Kyiv, the capital city of Ukraine, where the American dollars are crisp and clean, has just dodged a bullet. This one didn’t come from Russia; the shot was self-inflicted. Mayor Vitali Klitschko overruled the city council and a popular vote of city dwellers to prevent the naming of a street after a World War II-era Nazi collaborator.
The European Jewish Press reported Wednesday that the city “wanted to name a street after Volodymyr Kubiyovych, a Nazi collaborator and SS official,” until Klitschko, apparently mindful of how bad this looks in the West, stepped in and put a kibosh on the plan. Until his intervention, everything was going swimmingly: the Jerusalem Post reported last Tuesday that according to Eduard Dolinsky, director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, “a street in the Ukrainian capital will be renamed following a motion passed by the city council, and will bear the name of Volodymyr Kubiyovych, who during the Holocaust was heavily involved in the formation of the Waffen-SS Galizien, a Nazi military force made up of Ukrainian volunteers.”
Yes, you read that right. This eye-watering move was planned after a “historical expert commission within the council had put forward several options for the renaming of what is currently Przhevalsky Street in Kyiv,” and several names were put to a public vote. The National Socialist won handily: “The option to rename the street after Volodymyr Kubiyovych has so far received a majority, with 31% of the vote, with the second and third highest options receiving just 18% and 10% respectively.”
Does it really need to be said that this was a bad idea from the get-go? Some Ukrainians have a soft spot for the National Socialists because they fought against the Soviet Russians who starved and oppressed Ukraine, but honoring them at this late date is problematic on all kinds of levels, and Kubiyovych was hardly a good choice. Before the National Socialist invasion of the USSR, Kubiyovych “requested the creation of an autonomous state within Ukraine in which Poles and Jews would not be allowed to live.” Then, once the National Socialists had occupied much of Ukraine, Kubiyovych “took on a key role in the formation of the Waffen-SS Galizien, publicly announcing his willingness to take up arms and fight for the Nazi cause.”
After the war, Kubiyovych settled in France and won renown as an expert in Ukrainian history and culture. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t collaborate with the National Socialists.
Democrats used to care about Ukraine’s National Socialist infatuation. The independent journalism site Kanekoa News reported as long ago as last June that “on October 16, 2019, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee’s counterterrorism subpanel, Rep. Max Rose (NY), led a letter signed by forty Democrats asking the State Department why they had not placed Ukraine’s Azov Battalion on the U.S. list of ‘foreign terrorist organizations’ (FTOs).”
The irony couldn’t be richer, for in October 2022, the New York Times, that reliable organ of far-Left opinion, referred to “Ukraine’s celebrated Azov Battalion,” and claimed that “the group’s defense of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol — the southern port city decimated by Russian forces in the first months of the war — has become a powerful symbol of the suffering inflicted by Russia and the resistance mounted by Ukraine.”
The letter added that “the 115th Congress of the United States stated in its 2018 omnibus spending bill that ‘none of the funds made available by this act may be used to provide arms, training or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.’” But that was when Volodymyr Zelensky was widely regarded as some kind of ally or tool of the Left’s Emmanuel Goldstein of the day, Donald Trump; after all, the first Stalinist show trial impeaching the America-First president took place over a phone call to Zelensky. So it was in the Democrats’ interest to play up the Nazi element in Ukraine, just as it is in their interests now to pretend that element doesn’t exist.
Related: What Are We Buying in Ukraine for $80 Billion?
And so now that the war in Ukraine is the Biden regime’s favored cause, every last Democrat who condemned the Azov Battalion would likely prefer us all to forget that they once likened the Azov Battalion to the Islamic State (ISIS) and noted that it “openly welcomes neo-Nazis into its ranks.” Now it seems as if there is no limit to the taxpayer billions that must be funneled to these gallant Ukrainian defenders of freedom. But the recent near-miss with the Kyiv street naming should give them pause.
The full extent of the ties between Ukraine and the posturing, self-righteous, desperately corrupt, hypocritical and self-serving U.S. Democrat establishment is not publicly known, and may never be known. But what we do know should have brought that entire establishment crashing down years ago.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member