The media is full of comments by the Russians and their friends about the rise to power of Ukrainian nationalists and their fascist and anti-Semitic policies. These accusations reflect the Russian outrage that some of the Ukrainian nationalists fought on the side of the Nazis during the Second World War. That this happened is incontrovertible but the Russians don’t bother to mention that from 23 August 1939 to 22 June 1941 Soviet Russia was a treaty partner of Nazi Germany and used the Nazi invasion of Poland to invade Poland itself to capture the large part of the Ukraine which was then part of Poland after the 1918 Polish-Ukrainian war.

There is also a deep enmity of the Russians towards the Ukrainians as the result of the alliance of the Ukrainian nationalists with Hitler in his attacks on the Soviet Union. The Ukraine was occupied by the Germans for most of the Second World War and attracted notable Ukrainian support for their anti-Soviet and anti-Jewish efforts. There has been an extensive effort by the Russians (led by Sergei Glazyev) to couple the Second World War experience of Ukrainian co-operation with the Nazis to the rise of Ukrainian Far Right parties. Glazyev was a member of the Communist Party and a Communist deputy in the Russian parliament before cofounding a far-right party called Rodina, or Motherland. In 2005 some of its deputies signed a petition to the Russian prosecutor general asking that all Jewish organizations be banned from Russia. He is joined in this anti-Ukrainian program by Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of the most important talk show in Russia, and director of the state-run Russian media conglomerate designed to form national public opinion. Best known for saying that gays who die in car accidents should have their hearts cut from their bodies and incinerated, Kiselyov has taken Putin’s campaign against gay rights and transformed it into a weapon against European integration. He is the main propaganda for the Eurasian Union; an organisation of states led by Russia.

The two main examples cited of the Ukrainian links to fascism and the Nazis are the examples of  Stepan Bandera and the Siege of Sevastopol; the Ukrainian nationalist leader who led the collaboration with the Germans and the Crimean city which gallantly held out against the might of the German army. There is a lot of misinformation about the Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis being circulated. In World War II, the war on the eastern front was fought chiefly in what was then the Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus, not in Soviet Russia. Little more than five percent of Russia was occupied by the Germans; however, all of the Ukraine was occupied by the Germans. Apart from the Jews, whose suffering was by far the worst, the main victims of Nazi policies were not Russians but Ukrainians and Belarusians. There was no Russian army fighting in World War II, but rather a Soviet Red Army. Its soldiers were disproportionately Ukrainian, since it took so many losses in Ukraine and recruited from the local population.[i]

It should also be remembered that much of the Western Ukraine was not controlled by or part of the Soviet Union; it was occupied and governed by Poland after the disastrous Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918-1919. Western Ukraine became a hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism as it sought to be reunited with the rest of the Ukraine.

Following the end of World War I, the eastern part of the former Austrian province of Galicia, as well as Volhynia, which had belonged to the Russian Empire, were taken over by Poland. Between the World Wars eastern Galicia was divided into three administrative units — Lwów Voivodeship, Stanislawów Voivodeship, and Tarnopol Voivodeship, while in Volhynia, Wolyn' Voivodeship was created. The Ukrainian majority of these lands were further oppressed by the Polish authorities, and the conflict escalated in the 1930s, due in part to actions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (‘OUN’). The tensions were further exacerbated by arrival of thousands of osadniks,  Polish settlers, who were granted land, especially in Volhynia.

Polish rule over the provinces ended in September 1939, following the Nazi and Soviet attack on Poland. It should be remembered when speaking of Ukrainian nationalism that as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR were united in a common effort to control Europe. After Battle of Lwow, units of the Red Army entered the regional capital, Lviv, and following elections to the People's Assemblies of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, both eastern Galicia and Volhynia were annexed by the Soviet Union. The Ukraine was united as a unitary state because the Red Army was aided by its treaty with the Nazis. They remained locked in step with the Nazis until June 22,1941 when Hitler attacked Russia.

It is a monstrous act of hypocrisy for the Russians to condemn the Ukrainian nation as Fascists because a minority of Ukrainian Nationalists fought alongside the Germans during the Second World War when Stalin had no problems allying with Hitler to take control of the Ukraine while Hitler was taking over control of Poland. The fact that this propaganda blitz about Ukrainian Fascism is being conducted by such Russian anti-Semitic homophobic and skinhead fascists as Glazyev, Kiselyov and their ilk in the Russian Duma makes it even more ludicrous. It is not a wise point to make about collaboration with the Nazis when the Soviet Union and Stalin were in lockstep with the Nazis from the 23^rd of August 1939 to June 22,1941. The Soviet Union paid for their miscalculation with almost twenty million dead, a large part of whom were Ukrainians.