Canada’s Ukrainian Nazi fiasco raises even more troubling issues

Canada’s Ukrainian Nazi fiasco raises even more troubling issues

By: Rachel Marsden

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized for the fact that a Ukrainian (and naturalized Canadian) who had fought for Adolf Hitler’s 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, had appeared to rapturous applause from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the entire Canadian House of Commons. To call that a cock-up would be like calling the Titanic a boating accident.

So under the bus went the House Speaker turned speed-bump who extended the invitation, with Trudeau calling the incident “deeply embarrassing to the Parliament of Canada and by extension to all Canadians,” but adding that “it's going to be really important that all of us push back against Russian propaganda, Russian disinformation, and continue our steadfast and unequivocal support for Ukraine.”

Yet again, inconvenient facts were dismissed as “Russian propaganda,” much like the very real fact that Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s Ukrainian grandfather was the editor of a Nazi newspaper. She also tried to pass that fact off initially as Russian disinformation while she was Canada’s foreign affairs minister in charge of directing Canada’s policy toward Russia and Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has literally cited “de-Nazification” as one of the two main justifications for Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.
No one’s saying that Ukraine is full of Nazis, but it’s hard not to argue their lack of prominence or power when they keep popping up in prominent Western places and hailed as “heroes” — like when Stanford University’s campus hosted some Azov battalion fighters.

One eminent researcher with the university, when asked about having met with them, replied that “they originated among Ukrainian nationalists, but to call them neo-Nazis is to accept Russia’s framing of what they represent today,” adding that “by the time they defended Mariupol they were fully integrated into the [Armed Forces of Ukraine] and are heroes that I’m proud to support.”

In other words, they may have been neo-Nazis before, but that all became moot when they were whitewashed into the army and started doing the West’s dirty work against Russia. At that point, they became heroes, and anyone truthfully evoking their inconvenient past is doing harm to the Western establishment’s narrative.

Speaking of these Azov “heroes,” Canada was given fair warning years ago when Canadian military personnel discovered while training them in Ukraine that they had inconspicuous Nazi tattoos. “Canadian officials who met with members of a Ukrainian battalion linked to neo-Nazis didn’t denounce the unit, but were instead concerned the media would expose details of the get-together,” reported the Ottawa Citizen in November 2021 — well over a year before any Russian incursion into Ukraine.

So for those who have asked how 98-year-old veteran Yaroslav Hunka, from the Nazi side of the Second World War, could have possibly managed to slip through the cracks, the answer is that he really didn’t. The Nazi undertones have always existed, but they’ve long been downplayed as a means to an end — that of taking Russia off the geopolitical chessboard as a competitor to the US, leaving only China in the way of total global dominance with no options for any other nations other than to get sized for a Made in the USA economic straitjacket. To that same end, the history of the Red Army’s role as an ally of the West against Nazi Germany has been virtually erased. This would also explain why the chances were pretty low that even Canadian parliamentarians with any personal integrity would have had the historical knowledge to do the math and ask, “Hang on, if Hunka is Ukrainian and was just introduced as having fought against Russians during WWII, then wouldn’t that put him on Hitler’s side?” Instead, they all clapped like trained seals — which is an insult to seals, who arguably have greater capacity for critical thought.

The incident has since triggered an extradition request for war crimes from Poland, whose citizens were victims by the thousands of Hunka’s division, and controversy over a monument to Hunka’s Ukrainian Waffen-SS unit in the province of Ontario.

Jewish groups are demanding that Canada release classified documents about Nazis given refuge in Canada in the wake of WWII, around the time that Washington was loading up on Nazi scientists under Operation Paperclip and facilitating the escape of Vichy France’s “Butcher of Lyon,” Nazi Klaus Barbie, to Bolivia in order to fight communists in Latin America (after hiring him to do the same in Europe with the 66th Detachment of the US Army Counterintelligence Corps).

Historical reckonings are one thing, but what about these same leaders seizing the opportunity to ensure that they don’t create new blowback around today’s events? If anyone should have known better than to clap for Hunka after his service record had been read aloud, it should have been Zelensky. The fact that he didn’t makes you wonder who really has the power in Kyiv — or who ultimately will when the dust settles. Given that our lawmakers fail to grasp even the most documented aspects of history, it shouldn’t be assumed that they have the faintest idea what they’re doing now in Ukraine, either.