Joe Brunoli
2 min readFeb 13, 2024

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Thanks, but I don't think you have it right. Firstly, the Brittanica article you cite explains that the famine Ukraine experienced was not a deliberate act inflicted on them by Moscow. Instead, Brittanica notes:

"It was part of a broader Soviet famine (1931–34) that also caused mass starvation in the grain-growing regions of Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan"

The Holodomor "myth" was a story created by Ukrainian nationalists to stoke anti-Soviet sentiment among Ukrainians.

Secondly, the affinity that the OUN/UPA had for Hitler was long standing and proven. Resistance against Russia was not really the motivating factor, independence was. The OUN/UPA really believed that Hitler would grant them an independent Ukrainian state if they were sufficiently loyal. That "loyalty" included mass murdering 100,000 Poles, Jews and Russians in Volyn and elsewhere.

As far as being anti-Russian is concerned, the Waffen SS division formed from Western Ukrainian nationalists (14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS - 1st Galician) fought in Slovakia and Yugoslavia as well as Russia, where they conducted many massacres. The Ukrainian SS division was found guilty of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials in 1946.

Regarding the OUN, Wikipedia (a neutral source) characterises them well:

"The OUN was mostly active preceding, during, and immediately after the Second World War. Its ideology has been described as having been influenced by the writings of Dmytro Dontsov, from 1929 by Italian Fascism, and from 1930 by German Nazism. The Organization pursued a strategy of violence, terrorism, and assassinations with the goal of creating an ethnically homogenous and totalitarian Ukrainian state".

So you see, they were motivated more by pro-Ukrainian Aryan purism than simple anti-Soviet revanchism.

Mind you, in 1945 the OUN flipped the script and sold themselves to the Allies after the war not as Nazi collaborators (which they were ) but rather as valiant anti-Communists. That was a strategy to keep them out of prison for war crimes while also keeping their dreams of nationalism alive.

Of course the CIA welcomed them with open arms, as they did all the Nazis who were willing to fight the Soviets on behalf of the USA.

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Joe Brunoli
Joe Brunoli

Written by Joe Brunoli

Joe is a Yank with dual US-EU citizenship and comments on trends, politics and more. Buy Joe a coffee here: https://ko-fi.com/euroyankee

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