A bitter row has erupted between Kiev and Warsaw, after Volodymyr Zelensky renamed a Ukrainian military unit the “Heroes of the UPA”. The UPA - Ukrainian Insurgent Army - was an ultranationalist faction heavily implicated in the Holocaust, which slaughtered up to 100,000 Polish civilians during World War II. In addition to commemorating the mass-murdering militant group, the corpse of Andriy Melnyk, leader of UPA parent the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), was reburied in Kiev. At a grand accompanying ceremony, Zelensky declared:

“Today we all see that the Ukrainian idea can overcome what once seemed absolutely insurmountable. Now, when we are on Ukrainian soil, under our Ukrainian flag, to the sound of the Ukrainian national anthem, paying due tribute to our Ukrainian heroes, we feel in our hearts everything Ukrainians were forced to go through, everything our people had to endure.”

The unspeakable horrors inflicted upon Poles - and Communists, Jews, Romani and other “undesirables” - by Melynk and his fellow Nazi collaborators were of course unmentioned. So too that the genocidal nationalism practiced and preached by Melynk was covertly promoted and sponsored for decades by Anglo-American intelligence, within and without Ukraine. The ongoing proxy conflict is a direct product of this little-known spectral meddling, which was specifically concerned with promoting cultural and ethnic difference, and enmity, between Russians and Ukrainians globally.

As this journalist has previously revealed, in August 1957 the CIA secretly drew up elaborate plans for a US special forces invasion of Ukraine. Intended to collapse the wider Soviet Union, the Agency’s conspiracy depended heavily on recruiting local fascists as footsoldiers. A significant stumbling block to the Agency’s plot, however, was much of Ukraine’s population actually harbouring “few grievances” against Russians or Communism. “Points of conflict” between Russians and Ukrainians, which could be exploited by the CIA to foment a mass uprising, were scant.

The Agency lamented how “the long history of union between Russia and Ukraine, which stretches in an almost unbroken line from 1654 to the present day,” had resulted in “many Ukrainians” having “adopted the Russian way of life.” Moreover, the similarity of their “languages, customs, and backgrounds,” and the “great influence” of Russian culture in Ukraine, meant the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians felt “little national antagonism.” Yet, the CIA believed “important grievances exist,” and “under favorable conditions” Ukrainians would assist US invaders.

Unmentioned in the invasion planning documents, the CIA had since 1949 been covertly striving to create those “favorable conditions.”