chapotraphouse

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/04/29/ukrainian-ultranationalist-lobby-biden-russia/

Demonstrating the power the ultranationalist Ukraine lobby has attained in Biden’s Washington, the White House has withdrawn consideration of esteemed Russia specialist Matthew Rojansky.

Throughout the Cold War, the UCCA waged war on Kennan’s containment strategy, condemning it as a form of appeasement while advocating a policy of rollback that could have resulted in all-out war.

“The collapse of Kennanism in this country is a good sign,” Lev Dobriansky, a former president of the UCCA and co-founder of the right-wing Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, once remarked. Dobriansky was a close ally of Yaroslav Stetsko, a notorious Nazi collaborator who succeeded Bandera as leader of the OUN-B.

In the 1960s, Dobriansky and other UCCA leaders even lambasted a rival OUN faction that had been backed by the CIA as too soft on communism. Despite its history of extremism, the UCCA has apparently attained considerable influence over the Biden administration, while realists like Rojansky have been effectively blacklisted.

A March 2021 policy conference in Washington highlighted the growing bond between the Banderite movement and belligerent Beltway foreign policy figures tied to the Democratic Party.

Called, “Divining the New Administration’s Approach to Ukraine’s Most Pressing Security Issues,” the gathering was co-sponsored by the UCCA and organized by the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations (CUSUR), which is tied to the hip of the Banderite OUN-B.

Several “experts” from the NATO-funded Atlantic Council participated in the Banderite-run event. They included Anders Åslund, the neoliberal and often clownish economist who participated in the US-organized looting of Russia’s economy during the 1990’s. True to form, Åslund smeared Rojansky as not only an uninformed Putin apologist, but as a potential Russian agent.

Meanwhile, Atlantic Council senior fellow Melinda Haring warned of “impending disaster and disfunction,” predicting that Rojansky would “clash” with the “very hawkish,” “savvy operator” Victoria Nuland. In other words, he might balance the notoriously neoconservative tendencies of the former Obama State Department advisor who is widely seen as having stage managed the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine.

Haring and her Atlantic Council colleague, former US ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, sat silently while retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army Europe in 2014-18, denied that millions of Russians died in World War II.

During a previous panel, Atlantic Council senior fellow Daniel Fried also said nothing in response to his co-panelist, the nationalist Ukrainian politician, Hanna Hopko, sharing her goal of balkanizing Russia as Nazi Germany once aspired to do.

During the CUSUR event, Fried explained why New Cold Warriors like himself could never accept the appointment of someone like Rojansky. On issues related to Ukraine and Russia, Fried said the Biden administration “will not be a return to the Obama administration. It will be a return to the best sides of the Obama administration, without some of the disheartening debates that happened internally.”

Pointing to anti-Russia hardliners like Nuland and Secretary of State Tony Blinken as the “best sides of the Obama administration,” Fried articulated what has been made crystal clear by the Rojansky controversy. Having taken US-Russia relations to its post-Cold War nadir, the Russia hawks and their Ukrainian nationalist partners will be satisfied by nothing less than total control over Joe Biden’s foreign policy.