Kateryna Kruk will be working out of Warsaw in her new role as Facebook’s public policy manager for Ukraine. While Kruk’s immediate duties are not clear, the announcement was met with enthusiasm by her followers, hoping she would unleash a crackdown on ‘Kremlin trolls’.  Kruk has an unequivocal anti-Russian reputation, having written for several international publications and on Twitter.

Kruk shot to prominence at the height of the mass protests that preceded the 2014 armed coup in Kiev, becoming a ‘spokesman for Euromaidan’ as she live-tweeted in English from the first days of the two-month protest. As the movement was hijacked by right-wing nationalists led by the Right Sector and the far-right, borderline neo-Nazi Svoboda party, the situation quickly spiraled into violence. Around that time, Kruk worked as a staffer for Svoboda, praising the party for being “Ukrainian-focused,” while expressing some reservations about its hardline ultra-nationalist ideology.

Kruk might have had some concerns about the party, which embraced Ukrainian nationalist leader and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera as a hero, but it did not deter her from gloating over the deaths of several dozen of her political opponents in Odessa’s trade union building in May 2014, which was set on fire by football hooligans as police seemingly stood by watching. The people who burned to death and suffocated inside the building were peacefully protesting the coup in the central city square before being attacked by the rowdy gangs.

“Odessa cleaned itself from terrorists, proud for city fighting for its identity. Glory to fallen heroes,” Kruk tweeted at the time.

The term “glory to fallen heroes” is the common trope declared by racist Ukrainian nationalists who love the Nazi collaborator and butcherer, Stefan Bandera.

The Nazism in Ukraine is rooted right in the government.  In 2014, right after the Euromaidan revolution, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, who was before this the first deputy head of the Security Service of Ukraine, was elected Commissioner in charge of supervision over the Security Service of Ukraine. Nalyvaichenko’s work with Ukraine’s Security Service was highly controversial on account of his deep history with the CIA. In fact, when the Security Service had its graduation ceremony for recruits in 2008, it was attended by both the US ambassador William Taylor Jr. and Nalyvaichenko whose decision to invite the ambassador was criticized by current and former employees of the Security Service.

The Euromaidan revolution of 2014 was infested with Ukrainian nationalists and Nazis who were militants of various violent paramilitary organizations. Information actually leaked out revealing that Nalyvaichenko was involved with summer training camps for the Stephan Bandera Tryzub, a Nazi neo-Nazi organization. That the head of the Ukrainian Security Service (which is the CIA of Ukraine) was working to train neo-Nazis, and that this head of the Service was intimate with Washington, really reveals that the Gladio policy — in which NATO intelligence services recruited and trained Nazis after the Second World War to form paramilitaries in Europe — never ended and still continues today. This may shed light as to why German neo-Nazis were traveling to Ukraine to fight Russians, and why the French metal singer, Famine, travelled to Kiev to spread pro-Nazi propaganda late 2017.

It was in such training camps for Ukrainian Nazis that on July 17th, 2013, in the village of Ternopol, Dmytry Yarosh, leader of the Tryzub, declared that Ukraine needs a “national revolution” and as long as “the Russian Empire in any form” exists, Ukrainian independence will be impossible. In early April 2014, the Ukrainian publication, Ukrainian Pravda (“Ukrainian Truth”) published a report entitled, Za Kulisamy Pravogo Sektora (“The Right Sector: Behind the Scene”). The report noted how Nalyvaichenko, while a member of parliament, had Nazi terrorist Dmytry Yarosh, as his aid and consultant in the Supreme Rada.

It is not that surprising that McCain collaborated with the Nazi party in Ukraine, Svoboda, even with its leader, Oleh Tyahnybok. The resurgence of ultra-nationalism in Ukraine does not only involve anti-Russian sentiment, but also anti-Polish sentiment as well. McCain’s ally Tyahnybok actually demanded that Poland give to Ukraine 19 of its districts. On April of 2013, the Polish government registered a draft resolution that declared the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and UPA (the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) as main perpetrators of the genocide of the Polish people during the Third Reich reign of terror. The Ukrainian government struck back at Poland, with Ukraine’s parliament stating that the “project shows signs of Polish colonialism and chauvinism, interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine and territorial claims of Ukraine.” (See Byshok & Kochetkov, Neo Nazis & Euromaidan)

To this day Ukraine honors these Ukrainian death squads as heroes, as a report from CS Monitor states:

Tensions between Ukrainians and one of their traditional oppressors, Poland, go back centuries. But the current acrimony has its roots in the chaotic events of World War II, when Ukrainian nationalists sided with Nazi Germany in hopes that defeat of the Soviet Union could lead to creation of a Ukrainian state. The Nazis had other plans, and Bandera was arrested when he tried to declare independence in 1941.

But thousands of his followers in the UPA continued their battle, often in collaboration with the Nazis, in hopes of achieving that goal. Critics argue that, while they were certainly “fighters for Ukrainian independence,” they are in no way presentable as founding father figures due to their fascist ideology, collaboration with the Nazis, and involvement in mass ethnic cleansings of non-Ukrainian ethnic groups.

Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean Marie Le Pen, was a lobbyist for a Nazi party in Ukraine called at the time the Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU. Today it is known as Svobodoa). In the year 2000, the SNPU began collaborating with Euronat, a confederacy of Right-wing European parties that was established by Jean Marie Le Pen’s Front National. On May 21, 2000, Jean Marie Le Pen paid a visit to Ukraine where he took part in the SNPU’s 4th convention. Two of the parties involved with Euronat were the Sweden Democrats and the Vlaams Blok (which changed its name to Vlaams Belang in 2004), both of which are now being supported by Steve Bannon.