Using Ukraine Since 1948

Volume 29, Number 187 — Saturday, June 29, 2024


Using Ukraine Since 1948

June 10, 2024

The U.S. has staged operations with extremists from Ukraine to undermine Russia for nearly 8 decades. It’s led us to the doorstep of nuclear annihilation.

Clashes in Kiev during Feb. 2014 coup. (Mstyslav Chernov/Unframe/http://www.unframe.com/Wikimedia)

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News




The United States has for nearly 80 years seen Ukraine as the staging ground for its once covert and increasingly overt war with Russia.

After years of warnings, and after talk since 2008 of Ukraine joining NATO, Russia fought back two years ago. With neither side backing down, Ukraine is increasingly becoming a flashpoint that could lead to nuclear war.

The West thinks Russia is bluffing.

But its doctrine states that if Russia feels its existence is threatened it could resort to nuclear arms. Instead of taking these warnings seriously, NATO is recklessly opening corridors for a ground war against Russia in Ukraine; France says it’s putting together a coalition of nations to enter the war, despite Russia saying French or any other NATO force would be fair game.

Unless you read Consortium News and a few other alternative outlets, you won’t get this perspective. You will think Russia is an out of control aggressor bent on destroying the world. So …

In Paris the other day Joe Biden said Russia wants to conquer all of Europe but can’t even take Khariv. It is this kind of inflammatory nonsense, combined with allowing Ukraine to fire NATO weapons into Russian territory, that is imperiling us all.

The danger started building up many years ago but it is now reaching a climax.

The U.S. relationship with Ukraine, and its extremists, to undermine Russia began after the Second World War. During the war, units of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) took part in the Holocaust, killing at least 100,000 Jews and Poles.

Mykola Lebed, a top aide to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the fascist OUN-B, was recruited by the C.I.A. after the war, according to a 2010 study by the U.S. National Archives.

Lebed was the “foreign minister” of a Banderite government in exile, but he later broke with Bandera for acting as a dictator. The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps termed Bandera “extremely dangerous” yet said he was “looked upon as the spiritual and national hero of all Ukrainians….”

C.I.A.’s Allen Dulles asks U.S. Immigration to allow Lebed re-entry to U.S. despite murder conviction. (From Hitler’s Shadow. Click to enlarge.)


Instead of Bandera, the C.I.A. was interested in Lebed, despite his fascist background. They set him up in an office in New York City from which he directed sabotage and propaganda operations on the agency’s behalf inside Ukraine against the Soviet Union.

The U.S. government study says:

“CIA operations with these Ukrainians began in 1948 under the cryptonym CARTEL, soon changed to AERODYNAMIC. …

Lebed relocated to New York and acquired permanent resident status, then U.S. citizenship. It kept him safe from assassination, allowed him to speak to Ukrainian émigré groups, and permitted him to return to the United States after operational trips to Europe.

Once in the United States, Lebed was the CIA’s chief contact for AERODYNAMIC. CIA handlers pointed to his ‘cunning character,’ his ‘relations with the Gestapo and … Gestapo training,’ [and] the fact that he was ‘a very ruthless operator.’”

The C.I.A. worked with Lebed on sabotage and pro-Ukrainian nationalist propaganda operations inside Ukraine until Ukraine’s independence in 1991.

“Mykola Lebed’s relationship with the CIA lasted the entire length of the Cold War,” the study says. “While most CIA operations involving wartime perpetrators backfired, Lebed’s operations augmented the fundamental instability of the Soviet Union.”

Continued Until and Beyond Ukrainian Independence

Bandera monument in Lvov. (wikimapia.org)

The U.S. thus covertly kept Ukrainian fascist ideas alive inside Ukraine until at least Ukrainian independence was achieved.

Mykola Lebed, Bandera’s wartime chief in Ukraine, died in 1998.

He is buried in New Jersey, and his papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, the U.S. National Archives study says.

The successor organization to the OUN-B in the United States did not die with him, however. It had been renamed the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), according to IBT.

“By the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members. Reagan personally welcomed [Yaroslav] Stetsko, the Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7,000 Jews in Lviv, in the White House in 1983,” IBT reported. “Following the demise of [Viktor] Yanukovich’s regime [in 2014], the UCCA helped organise rallies in cities across the US in support of the EuroMaidan protests,” it reported.

That is a direct link between the U.S.-backed 2014 Maidan coup against a democratically-elected Ukrainian government and WWII-era Ukrainian fascism.

[See: Ukraine Timeline Tells the Story]

Since 2014, the U.S. pushed for an attack on the Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine who had rejected the coup, and NATO began training and equipping Ukrainian troops. Combined with talk since 2008 of Ukraine joining NATO, Russia reacted after years of warning.

More than two years after Russia’s intervention, with Ukraine clearly losing the war, Western leaders will do just about anything to save their political skins, as they’ve staked too much on winning in Ukraine. Don’t listen to them. They need a West in denial of the dangers facing us.

As President John F. Kennedy said in his 1963 American University speech:

“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

The world may wake up when it’s too late — after nuclear missiles have already started flying.




Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.