"What Russia Should Do With Ukraine"
By Timofey Sergeytsev
April 3, 2022

The text below is a translation of the article “What Russia should do with Ukraine,” published by RIA Novosti - a Russian state-owned domestic news agency. Thus it appears to reflect the position of the Russian government.

Note: this translation may have been done by Google Translate, so it is not guaranteed to be perfectly accurate.
 

Back in April of last year we wrote about the inevitability of denazification of Ukraine. We don't need a Nazi, Banderite Ukraine, an enemy of Russia and an instrument of the West to destroy Russia. Today the issue of denazification has moved to the practical level.

Denazification is necessary when a significant part of the people - most likely its majority - is mastered and dragged by the Nazi regime into its politics. That is, when the hypothesis "the people are good - the government is bad" does not work. The recognition of this fact is the basis of the policy of denazification, of all its activities, and the fact itself constitutes its subject.

Ukraine is in precisely this situation. The fact that Ukrainian voters voted for "Poroshenko's peace" and "Zelensky's peace" should not be misleading - Ukrainians were quite satisfied with the shortest way to peace through a blitzkrieg, which the last two Ukrainian presidents hinted transparently at when they were elected. This very method of "appeasement" of internal anti-fascists - through total terror - was used in Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Mariupol, and other Russian cities. And it suited the average Ukrainian citizen quite well. Denazification is a set of measures in relation to the Nazified mass of the population, which technically cannot be directly punished as war criminals.

Nazis who have taken up arms must be destroyed on the battlefield to the maximum extent possible. No significant distinction should be made between the AFU [Armed Forces of Ukraine] and the so-called Natsbat (national battalions), as well as the territorial defense that joined these two types of military formations. All of them are equally complicit in outrageous cruelty against civilians, equally guilty of genocide of the Russian people, and do not observe the laws and customs of war. War criminals and active Nazis should be examplarily and demonstrably punished. A total lustration must be carried out. Any organizations that have associated themselves with the practice of Nazism must be eliminated and banned. However, in addition to the top brass, a significant portion of the mass of the people who are passive Nazis, Nazi collaborators, are also guilty. They supported and indulged the Nazi power. Just punishment for this part of the population is only possible as the bearing of the inevitable burdens of a just war against the Nazi system, waged as gently and discreetly as possible with regards to civilians. The further denazification of this mass of the population consists in re-education, which is achieved by ideological repression (suppression) of Nazi attitudes and severe censorship: not only in the political sphere, but necessarily also in the sphere of culture and education. It was through culture and education that the deep mass Nazification of the population was prepared and carried out, consolidated by the promise of dividends from the Nazi regime's victory over Russia, Nazi propaganda, internal violence and terror, and the eight-year war with the people of Donbas who rebelled against Ukrainian Nazism.

Denazification can only be carried out by the victor, which presupposes (1) his unconditional control over the denazification process and (2) the power to ensure such control. In this respect, the denazified country cannot be sovereign. The denazifying state - Russia - cannot proceed from a liberal approach to denazification. The ideology of the denazifier cannot be challenged by the guilty party undergoing denazification. Russia's recognition of the need for denazification of Ukraine means the recognition of the impossibility of the Crimean scenario for Ukraine as a whole. However, this scenario was also impossible in 2014 in the rebellious Donbas. Only eight years of resistance to Nazi violence and terror led to internal cohesion and a conscious, unequivocal mass refusal to maintain any kind of unity and connection with Ukraine, which defined itself as a Nazi society.

The time frame for denazification can in no way be less than one generation, which has to be born, grow and mature under the conditions of denazification. The nazification of Ukraine has lasted for more than 30 years - beginning at least in 1989, when Ukrainian nationalism received legal and legitimate forms of political expression and led the movement for "independence" towards Nazism.

The peculiarity of modern Nazified Ukraine is its amorphousness and ambivalence, which allow it to disguise Nazism as a striving for "independence" and a "European" (Western, pro-American) path of "development. (in reality - to degradation), to claim that "there is no Nazism in Ukraine, only occasional individual incidents. Because there is no main Nazi party, no Führer, no full-fledged racial laws (only a stripped-down version in the form of repression of the Russian language). As a consequence, there is no opposition and no resistance to the regime.

However, all of the above does not make Ukrainian Nazism a "light version" of the German Nazism of the first half of the twentieth century. On the contrary - since Ukrainian Nazism is free of such "genre" (political-technological in essence) frameworks and restrictions, it unfolds freely as the fundamental basis of any Nazism - as European and, in the most developed form, American racism. Therefore, denazification cannot be carried out in a compromise, based on a formula such as "NATO - no, EU - yes". The collective West itself is the designer, source and sponsor of Ukrainian Nazism, while the Western Bandera cadres and their "historical memory" are only one of the instruments of Nazification of Ukraine. Ukronazism is no less of a threat, but a bigger one to the world and Russia than Hitler's German Nazism was.

The name "Ukraine" apparently cannot be retained as the title of any fully denazified state entity on territory freed from the Nazi regime. The People's Republics newly established in Nazi-liberated territory must and will grow out of the practice of economic self-government and social welfare, the restoration and modernization of the population's life-support systems.

Their political aspirations in fact cannot be neutral - redemption of guilt towards Russia for treating it as an enemy can only be realized in reliance on Russia in the processes of reconstruction, revival and development. No "Marshall Plan" for these territories should be allowed. There can be no "neutrality" in the ideological and practical sense, compatible with denazification. The cadres and organizations that are the instruments of denazification in the new denazified republics cannot not (i.e. must) rely on the direct power and organizational support of Russia.

Denazification will inevitably be de-Ukrainization - a rejection of the large-scale artificial inflating of the ethnic component of the self-identification of the population of the territories of historical Little Russia and Novorossia, which was started by the Soviet authorities. As a tool of communist superpower, after the fall of communist power, this artificial ethnocentrism did not remain useless. In this service capacity, it was taken over by another superpower (power standing above states) - the superpower of the West. It must be returned to its natural boundaries and stripped of its political functionality.

Unlike, say, Georgia and the Baltic states, Ukraine, as history has shown, is impossible as a nation-state, and attempts to "build" one lead inevitably to Nazism. Ukrainianism is an artificial anti-Russian construction, which has no civilizational content of its own and is a subordinate element of a foreign and estranged civilization. Debanderization by itself will not be enough for denazification - the Banderite element is only a performer and a screen, a disguise for the European project of Nazi Ukraine, so the denazification of Ukraine is also its inevitable de-Europeanization.

The Banderovite top brass must be liquidated; its re-education is impossible. The social "swamp," which actively and passively supported it through action and inaction, must survive the hardships of the war and assimilate the experience as a historical lesson and atonement for its guilt. Those who did not support the Nazi regime, who suffered from it and the war it unleashed in Donbas, must be consolidated and organized, must become the support of the new power, its vertical and horizontal axes. Historical experience shows that wartime tragedies and dramas benefit peoples who have been seduced and carried away by the role of Russia's enemy.

Denazification as the goal of the special military operation itself is understood as a military victory over the Kyiv regime, liberation of territories from armed supporters of Nazification, elimination of irreconcilable Nazis, capture of war criminals, and creation of systemic conditions for subsequent peacetime denazification.

The latter, in turn, should begin with the organization of local self-government, police and defense, purged of Nazi elements, launching on their basis the founding processes of the new republican statehood, integrating this statehood into close cooperation with the Russian agency for the denazification of Ukraine (newly created or remade, say, from Rossotrudnichestvo [Russian cooperation agency], with the adoption under Russian control of a republican regulatory framework (legislation) for denazification, defining the borders and frameworks of directly applying Russian law and Russian jurisdiction on the liberated territory in the sphere of denazification, creating a tribunal on crimes against humanity in former Ukraine. In this respect Russia should act as a custodian of the Nuremberg Trials.

All of the above means that in order to achieve the goals of denazification, it is necessary for the population to support Russia, to go over to Russia's side after its liberation from the terror, violence, and ideological pressure of the Kyiv regime, after its withdrawal from informational isolation. Of course, it takes some time for people to recover from the shock of military action, to be convinced of Russia's long-term intentions - that "they will not be abandoned". It is impossible to foresee in advance in which territories such a mass of the population will constitute a critically needed majority. "The Catholic province" (Western Ukraine, comprised of five oblasts) is unlikely to be part of the pro-Russian territories. The line of exclusion, however, will be found experimentally. Ukraine, hostile to Russia, but forcibly neutral and demilitarized, will remain behind it, with Nazism forbidden on formal grounds. Russia-haters will go there. A guarantee that this residual Ukraine will remain neutral should be the threat of an immediate continuation of the military operation if the aforementioned requirements are not met. This would probably require a permanent Russian military presence on its territory. From the exclusion line and up to the Russian border there would be the territory of potential integration into Russian civilization, anti-fascist in its inner nature.

The operation to denazify Ukraine, which began with the military phase, will follow in peacetime the same logic of stages as the military operation. At each of them it will be necessary to achieve irreversible changes, which will be the results of the corresponding stage. In this case, the necessary initial steps of denazification can be defined as follows:

- Liquidation of the armed Nazi formations (by which we mean any armed formations of Ukraine, including the AFU), as well as the military, informational, and educational infrastructure that ensures their activity;

- The formation of people's self-government and militia [older Russian word for police] (defense and law and order) of the liberated territories, protecting the population from the terror of underground Nazi groups;

- Installation of the Russian information space;

- Extraction of educational materials and prohibition of educational programs at all levels that contain Nazi ideological attitudes;

- Mass investigative actions to establish personal responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity, dissemination of Nazi ideology, and support for the Nazi regime;

- Lustration, publication of the names of collaborators of the Nazi regime, and their compulsory work to rebuild the destroyed infrastructure as punishment for their Nazi activities (from among those to whom the death penalty or imprisonment would not apply)

- Adoption at the local level, under Russia's curatorship, of the primary regulatory acts of denazification "from below," prohibiting all types and forms of revival of Nazi ideology;

- The establishment of memorials, commemorative plates, and monuments to the victims of Ukrainian Nazism, and the immortalization of the memory of the heroes who fought against it;

- The inclusion of a set of anti-fascist and denazification norms in the constitutions of the new people's republics;

- Creation of permanent denazification bodies for a period of 25 years.

Russia will have no allies in the denazification of Ukraine. Because this is a purely Russian affair. And also because not just the Bandera version of Nazi Ukraine will be subject to eradication, but also and above all the Western totalitarianism, imposed programs of civilizational degradation and collapse, mechanisms of subordination to the superpower of the West and the USA.

To put the plan of denazification of Ukraine into practice, Russia itself will have to finally give up its pro-European and pro-Western illusions, to realize itself as the last instance of protection and preservation of the values of historical Europe (Old World), which deserve it and which the West ultimately abandoned, having lost in the struggle for itself.