image problem yeah an image problem rather than like an ideology problem or perhaps a problem with its actions so i guess what's your response to these very blatant efforts i think to try to frame these far right extremist groups as not actually being scary but really just being like resistance that's maybe more moderate than we initially thought like what do you what's your response to that attempt by the media yeah look um extremely critical i think it's a phenomenon that we know from the history of the cold war and not only about the cold war comes to mind where in that confrontation um you make allies de facto allies helpers auxiliaries whatever you call it out of extremely unsafe resources and since you want that so very much essentially for geopolitical and military reasons you then rationalize it i i think this is what happened what's happening in the case of azov um and that's why i'm so angry with people who tout this line and to simply pretend that azov has changed in reality it's it's azov is changing over time but there at least as many reasons to assume that it's getting worse in terms of far-right ideology then it's getting better right the second um for instance corbon again the canadian journalist who's just brought out the book um that's his argument and i i trust him on that uh his argument is no actually what's happening inside the ass of battalion is that you have younger people who are actually not happy with the older people because the older people are too moderate in their view and those old people were not moderate those old people are people like andrey the original one of the original founders who is you know i mean as as far right as you can possibly imagine who believes in like a mission to save the white race uh to rebuild european civilization who was heavy on the anti-semitism in the beginning but he's torn that down a little bit recently so this this is a very very seriously far-right route already and this assumption that these guys have become milder is based on nothing it's based on one thing on our wishful thinking in the west because hey once we want these guys as allies how can they be so bad that's sort of uncomfortable nobody likes cognitive dissonance and the other apart from visual thinking is their strategies of printing themselves and this is a very important point and it's it's a bit of an obsession of mine or bug bear which is i see so much comment on the ukrainian far-right phenomenon which is incredibly naive i you know look i'm also historian i'm very much a historian of the soviet union and i know this this term the useful idiots of the communists of the bolsheviks right where people travel to stalin's soviet union in the early 1930s when things are really bad in many ways and come back and write these reports like i saw the country where everything works i saw a working tractor it's a nursery and so deservedly right now you know some people like arthur kessler who later became a huge western cold warrior of course was very seriously on that side back then so we call these people useful idiots right and we blame them for two things first of all being idiots and certainly probably wanting to idiots wanting to be a bit worse right and i see that now i see a useful idiotism of the ukrainian far-right youth naive articles where you interview these guys who are really not stupid who are quite savvy by now who look abroad who understand much more about western discourses than these guys who interview them understand about them right it's a very asymptotic situation and who basically bamboozle them and these reporters or journalists or whatever very often let themselves be bamboozled right wow yeah i'll give you an extreme case i'll give you an ex if you want an example right there is um a major spokesperson she's very young um of the azov movement not the battalion the movement her name is elena seminyaka um she's sort of the i don't know the iron lady she like she's like the gensaki of the ukrainians like that kind of spokesperson like the sort of like press secretary no i look i i i very it's very hard for me to say something positive about seminyaka but i think she's a little more um she has a little more of her personality wow okay all right so she's look own good at what she does she's good at what the question is what sort of personality is somebody who about a decade ago uh literally did a hitler hitler salute at a party holding a swastika flag right wow by now she's saying that was ironic this is very very fashionable on the ukrainian far right they do a lot of ironic stuff you know ironic ironic fascism ironic ruins it's very iconic they're very postmodern but anyhow so she does that and then which is perhaps even more important because it has much more effects she becomes over recent years the i would say the key figure for azov's international outreach that her office is called that she's either western outreach or international outreach and she's very influenced again by nouvelle drat in in france by this sort of french post-war attempt to invent sort of a nice fascism or something um she's into all of these super right-wing people like yura evola and so on and so on she she goes to these enormously right-wing congresses and meetings she meets rondo she meets what's his name greg johnson it's it's crystal clear what she is she is a far-right carter and everybody agrees on that it's out there right what happens in 1921 in 1921 the institute for division of information in vienna which is a very important and prestigious historical social science research institute and generically very liberal right sort of centrist liberal gives her a fellowship one of its most prestigious fellowships for half a year now this didn't go through it didn't go through because the research in canada saw it on social media and said are you completely nuts and the case was so extreme that in the end they had to give it up but we've never learned how this happened this has become a black box and it's absolutely scandalous right we never heard who was on the committee who thought that was a good idea but even without actually knowing what happened there in detail we know one thing there were people who were so blind and so ill-informed at this institute where by the way tim snyder is a major fellow who is an expert on ukraine somehow that she ended up almost being given the scholarship wow that makes you wonder how many people in the west who talk about ukraine do not understand who they're dealing with although it's very very very clear you find it in you know you can find it from the sufan center you have reports from propublica you have people like kuzmenko you have corbon it's not that nobody writes about this right the information is out there even in english some people don't seem to care because they don't why yeah well it's like there's bigger geopolitical ambitions here that are more are seen as like more important right than any of these small details so and you know it's either like just it's intentional blindness like i think there's a there's something else i think which is more psychological i mean i'm speculating right but what i sometimes suspect is actually a very patronizing attitude to ukraine very patronizing and very unfair in a way which is look i've lived in ukraine all together for for five years and and i learned to speak ukrainian fluently at one point my life my ukrainian was better than my russian and they're both pretty loud so it you know to the extent that my ukrainian was crowding out my russian i went to moscow i started talking ukrainian to people and they laughed at me whatever so i was sort of as embedded in ukraine as you could be as somebody not from ukraine clearly right i don't want to overstate the case um i also lived all this time in the center of national identity in ukraine which is live right um and i so i got a big a sense of this and i i often had arguments even at that time sometimes in ukrainian i was publishing texts that some ukrainians didn't like at all but what i never did and what i think some of these people are doing is i didn't look down on ukrainians and basically pat them on the head and say oh you don't really understand this sort of stuff yet so your right-wing nationalism is excusable you'll get there right you just need to develop a little more and i do think that this is happening with some liberals and centrists who think they're cutting ukraine slack by giving a very conscious very savvy very internationally savvy far right cover like for instance seminyaka the fellowship it has nothing to do with helping ukraine it has something to do with helping the far right to do damage to ukraine right so i wanted to ask you to elaborate a bit on 2014 in terms of like how did the 2014 coup in uk ukraine contribute to this rise of this sort of right-wing nationalist sentiment and revision revisionist history where we see the glorification of these past nationalist figures you mentioned the early 2000s but it does seem like 2014 was a really essential year uh in terms of understanding the right wing turn uh and especially especially when we think about like the azov battalion gaining more prominence and then being folded into state and state institution yes so look 2014 right the the fall of of the yanukovych government uh and then its replacement by by you know revolutionaries whatever you call them by new people right yeah um i i still don't know what to call it um i think it's a lot of things at the same time i should say that you know um janukovich really did run a horrible type of thing he was he was legitimately elected in 2010 in that sense getting rid of him in this manner was a coup okay on the other hand uh since 2010 and this was very expectable if you knew where he was coming from he had abused his power terribly right um and so there was also there were real revolutionary impulses there right they were unevenly spread they weren't the same in all parts of ukraine some of it was then instrumentalized and so on and so on the geopolitics came in say victorian england and similar um unhelpful forces but my my concern is to not reduce it to coup right i think this is very complicated event where we will struggle with giving it a good name for a long time but okay you have this you have this event right and you're absolutely right that um it promotes the ukrainian far right to a new level right i think that's one of these leaps they take and i think it does so in two ways two main ways of course it's all very complicated but there are two big things here one is they play um an important role during the standoff with the yanukovych regime right [Music] it has often been pointed out that they do not either constitute the majority of protesters that's probably true absolutely or simply dominate the process that's also true but i would argue and and in fact i've come to be more adamant about this that they play a very important role in the sense that they've radicalized the protests on the protesters side the regime goes violent that's absolutely true with its special police forces and so on and with sort of militia types called the titushki but the protesters go violent as well right and that in a way that didn't happen in 2004-2005 which is a direct comparison and this turned to a much more violent approach to attacking the regime that has a lot to do with the far right pushing its line during the protests and becoming very important precisely it's a feedback the more violent the process gets the more it the the far right becomes important to the revolutionary or you know resisting or protesting side right right and they're not innocent in this they also want this right it's not a simple story of oh yanukovych sent in the special police forces they beat everybody up and therefore the others had to strike back yes that also happens but there also is a very conscious policy on the far right of using this right to get to a darker place and i say dark deliberately because at the time there is a very naive piece by an apple bomb published in newsweek or whatever i can't remember where she literally says that this is the orange revolution the color revolutions are going dark or black now and she's happy she's happy she doesn't understand that this is a very bad thing with a lot of terrible consequences and this is what happens and the far right promotes it and it profits from it i wouldn't say the far-right is alone in doing this yanukovych is the other pole right they sort of do this with each other but in the end the far-right plays an important role and it wants to do this now when there is second stage when there is an agreement the last exit ramp right before things get even worse happened i think 21st of february which is when several european politicians come in and negotiate a deal it's already very late in the day a lot of people have died it's all very tragic but they negotiate a deal with yanukovych and yanukovych basically says well it will still take half a year or something but you know i leave and we have a transition process and so on at that point the far right is instrumental in scuppering the deal on the side of the protesters which is horrible now again janukovich as well um essentially just absconds right and there have been endless discussions of who's more to blame it's jeremy fleeing because he feels so threatened by the far right or blah blah blah not the most important question the key point is at least two forces don't really want to go through with the deal and one of them is the far right part of the protesters and that is a great responsibility because it was the last offering now then you get to another situation where now you have this new regime whatever you call it yanukovych is on the run goes to russia and russia begins to act very aggressively so it takes crimea and then begins to sort of help its separatists proxies whatever you call them in regions in donbass in the very east of ukraine and that in turn is an enormous boost for the far right and what happens here is very well known at that point the ukrainian military is very different from now it's extremely weak it's disorganized it's been weakened by years of corruption it's demoralized and it can't really fight back and so what the new regime does fatally i think is they rely on these volunteer units now not all volunteer units are necessarily far right but some very important ones are very far right right and azov is precisely one of those it's not the only ones one of those but it that's where as often gets its second big kick and since then you know azov has profited from this long conflict enormously and that is true for the far right in general in one sense because they got access to resources because they got to colonize as part of the state because the other thing is that they got to actually shape discourses in ukraine and this might be the most important one um that's something where i want to get back to elena seminyaka who thankfully has been extremely clear in an interview where she actually she was asked you know by journalists but what what is your strategy here and this was 20 21 it's quite recent that our strategy is a struggle for cultural hegemony we are trying basically i'm now i'm rephrasing but these were her terms we are trying to shift the frame we are trying to make people we are trying to we would say normalize and legitimize far-right politics in ukraine and this is something that the far-right in ukraine has again done extremely deliberately and self-aware right they're absolutely not naive about this and i think that that's probably maybe what makes them a more dangerous far right than maybe other european far rights where they do have this kind of cultural hegemony um over society and i think you you know a lot of their investment in like you having youth wings or being in charge of culture in various ways is a part of that and it it it is really disturbing and i wanted to ask you you know another one of the things that russia will say is that um or not maybe not i don't know if i've heard the russians say it they probably have but like some of their defenders will say is that this is a coup government they'll call the ukrainian government a coup government which i think is absolutely it's just not right to say you could have said that maybe it would have worked you know the previous administration but zielinski was elected um and interestingly enough as you know he was elected on this very pro-peace platform you know he was speaking russian uh openly which was seen as like a gesture of peace uh and and uh and so i guess with that said now you see a very different zielinski a one that is on the international stage you know dismissing the role of the far right i'm curious though how much pressure was zielinski under from nationalists which isn't talked about very much because we've seen like quotations from these right-wingers in the past years about zielinski threatening literally making threats to his life like we're going to lynch you if you make peace with russia so you know in that case like is this why he didn't abide by minsk i know there's also international factors here perhaps the role of the us and encouraging him to go one way or another with peace with russia but how much of a factor has the far right been in pushing zielinski to have more of an aggressive anti-peace stance you know obviously i i'm not privy to you know i'm i don't know the landscape person yeah how he works with his advisors i think he has very important influential advisors who also are very interesting to look at but you know if you think about it right what could it have been uh it's it's absolutely true as you point out that when he comes in and and he really scores this fantastic elective victory what is it 78 71 or something he also evenly spread which is very impor mostly evenly spread like he succeeds everywhere in ukraine center east west whatever you know i think there are two regions in the far right that don't like him right so the landscape has an unbelievable mandate when he comes in i think in 2019 right or 2020 i can't and then and he talks he's remember when he when he runs his election campaign one thing he's criticized very often for is that he isn't very specific about what he wants to do and that's absolutely true it's a very smart move i think he makes right he runs an election on vague promises and his enemies of course don't like this but hey it works one thing and this is even more interesting one thing the one thing actually the one thing he's specific about is the thing you said where he says i would literally at one point he says i would go on my knees imagine i would go on my knees in front of putin just so that we get to talk about peace and a compromise right this is how far he goes this is how he wins moreover so there is a majority that goes with that right at least is ready to accept that and then we come to this point that it's very clear that zelinski does not implement this policy that's absolutely clear we could talk about the details but we don't need to i mean there's consensus that's not what the landscape does once he's in power right and now the question why i think the far right does play a role and i think that um the sense of being threatened politically right you could be challenged in all sorts of ways um but also actually being threatened personally because it's far right this is something very important precisely in this period is also developing a very aggressive brand of street politics right and it's very it's very brutal it's violent the victims people die right roma are killed in these street politics in 2018 for instance so this is serious stuff right you attack lgbtq demonstrations or parades you attack lectures about the holocaust this is all stuff that actually happened you attack media you don't like you you storm government buildings when there's something that happening that you don't like locally and sometimes even in kiev the far right demonstrates we are ready to grab a baseball bat and more and more also knives and even firearms and deal with problems that way and they do this very deliberately and in their terms unfortunately with some success so the way in which they begin to threaten everybody around them is very real now of course you can ask well zelansky is the president obviously he has security right i mean there's a whole state operators there to among other things protect the president true enough two enough but could you have first fell personally threatened as well now here's a twist to that story if you look at the way zilensky behaves i know there's a lot of showmanship and i don't hold that against him why not everybody uses their own resources showmanship is part of politics in many countries but my sense is that he's not a personally cowardly person i think he's personally actually courageous right so that makes me think how far could they have impressed him by this by this remote possibility that we might actually come and assassinate you i'm not sure that actually worked with him but the political the political pressure you have to consider that it's not simply the far right it is also mainstream parties such as his old opponent petro poroshenko who was by no means gone from politics who have shifted very clearly to the right right this is what happens in the struggle for hegemony if the far right pushes everybody more to the right mainstream police mainstream parties will also adopt far-right positions right to compete electorally and in general for its population and its allegiances so the landscape may very well have been afraid of what happens if i really make a deal if i go through with minsk too and donetsk or these parts not bonex these parts of donbass get a certain type of autonomy and special rights and the russian language and all of this and it gives my opponents this enormously efficient cudgel to go after me as the man who sold out who sold out through ukrainian interest to the russians and what is interesting here my last point is that when you look at what happens in the media around zelinsky before this war in late 2021 he's under fire all the time and he isn't just under fire from extremists he's under fire from the major talk show hosts in ukraine everybody is against him and everybody is lining up schuster gordon all these people are lining up and putting pressure on him as you know we don't trust you we don't know maybe you're gonna sell out that's basically what's happening to him at this time so even electoral calculus alone may have been enough to make to have made him shy away from actually pursuing minsk two the other thing about mints too of course is we should add this it's not an easy way to go because when minsk 2 was agreed on in february 2015 it basically had western support right it had the ukrainian government in kiev it had the separatists on board and in a way it had russia on board although russia always played a very weird game about it but essentially they were there nobody nobody i've really looked into this very carefully nobody treated minsk too well nobody now if somebody pushed me against the wall and said who is most to blame for not making rules two coming true i would still say kiev in the end kiev but nobody treated it in good faith nobody unfortunately so if you're in zelinski's position and you want to make it come true against your own critics and potential opposition and real opposition you also look at your potential partners and they're sort of very difficult to work with right yeah i do actually want to get to the russians but first i wanted to ask you to comment on this um i'm just going to quote this from a washington post article uh it's about the kind of uh threat this is presenting globally as people on the far right around the world are attracted to this conflict and the washington post writes for neo-nazis and white supremacists ukraine could become their version of what afghanistan was for the jihadi movement in the 1980s and i raised that because i wanted to ask you is the invasion is the russian invasion of ukraine a boon to the far right in europe the far right globally do you see this considering that weapons have flooded the country and also foreign fighters do you see this as potentially uh creating a situation where it strengthens the far right well into the future not just in ukraine but beyond well the short answer my short answer would be yes yes now you know the unexpected can always happen you never know but as far as one can you know sort of predict things so try to predict yes i think the russian invasion um i would i have to say it it's it's a war of aggression in my book as much as what tony blair and george w bush did to iraq in 2003 i think in that respect those two are very comparable we are dealing with wars of aggression right but so this war of aggression on the russian side has created a situation which the far right internationally can profit from definitely now the thing is um that one should add right the argument that ukraine was acquiring a special position in sort of the international networks of the far right it's older than the war it's been made before it was made in a long report again by the sufan center right um and even if there are difficulties with the details and people always make mistakes and then others prey on that but i think they were right i think they were right ukraine because of the efforts the very deliberate efforts of the ukrainian far right and because of in interest coming in from north america from the usa from canada from britain from france from italy um you named germany definitely ukraine even before the war this happened before this war okay there was another war but before the large-scale invasion of february right this happened before ukraine was already turning very clearly into a special place in the international far right right and again i'm quoting colburn's interview here which he gave somewhere i think he's absolutely right saying that there is something like a global far-right revival that we are living through unfortunately and what has happened in ukraine and is happening in ukraine is part of that i would add and i think he would say that too but i don't want to sort of summarize for him but also ukraine has played a special role in that now i want to be clear about one thing this is not an argument about somehow ukrainians being worse than other people of course it's sometimes misrepresented as that and then people feel offended and all that stuff no it simply is that certain political geopolitical circumstances in ukraine in this period have worked out in such a way that this niche opened up for its national far right and then the second factor was that its national far right has an elite in quotation marks that very much understands the value of connecting internationally absolutely loves international networking that's why you see for instance the opening of a special club in one of the best locations in kiev right on maidan is a legend still right in the center of town where you then have like this mixed martial arts event with international guests and these lectures with international mixed martial arts a huge part of this story the far right exploits them not only in ukraine but also in ukraine very very much as as as something to to actually convey the program and the ideology with right um you have uh music festivals uh asgard rai or asgard sorry which has by now i see take place six or five times in ukraine international really literally neo-nazi music festivals right where you get a certain it's a particular type of black metal that is associated with the neo-nazi scene right um you have outreach by traveling to these people to making links with um french groups in paris or with casa pound which has i think by now been forbidden in italy you can trace this massively the promises once the promises were made in 1990 during the negotiations over the reunification unification whatever of east and west germany right and there is this insane line among some western scholars even which i really can't understand how they do that where they basically say well well but it was a sort of oral promises but they were noted down we didn't do formal agreement and so that's not really counting and also at the time that's what they argue the warsaw pact was still there so how could we possibly have guaranteed anything apart from east germany now this is a completely insane logic right so gorbachev the soviet leadership looks at the west saying we will not go one inch to the east those were the terms by baker then american foreign secretary of secretary of state and of course the russians think oh that means i'm not going to go into east germany but maybe they go to poland and be okay with it no it means the opposite pact was still there the soviets of course weren't even thinking about nato ever going to poland or the baltics which by that time were still even if shakily parts of the soviet union so that's one the promise of 1990 was real and didn't matter and it implied that nato would not go east at period you know then there was a second promise in 1993 and almost nobody ever talks about this which is warren christopher going to yeltsin at this time and saying look we have this partnership for peace program is sort of nato light for people in the east of europe who used to be in your sphere of influence are you okay with that and yes in basically says if i must and i must i'm okay but you need to promise me that this is it no full membership only partnership for priests and within a few years and they promise christopher promises and within a few years the clinton administration goes decides to go back on that deal which is very very clear now you get people so i have to say this as well who have this other really brilliant argument which is nato never promised oh yeah it's the russians problem that two were you as secretaries of state went to the russians and presumed to talk for nato i mean imagine you are the russian leadership and the americans come to you the secretary of state and says i can tell you what nato will and will not do your response is because you're realist and you understand how nato works yeah well that's true you can because you lead nato right right so now you get brilliant brains like secretary schultenberg going nato never promised yeah well you know what the americans promised and that was bad enough and that is your problem that is the best problem not the reasons problem so we are getting to to logic here when these promises are denied that i would call it's a logic of an ambulance chasing lawyer little formalistic oh we didn't really sign it we just promised it's ridiculous and that the russians find that ridiculous i've always understood these promises were made and they were broken now that doesn't justify the war absolutely right but it's a different issue now do the versions have your second question is nato potentially aggressive well nato of course says about itself we are not aggressive defensive alliance right yeah we are defensive alliance and we only ever defend now well ask the libyans about this ask the afghans about this we have now a record i mean you can look it up on the nato website i've done it of nato supported operations out of area that were clearly aggressive by any standards that had nothing to do with defending anybody who had been attacked within the north atlantic area nothing at all so that's point one the second point of course is that it's a fundamental tenet and it makes sense of thinking about security that the other side won't simply believe you and that makes sense you know i mean the soviets during the cold war said we are peace loving power right did we still did the best arm itself against the soviets oh yes a lot and nobody said in the west yeah but the soviets say they are peace loving so we can't upon potentially not believe them of course moscow doesn't believe nato when nato says we would never do anything aggressive because that's not what governments do and to ask moscow to just believe nato if you do that you betray that you're complete fool in my view or that you're deeply dishonest this is not how due diligence in security works and that due diligence we have to also give the russians they have a right to practice that independent of what sort of political system they have independent of whether we like them or not that's a different issue none of this again coming back to my initial point putin should never have launched this horrible aggression and by the way it will be terribly self-defeating for russia at least that's very likely but again it's simply true that the west also messed up horribly not to speak of course last point the famous open door what did we do with the famous open door right basically in 2008 in bucharest the leaders of nato came together and the americans and i think the british but the americans of course were the ones who counted said we want to offer membership meaning a membership action plan to georgia and ukraine the french and the germans is always a little more sort of you know cheerful and rightly so we're like we don't like the idea but also as always the europeans did the usual opportunism right nato isn't a place where the europeans just say no nato is a place where you at most say look could we do this a little differently so what happens is they come out with this idiotic compromise and they promise georgia and ukraine membership but sometime in the future yeah which means you expose them to russian retaliatory action this is what this means it's completely irresponsible first result sarcasm of georgia then misunderstands the situation completely and actually initiates a war with russia which he loses and the russians of course takes opportunity for which they have waited most likely and settle accounts with him and make it clear to nato that's what we do if you promise membership and who is but the second country that has now been trapped by this horrible open door policy is ukraine and what do we see now now we see the ukrainian leadership after all of this horrible slaughter is happening saying oh yeah maybe we don't need nato yeah well listen this could have been said in december and even better we get people in the western media say frankfurter mine and zeitung which is sort of the conservative centrist paper of record in germany and that's why i have to read it even if it hurts you get these security experts who were always like tornado nato and suddenly they also say well yeah maybe that nato thing maybe we could let go of that for you actually yeah already really you've noticed it's unbelievable we had one thing you can't say about the russians one thing you really can't say and again it's not an excuse for what putin has done but they did warn us they did warn us this discourse of of putin is so inscrutable you never know what he's gonna do he told you can i say that but it's total nonsense it's total nonsense because since december the russians have really come out i've read all of these documents and said very clearly this is what we want this is what we need and if this doesn't happen they threatened very clearly military action now you might say they shouldn't have done that maybe but the point is we knew and we made a decision in the west and this mainly came i think out of the united states again because it does cause the shots to say we run that risk we run that risk right and and ukraine is the country that is now suffering for all of these blades yeah at the end of the day they're like sacrifice it's not the u.s that's hurting necessarily it's the ukrainians that i mean their country is being destroyed uh they're they're being they're like a sacrificial lamb for this insane policy but given everything you did say and i do agree with you about this war not being the answer what alternatives did putin have to invading ukraine if he was right about these broken promises and the reason i ask you that is because i've been asked that and i don't know how to answer the question so what alternatives were there besides war for russia you know one is concrete one is concrete um which is right on the eve of the war and i was i was following this very very much in detail at that time because i was very interested in it also but but i hoped for it you know i was emotionally invested if you want right on the eve of the war the president of france macron was repeatedly putting himself actually a little bit on the line in the west and got getting some serious flag for trying to open the door to negotiations and and this was really going on until the very last minute until putin suddenly came out and said first of all i'm gonna take these two um we're not gonna take but we're gonna recognize officially these two separatist republics and then very quickly within one or two days uh also said okay and by the way we also start this this invasion which they call uh what do they call it the political special special military operation exactly so there was the macro initiative it was very real i don't know if it could have worked but it might not have worked it might not have worked because maybe the russians wouldn't have been um cooperative enough maybe the ukrainians wouldn't have been cooperative enough maybe do you the americans would have succeeded successfully torpedoed it but from outside at least it does look as if that hadn't been exhausted right that would be my most concrete point that should have been continued even with bad chances the second point i would make is much less concrete right this comes much more from my general thinking as a historian i you know i do think that sometimes as state leadership political leadership has to has to understand that you you you need to you need to take a loss right before you before you resort to something that is a incredibly brutal and it is incredibly important and and b also unbelievably risky right i mean this is why so many people didn't believe they would do it because not because they were on naive thinking all the versions are too nice but because why would they commit suicide right why would they run this risk before you do something like that maybe sometimes you just have to climb down right and it might cost you something it might be hard but what this means in concrete terms it's not just a moral term it also means you make time work for yourself again you know if you if you end a problem by smashing everything then you also obliterate the possibility that maybe in half a year this is gonna look different maybe in one year this is gonna look different again maybe the better tactic is to wait and be patient so you know what what i really miss a lot and and in in russian behavior very much like now but also in the west is you know i grew up in the at the end of the cold war i i still have very vivid memory of the 80s and what i think was different was that there was some sense of patience and um as it were a healthy sort of restraint you you didn't want to do two radical things right you didn't want to do things that would frighten you yourself and what what putin has done is to me among other things for many reasons it's of course there's a terrible human aspect here but also in political terms it's so shocking because honestly it was predictable that this could from the russian perspectives by their terms go horribly horribly right now we don't know yet what will happen in the end but i'm pretty sure that a lot of things have already gone very wrong for russia right yeah and i people actually get really depending on like where they stand on this issue people have really bought into their own propaganda bubble um if they want the russians to win they're only consuming people who are saying the russians are winning there anybody who suggests otherwise is crazy the russians are smart they know what they're doing and of course the other side of that is you know you're in your pro-ukraine propaganda bubble the ukrainians are winning they're pushing the russian invaders out they're going to succeed you know wear your blue and yellow and support ukraine and they're going to win and at the end of the day you know i don't i don't think anyone wins in this situation no yeah i mean even if no matter who wins militarily which i mean still does seem like it just based on who has more power would be the russians um you know russia is going to be under i mean these sanctions aren't going to go away uh russia's economy is just going to be put through the meat grinder it kind of already is i and it's just really sad to watch and also of course the ripple effects on the rest of the world you know i'm speaking to you from lebanon and you know it's one of many countries in the global south that is already dealing with the negative consequences of this war because of fuel and fertilizer needs that aren't going to be yeah it's going to lead to food shortages i mean weed shortages it's it's devastating um the results of this war but that said it you know i do appreciate your expertise here too because it is important that to also say like when we're not on the ground to see so we don't know how things are going um but it can't be going well for anyone that said you know i do i do appreciate your time and i just have a couple more questions for you actually related to germany just because you are from germany so it would be a shame not to get your your perspective on this but you know how do you explain the german about face on policy and the sort of german embrace of an increased militaristic rhetoric as well as this increased military budget um you know before the invasion germany was very much being tarnished in the western press particularly the u.s press because they were fusing they were refusing to uh to cancel nordstrom 2 and they were taking a more maybe neutral is not the right word but a more more middle of the ground line so how do you explain that about face yeah more moderate line so how do you explain that very dramatic change yeah you know i think it was i'm not sure it's really the right term i'm using here but but i'm trying i think it was sort of a tipping point uh straw that broke the camel's back situation in in in the german public and in german politics um [Music] germany has um very ambivalent to generalize relationship towards russia and there is some naive admiration there is the prejudices of the nastiest kind as well um but the relationship is important right russia matters in german minds as you would expect and um for a long time the the the way that this would shape politics was was sort of suspended uh between people who on the whole look to a cooperative relationship not necessarily naive not necessarily even very friendly but cooperative and people who wanted to strike a much more sort of neo-cold war tone again right and this began to shift seriously in 2014 when russia took crimea that was again one moment in which this this the party of those who like the corporation really lost ground in german politics and especially in the german public sphere right but you had merkel you had as you pointed out nordstrom 2 was was like a litmus test issue and they stuck to it right so in the end in terms of politics germany went along with sanctions went along opposing russia on ukraine but as you as you rightly put it there was a moderate element and even a moderating element which i think was extremely valuable right the germans have gotten a lot of nastiness for this but i really don't think they deserve that i think that was something very productive and although i'm not a fan of michael in general i'm not a fan of conservatives in general i miss this about him but but then you got this new coalition coming in which is an unrelated event right but it happened and you have to understand that the green party which plays a large role in this coalition which has the ministry of economics which is very important now and which has the foreign ministry is more nato than than almost anything else in germany this is strange because the green party in germany came out of pacifism in part right they came out of cold war pacifism but that has totally changed right the green party in germany is now nato green olive green camouflage green sorry but that's what it is and why that happened is another very complicated story and i think there's very many political no not generational and psychological um uh components but we can't go into that and then you had the social democrats and the social democrats schultz at the chancellor keep kept sitting on the fence and this is why germany got all this recent trash talk again right and what broke this stalemate right this uh this constant sort of wrestling of these two positions what broke the stalemate was was the russian attack and once again you really can't see how anybody in moscow can think this is a good idea you know yeah yeah no it is actually incredible because before the invasion the americans look so stupid because they kept they kept remember they were predicting oh the russians are going to invade at 2 a.m on this day and then it wouldn't happen the germans were like rolling their eyes at the americans the french were uh and then the invasion just undid sort of all of that i wouldn't say support but maybe all of that space to maybe have a little uh of a moderate tone with the russians like that's all just vanished overnight and now nato yeah without the death blow to any attempt to be differentiated moderate now i mean i'm still trying but to be realistic the public sphere in the west now uh has gone completely gung-ho and will remain so for a while and and really it it happened because the russians attacked and and i agree with you if they hadn't attacked it would have been very different look the thing about putin is he's sometimes seen or presented as his master strategist putin has made terrible mistakes in his career this is not the first one right and why shouldn't he he's a human being but what i think is is special about this one and this is again i'm speculating i don't know this but i have a suspicion that the putin that is that we have now is not the same putin as say 2004 2008 even 2010 that what we are seeing now is a man who has had far too much power for far too long and who may very well be um surrounded by opportunists and people who strive to tell him what he wants to hear most of the time i know that this is also something that american intelligence has now discovered so i i don't like saying more or less the same thing as the cia well no but there there is a truth this is what what can very easily happen with people like putin and my my sense is that he made this terrible mistake and there are signs and how he behaved in the first days he made this terrible mistake because he completely underestimated the ukrainian resistance and he thought he could finish this in like two or three days and have this striking success um on his terms and none of this has worked right i think the only thing that you could i know i agree with what you're saying and i think that that that is absolutely true i mean when you have a situation or when you have like a governing apparatus that kind of you know i again i hate to use these terms because it does sound very like this is what america says but when you have a governing apparatus that becomes you know a court sort of strong man figure who gains more and more power that sort of inner circle becomes smaller and smaller and you do you end up surrounded by people who just say yes to you rather than challenge what you might want to do or what you're saying and if people are telling you yes when it's a terrible idea something like this could happen and the other you know the one thing i will say that the russians uh or whoever made this decision uh specifically may have done something good for themselves is that they used very vague terms for why they were going in ukraine so that they can shift the goal posts you know so that if they didn't succeed in five days or two weeks or now it's dragged on for a month they can kind of like use terms like demilitarization and denotification in whatever the way they want that could mean anything you know what i mean that's like maybe the only way to save to save their you know to save themselves in front of their population at the end of the day if this drags on is whenever they decide to say okay enough is enough we achieved our goals the goals are just so vague that you can say that any time you get very contradictory signals but but there is shifting of goalposts definitely yeah absolutely yeah that will be enough to now find a way out that's a different right right that's right yeah um i one more question just very briefly about germany i'm curious do you worry about a more militarized germany because you know i mean historically speaking having a militarized germany has been negative uh for europe and of course we're not in the same time period as like the 1930s or 1940s uh but it is a question is a more militarized germany something to be concerned about yeah you know look large-scale shifts like this work themselves out over sometimes several generations easily so i think people who look at germany now and say oh this is sort of a liberal democratic with all its flaws place so what if they have a bigger army it's fine i think that's very naive because you might look at the germany in 50 years that is very different and still has a very big army right and you could argue that when 1871 rolled around and germany got together for the first time as a german empire it was also not immediately obvious that this could lead to 1914 right you would have had to get incredibly good intuition right so um i think this is an open-minded question i think it's naive to assume that a shift like this is necessarily harmless that would be very naive um my my other my other idea about this you know that that comes to mind to me is that look it may be a healthier thing and again i'm very much guessing here and i might be absolutely wrong and not understand the unintended consequences of what i'm suggesting but it may be a healthier thing if europe finally learned to stand on its own feet in terms of defense not germany europe and germany as part of that but that would take a big revision of the relationship with the united states personally you know call me goal is but i would like to see europe that can cooperate with the united states but is not dependent on them anymore i think it's an anomaly that europe stays defense dependent on the united states now the flip side of that is of course what happens if europe actually becomes another major military power right if it uses its demographic technological economic potential and harms itself in accordance to what it could do which is much more than now and then europe becomes a dangerous place that could also occur right so this this is a very difficult thing to say but what i'm now seeing is a world in which this really quite perverse and dated dependence of something as rich and big as europe on the united states is producing a lot of damage concrete example imagine doing the run-up to this crisis we wouldn't have had a nato just dominated by the states but we would have had a european and the u.s poll of response to the russians and imagine that would have been a european answer that would have been more reasonable and they would have said you know what let's talk about neutrality that could have made a difference so in an ideal scenario a much more independent europe defense independent europe could be a force for good so in that sense if european countries be start paying more for the defenses i'm not necessarily against it but of course they're risk attached the other thing and this is a bit of a class issue but i have to say look um i actually served in the west german army when i was here it's simply as a you know not because i'm a particularly gifted soldier i think i'm anything but but um but it was obligatory and you could replace it with some sort of of replacement service which i didn't want to do because i was not a pacifist i'm not a pacifist even now so um what i'm a little bit concerned with is in a case like germany that you get like the middle classes very much like the greens and the waters going let's build an army let's build an army let's let's see military power again and nobody talks about actually reintroducing obligatory military service which frankly you know people if you want to have a bigger army i don't think it should be just the working-class grants doing the stuff for you frankly then let's talk about military service for everyone which under ideal circumstances this doesn't always work right but under ideal circumstances can also be a restraining element right i'm afraid of a situation where countries have very powerful armies like the u.s it's a classical example and the elites don't carry any of the risk right right yeah it's just something that a bunch of well especially with the us which has almost no social safety net it becomes something that a bunch of poor and working class kids use so they can go to college or get like free health care because the military is the only socialized aspect of american society but there's also of course you know the issue of when it comes to the us taking on the role of defense of europe like it's amazing because what can you even say the u.s has defended everything the u.s has done for the last 30 years has made europe more unstable particularly the last 20 years when you look at all of these military interventions in the middle east the u.s doesn't bear the brunt of refugee crises it's europe actually and it ended up you know what what the u.s did in iraq what the us did in syria what the u.s did in libya ended up creating this refugee wave that actually changed the politics of europe uh quite dramatically so it's like when we even talk about the us taking on the role of defending europe it's like what is it what does that even mean it's is it really defending europe because what the us did in syria caused the you know and iraq caused the rise of isis and it was european cities that were getting attacked by isis ideologues not i mean it happened in the u.s a couple times but nothing compared to the many attacks that europeans face i'm always curious you know when i hear european officials talk about that like how is the u.s defending you u.s actions are actually like hurting you especially with regard to what's happening in ukraine right now but of course you know that's a conversation for another day tariq i i want to leave you with any last words can you tell people where they can follow your work you're quite prolific on twitter uh but if you want to you know give anything else a shout out while you're on please feel free to well um i sometimes write for different outlets sometimes in german often in english [Music] there's a german site called microscope published one text i might publish in the future i used to write a lot for rt right red rt how could you i i could very well because i was very clear with them and a very good editor and i said look i write what i want um and if that's okay for you publish it and if not you don't publish it and on that basis we've worked until the day of the invasion on the day of the invasion i of course did say okay listen i mean sorry you know also because for two reasons first of all because the invasion made a difference but also because it was very clear that this this posture of mine of saying i really say what i want to say and and you're not censoring me and you're not telling me what to write which did not happen wouldn't work anymore right russia as well is now militarizing much much more than before its public space and there is no room for this anymore on rt so apart from that it's twitter and occasionally other things but mostly mostly right now it's really twitter yeah this sensorial environment is incredible um i guess everything you ever i mean it's like there's things there's all this work that people have done whether for rt or other outlets that that are related to rt that's just been wiped away from various social media it's just it's horrible i've had these discussions with people sometimes in a civilized manner and sometimes people have been very unsurprised about this where you know the the basic idea is you cannot possibly write for rt at the time right and my response has always been and i'm still very serious about this if you can't write 40 you can't write for the bbc i'm sorry and you can't write for cnn um if you look back on the record of these pillars of western um media in say the middle east i mean how could you frank yeah right i think the world in which we really live is where you can say what you want in specific places when they let you and when they don't let you then you can't and that's it exactly so this whole idea of of not actually interacting with what some what a person actually says and instead of interacting with the label has always struck me as completely idiotic and also very malevolent i mean i'll give you one example um when putin came out before the war already and said you know what's happening in donbass's genocide artie asked me do you want to write about this and my response was i can write about this but i would say it's not and that's what i wrote and it's still online i clearly explained it's not genocide that's wrong yeah on rt and they let me do it and they published it at that time i don't think they would do it anymore and i don't think the editor who let me do this then would be able to let me do this now right i do think these things must have shifted but at the time that was perfectly possible uh on another occasion they asked me do you want this was in january do you want to talk about what could happen in a potential war between russia and ukraine so i wrote about this and my prediction was it could be pyrrhic victory for russia and this is all the damage it could do to russia and you shouldn't underestimate the ukrainian resistance you would encounter they published it right at the time this was perfectly possible now probably not but who knows right i mean that's i i will say i've written for rt before and i have also written for like a couple times when i was allowed to somehow be in an american mainstream outlet and it was quite a different experience um i don't think that at least i'm not familiar with european outlets so much but in american outlets there's a real lack of understanding of how much isn't allowed in in terms of viewpoints um anyways yeah anyways all that said all that said i want to thank you so much for joining me for uh for such a lengthy time to really break down uh all of these very complex topics and i appreciate your nuance as well something that i think is lacking in many spaces these days uh so thank you so much derek really appreciate it

Channel: BreakThrough News

Views: 365,830

Keywords: ukraine, russia, documentary, vladimir putin, putin, news, history, war, politics, ukraine war, documentaries, nazi, nato, military, al jazeera english, al jazeera, aljazeera news, world news, europe, ukraine russia, aljazeera english, aljazeera live, kyiv, neo-nazis, fascism, world, ukraine news, culture, holocaust, russia ukraine war, neo nazi, neo-fascism, neo-fascist, fascist, far-right, ukraine far right, ukraines far right, azov batallion, ukrainian fascism, breakthrough news, rania khalek

Id: 5C7DE2KFJHs

Length: 104min 1sec (6241 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 05 2022