The Grayzone: A new generation of US-trained extremists is fighting Russia. Are we prepared for the blowback?

US agencies have directly and indirectly trained and empowered Nazis and ultra-nationalists at home and abroad to fight Russians in Ukraine. This program follows the blueprint established by Western intelligence agencies in Afghanistan and Syria.

 

Today, the CIA, US Special Forces, and other branches of government are training regular units in Ukraine. With US support, far-right elements of those units go on to train and recruit for Nazi paramilitary units and gangs. White nationalist Americans are allowed to travel to Ukraine and train paramilitaries and/or receive training, depending on the individual or group. State-corporate media have confirmed the existence of a major CIA training program involving “irregular” (i.e., terrorist) warfare, but we do not yet know the name of the operation.

 

As Alex Rubinstein reported for The Grayzone, corporate US media has promoted known US white nationalists fighting in Ukraine as heroes, while whitewashing their records of murder and political violence. And while the Department of Homeland Security expresses “concern” over potential blowback when these openly fascist combat veterans return to the US, the administration of Joseph Biden appears to be doing nothing to stop them from making their way to the battlefield.

 

The US program in Ukraine bears such striking similarities to Operation Cyclone it could be dubbed “Cyclone 2.0”. The nature of the proxy war has all but been admitted by former US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and the endgame of regime change in nuclear-armed Russia has been acknowledged by President Joe Biden.

 

By March this year, at least 3000 US citizens were allegedly on the Ukrainian battlefield. In April, John T. Godfrey, the State Department’s Acting Coordinator for Counterterrorism, said of American extremists going to fight: “when they return, they have skill – they typically come back more radicalized than when they left … [T]hey do have hard skills that they are able to, in some cases, use in attacking targets domestically.” In intelligence circles, this is called “blowback.”

 

In April, I filed a freedom of information request with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to obtain documents on travelers to Ukraine and its neighbors, including Georgia and Poland, from 2014 to the present. The aim was to measure the size of “Cyclone 2.” From logs and incident reports that had come to the attention of the DHS, I wanted to know how many people had been stopped and questioned about their trips by federal or local authorities. The DHS unlawfully ignored my request, as they have a habit of doing: no acknowledgement, no delayed response, nothing.

 

Had the department answered, it might have confirmed the story of people like “Alex”: a US armed forces veteran who was connected to Ukraine by an anonymous online account. “Alex” ended up in the extremist-heavy Shyrokyne (near Mariupol), fought with Ukraine’s openly fascist party the Right Sector, and ended up recruiting other Americans for the Azov Battalion. (The source is the US and British intelligence cut-out, Bellingcat.)

 

https://thegrayzone.com/2022/05/31/us-trained-extremists-fighting-russia-blowback/