– N. Ribar –
Around the world and specifically in the West, the history of Ukraine over the past 9 years is hushed up with a vengeance. According to the version posited by the mainstream, Putin went into Ukraine earlier this year, 2022, because he is a fascist, evil and so on. But these events are much more complex than such simplicism can answer and require elucidating the facts that today’s medieval ruling perspective in power will not. The neo-fascist and ultra-reactionary measures which have been taken under the banner of Ukrainianization, derussification, decommunization and other -ations have brought untold destruction and wrecking effects to the Ukrainian people. Presented here are facts, which are known for being stubborn things, as well as the truth that can be sought from them — two things which make the imperialists feel very uneasy during this period.
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In November 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich decided to decline EU offers for massive loans to the country, ones which Ukraine would never have been able to repay. He also refused to sign a plan which would make Ukraine an associate of the EU. On December 17, 2013, Yanukovich signed the Russian–Ukrainian action plan, which pursued repayable loans from Russia and created closer ties between the two countries. Right at these moments, the Euromaidan coup was put into motion, indeed it had already begun. It was unacceptable to the U.S. and NATO that Ukraine should leave their sphere of influence and their domination of markets.
This Euromaidan, under the guise of protests against corruption, was a combination of fascists, neo-nazis and so-called “respectable” pro-EU democrats. According to Wikipedia, the nazi groups who partook as main instigators in the so-called “Maidan People’s Union” were as follows: the Right Sector, Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, Svoboda and Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian People’s Self-Defence. But listing this as the extent of their participation would be quite deceptive. Things went so far that on Maidan headquarters during these protests hung a large portrait of Stepan Bandera, an associate of Adolf Hitler and leader of the nazi group Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). In 1941, the nazi SS and Bandera’s OUN jointly carried out the execution of over 20,000 Polish servicemen in the Katyn forest and other areas. The same year, his organization welcomed the Hitlerite forces as liberators in the city of Lvov and immediately put up pro-nazi propaganda, declaring that Jews “have to be treated harshly… We must finish them off… Regarding the Jews we will adopt any methods that will lead to their destruction.” Throughout the Second World War, the OUN rounded up women, children and old people into village barns and burned them alive. Under Bandera’s leadership, hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews were exterminated as a component part of the Holocaust in Soviet territories. Post-war, the OUN was designated by the Nuremberg Trials as an agency of the German Gestapo which actively attempted to create a fascist fifth column within the ranks of the various Soviet nationalities and collaborated with them in carrying out genocide. This was the Euromaidan’s chosen symbol and hero. Of note is the fact that vilified President Yanukovich revoked the “Hero of Ukraine” title posthumously bestowed to Bandera in 2010 by then-president Viktor Yushchenko. Neo-nazi and holocaust denialist ambitions drove the Maidan protests, which once in power put dozens of statues of Bandera up and glorified the notorious nazi traitor and perpetrator of the Holocaust, especially in Galician Western Ukraine. Ukrainian communists vigorously opposed all this drivel and pointed out from the very start that it was an imperialist-nazi coup in the making.
These Banderite nazis did not merely re-emerge in 2013-4, as some might imagine, but were deliberately kept alive by the U.S. and its Central Intelligence Agency since the day the nazis lost the Second World War. This is no conspiracy, but something which the CIA itself has admitted in its 1998 report “Cold War Allies: CIA’s Relations with Ukrainian Nationalists.” Their own report states that after the war they gave refuge to Ukrainian nazis who had committed horrific war crimes, protected them and utilized them as an underground movement to undermine the integrity of their Cold War opponent, the USSR. As such, they refused to extradite the nazi war criminal and holocaust perpetrator, Stepan Bandera, to the Soviet Union where he would have faced criminal trial. They protected and hid him personally along with countless other OUN members. And, so they claim, they did so because an OUN extradition would have “adverse effects on the future of US operations with the Ukrainians.”
Another revealing report, this time by the U.S. National Archives and titled “Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War, ” takes full advantage of the recent declassification of U.S.-nazi post-war collaboration documents. Alongside confirming many of the conclusions of the above report, it cites records stating that CIA officials contacted Bandera as late as a week before his death in October 1959 with an offer for a visa — the purpose being to meet with the State Department, officials from the CIA and Ukrainian nationalist emigres. Further discussed is U.S. collaboration with fellow OUN nazi leader, Nikolai Lebed, who proposed in April 1943 to “cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population.” Nor was he brought to justice for the crimes he committed due to the involvement of the U.S., and specifically the CIA. Its director, Alan Dulles, penned a 1952 letter protecting Lebed from prosecution on the pretext that he was highly useful to the agency and U.S. interests in general. They were not lying: “Lebed’s operations augmented the fundamental instability of the Soviet Union,” such as plan AERODYNAMIC, under which CIA-trained Ukrainian agents with Lebed at the head infiltrated the USSR, aiding and egging on underground nationalist-separatist movements, bringing about the tragedy of the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and ensuring a fate of mass poverty and oligarchical rule for the post-Soviet states. He later died peacefully on July 18, 1998 in Pittsburgh. Even though Bandera, Lebed and their associates were dead, the day would come when the U.S. would again utilize these nazi-nationalist links to their full advantage, in an attempt to prevent their new rival, Russia, from gaining an ally in Ukraine.
U.S. interference in the Euromaidan became obvious when U.S. Senator John McCain, noted war criminal against the Vietnamese, ventured to Ukraine to support the coup in December 2013. Speaking in connection with his visit to CNN, he noted that the protests were about depriving Russia of becoming a superpower, about loving “freedom” and a “democratic society” such as that which exists in the United States of America. This certainly sounds familiar! It was about opposing Russia, placating the U.S. and postulating this Western system as the highest possible level humanity can progress, that the whole world yearns for the type of system where individuals like KKK leader David Duke are never punished for their crimes against the people.
At the same time, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, expressing the U.S. government’s position, held a talk with President Yanukovich. In this talk, she explained explicitly that there was a way to prevent his overthrow — go back to EU and IMF loans, and abandon their new road of economic independence. A foreign country could only make such a promise if they were actively orchestrating a coup. But if such a coup was not obvious in December, it was to become blatant in the early months of 2014. On February 4, 2014, while Yanukovich still retained state power, Victoria Nuland held a call with the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt. The call discussed who they were going to implement as the new Prime Minister in Ukraine when the plot succeeded — Nuland expressing the U.S. view that Arseniy Yatsenyuk should be installed. On the night of February 21-22, 2014, President Yanukovich left the country, de facto vacating the Presidency amidst complete chaos. And on February 27, Yatsenyuk was declared the new Prime Minister, leading the new government without an elected President. The coup had been carried out, and the U.S., who had plotted it for weeks, commanded the new government.
Obvious frame-ups were also organized with this coup. The Anti-Protest Laws signed by Yanukovich were claimed by the opposition to give secret police powers to kill and shoot at civilians protesting. While this regularly occurs in the United States, and not a single eye is batted — a country where police make the law, kidnapping and killing protestors with no accountability or investigation as they did in the summer of 2020 — in Ukraine this was said to be the greatest crime against humanity. In actuality, all the evidence points against Yanukovich’s police firing on the protestors, and for bullets coming from the Maidan-controlled buildings, as Prof. Ivan Kachanovski points out. In other words, the nazis fired on their own sympathizers to frame the Ukrainian government as criminals. This narrative was blindly supported and sold to the people by the Western press for weeks as proof that regime change was the “humane” thing to do.
Nor were genuine crimes against humanity exempt from the murderous rampage by the nazi-led coup. Known to many as the Odessa trade union massacre, in May 2014 anti-coup protestors were surrounded by the Maidan Self-Defence forces, led by the openly nazi Right Sector, and fled to safety in the Odessa Trade Union House. The Maidan forces moved to smash windows and throw Molotov cocktails inside, brutally beating those left outside. The official death toll by death through scorching, individuals jumping from the upper floors and physical assault reached 48, though eyewitness accounts are much higher at approximately 100.
Andrei Parubiy, Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, was the main leader of the Odessa massacre. He is quoted as praising Adolf Hitler as history’s “greatest democrat,” warning in a speech “not to forget the contributions of the fuhrer to the development of democracy.” Yet this did not prevent the massacre leader from being invited by the U.S.-NATO imperialists to the West many times, such as his meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He later became the speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada. Yevgeny Deidei, commander in the massacre, also later became a member of the Verkhovna Rada.
At the time, it was widely reported in Western news outlets that the level of nazi involvement in the overthrow of President Yanukovich and inflaming the other bloody events which succeeded the coup was high. The New York Times, in an article titled “Ukraine Strategy Bets on Restraint by Russia,” reported on the wild nature of the so-called Maidan Self-Defence Militias, the same militias who carried out the Odessa Massacre: “One [group]… which took over the village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag. In pressing their advance, the fighters took their orders from a local army commander, rather than from Kiev.” The NYT admitted that neo-nazis controlled entire regions and did not listen to anyone — nazis held power there. Another article, this one by the BBC, titled “Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict” writes that this was not limited to local regions either, that nationally “far-right extremists seem to be making inroads by other means, as in the country’s police department.” They end the article by stating: “Ukraine’s public is grossly under-informed about this [nazi-state links]. The question is, why doesn’t anyone want to tell them?” Indeed! In 2014, the BBC was questioning why a government that rose to power due to a neo-nazi, Bandera-supporting violent overthrow would refuse to throw those very elements under the bus; for objective observers, it is not difficult to guess why. CNN, in their article, “Rein in Ukraine’s neo-fascists,” discusses the fact that in the Euromaiden’s violent clashes with government police forces, the neo-nazi Right Sector group was used as shock troops and instigators of murder. It notes that the interim U.S.-appointed government had its Deputy Prime Minister and leader of various ministries members of Svoboda, a nazi party led by well-known fascist Oleg Tyagnibok, which supports the “cleansing” of Ukraine from Russians, Jews and “other scum.” It admits that Andrei Parubiy also appointed a member of the far-right Right Sector to the post of deputy chairman of the Maidan Self-Defence forces and states that racist attacks against Jews in western Ukraine had increased, nazi slogans being doused on their homes. This is what Western media admitted in 2014 — today, these facts about nazi involvement in every sphere of the Maidan coup are considered “Russian disinformation.”
As in all countries where fascists have taken power, communists are the first to be persecuted. Fighting against the coup and for national independence, Ukrainian communists were the most vigorously opposed to what was going on. The Maidan was an attack on all Ukrainians by painting their national heroes as genocidal maniacs who committed mass murder and stamping out descent under the pretext of combatting Russian influence. This decommunization, ushered in with new laws during 2015, has rendered all the past heroes of Ukrainian progress dead, and all the landmarks and statues of progressive fighters who led Ukraine, such as Sergei Kirov and Mikhail Frunze, wrecked or demolished. The image is given by the Ukrainian government that Ukrainians are fascists, and in a sick twist this is presented as “progressive,” against Russian “colonialism,” the same rhetoric of the Banderites many decades ago. The nationalist rulers denigrate the role of the Great Patriotic War in official historiography and paint the most crucial and glorious war effort in the history of the world as a mere product of Russian chauvinism. In place of the great Stalin, they put the OUN and Bandera as liberators of Ukraine. They even outright invent reality, claiming that it was the OUN who fought the nazis, and that only after they had defeated Hitler, the Soviets annihilated them. The current President Vladimir Zelensky, who has himself praised Bandera as a “national hero,” has even said the USSR “invaded” Ukraine in that time period. No evidence exists for any of these claims.
When Eastern Ukrainians decided not to be a part of this fascizing coup state in 2014, declaring independence, Ukraine declared a bloody war on them, a war which is ongoing to this day. The new President, Pyotr Poroshenko, stated blankly on Donbass, the region that declared independence: “We will have our jobs. They will not. We will have our pensions. They will not. We will have care for children, for people and retirees. They will not. Our children will go to schools and kindergartens. Theirs will hole up in basements [from our bombs]. Because they are not able to do anything. This is exactly how we will win this war!” They would attempt to win the civil war through means of terror, sending the most reactionary and cruel bandits to commit grave war crimes.
In this vein, a 2015 archived Ukrainian government webpage notes that the neo-nazi Azov Battalion “is a linear special purpose unit and is part of the military unit 3057 of the Eastern Operational and Territorial Association of the National Guard of Ukraine.” Further: “The personnel of the unit serves under contract and performs assigned tasks.” Included on their website is their logo, featuring the nazi Sonnenrad and Wolfsangel. This nazi band has had many crimes noted by Western sources. One report released by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2016 states: “A man with a mental disability was subject to cruel treatment, rape and other forms of sexual violence by eight to 10 members of the ‘Azov’ and ‘Donbas’ battalions in August-September 2014.” The same report finds: “A resident of Mariupol was detained by three servicemen of the ‘Azov’ battalion on 28 January 2015 for supporting the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’. He was taken to the basement of Athletic School No. 61 in Mariupol, where he was held until 6 February 2015. He was continuously interrogated and tortured. He complained about being handcuffed to a metal rod and left hanging on it, he was reportedly tortured with electricity, gas mask and subjected to waterboarding and he was also beaten in his genitals.” Another report by the same source detailed extensive similar war crimes by Azov from November 2015 to February 2016.
This same Azov battalion was founded by Andrei Biletsky, a nazi who has made it his self-proclaimed mission to save the “white race.” More specifically, and in his own words, he said Ukraine’s mission was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led Untermenschen,” a nazi term often used for Jews and Slavs, literally meaning subhuman. This situation was so obvious that even the U.S. Congress admitted in 2015 that neo-fascist Ukrainian groups were receiving U.S. funding, but decided to continue their aid to them at the urging of the Pentagon. Believe it or not, just earlier this year CTV News reported that the Canadian army was training Azov nazis. Such things revealed by the U.S. Congress and imperialist press are often denied today by people in power as “Russian disinformation,” just like the events of 2014.
Up to the 2022 Russian involvement in the war, the OSCE, an organ of NATO propaganda, was forced to document almost daily the crimes committed by the Ukrainian forces in the Donbass region for 8 years. In this territory, comprising Donestk and Lugansk, an estimated 14,000 civilians were murdered by the Ukrainian offensive, for which mass graves were dug. 25,000 cultural sites and 300 schools in Donbass, similarly, fell victim to the brutality. These civil war conditions come as unsurprising in conjuncture with Poroshenko’s previously outlined statement. Therein lies the source of the present war, not some innate evil of Putin, but the aggressive actions of the Ukrainian state and its U.S. masters in imposing siege-like conditions on those who took exception to their coup, deploying their nazi thugs to commit heinous war crimes and torture, and murdering tens of thousands of civilians. This war taking place right now has not been going on for mere months, but nearly a decade.
All this despite the Minsk agreements which stipulated that Ukraine stop attacking Donbass in exchange for guarantees of peace — agreements which Ukraine threw in the trash the day they were signed. As seen above, up to the day when Russia did indeed intervene, they continued to bombard civilians by the thousands. One of the agreement’s foreign mediators, former German chancellor Angela Merkel, has since put out a statement to the effect that the West and Ukraine never meant to actually implement the agreements or give peace to Donbass, only to delay Russia from recognizing the independent republics and intervening on their behalf. The intent of this was to militarize and arm Ukraine against Russia to eventually drag out a long war between the two countries, as is occurring at the moment.
With the Russian intervention in Ukraine, the fascist and racist attitudes of the Ukrainian state have come out in full colour. Post-Maidan Deputy State Prosecutor of Ukraine, David Sakvarelidze, said on the BBC earlier this year that the worst part about this war was seeing “European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed.” This superior Aryan race propaganda was displayed from the highest echelons of the Ukrainian state, so much so that the Western media was unable to hide it. Similarly, the Ukrainian National Guard boasted on social media in February about putting lard on bullets to shoot Muslim Chechens, whom it considers “orcs” and “subhuman,” a blatant war crime and signifier of religious hatred by every measure. On March 2, the command of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces posted on Facebook that there will be no more Russian prisoners of war taken and that they will be “slaughtered like pigs” from then on. The same day, Vladimir Struk, mayor of Kreminnaya of Lugansk, was extrajudicially murdered for being insufficiently loyal. Opposition forces have, too, been completely banned by the Zelensky government. Gypsies have been tied to posts and humiliated constantly for months, under the prejudice that they are all Russian agents. The persecution of Communists has accelerated, with freedom of conscience being totally banned, and Mikhail and Aleksander Kononovich, leaders of the Leninist Communist Youth Union of Ukraine, jailed on the mere suspicion of being “pro-Russia.” A witch hunt trial for them is currently being carried out. Zelensky is using the war as an excuse to carry out the anti-social offensive in the economy to unprecedented spheres of life, hidden under the bombastic rhetoric of the war and chaos he is enforcing massive privatization programs and shredding the last of any semblance of a social safety net. He has removed all rights for workers at most enterprises, implemented a maximum 12-hour work day, eliminated collective bargaining and allowed employers to dismiss employees for any reason, all of which trade unions have vocally opposed. The Russian language, which much of Ukraine speaks in daily life, is being relentlessly persecuted, with many books and classical works in the language or even anything originating from Russia banned. Nor are Russian people themselves spared from this racist attack — parliamentarian Irina Podolyak has stated, without any reservation, that “good Russians do not exist.” In his latest, Zelensky has gone so far as to try to ban the Orthodox church (one of Ukraine’s most notorious cultural staples) due to its traditional ties to Russia, as well as moving Ukraine’s day of Christmas to the Catholic December 25. How often do we hear in the media that Ukraine is protecting its culture from Russian “colonialism” and so on? It turns out that the ones in power are destroying its culture the most. How often do we hear of the brutality of Russia towards Ukrainian citizens? Just earlier tonight, Zelensky presented a threat of terror to the citizens of Russia. There is nothing more brutal than this cynical offensive of the Ukrainian state against its working people, measures which are not too dissimilar to Hitler’s and Mussolini’s banning of workers’ parties and rights immediately after taking power. There is nothing more brutal than openly threatening terror against civilians of neighbouring countries, as the Hitlerites constantly did in their warmongering propaganda. This is how far the Ukrainian proxy state is along the road of fascism and decay.
The fascist Ukrainian state is also endangering the whole world with its reckless international policy. One such example of this is Zelensky’s incessant insistence that Ukraine join NATO and consider Russia’s army in Ukraine as an attack on all NATO countries, triggering a third world war. Or take November’s false framing of Russia sending a missile into Poland. The warmongers, led by Zelensky and his U.S. puppet masters, immediately spread their disinformation and lies like wildfire in the West, all of whom clamoured that an attack on Russia to start a third world war was necessary in the name of Article 5 of NATO and, ironically, “world peace.” The headline was at once dropped when it was found out that it was actually an errant missile of the Ukrainian forces. With such irresponsible individuals at the head of countries, peace in the world will never be realizable. Not Russia, but Zelensky, is relentlessly and openly propagating to engulf the entire world in flames.
Before Russia was even involved in this war, U.S. politicians were quite clear about their aims in aiding Ukraine — to destroy Russia. In the first impeachment trial of Trump, leading representative Adam Schiff stated “the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.” A proxy war had already begun against Donbass at the time. And now, the Ukrainian state is even more open about being under the lock and key of the U.S. imperialists. Senator Lindsey Graham was boldest in stating American intentions, not mincing words when he stated: “I like the structural path we’re on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need… they will fight to the last person.” Ukraine will fight to the last Ukrainian to destroy Russia on the behalf of the U.S. — all with the mere aid of American weapons. Ukrainians themselves are considered a dispensable tool, while the biggest propaganda campaign is being carried out in their name. In economic life, the country is literally being sold on Wall Street — Zelensky going to the U.S. financial capital, New York, and stating that Ukraine is “open for business,” cheap labour and natural resources, the hallmarks of neo-colonial economics. Even the so-called Ukrainian economic reconstruction is subject to American monopolists, to go along with the anti-worker offensive in all spheres of life. After his September meeting with the CEO of the notorious U.S. speculator BlackRock, Zelensky and the Ukrainian Ministry of the Economy have agreed to co-ordinate their economic development with the American corporation.
Nor does the U.S. itself shy away from involving itself in terrorist attacks to stir the present war, destroying Europe’s relations with Russia and keeping them under the grip of NATO. Another frame-up, this time in the form of a major international provocation, was organized to accuse Russia of blowing up the Nordstream-2 pipeline. Even from a logical point of view, this claim makes no sense, as the pipeline was hugely beneficial for the economies of Russia and Europe. After not a single fact could be found to support this position, it too was immediately dropped by the press headlines. The crime was forgotten, simply because allowing people to know the perpetrators would have been devastating both in their home countries and abroad. One can suspect that U.S. involvement was present — they would be the only ones to benefit from such an attack. It has certainly had the effect of making Europe more dependent on U.S. oil and gas, highly expensive with costly shipping across the Atlantic Ocean. The working people of Europe are groaning under a winter of harsh inflation and unliveable conditions, many tens of thousands dying from that alone according to The Economist, while the war profiteers rack in the cash by the billions and support their puppet in destroying Ukraine too, as they have been for the last decade.
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Today, the Ukrainian nation is utterly wrecked. Specifically, women and children have left en masse. At the time of writing this article, 2.9 million Ukrainians have fled to Russia, while 2.5 million have fled to all the Western countries combined — most Ukrainians have fled to Russia, not to the West, one of the many facts smudged over by the imperialist press.
For those U.S. imperialist warmongers who are now making the argument that this war is incredibly cheap in their goal of destroying Russia, they expose their anti-conscious, anti-human and misanthropic outlook, where all that matters is to destroy the “official enemy” and to retain their bottom line of profits in doing so. They do not feel sorrow for the refugees or the dead. They started this war 9 years ago in the name of freedom and democracy because Ukraine was moving away from their economic sphere, and then they sought to crush the people of Donbass who opposed the coup and who, today, would rather sacrifice their lives than languish under a fascist Ukrainian state. It is not fortuitous in this regard that Donbass has always been the industrial powerhouse of Ukraine, which they need to retain under their thumb if they are to secure maximum profits.
Moreover, the Ukrainian situation was needed for another reason: securing the demonization of a new official enemy. Even if another capitalist nation, such as Russia undeniably is, challenges the status quo in this so-called rules-based international order (where the U.S. makes all the rules), they are deemed evil, fascists, Hitlers and every other epithet in the book. President Putin himself is seen as a metaphysical evil, a disrupter to the great system of liberalism. The U.S. and its allies who created a unipolar exploitative order after the fall of the Soviet Union know very well that the disequilibrium of capitalism, and namely crises, lead the way to its demise. That is why they try to put any opponents of their world domination, even capitalist opponents, immediately in the sphere of Hitler and the world’s other greatest criminals to demonize them to the public. No effort was taken to understand the issues which Russia raised for many years in the international arena, issues which were ignorantly laughed off because the U.S. was not interested in international security at all — blinded by their ferocious and revanchist lenses, they were only concerned about ending a threat to their hegemony.
When Adam Schiff and other U.S. politicians state quite clearly the intention of aid to Ukraine — to destroy Russia — purposefully arming and training nazi armed gangs to terrorize the working people of Ukraine and the whole people of Russia, they are not being hyperbolic or exaggerating. When former President Jimmy Carter admitted that the U.S. is the most war-like nation in the history of the world in imposing its high “values” on foreign countries, nor was he being hyperbolic or exaggerating. When the U.S. and Ukraine are the only two countries in the world bold enough to vote against UN resolutions condemning nazism, racism, social discrimination and xenophobia, nor are they being hyperbolic or exaggerating. When the beast tells you who he is, you believe him. The Ukraine tragedy over the past 9 years was entirely preventable, but so are all imperialist wars. The people themselves need a new outlook to navigate through this minefield, an outlook to place them on their own two feet, an outlook to throw imperialism, capitalism and its fellow-traveller, crises, into their graves. The old anti-conscious and medieval outlook can never solve any of society’s problems, and as long as it reins we will experience hundreds and thousands of Ukraines.