Ukraine: World War II Fiasco Leads to PR Disaster and Thorny Questions for Kiev and Foreign Diaspora

The World Post (Huf Po) ^ | June 29, 2015 | Nikolas Kozloff

[Navy Patriot]

For Kiev, winning the public relations war against Vladimir Putin would seem to be a no-brainer. For a year now, the Kremlin has conducted a thinly-disguised war of aggression in eastern Ukraine resulting in the deaths of thousands. Yet Kiev seems intent on squandering any international public support it might have had amidst a bizarre crackdown on free speech and censorship of controversial historical debates. Through its crackdown, Ukraine has actually played into Putin's propaganda war and facilitated Russia's PR efforts.

At issue is Ukraine's contentious World War II past, some of which isn't particularly flattering. With the support of Nazi Germany, militias affiliated with the extremist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) allegedly committed a pogrom in the western city of Lviv. Writing in the London Independent, journalist Patrick Cockburn notes that while "Ukrainian politicians and historians have denied complicity... surviving Jewish victims, other witnesses and contemporary photographs prove that Ukrainian militiamen and mobs of supporters carried out the pogrom, though the Germans oversaw it and committed many of the murders."

[Navy Patriot]

Seems the Socialists can't agree on which Socialists are Nazis and which Socialists are pushing Russian propaganda as opposed to which Socialists are pushing Obama DemoRat Socialist propaganda.

[Robert357]

There is no excuse for what the Ukrainian militias did in Liviv. There is also no excuse for what the Soviets did in starving to death so many Ukrainians prior to WW2 or the Great Patriotic War. By the time WW2 rolled around a lot of Ukrainians who had not been starved, rounded up in the middle of the night and killed, or shipped to Siberian work (death) camps, really disliked the Soviets. When Hitler's troops invaded, many jumped at the chance to avenge past Soviet atrocities against them. That is absolutely no excuse for what some did, but it does explain how vicious things were in the Ukraine.

[Terry L Smith]

The Ukrainian Steppes were the doorway to the German invasion of Soviet Russia. The Ukrainian Steppes are also the richest farmlands in the former Soviet Union, which under Stalin, became his ‘killing fields’.

The Ukrainian Steppes are part of the contention that the Ukraine remain as part of Russian territory, instead of a complete break from New/Soviet/Imperialist Russia. For Russia, no Steppes, no breadbasket, no wheat for commerce or for weaponization, i.e., ‘yellow rain’.