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Headline: What I Learned in Ukraine

WARSAW — Last week, a friend asked me what I could learn from a four-day trip to Ukraine I was planning that I couldn’t glean just by reading the news. It was a fair question. With the trip now behind me, I can answer.

I learned how strange it is to visit a country to which no plane flies and, as of last Monday, no ship sails — thanks to Vladimir Putin’s cruel and cynical withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative through which Ukrainian farm products reached hungry countries like Kenya, Lebanon and Somalia. The only feasible way for a visitor to get from the Polish border to Kyiv is a nine-hour train ride, where the sign inside the carriage door urges, “Be Brave Like Ukraine.”

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Mr. Stephens doesn’t quite reach the level of apologetics that fellow Neo-Con Francis Fukuyama expresses:

Headline: Author Francis Fukuyama, a Stanford fellow, backs far-right Azov group after school visit

https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/fukuyama-senior-fellow-stanford-far-right-group-18193614.php

Francis Fukuyama, a well-known author and researcher at Stanford University, said he is “proud to support” the Azov brigade, a Ukrainian military unit with longstanding far-right ties and connections to neo-Nazis. 

In an email to SFGATE, Fukuyama — who was photographed alongside representatives from the brigade at an on-campus event on June 29 — didn’t back down from associating with the group, which he said is made up of “heroes.” 

“I think you need to do a little more reading on Azov,” he wrote. “They originated among Ukrainian nationalists, but to call them neo-Nazis is to accept Russia’s framing of what they represent today. By the time they defended Mariopol they were fully integrated into the [Armed Forces of Ukraine] and are heroes that I’m proud to support.” 

Just last year, that same institute published a report on what’s known as the “Azov Movement,” the broader network of military and political organizations that were born out of what was originally a battalion. The institute’s report said that Azov “mixes classic right wing themes, including antisemitism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, and racism, with more populist economic proposals arguing for a greater role of the state in society.”

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February of last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin said his ostensible goal was to “denazify” Ukraine through force — a comment many saw as a direct reference to groups like Azov. While Putin’s claim that the Ukrainian government is run by neo-Nazis has been widely dismissed, and was used as a false pretense to invade Ukraine, the country nevertheless has some real far-right elements.  

First formed as a paramilitary group in 2014, Azov quickly earned praise for its prowess on the battlefield as it fought alongside Ukrainian forces and other paramilitary groups in clashes with Russian-backed separatists. Just months after its initial formation, the unit was integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard as an official “Special Purposes Regiment.” Since Russia’s most recent invasion, the unit has received widespread praise from Western institutions and officials for its heroics in the field — namely the role it played in defending Mariupol from Russian invaders in the spring of 2022. 

But apart from its combat expertise, the brigade is also known for its association with neo-Nazi ideology and other far-right beliefs. Azov was formed by Andriy Biletsky, the founder of two other far-right groups in Ukraine, who in 2010 reportedly said that the country’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [inferior races].” Azov often uses symbols that are similar to those used by Nazi soldiers during World War II, including the wolfsangel, totenkopf and sonnenrad. 

The Reader has to wonder at a writer, thinker, intellectual celebrity, not to speak of relentless self-promoter, seems to have suspended his critical judgement, in the interests of ideology? Though it should not surprise that the gloss of Hegel’s highfalutin chatter, made this man’s career. ‘The End of History’ was superb public relations. The Philosophical Provincials swooned over this. Fukuyama entered the Pantheon of The Moment of Intellectual Celebrity. Who can forget Edward Bernays contribution to the study of Propaganda ? Its offers the key to the rise of Fukuyama, as that rare being whose thought is transformational?

Back to Mr. Stephens:

Is it pure luck that he should encounter R2P Zealot Samantha Power?

I learned what it was like to sit in conference rooms and walk along corridors that would soon be shattered by Russian ordnance. On Tuesday, I joined a diplomatic group led by Administrator Samantha Power of the United States Agency for International Development on a visit to the port of Odesa. Power met first with Ukrainian officials to discuss logistical options for their exports after Putin’s withdrawal from the grain agreement, then with farmers to discuss issues like de-mining their fields and de-risking their finances. The stately Port Authority building in which the meetings took place, a purely civilian target, was struck barely a day after our departure.

Mr. Stephens was given a guided tour. This wasn’t happenstance, as he presents it. He sounded all the notes of the brave Ukrainians, stalwart Samantha Power … this is propaganda dressed casually. Mr. Stephens is an ally of Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, in sum the Neo-Con coterie, that salivates over war, with the enemies of the American Hegemon. The Neo-Cons exalt War, with no experience of service in its stark realities, as a soldier doing the fighting. Mr. Stephens provides the window dressing and then boards his flight… scribbling in his notebook as Ukraine become memory, attached to propaganda.

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