Letters from Vienna #53
The end of WWII didn’t end upheavals in the East. Timothy Snyder, who I’ll once again rely upon as my guide and storyteller (and what he tells is a story, and as such must be treated with caution), tells us that: “About 780,000 individuals were resettled as Poles or Jews from Soviet Ukraine to Poland between 1944 and 1946…”[1] while in: “…April 1946 Polish authorities organised Operation Group Rzeszów, tasked to complete the expulsion of Ukrainians from Poland. A quarter of a million people were classified as Ukrainians and forcibly resettled to Soviet Ukraine between April and June 1946. During the entire period of the “repatriations” between October 1944 and June 1946, 482,661 people classified as Ukrainians departed for the Soviet Union.”[2]
In 1947 Operation Vistula was put into effect. “In the four months which followed 28 April 1947, the Operation Group moved some 140,660 individuals identified as Ukrainians from southeastern to northern and western Poland. Just as the first round of evacuations and deportations had removed 75 percent of the Ukrainians remaining in Poland in 1944-46, Operation Vistula resettled about three-quarters of those who remained in 1947. Operation Vistula perfected tactics used in Operation Rzeszów. Soldiers would enclose a village and seal off the area to prevent UPA intervention, then a military or security services officer would read a list of names of those to be resettled. Those identified as Ukrainians were given a few hours to pack, and then relocated to intermediary sites. If men tried to escape when the army encircled the village, they were shot.”[3]
The ethnic cleansing was devastating: “In what had been Polish Volhynia, perhaps 7,000 Poles remained in 1947, down from 350,000 in 1939. This was a reduction of 98 percent. In what became Soviet Ukrainian Galicia there were perhaps 150,000 people who called themselves Poles, compared to 1.8 million before the war. This was a reduction of 92 percent. On the far smaller Galician territories that remained in Poland after the border shift, there had been perhaps 600,000 speakers of Ukrainian in 1939; by 1947 there were only about 30,000: a reduction of 95 percent. In Volhynia and Galicia taken together, about 97 percent of the Jewish population was killed during the war.”[4]
This is not all merely of academic interest but has real world implications today. “Ukrainians remember ethnic cleansing by a “Polish” regime and recall the UPA (Ukrajinska powstanska armija (Ukrainian Insurgent Army)) as an organisation that helped them. The memory of the UPA became an essential element of Ukrainian identity in postwar Poland. Most of the Ukrainians deported from Poland in 1944-46 settled in western Ukraine. For them as well, the UPA became the main institutional repository of national identity.”[5]
The connection to the current situation is clear. The right-wing extremists who took over Ukraine in 2014 and have since succeeded in driving the country into war are seen by many of their fellow countrymen and women as being heirs of the “heroic” UPA who would rather commit suicide than surrender. At the same time: these same extremists have a rich tradition of bestiality all of their own. That they are raping, robbing and murdering defenceless Ukrainians shouldn’t surprise[6].
Yet, as Timothy Snyder points out: the question of identity is a complex one. Just as I’m able to switch within a single sentence between two languages and just as many do the same, so many in what is now Poland and Ukraine were able to do likewise. This isn’t a proof of genius but simply an example of the social nature of man (and woman) kind.
“Teenagers and adults who cleansed each other during the 1940s were once children who (sometimes quite literally) played together in the 1930s. The recollection of the Volhynian Pole “Waldemar Lotnik,” who took part in the ferocious mutual cleansings of late 1943 on the Polish side, is typical: “but it was with Ukrainians that I spent most of my childhood, learnt to read and write, skated on frozen lakes in winter and discovered shards of Russian and German ammunition, left over from the First World War, in the forests and fields…” He doesn’t say so, but he certainly spoke Ukrainian with these children.”[7]
“Some Polish children escaped death in Volhynia in 1943 because they spoke Ukrainian with Ukrainian children they played with and could say their prayers in Ukrainian when stopped on the road by strangers. Volhynian Ukrainian families who wished to save Polish children taught them the Lord’s Prayer in Ukrainian.”[8]
The complexity led to a confusion, which might have been funny had its consequences not proven so tragic: “The Poles who surrounded the Galician village of Zubrza in summer 1944 wished to take revenge on the Ukrainian nation by killing Ukrainians. The village’s five Poles were not convinced that these unknown attackers were really Poles: local Poles apparently thought the armed outsiders were an UPA brigade, masquerading as Poles to reveal the village’s Poles. In accordance with this reading of the situation, these five Poles pretended to be Ukrainians. Their calculation was wrong; the attackers really were fellow Poles. The ruse was successful; their fellow Poles took them for Ukrainians and killed them.”[9]
“In May 1947…the Polish regime created a false UPA brigade, composed of speakers of Ukrainian, in an attempt to draw the OUN leader from his bunker. A meeting was arranged. But the disguise worked all too well: on its way to the rendezvous, the Polish “UPA” unit was mistakenly attacked by Polish security forces.”[10]
It should hardly surprise that outside agencies should take the opportunity to exploit the chaos, which continued well after the war.
Wayne Madsen reported in 2016 how a “formerly top-secret CIA document dated July 13, 1953, provides a description of Aerodynamic: “The purpose of Project Aerodynamic is to provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance for cold war and hot war purposes. Such groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UHVR) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN), the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in Western Europe and the United States, and other organizations such as the OUN/B will be utilized”. The CIA admitted in a 1970 formerly secret document that it had been in contact with the ZPUHVR since 1950.”
“The OUN-B was the Bandera faction of the OUN and its neo-Nazi sympathizers are today found embedded in the Ukrainian national government in Kiev and in regional and municipal governments throughout the country.”
“Aerodynamic placed field agents inside Soviet Ukraine who, in turn, established contact with Ukrainian Resistance Movement, particularly SB (intelligence service) agents of the OUN who were already operating inside Ukraine. The CIA arranged for airdrops of communications equipment and other supplies, presumably including arms and ammunition, to the “secret” CIA army in Ukraine. Most of the CIA’s Ukrainian agents received training in West Germany from the US Army’s Foreign Intelligence Political and Psychological (FI-PP) branch. Communications between the CIA agents in Ukraine and their Western handlers were conducted by two-way walkie-talkie (WT), shortwave via international postal channels, and clandestine airborne and overland couriers.”[11]
CIA involvement in Ukraine has never been idealistic; it has never been concerned with “helping Ukrainians” or “liberating Ukraine”: “The CIA isn’t doing illegal things so the minimum wage will go up, or so that bankers will be more careful about selling mortgages to people who can’t afford them” Doug Valentine said to Ryan Dawson. “They’re working with the bankers. They want Ukrainians putting their money in Morgan Stanley brokerage firm in Kiev. They want to suck the life out of Ukrainians.”[12]
Valentine told Dawson how the United Action Center “looks like a CIA facilitated mechanism to create a crisis in Ukraine and exploit it. The 40 NGOs it coordinates are perfectly placed to provide cover for covert CIA political action.”
“The center UA’s stated purpose was to pull Ukraine out of the Russian orbit and deliver it to western corporations. And that’s what happened…”[13]
Ultimately what has been going on since 1953 (and long before) has been a game of geopolitical chess. As I mentioned before (see letter #25): “In the 1990s Zbigniew Brzeziński wrote: “Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.””
The fate of the average Ukrainian, the sufferings and needs of those caught up in the horrors of a meaningless war, are the last things on the minds of the planners in Washington, Langley or Brussels.
[1] p. 187 The Reconstruction of Nations, Timothy Snyder
[2] p.194 Ibid
[3] p.199 Ibid
[4] p.203 Ibid
[5] p.203 Ibid
[7] p.205 Ibid
[8] p.205 Ibid
[9] p.206 Ibid
[10] p.206 Ibid
[11] https://www.voltairenet.org/article189895.html?fbclid=IwAR306BaIst1WIi6vYAEUf-v4sVggEi2P4Fl7wBwGMwkcZafE4O4yKhYTVlo
[12] p.137 The CIA As Organized Crime, Douglas Valentine
[13] p.131 Ibid