Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Andrey Khrustalev
[REGNUM] On the eve of July 11, when Poles for the first time celebrate the National Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Genocide Committed by the OUN and UPA, an offer to work was circulated in Lviv social networks. Come to Kropyvnytskyi Square, take part in a rally and earn "from a thousand dollars."
Although, according to the law signed on July 2 by the outgoing President Andrzej Duda, this day is not a day off even in Poland and does not imply any street events with budget expenditures. At most, educational events explaining how Banderites massacred Polish villages in Volyn in 1943.
The preamble to the Law states that in 1939–1946, Ukrainian nationalists from various formations, “operating on the eastern outskirts of the Second Polish Republic (Volyn, Tarnopol, Stanislaviv, Lviv, Polesie Voivodeships) and on the territory of today’s Lublin and Subcarpathian Voivodeships, committed the crime of genocide against the Polish population. They killed more than one hundred thousand Poles, mostly rural residents, destroyed their property and led to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Poles from the eastern outskirts of the Second Polish Republic.”
The apogee of this crime came in July 1943, and the “symbolic date of the hecatomb of Poles” is July 11, 1943, when Poles were killed in about a hundred cities.
The Sejm immortalized the “martyrdom for belonging to the Polish nation” in the form of an annual “holiday” (the Polish word święto has a broad meaning, implying any celebratory events). And this is a personal project of the new president who won the election, Karol Nawrocki, who headed the Institute of National Remembrance. Part of his election campaign, built on anti-Ukrainian and anti-European slogans.
Naturally, “across the road”, in the former eastern Kresy, indignation about what is happening knows no bounds. After all, the OUN* (b) and UPA* are the cornerstone of the new historical myth created by the representatives of Galicia, the main heroes for the “conscious” Ukrainian.
The discussion of the upcoming rally (or rather, the rumor that it would take place) was going on in social networks back in the spring of 2025. And here it is worth clarifying that it is on Kropyvnytskyi Square that a monument to "hero No. 1" Stefan Bandera was erected. Ukrainian authorities, public figures and various activists shouted in one voice that the Polish Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Genocide is another provocation by the Kremlin to set Ukraine and Poland at odds.
The leader of the odious Svoboda party, Oleh Tyahnybok, wrote after Duda signed the law: “We clearly know the truth, and it is extremely simple: the Ukrainian Insurgent Army* are fighters against the Nazis, Bolsheviks and any other occupiers, including the Polish ones at that time.”
And his comrade, the odious “historian” Mykhailo Galushchak, posted banners with Bandera and red-and-black flags with the comment “Our answer to the Polish Sejm” on his social network page. Although this is basically all he can do – Galushchak was detained for an administrative offence back in 2017, when during memorial events in the Polish village of Guta-Penyatskaya, destroyed by the Galician SS, he held a red-and-black flag and a poster demanding the restoration of Ukrainian graves destroyed in Poland.
But who is organizing this obvious provocation with the rally is a very interesting question.
The first option is the work of the Ukrainian special services, acting preemptively to prevent any mass gatherings of people who could transform dissatisfaction with the political position of the Poles into their own, given that in Lviv there are crowds of relatives of Ukrainian Armed Forces servicemen who went missing at the front.
The second option is that this is a fun activity for the Polish special services, who are feeling out the situation in the region and want to destabilize it. The following scenario is possible: several dozen local Poles will gather for a peaceful protest, the Lviv authorities will take measures, and thus the Polish authorities will get a pretext for countermeasures and more active intervention in the cultural and historical policies of their neighbors.
Provocative call to come to the rally for money, spread on social networks
Because the same Navrotsky puts the question bluntly: until you repent for the sins of your Bandera, you will not see the European Union.
But we should not discard the third option, that this is an internal political showdown between supporters of Petro Poroshenko **, "Servants of the People" and nationalists, an attempt to limit the influence of the latter. The Lviv City Council officially stated that no one had approached them about holding mass events on July 11 and if such events take place, they will be unauthorized - the police and the SBU will intervene.
In any case, the promise to pay $1,000 for participation initially indicates that this is some very shady story.
Because it cannot be otherwise in the matter of the spread of Polish influence on territories that Poland considers its historically. It is unlikely that we should expect a military invasion or other forceful measures - everything is done more carefully, and only the problem of attitude to the events of 1943 is a point of open conflict.
According to modern Ukrainian pro-government historians and nationalist historians, the victims of the "Volyn tragedy" (as the Ukrainian side calls it) were 30-40 thousand Poles and 15-20 thousand Ukrainians. According to the late professor of Lviv University Stepan Makarchuk (data from 1999), in 1941-1945, about 380 thousand people died in Volyn, including 20 thousand Jews, 50 thousand Poles, 120 thousand Ukrainians (mainly from the actions of the Germans).
At the same time, according to Polish historians, the first of whom was Professor Grzegorz Motyka, 50-60 thousand Poles died in Volyn, and if we add to this the number of killed Poles in Galicia and other regions, we get a figure of 100-130 thousand people, which was repeatedly stated by representatives of the Polish authorities.
Only a few villages were able to escape, having created powerful and well-armed self-defense units.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry criticized the decision to mark "Bloody Sunday" and said that it "runs counter to the spirit of good neighborly relations" between the countries. According to this side, it is necessary not to pedal the topic of genocide, but to perpetuate the memory of "all parties to the conflict."
"The Volyn tragedy is complex, bloody, multi-layered. It was not just "Bandera terror" or "Polish revenge", as different sides present it. It was an ethnic war in the context of the collapse of states, chaos, loss of control over the region. But if one side only hammers its dead into granite, and officially brands the other as executioners, then this is no longer about history. This is about the geopolitics of memory," sadly says Kiev journalist and publisher Maksim Golubev.
And his hint replaces a direct statement of fact: if not the majority, then many Poles continue to believe that Poland’s real eastern borders are much further than the current ones and that it should return Western Ukraine to itself.
The official recognition of the genocide is a development of the already established ideology that the OUN* and its militant wing were a terrorist organization. And this terrorism was directed against the Polish state, of which the Western Ukrainian nationalists were citizens.
That is, the logic here is actually elementary: if some Polish citizens committed an act of genocide against other Polish citizens on the basis of nationality, then ultimately this is Poland's internal affair. And it is actively dealing with it. What does some Ukraine have to do with it, having seized the territory of an ancient power as a result of the aggression of the Soviet Union?
Moreover, the Ukrainian fools themselves sing in every possible way about the “Soviet occupation”.
Well, other processes are going on in parallel. Back in 2016, the press was actively spreading information that the Poles had prepared more than 1,600 claims for restitution - compensation for lost property.
One of its initiators was Konrad Renkas, the head of the society of Poles whose ancestors lived in the "Eastern Kresy". No one gave exact figures for the amounts of restitution payments that Poles could theoretically present to Ukrainians. But this is a huge amount of money. For example, according to rough estimates, Jews could present claims to the Polish government for 300 billion dollars for the property they lost on Polish territory.
In general, the topic of returning Ukrainian territories to Poland is quite popular among Polish politicians, especially nationalists. Another stone thrown in Ukraine's direction is a solid "dividend" in the elections, so the topics of restitution and Kiev's recognition of the "Volyn massacre" are raised there regularly.
Blocking Ukraine's accession to the European Union if Ukrainians do not repent for the crimes of the UPA* is the main lever of pressure that Warsaw uses. But it is not the only one. Before the start of the SVO, one of the active instruments of influence on Ukrainians was the issuance of "Pole's cards" to the latter. They provided various benefits for education, doing business in Poland, social payments, etc.
Officially, the cards were only given to those who could document that their grandparents were ethnic Poles. In reality, such “roots” were often simply bought. According to unofficial estimates, several hundred thousand cards were issued. Those who received them automatically acknowledged the traditions, rights and legislation of Poland, and therefore agreed that the UPA* were criminals and murderers.
And if at the interview regarding the issuance of the “Pole’s Card” someone says otherwise, they will fly out like a bullet, and there will be no more chances to get an appointment.
Well, more than 1.5 million Ukrainians, who, according to official data, live in Poland, are already integrated into the Polish picture of the world in one way or another - first of all, children attending schools and other educational institutions. And the situation greatly contributes to this: only 600 thousand of them are legalized, and being on bird rights and in constant fear of deportation to Ukraine greatly contributes to the development of obedience.
After the start of total raids on shopping malls, the crazy rise in prices and other Ukrainian realities, many Ukrainians are ready to work for shelter and food for pennies, forgetting about saving money.
It is worth noting the fact that a fairly powerful circle of lobbyists for Poland has formed among the Ukrainian intelligentsia and scientific staff.
A group of Ukrainian historians, including professors from the Ukrainian Catholic University Yaroslav Hrytsak and Alexander Zaitsev, signed a petition recognizing the Polish interpretation of the events of 1943 in Volyn.
Lecturer at the Lviv Academy of Land Forces Andriy Kharuk, who until 2014 actively published his works in Russian publishing houses, after 2022 reoriented himself to Poland, where he actively publishes in scientific journals. His daughter studies there.
One thing is clear: the weaker the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the Ukrainian authorities are, the more brazenly Poland will behave and demand the return of the "Eastern Borderlands" and compensation payments. It was not for nothing that Churchill once called it "the hyena of Europe." The stronger the smell of decaying Ukraine is, the stronger Warsaw's appetite will be: all this has already happened in the past, and it is unlikely that the Poles have changed their habits.
[AmericanThinker] The United States and the European Union (EU) are often portrayed as natural allies, bound by shared values, history, and mutual economic interests. Yet behind this facade lies the reality that the EU repeatedly acts to undermine American power, prosperity, and principles. Far from being a loyal friend, the EU is a strategic competitor, an economic rival, and a political bloc hostile to democracy and free speech.
Moreover, U.S. leaders like Clinton, Obama, and Biden often aligned themselves closely with the EU and its globalist ideology, and, at least as seen from the British view, do so at the expense of our and American sovereignty, national interests, and constitutional freedoms. In doing so, these leaders facilitated not only the EU’s rise—nobody in Britain will forget Obama’s threat just before we voted to leave the rotten, corrupt EU—but also undermined the democratic foundations and free speech traditions valued by our conservative American friends.
The EU is a supranational political entity with ambitions that run counter to American interests and the principles of self-governance. It is an organization that stifles democratic expression, disregards the will of the people in the member nations, and suppresses dissent. It has long used its regulatory clout to pursue policies that harm American industries, the most glaring example being the Airbus-Boeing dispute in which the EU provided illegal subsidies to Airbus, enabling it to undercut Boeing on the global stage. Despite WTO rulings condemning these subsidies, the EU has consistently prioritized protecting its own industries (mostly French and German) over fair competition.
In the technology sector, the EU has waged regulatory warfare against American tech giants. Under the guise of privacy protection and consumer rights, it has implemented sweeping rules such as the General Data Protection Regulation and issued multi-billion-euro fines against U.S. companies, including Google, Amazon, and Apple. While concerns over data privacy are legitimate, the EU’s hypocritical regulatory approach is motivated by protectionism and a desire to weaken U.S. technological dominance.
Beyond economics, the EU repeatedly seeks to position itself as a counterbalance to U.S. global leadership. During the 2003 Iraq War, key EU members like France and Germany led international opposition to the U.S.-led coalition, undermining American diplomatic efforts and fueling global anti-American sentiment.
...Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the EU’s trajectory is its hostility toward democracy and free speech, principles supposedly enshrined in Western political culture. While the EU lectures the world on human rights and democratic values, it has repeatedly shown disdain for democracy by ignoring or overturning referendum results and trying to change national election results.
...President Obama took Clinton’s globalist orientation to new heights. His presidency represented the most ideologically aligned American leadership the EU had ever encountered. Obama’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Paris Climate Accord, a framework largely shaped by EU priorities, exemplified his readiness to subordinate U.S. economic interests to globalist objectives by imposing burdensome environmental restrictions on American industry while giving major polluters like China and India a free pass.
...So, beneath the public declarations of partnership, the European Union has emerged as a strategic rival to the United States, a political entity hostile to democracy and free speech, and a promoter of globalist policies that erode national sovereignty.
Friendship is measured not by shared platitudes but by respect for sovereignty, democracy, and liberty. By that measure, the EU is no friend of the United States, and neither were Clinton and Obama. Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Grom the Affective ||
07/11/2025 02:02 ||
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#1
Forget Iran - send B-2s to Brussels.
Pay me now or pay me later.
We'll be at war with Europe within a generation, and better to strike now while they're weak.
The pussies they have won't fight, but the Muslims they're raising will.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Denis Davydov
[REGNUM] In many stories about the inglorious military path of the Galician division of the SS troops, the role of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church remains somehow behind the scenes. Although its contribution to the fate of the "SS" cannot be overestimated: perhaps it was this that determined the decision to effectively ban it in 1946.
Uniate priests ministered to the OUN(b) formations as part of the special purpose regiment "Brandenburg-800" even before the invasion of the USSR. The Church did not try to prevent the extermination of Jews and Polish intelligentsia in Lviv, which was organized by the OUN*, and did not condemn it in any way. Metropolitan of Galicia, Archbishop of Lviv and Bishop of Kamenets-Podolsk Andrey Sheptytsky addressed the faithful in July 1941 with a pastoral message: "We greet the victorious German Army as a liberator from the enemy. We render due obedience to the established Authority."
Later, the parishes of the UGCC were the main centers of agitation during the formation of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, better known as "Galicia" (although it was never called that). And the SS uniform was donned mainly by representatives of the Greek Catholic confession, to whose care two dozen chaplains were assigned to each regiment.
In general, the lucky rescue of the Galician SS men from punishment took place because, through the Uniate priests, it was possible to organize a meeting between the commander of “Galicia” and Pope Pius XII, who lobbied for their non-extradition to the USSR as Polish citizens.
And instead of the deserved camps, the former punishers quietly dispersed all over the world - to the USA, Canada, Argentina, except for those who consciously decided to return to their homeland. So, in the end, it turns out that if the Nuremberg Tribunal recognized the SS as a criminal organization and gave participating countries the right to bring to trial national, military or occupation tribunals for belonging to it, then the "repressions" against the UGCC seem quite justified - in addition to the fact that almost 80 years ago, the Vatican's claims to ownership of Ukraine were stopped for a long time.
CC RECRUITERS
The Galicians have always been very proud of their religiosity; even in the famous song of the punk, Soviet rock group “Brothers Gadyukini” there were the words: “We are guys from Banderstadt, we go to church, we respect our parents.”
That is, they are bearers of a special spirituality.
When I first attended a service at the Cathedral of St. George (where the residence of the UGCC metropolitans was located for a long time), I was amazed at the fervor with which very young people fell to their knees, crossed themselves, and kissed the icons. This was also astonishing because outside the church, these same citizens demonstrated xenophobia and undisguised aggression in every way, which eventually devoured the entire country.
But then, before the illegal third round of presidential elections, pushed through by these devout supporters of the “orange revolution,” it was enough that they climbed on our heads with their political ideas, while shying away from our Russian language.
So even in 1943–1944, in the first training camp of the 14th Waffen-Grenadier Galician Division in Heidelager, a regular Sunday liturgy was held in the barracks. Although the SS barracks were considered almost sacred places of National Socialist neo-paganism.
At least, other Christian services were definitely not held in them and there were no chaplains in other SS divisions.
The Governor of Galicia, Otto Wächter, was an Austrian and understood well how important religion was in the lives of former subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Therefore, he took this into account in his March 1943 “Manifesto to the Armed Youth of Galicia”: “The religious care of the volunteers will rest in the hands of Ukrainian priests.”
So, against the backdrop of promises to provide for the families of military personnel on par with the Germans, this circumstance raised the whole of Galicia on its ears - volunteers came from the most remote villages, in total there were about 80 thousand of them, of which only 50 thousand were left, and 13 thousand were enrolled (in January 1944 there were 17,200 of them).
But the main recruiters, in fact, were Greek Catholic priests: in May 1943, festive "proclamations" about the creation of the division were held in the large cities of the region, combined with the service of God. Volunteers listened to inspired speeches from their pastors, there is even a photo of Bishop Josaphat Kotsylovsky in Przemysl instructing his fellow countrymen: "Go into battle and return as victors."
The formation was carried out by a specially created body - the Military Administration, which was headed by the German Colonel Alfred Bisanz, and the members were authoritative Galician figures. Including Fr. Vasyl Laba, who, by appointment of the head of the UGCC Sheptytsky, headed the department of pastoral care of the division and selected chaplains, having experience working in the same position with mountain riflemen in the Austrian army.
On July 8, 1943, a farewell ceremony for the volunteers took place in Lviv. It was a huge demonstration in which about 50 thousand people took part. The field bishop's service was conducted on the square by Pelchinska Street by Bishop Nikita Budka, and the farewell speech was given by the same Doctor Laba.
After the service, volunteers marched in columns along the streets of Lviv, past the platform from which they were greeted by Governor Vekhter and Professor Vladimir Kubiyovych, the initiator of the idea to create a military formation from Galicians. Probably everyone has seen the photo of girls giving the Nazi salute in beautiful wreaths.
But it turns out that the Greek Catholic Church, which became an intermediary between the Ukrainian community and the German command of the division, which treated the natives with undisguised disgust, also gave the Nazi salute along with them.
So the head of the SS Main Office, SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, promised his boss Ernst Kaltenbrunner that the priests would remain in the division as long as their influence was positive, without promoting anti-German sentiments.
And the Uniates, of course, did not disappoint.
THE MASTERMINDS OF MURDER
The duties of the chaplains were as follows.
Every Sunday they celebrated the liturgy and preached a sermon, but they could do it on weekdays as well if the unit commander did not object. Twice a week, the military priest held discussion circles with the servicemen about the psychology of a soldier, his virtues, his readiness to die in battle, fighting spirit, comradeship, and similar things.
Plus, the chaplains were responsible for all the cultural education with the choir and church hymns, press reviews with translation into the language, and organizing meetings with families who came to visit the soldier.
In the decree on the tasks of field priests, which is quoted by the diaspora writer Roman Kolesnik, it was stated: “All attempts of the priest should be focused on gaining the trust of the soldiers, on understanding their character and soul, in order to have the appropriate influence on them at a critical moment and help the unit commander understand his goal.”
However, the Germans looked at this more simply and shot their Untermenschen charges even for minor offenses: this one ate a piece of margarine from a supply cart during a march, this one threw a blanket over a non-commissioned officer’s head as a joke during an evening roll call.
And chaplain Vladimir Stetsyuk was shot for failing to follow orders during the battle near Brody in July 1944 by a German major in the presence of division commander Fritz Freitag and witnesses from among the rank-and-file SS men.
The command did not need ephemeral spirituality, but a very specific attitude, which is demonstrated by the biography of Fr. Ivan-Vsevolod Durbak, chaplain of the 5th Galician Rregiment. In August 1944, Metropolitan Sheptytsky issued him a personal certificate, which is now kept in the SBU archive.
The document states that Durbak "is a Catholic priest of the Greek-Ruthenian rite of the Lviv Archdiocese, properly ordained and not subject to any ecclesiastical censure that would prevent him from being in the altar. Therefore, we strongly recommend him in the Lord to all to whom he may come."
It would seem, what kind of censure could there be?
However, back in 1940, Durbak joined the Nachtigall battalion and provided spiritual guidance to it. In particular, when Jews, representatives of the Polish intelligentsia, Soviet authorities, and communists were exterminated in Lviv according to a list prepared by the OUN*. From July 1 to 6, several thousand people were shot and hanged, including over 70 professors of Lviv University.
According to legend, the metropolitan was hiding some rabbis in his residence, but his church did not condemn the murder or try to stop it. It welcomed the "new order."
Then Fr. Durbak, together with his charges, moved to the 201st Schutzmannschaft Battalion and told something about God to the people who were burning Belarusian villages along with their inhabitants.
In 1943, the holy father became a chaplain in the Galician SS division, and in February 1944, as an experienced fighter, he worked with the Beiersdorf combat group, sent by the Germans against Kovpak’s partisans.
At the same time, they burned down the Polish village of Guta-Penyatskaya for supporting the Red partisans, suffering their first losses - the Polish self-defense tried to resist and killed two SS men. As a result of these efforts, Durbak was awarded the Military Merit Cross with Swords, 2nd Class (analogous to the Medal for Military Merit).
August 1944, which is the date of the document, is another seasonal migration; the Galician division was defeated near Brody, and its remnants were sent for reformation at the “home” Neuhammer training ground, where the reserve regiment was located.
Apparently, the SS “priest” was also heading there.
Ahead of him was participation in the suppression of the Slovak national uprising and the fight against the Yugoslav partisans, who were given a special concept of Christianity, as the Galicians saw it, just as the Belarusians had seen it before.
Well, when "Galicia", hastily renamed the "1st Division of the Ukrainian National Army", surrendered to the British, the Uniate chaplains managed to organize a meeting between General Pavlo Shandruk and the anti-Soviet Pope Pius XII. And he sent a letter to the US State Department, explaining that the Galicians were Polish subjects and did not fall under the Yalta agreements.
So they were taken to England and in 1947 they were released to do their own thing: to write memoirs and tell how all of Europe admired the beauty of their liturgies and beautiful singing.
Which was only appreciated by the Soviet prosecutor's office and the MGB of the Ukrainian SSR.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] The Russian FSB has published the interrogation protocol of 18-year-old Ivan Vasyuk, who participated in the Volyn massacre of 1943-1944 and was a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, as well as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN and UPA are extremist organizations whose activities are banned in the Russian Federation). The document is posted on the agency's website.
"During my stay in the Bandera organization from July 1943 until the moment of my arrest... our unit under the command of "Raven" was engaged in attacks on Polish villages, killed the Polish population, took away all their usable property, cattle, bread and other products. Personally, I took part in attacks on Polish villages about 10 times and personally killed at least 19 Poles, including eight adult men, six women and five children," he said during interrogation.
According to Vasyuk, Banderites killed both Poles and Ukrainians who were not members of the OUN. In January 1944, Soviet military counterintelligence arrested a young man in the Rivne region.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on June 5, the Polish Sejm granted state status to the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Volyn Massacre. 435 of the 436 deputies present at the vote voted for this decision.
On the same day, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry condemned Warsaw's decision to grant state status to the Day of Remembrance of Poles - victims of the genocide committed by the OUN-UPA. Kiev considered this step to be contrary to the spirit of good-neighborly relations and called for refraining from escalation measures.
Below is a translation of the documents the FSB posted on their website: VOLYN MASSACRE OF 1943-1944. REVELATIONS OF A UPA CUT-OFF: “…I PERSONALLY KILLED AT LEAST 19 POLES”
In the summer of 1943, Ukrainian nationalists carried out mass actions to exterminate the ethnic Polish population in the territory of Volyn (Rovno, Volyn and part of the Ternopil regions of modern Ukraine). This tragic date went down in the history of World War II under the name of the Volyn massacre. According to a number of historians, more than 100,000 Poles and civilians of other nationalities, including Ukrainians, fell victim to Ukrainian nationalists.
* * *
In early January 1944, the 143rd Konotop-Korosten Rifle Division (143 KKSD) of the 13th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front entered the territory of the Rivne region with fighting.
On January 8, having overcome the stubborn resistance of the Nazi troops, the division went on the offensive and on January 11, after street fighting, took the city of Sarny.
During the fighting, officers of the counterintelligence department (OKR) "Smersh" of the 143rd KKSD carried out a search for Nazi war criminals and their accomplices, including members of Ukrainian nationalist organizations.
During the search operations, the SMERSH members detained one of the participants in the Volyn massacre, Ivan Vasyuk (pseudonym Golub), a member of one of the units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA - an organization banned in Russia) - the combat wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Banderites (OUN-B - an organization banned in Russia).
On January 9, 1944, during an interrogation by the SMERSH OKR officers of the 143rd KKSD, Vasyuk gave detailed testimony about the crimes he had committed.
He commanded bandit raids on Polish villages in Volyn in 1943–1944 by the Zdolbunovsky kuren of the UPA group “Bogun” in the south of Volyn – Mykola Svistun (pseudonyms “Raven”, “Ash” and “Yarby”).
When the investigator asked him what he did while in the “Bender organization,” Vasyuk replied:
"During my stay in the Bendery organization from July 1943 until the moment of my arrest, i.e. from 7.I-[19]44, our unit under the command of "Raven" was engaged in attacks on Polish villages, killing the Polish population, taking away all their usable property, cattle, bread and other products. Personally, I took part in attacks on Polish villages about 10 times and personally killed no less than 19 Poles, including eight adult men, six women and five children."
Bandera's followers killed not only Poles, but also did not spare Ukrainians, unless they were members of the OUN organization:
"Our detachment, including myself, attacked the following villages: Stariki, Vyazovka, Ugla. The attack on these villages took place in November 1943. In these villages, as I have shown above, I killed 19 people. After the inhabitants of these villages were killed, the property and cattle were taken by us, in these villages, except for the village of Ugla, all the huts were burned, the bodies of the killed men and women, old people and children were left in place in the houses and then set on fire. If Poles and Ukrainians live in one village and if these Ukrainians are not members of the Bendery organizations, then we treat them the same as the Poles [...]."
According to Vasyuk’s testimony, members of the “Vorona” detachment brutally killed about 1,500 civilians of Polish and Ukrainian nationality in July 1943 – January 1944:
"In total, our detachment, i.e. a hundred, killed in three villages, approximately 1,500 people of all ages, some of them were killed on the spot, in their homes, and most were taken into the forest. The killings often took place with axes, some were stabbed with knives, I personally killed 19 people with a rifle [...]."
The population of Ukrainian villages supporting the Banderites stayed at home during the day, and at night they participated in attacks on Polish villages in Volyn. During interrogation, Vasyuk testified about the villages that supported the Banderites:
"The Bender villages are the following: Tynny, Sarnovsky district, Vznosychi, Bovshi, Tyzhechi, Viktovichi, Knyasovo, Kholopy, Bytrichi, Yanevka, Belka, Drokhovo, Yadvipolo. The entire population of the above-mentioned villages is male and are members of the Bender organization. Weapons are kept in huts during the day and are not hidden anywhere [...]".
#2
The link is https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GvekEXiakAAgbPo?format=jpg&name=medium, Jairong+Scourge+of+the+Gepids2435. My interpretation of that is that Contrapoints posted the image sourced from PBS. I meant to expand on the identification and pointed comment in the headline, not contradict it — clearly I was less effective than I’d hoped. My apologies for the confusion.
[WAPO] Aaron Brown was working as a CIA case officer in 2018 when he wrote a post for an agency blog warning about what he called "gait recognition." He cautioned his fellow officers that computer algorithms would soon be able to identify people not just by their faces, or fingerprints, or DNA — but by the unique ways they walked.
Many of his colleagues, trained in the traditional arts of disguise and concealment, were skeptical. One called it "threat porn." But Brown’s forecast was chillingly accurate. A study published in May reported that a model called FarSight, using gait, body and face recognition, was 83 percent accurate in verifying an individual at up to 1,000 meters, and was 65 percent accurate even when the face was obscured. "It’s hard to overstate how powerful that is," Brown said.
Brown’s story illustrates a profound transformation that is taking place in the world of intelligence. For spies, there is literally no place to hide. Millions of cameras around the world record every movement and catalogue it forever. Every action leaves digital tracks that can be studied and linked with others. Your cellphone and social media accounts tell the world precisely who and where you are.
Further, attempts at concealment can backfire in the digital age. An intelligence source told me that the CIA gave burner phones to a network of spies in a Middle Eastern country more than a decade ago and instructed them to turn the phones on only when sending operational messages. But the local security service had devised an algorithm that could identify "anomalous" phones that were used infrequently. The network was exposed by its attempt at secrecy.
"The more you try to hide, the more you stand out," Brown explained. He wouldn’t discuss the Middle East case or any other operational details. But the lesson is obvious: If you don’t have a cellphone or a social media profile these days, that could signal you’re a spy or criminal who’s trying to stay off the grid.
Brown, a wiry former Army Ranger and CIA counterterrorism officer, is one of a small group of ex-spies who are trying to reinvent American intelligence to survive in this age of "ubiquitous technical surveillance," or UTS. He launched a new company this year called Lumbra. Its goal is to build AI "agents" that can find and assess — and act upon — data that reveals an adversary’s intentions.
Lumbra is one of nearly a dozen start-ups that I’ve examined over the past several months to explore where intelligence is headed in 2025. It’s a dazzling world of new technology. One company uses data to identify researchers who may have connections to Chinese intelligence. Another interrogates big data systems the way an advertising company might, to identify patterns through what its founder calls "ADINT." A third uses a technology it calls "Obscura" to bounce cellphone signals among different accounts so they can’t be identified or intercepted.
Most of these intelligence entrepreneurs are former CIA or military officers. They share a fear that the intelligence community isn’t adapting fast enough to the new world of espionage. "Technologically, the agency can feel like a sarcophagus when you see everything that’s happening outside," worries Edward Bogan, a former CIA officer. He now works with a nonprofit called 2430 Group — the number was an early CIA cover address in Washington — that tries to help technology companies protect their work from adversaries.
The Trump administration recognizes this intelligence revolution, at least in principle. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said during confirmation hearings he wants to ramp up covert operations, with officers "going places no one else can go and doing things no one else can do." That’s a commendable goal, but if the agency doesn’t reinvent its tradecraft, Ratcliffe’s bold talk may well fail. Traditional operations will only expose the CIA and its sources to greater risk.
A CIA spokesperson said this week in response to a query: "Today’s digital environment poses as many opportunities as it does challenges. We’re an adaptable agency, and it is well within the ingenuity and creativity of our officers to develop ways to navigate effectively in complex environments. In fact, we are exploiting many of the same technologies to recruit spies and steal information."
Brown takes hope from the work that younger CIA officers are doing to reimagine the spy business: "Some of the agency’s smartest people are working on these tradecraft problems from sunup to sundown, and they are coming up with unique solutions."
The CIA’s technology challenge is a little-noted example of a transformation that’s happening in every area of defense and security. Today, smart machines can outwit humans. I’ve written about the algorithm war that has revolutionized the battlefield in Ukraine, where no soldier is safe from drones and precision-guided missiles. We’ve just seen a similar demonstration of precision targeting in Israel’s war against Iran. For soldiers and spies everywhere, following the old rules can get you killed.
(Illustration by Raven Jiang/For The Washington Post)
The art of espionage is thousands of years old. The Bible speaks of it, as do ancient Greek, Persian and Chinese texts. Through the ages, it has been based on two pillars: Spies operate in secret, masking who they are and what they’re doing (call it "cover"), and they use techniques to hide their movements and communications (call it "tradecraft"). Modern technology has shattered both pillars.
To recall the mystique of the CIA’s old-school tradecraft, consider Antonio J. Mendez, the agency’s chief of disguise in the 1980s. He described in a memoir how he created ingenious facial masks and other deceptions that could make someone appear to be a different race, gender, height and profile. Some of the disguises you see on "The Americans" or "Mission Impossible" use techniques developed by Mendez and his colleagues.
The CIA’s disguises and forgeries back then were like works of fine art. But the agency in its first few decades was also a technology pioneer — innovating on spy planes, satellite surveillance, battery technology and covert communications. Its tech breakthroughs were mostly secret systems, designed and built in-house.
The Silicon Valley tech revolution shattered the agency’s innovation model. Private companies began driving change and government labs were lagging.
Seeing the disconnect, CIA Director George Tenet in 1999 launched the agency’s own venture capital firm called "In-Q-Tel" to connect with tech start-ups that had fresh ideas that could help the agency. In-Q-Tel’s first CEO was Gilman Louie, who had previously been a video game designer. In-Q-Tel made some smart early investments, including in the software company Palantir and the weapons innovator Anduril.
But the CIA’s early attempts to create new tradecraft sometimes backfired. To cite one particularly disastrous example: The agency developed what seemed an ingenious method to communicate with its agents overseas using internet addresses that appeared to be news or hobby sites. Examples included an Iranian soccer site, a Rasta music page and a site for Star Wars fans, and dozens more, according to investigations by Yahoo News and Reuters.
The danger was that if one agent was caught, the technology trick could be exposed — endangering scores of other agents. It was like mailing secret letters that could be traced to the same postbox — a mistake the CIA had made with Iran years before.
Iran identified the internet ruse and began taking apart CIA networks around 2010. China soon did the same thing. The agency’s networks in both countries were largely destroyed from 2010 to 2012.
In a 2012 speech during his stint as CIA director, Gen. David H. Petraeus warned that the fundamentals of spying had changed: "We have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy. ... Every byte left behind reveals information about location, habits, and, by extrapolation, intent and probable behavior."
But machines moved faster than humans in the spy world. That’s what I learned in my weeks of on-the-record discussions with former CIA officers working to develop the espionage tools of the future. They describe a cascade of commercial innovations — instant search, mobile phones, cheap cameras, limitless accessible data — that came so quickly the CIA simply couldn’t adapt at the speed of change.
Duyane Norman was one of the CIA officers who tried to move the system. In 2014, he returned from overseas to take a senior operations job. The agency was struggling then to recover from the collapse of its networks in Iran and China, and the fallout from Edward Snowden’s revelation of CIA and NSA secrets. Norman remembers thinking that "the foundations of our tradecraft were being disrupted," and the agency needed to respond.
Norman convinced his superiors that in his next overseas assignment, he should try to create what came to be called "the station of the future," which would test new digital technology and ideas that could improve offensive and defensive operations. This experiment had some successes, he told me, in combating surveillance and dropping outmoded practices. But the idea of a "station," usually based in an embassy, was still a confining box.
"You’re the CEO of Kodak," Norman says he warned Director Gina Haspel when he retired in 2019, recalling the camera and film company that dominated the industry before the advent of digital photography. Kodak missed the chance to change, and the world passed it by.
When I asked Norman to explain the CIA’s resistance to change, he offered another analogy. "If Henry Ford had gone to transportation customers and asked what they wanted, they would have said ’faster horses.’
"That’s what the CIA has been trying to build. Faster horses."
The intelligence community’s problem was partly that it didn’t trust technology that hadn’t been created by the government’s own secret agencies.
Mike Yeagley, a data scientist who runs a company called cohort.ID, discovered that in 2016 when he was working with commercial mobile phone location data. His business involved selling advertisers the data generated by phone apps. As a cellphone user moves from work to home — visiting friends, stores, doctors and every other destination — his device reveals his interests and likely buying habits.
Yeagley happened to be studying refugee problems back then, and he wondered if he could find data that might be useful to NGOs that wanted to help Syrians fleeing the civil war into Turkey. He bought Syrian cellphone data — cheap, because it had few commercial applications. Then, on a whim, he began looking for devices that dwelled near Fort Bragg, North Carolina — where America’s most secret Special Operations forces are based — and later appeared in Syria.
And guess what? He found a cluster of Fort Bragg phones pinging around an abandoned Lafarge cement plant in the northeast Syrian desert.
Bingo! The cement factory was the headquarters of the Joint Special Operations Command task force that was running America’s war against the Islamic State. It was supposed to be one of the most secret locations on the planet. When I visited several times over the past decade as an embedded journalist, I wasn’t allowed to walk more than 50 yards without an escort. And there it was, lighting up a grid on a commercial advertising data app.
Yeagley shared that information with the military back in 2016 — and they quickly tightened phone security. Commanders assumed that Yeagley must have hacked or intercepted this sensitive data.
"I bought it," Yeagley told them. Even the military’s security experts didn’t seem to realize that mobile phones had created a gold mine of information that was being plundered by advertisers but largely ignored by the government.
Thanks to advice from Yeagley and many other experts, data analytics is now a growing source of intelligence. Yeagley calls it "ADINT," because it uses techniques developed by the advertising industry. Who would have imagined that ad salespeople could move faster than secret warriors?
(Illustration by Raven Jiang/For The Washington Post)
Glenn Chafetz had been station chief in three countries when he returned to Langley in 2018 to take an assignment as the first "Chief of Tradecraft" in the operations directorate. It was the agency’s latest attempt to adapt to the new world, succeeding the Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance Working Group, which in turn had replaced the CCTV Working Group.
"People realized that the problem wasn’t just cameras, but payment systems, mobile apps, WiFi hubs — any technology that produced data that lived permanently," Chafetz recalls. But there was still a lack of understanding and resistance from many officers who had joined the CIA when there were no cellphones, digital cameras or Google.
For the older generation, tradecraft meant executing "surveillance detection routes" to expose and evade trackers. Case officers had all gone through field training to practice how to detect surveillance and abort agent meetings that might be compromised. They met their assets only if they were sure they were "black," meaning unobserved. But when cameras were everywhere, recording everything, such certainty was impossible.
Chafetz lead a team that tried to modernize tradecraft until he retired in 2019. But he remembers that an instructor in the agency’s training program admonished him, "New officers still need to learn the basics." The instructor didn’t seem to understand that the "basics" could compromise operations.
The tradecraft problem wasn’t just pervasive surveillance, but the fact that data existed forever. In the old days, explains Chafetz, "If you didn’t get caught red-handed, you didn’t get caught." But now, hidden cameras could monitor a case officer’s meandering route to a dead drop site and his location, long before and after. His asset might collect the drop a week later, but his movements would be recorded, before and after, too. Patterns of travel and behavior could be tracked and analyzed for telltale anomalies. Even when spies weren’t caught red-handed, they might be caught.
The CIA’s default answer to tradecraft problems, for decades, was greater reliance on "nonofficial cover" officers, known as NOCs. They could pose as bankers or business consultants, say, rather than as staffers in U.S. embassies. But NOCs became easier to spot, too, in the age of social media and forever-data. They couldn’t just drop into a cover job. They needed an authentic digital history including things like a "LinkedIn" profile that had no gaps and would never change.
For some younger CIA officers, there was a fear that human espionage might be nearly impossible. The "station of the future" hadn’t transformed operations. "Cover" was threadbare. Secret communications links had been cracked. The skeptics worried that the CIA model was irreparably broken.
After all my conversations with veteran CIA officers, I’ve concluded that the agency needs an entirely new tool kit. Younger officers inside recognize that change is necessary. Pushing this transformation from the outside are scores of tech-savvy officers who have recently left the CIA or the military. It’s impossible at this stage to know how many of these ventures will prove successful or important; some won’t pan out. The point is the urgent need to innovate.
Let’s start with cellular communications. That’s a special worry after Chinese intelligence penetrated deep inside the major U.S. telecommunications companies using a state-sponsored hacking group known as "Salt Typhoon." A solution is offered by a company called Cape, which sells customers, in and out of government, a mobile network that can disappear from the normal cellular grid and protect against other vulnerabilities.
Cape was founded in 2022 by John Doyle, who served as a U.S. Army Special Forces sergeant from 2003 to 2008 and then worked for Palantir. His "Obscura" technology bounces mobile phone identifiers among thousands of customers so it’s impossible to trace any of them. He calls his tactic "opportunistic obfuscation."
One of the most intriguing private intelligence companies is Strider Technologies, founded in 2019 by twin brothers Greg and Eric Levesque and chief data officer Mike Brown. They hired two prominent former CIA officers: Cooper Wimmer, who served in Athens, Vienna, Baghdad and Peshawar, and other locations; and Mark Pascale, a former station chief in both Moscow and Beijing. The company also recruited David Vigneault, former head of Canadian intelligence.
Strider describes itself as a "modern-day economic security agency." To help customers secure their innovation and talent, it plucks the secrets of adversaries like China and Russia that steal U.S. commercial information. China is vulnerable because it has big open-source databases of its own, which are hard to protect.
Using this data, Strider can analyze Chinese organizations and their employees; it can study Chinese research data, and how it was obtained and shared; it can analyze the "Thousand Talents" programs China uses to lure foreigners; it can track the contacts made by those researchers, at home and abroad; and it can identify connections with known Chinese intelligence organizations or front companies.
Eric Levesque explained to me how Strider’s system works. Imagine that a software engineer is applying to work for an international IT company. The engineer received a PhD from a leading American university. What research did he conduct there? Was it shared with Chinese organizations? What research papers has he published? Who in China has read or cited them? What Chinese companies (or front companies) has he worked for? Has this prospective employee touched any branch of the Chinese civil-military conglomerate?
Strider can operate inside what China calls the "Great Firewall" that supposedly protects its data. I didn’t believe this was possible until Levesque gave me a demonstration. On his computer screen, I could see the links, from a researcher in the West, to a "Thousand Talents" program, to a Ministry of State Security front company. It turns out that China hasn’t encrypted much of its data — because the authorities want to spy on their own citizens. China is now restricting more data, but Levesque says Strider hasn’t lost its access.
We’ve entered a new era where AI models are smarter than human beings. Can they also be better spies? That’s the conundrum that creative AI companies are exploring.
Scale AI sells a product called "Donovan," named after the godfather of the CIA, William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan. The product can "dig into all available data to rapidly identify trends, insights, and anomalies," says the company’s website. Alexandr Wang, the company’s founding CEO (who was just poached by Meta), explains AI’s potential impact by quoting J. Robert Oppenheimer’s statement that nuclear weapons produced "a change in the nature of the world."
Vannevar Labs, another recent start-up, is creating tools to "influence adversary behavior and achieve strategic outcomes." Its website explains: "We develop sophisticated collection, obfuscation, and ML (machine learning) techniques to provide assured access to mission relevant data."
The company’s name evokes Vannevar Bush, an MIT engineer who headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, which oversaw all major U.S. research projects during World War II, including the launch of the Manhattan Project.
Lumbra.ai, the company launched in March by Brown, seeks to create what he describes as a "central nervous system" that will connect the superintelligence of future AI models with software "agents." After leaving the CIA in 2021, Brown met with Sam Altman, the founder of Open AI, to refine his thinking. To describe what agentic AI can do, he offers this hypothetical: "We can find every AI researcher, read all the papers they’ve ever written, and analyze any threats their research may pose for the United States." Human spies could never be so adept.
LUMBRA
"No one said we have to collect intelligence only from humans," Brown tells me. "When a leader makes a decision, someone in the system has to take a step that’s observable in the data we can collect." Brown’s AI agents will create a plan and then build and use tools that can gather the observable information.
Brown imagines what he calls a "Case Officer in a Box." Conceptually, it would be a miniaturized version of an agentic system running a large language model, like Anthropic’s Claude. As an offline device, it could be carried in a backpack by anyone and left anywhere. It would speak every language and know every fact ever published. It could converse with an agent, asking questions that elicit essential information.
"Did you work in the Iranian weaponization program?" our Case Officer in a Box might ask a hypothetical Iranian recruit. "Where was your lab? In the Shariati complex? Okay, then, was it in the Shahid Karimi building or the Imam Khomeini building? Did you work on neutron triggers for a bomb? How close to completion was your research? Where did you last see the prototype neutron triggers? Show me on a map, please."
The digital case officer will make a great movie, but it’s probably unrealistic. "No one is going to put their life in the hands of a bot," cautioned Wimmer, a fabled CIA recruiter. The agent would suspect that the AI system was really a trick by his own country’s spies. Brown agrees that recruiting a human spy will probably always require another human being who can build the necessary bond of trust. But once that bond is achieved, he believes technology will enhance a spy’s impact in astonishing ways.
Here’s the final, essential point. Human spies in the field will become rare. Occasionally, a piece of information will be so precious that the CIA will risk the life of one of its officers, and the life of an agent, to collect the intelligence in person. But that kind of face-to-face spying will be the exception. The future of espionage is written in zeros and ones. The CIA will survive as a powerful spy agency only if it makes a paradigm shift.
PNNL is part of The Battelle Memorial Institute (BMI). A "non-for-profit" located in Columbus, Ohio. PNNL has been instrumental in the containment and disposal 'efforts' of WWII atomic waste at the Hanford, WA site for the last 100 years or so. (only a slight exaggeration).
CIA gave burner phones to a network of spies in a Middle Eastern country more than a decade ago and instructed them to turn the phones on only when sending operational messages. But the local security service had devised an algorithm that could identify "anomalous" phones that were used infrequently. The network was exposed by its attempt at secrecy.
[Morgoth’sReview] How the post-woke era is destroying the political centre
Within the logic of the "Woke Mind Virus" was a faulty piece of wiring that was present all along but not too much of a problem until October 7th, 2023. Where in a worldview rooted entirely in identitarian power dynamics did Jews and Israel sit? Were they, too, a vulnerable minority group? Or were they "white"? And further still, where did Israel sit as a country propped up by the West and predicated (as they saw it) on oppressing powerless non-white people? Generally speaking, the left opted for the safer route of lumping Israel in with the general theory of white privilege, albeit the plot holes and paradoxes were skipped over, mainly.
This meant that when Zionism sought to retaliate against Hamas and other forces aligned against it, it discovered that a considerable number of people embedded within institutions across the West, and particularly in America, agreed with the terrorists!
Conveniently, then, the re-electing of Donald Trump meant that woke would be "put away" because it had become a rival node of power within the system. The institutions were purged of their mad progressive ideas so everyone could return to the 1990s. The Mad Dog left would be taken out back and put down like Ole Yella.
In America, at least, the woke left seems to have taken a drubbing, but I argued a while ago that the possibility of a similar purge taking place in the United Kingdom was doubtful. Yet it can’t be denied that the most egregious and irritating form of woke has indeed receded, and we are in a new paradigm.
The idea that a movement can be relegated to obscurity because its institutional and corporate incentives have been severed is, in my view, becoming a flawed perspective. The human capital that constitutes the ideology does not simply evaporate because the incentives have changed; instead, a more militant rebranding emerges, half in and half out of institutional power structures.
And this is where the post-woke left is now.
The rainbow flags have been replaced with Palestinian flags, and the purple hair has been replaced with a keffiyeh.
The recent Glastonbury debacle, where a black rap artist led the crowd in chanting "Death to the IDF" saw an institutional backlash, though not because the same person also gloated that native Brits would never get their country back. Owen Jones, long regarded as emblematic of the entitled leftist wet lettuce who never knew struggle for a cause, now claims he is prepared to go to jail for his stance on the Israel/Gaza issue.
Across the left, the term "Zionist" is spat out with contempt, and associated with a corrupting force that dictates institutional policy across the West. One young lady on TikTok claims to yearn for the end of the West, because of its unending support for the genocide in Gaza.
More problematic is that the "West" and Israel are inextricably linked in their world view, and in terms of power dynamics, it is difficult to refute. During the Glastonbury affair, the revealed preferences of the mainstream right were, predictably, to instantly white-knight for the IDF and leave the insult to their own countrymen ignored. Objectively speaking, some of the reports of atrocities coming out of Gaza are truly horrific, yet the toilet seat warmers on the centre-right are happy to defend it. The thousands of dead children, families buried alive under rubble, starvation lines, and general sadism — none of it seems to faze the smug idiots of Julia Hartley Brewer-style punditry.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Morgoth’sReview] How the post-woke era is destroying the political centre 
