Thousands of Nationalists march in Kiev

You pay a lot of attention to seeing freemasonry symbols. I thought it looked like EU. Here's how the Jerusalem Post sees it:

A new year’s torchlight march through downtown Ukraine in honor of Holocaust era-Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera drew harsh criticism from the Simon Wiesenthal Center on Sunday, but failed to elicit condemnations by Ukrainian Jews.

Members of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party and the Right Sector movement marched down Khreshchatyk Street, one of Kiev’s main boulevard’s and the site of last year’s EuroMaidan revolution, to celebrate the 106th birthday of Stepan Bandera, whose faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists helped murder thousands of Jews during the Second World War.

Five thousand people participated in the march, according to organizers, The Kyiv Post reported.

The “current government came to power using Bandera’s slogans, so it has to follow his ideas,” Svoboda leader Oleh Tyanhybok said before the march began, according to the Ukrainian newspaper.

SWC Jerusalem Bureau Director Effraim Zuroff said in a statement: “Holocaust perpetrators are the last people on Earth who deserve to be glorified, regardless of their nationalist credentials. This phenomenon, currently so common in post-Communist Eastern Europe, and especially in Ukraine and the Baltics, clearly shows that these countries don’t fully comprehend the obligations of true democracy,”

“The march has more to do with the systematic Holocaust distortion prevalent in post-Communist Eastern Europe, which has a very fundamental anti-Semitic component, than outright anti-Semitism,” Zuroff told the Post.

The march is a good example of three separate phenomena, he continued: “hiding or minimizing the role of local Nazi collaborators in Holocaust crimes; promoting the canard of equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes; and glorification of anti-Communist freedom fighters (the new heroes of these countries), who were local Nazi collaborators who participated in Shoa crimes.”

Right Sektor has made efforts to disassociate itself from anti-Semitism, with its leaders meeting with community representatives and protesting in favor of Israel during last summer’s Gaza war.

Svoboda, known as the Social-National Party of Ukraine until 2004, has been accused of being a neo-Nazi party by Ukrainian Jews and while party leaders have a history of making anti-Semitic remarks, their rhetoric has toned down considerably over the past years as they attempted to go mainstream.

Prior to the revolution the party had 36 seats out of 450, or roughly eight percent of the total representation in parliament, but the party failed to make the election threshold in October’s election.

While Svoboda has several lawmakers in the legislature who were elected in direct elections in their districts, the party’s representation is now minimal. Parliamentary seats are apportioned through both a proportional representation system and by direct election of candidates by region.

Ousted president Victor Yanukovich’s predecessor, Viktor Yushchenko, engaged in an effort to rehabilitate figures such as Bandera, posthumously awarding him the title of “Hero of Ukraine” in 2010, riling the Jewish community.

“To glorify Bandera is to reject Stalin and to reject any pretension from Moscow to power over Ukraine,” one academic explained at the time.

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Noting Svoboda’s failure to pass the election threshold, the rabbi said that while Ukraine’s past should not be ignored, the problem is not anti-Semitism but the “difficult financial situation and lack of security and political stability which has resulted in a large number of Ukrainian Jews immigrating to Israel and, unfortunately, to Germany.”

Zuroff, however, sees things differently, saying many Jews living in Ukraine “believe that in order to secure their existence in today’s Ukraine, they have to turn a blind eye to the glorification of people like Bandera.”

In response, Kaminezki stated that Ukrainians see Bandera as a national hero rather than as an anti-Semitic figure, similar to how Scotts view William Wallace or the Italians see Garibaldi, and do not always associate him with anti-Semitism.

“My perception out of what I hear and see: In contemporary Ukraine Bandera has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, but more with national self-identity of Ukrainians,” said one Ukrainian Jew who asked not to be identified, explaining that support for Bandera for many has less to do with anti-Semitism than anti-Russian sentiments.

I do not mean to champion Ukraine. But this "separatist, pro-Russian breakaway" with the help and instigation of Russia is entirely unjustified. It seems the Russians are just clumsy and heavy-handed; they always become unlikeable. That's enough reason to sympathize with Ukraine and all the other countries bordering Russia.