Tehran, IRNA – Some signs like comments made by politicians close to the power circle in Washington, including Hilary Clinton, suggest that the United States and Western countries are seeking to replicate the CIA Operation Cyclone in Ukraine.
While the world is stunned by the headlines about Ukraine crisi, the increasing evidence of continuous attempts by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to form and arm insurgent extremist forces in Ukraine and the consequences of such measure has attracted less global attention.
IRNA has prepared a report based on a Yahoo News report covering recent CIA movement in Ukraine. IRNA's report gathers evidences that show Washington has been arming and strengthening Neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine. The report also surveys the ideology of the group, compares the US’ policy in Ukraine to its policy in Afghanistan during the 1970s and explores the consequences of such approach.
Yahoo News reported in January, a month before Ukraine crisis, that CIA was training an insurgency in Ukraine under a program, which started in 2015, “to kill Russians".
The covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA's Ground Branch was established by the Obama administration after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, but the Biden administration has further augmented it, Yahoo News cited a former senior intelligence official as saying.
One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly, according to Yahoo News, saying that the program has taught the Ukrainians how "to kill Russians".
US officials deny that the CIA training program is, or was ever, offensively oriented and a current senior intelligence official said that the purpose of the training was to assist in “the collection of intelligence". However, several former officials noted that the CIA program has included training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like “cover and move", intelligence and other areas.
Shortly after the Yahoo News report, the Washington Post confirmed the CIA movements in Ukraine, too. In March 5, two weeks after the Russian invasion began, the Washington Post reported that officials in Washington and European capitals anticipated that the Russian military will reverse its early losses, setting the stage for a long, bloody insurgency.
The report said that Americans are planning how to help establish and support a government-in-exile, which could direct guerrilla operations against Russian occupiers, according to several US and European officials. The weapons the United States has provided to Ukraine's military, and that continue to flow into the country, would be crucial to the success of an insurgent movement, officials said.
But who are the groups CIA is supporting?
The fact that the far right force called Azov Battalion was the group trained by the Americans and has received Western arms in recent weeks has been repeatedly mentioned in the Western media.
For example, CNN wrote in a report dated March 30: "The existence of an identifiably Azov element within the Ukrainian armed forces -- and an effective element at that -- poses uncomfortable questions for the Ukrainian government and its Western allies, which continue to send arms to the country.” CNN has also confirmed that Azov Battalion forces have been active among the groups fighting Russian forces in and around Mariupol in recent weeks.
Jerusalem Post is another news outlet that reported the anti-armor weapon MATADOR has recently seen used by the Azov Battalion, which is widely characterized as Neo-Nazi ideologically. "An anti-armor weapon jointly developed by Israel, Singapore and a German company has been seen in operational use by the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion against Russian military forces," Jerusalem post said in the report.
Furthermore, a twitter account affiliated to Azov Battalion released a video last month showing a member of the group was using the weapon to target a Russia armored carrier. There have also been photos showing Azov members while using British rocket launchers. The Belarus medium Nexta TV revealed in a series of photos in March 8 that Azov Battalion was the first Ukrainian group to have learnt using British anti-tank launcher NLAW.
The website Declassified UK reported that it was "highly likely the NLAWs pictured with Azov members were supplied by the UK". It also said that the only other donor of the equipment to Ukraine was believed to be Luxembourg, which recently sent 100.
The publication of the photos was followed by conservative UK MP James Heappey’s reaction, asking the UK Secretary of State for Defense whether Ukraine's Azov Battalion would have access to UK-supplied NLAW anti-tank weapons. The secretary has yet to respond to Heappey’s question.
Western media have recently began their own psychological operation to normalize and whitewash Azov Battalion. The AFP, for instance, claimed in a report last Wednesday that Ukrainians supported the group. The report said: "But in Ukraine, the Azov regiment has largely enjoyed a solid reputation and been showered with praise for its years-long commitment to fight Russian incursions into the country."
“This week, demonstrators gathered in Kyiv to rally public support for Azov and their fellow defenders of Mariupol, as the Russians launched another withering assault on a sprawling steel plant where Ukrainian forces in the southern city are taking a final stance,” the report continued.
They are not "monsters and psychos", Sky News cited a Briton who had recently joined Azov Battalion as saying. “The regiment's background has been used by the Kremlin to justify its claim that Ukraine needed ‘de-Nazifying’. However Ed Arnold, research fellow on European security at the defense think tank RUSI, told Sky News that the Azov military group had ‘made steps to move away from its far-right links’," Sky News said.
Other than Azov, another far-right group named Pravy Sektor also released photos showing its members beside UK-made anti-tank weapons. While Pravy Sektor members dismiss supporting neo-Nazi ideology, they publicly express themselves as fans of Stepan Bandera, the ultranationalist Ukrainian militant leader who cooperated with Nazis during the World War II.
As stated in the first part of this report, however, the US and the West began supporting these far-right Ukrainian groups long before the current war (at least since 2015). In addition to the recent Yahoo News report mentioned above, there is ample evidence of the US policy in recent years in support of the Ukrainian neo-Nazis and their armaments, particularly the Azov Battalion, but "we will mention the most important ones" to summarize the report.
The first signs of Washington's determination to arm and strengthen the neo-Nazis appeared in December 2015. The US Congress at the time stripped the spending bill of the fiscal year 2016 of an amendment that prevented funds from falling into the hands of Ukrainian neo-fascist groups. The Nation later reported that the amendment was removed under pressure from the Pentagon. The move revealed that Washington had changed its previous policy on these extremist groups and was seeking to strengthen them to fight Russia.
There were, then, reports of American weapons flowing into Nazi militias. The reports began emerging from October 2016, when Texas-based AirTronic announced a $5.5 million contract "originating from an Allied European military customer" for their PSRL-1 weapons systems.
In June 2017, photos were published on Azov Battalion's website showing the group's fighters testing PSRL-1 RPGs in the field. The images raised speculation that the unnamed "customer" of AirTronic could be Ukraine.
Two months later (August 2017), the pro-Russian military analytics website Southfront released a secret contract between the Ukrainian state-run company Spetstechnoexport and the American company AirTronic on delivery of 100 PSRL-1 launchers worth $554,575 (about one-tenth of the total). (See the documents here.)
In an interview with VOA in December 2017, Richard Vandiver, Chief Operating Officer at the Texas company, emphasized that the activities were conducted in "very close coordination with the US Embassy, with the US State Department, with the US Pentagon and with the Ukrainian government."
Finally, in January 2018, the Atlantic Council confirmed that the US government had delivered these lethal weapons to the Azov Battalion neo-Nazis. The US embassy has facilitated the transfer of these weapons to Ukraine, Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab research Aric Toler wrote, adding that he was not sure they knew Azov would be the first group to be trained with these weapons.
The Atlantic Council, known among experts as the unofficial NATO lobbyist in Washington and one of the strongest advocates for arming Ukrainian military, was a very unlikely source for such disclosure. While the think tank's motives for the exposure remain unclear, the move made America's semi-covert support for neo-Nazis in Ukraine more apparent and be more widely reported in the media.
A day after the Atlantic Council reported on Azov's acquisition of the US weapons, the National Guard of Ukraine emphasized in an official statement that these weapons were not in Azov's possession at the press release time. On the other hand, Azov Battalion removed all photos of its soldiers working with these weapons from its website under pressure from public opinion.
This content was published in IRNA on May 08, 2022. To restrict the overall size; some images may have been excluded.
Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of UMMnews.
