1998 Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski on Afghanistan in Le Nouvel Observateur

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The interview is published on the site of University of Arizona, sourced from Zbigniew Brzezinski and Vincent Jauvert, “Les Révélations d’un Ancien Conseiller de Carter: ‘Oui, la CIA est Entrée en Afghanistan avant les Russes…’” Le Nouvel Observateur [Paris], January 15-21,1998.

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Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980,that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was Ju ly 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention [emphasis added throughout].

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked for a way to provoke it?

B: It wasn’t quite like that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q : When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement in Afghanistan, nobody believed them. However, there was an element of truth in this. You don’t regret any of this today? 

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B : What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q : “Some agitated Moslems”? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today…

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West has a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid: There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner, without demagoguery or emotionalism. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among fundamentalist Saudi Arabia, moderate Morocco, militarist Pakistan, pro-Western Egypt, or secularist Central Asia? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries…

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🦇 As an afterword

The final paragraph from Scott.net article Grand architect of modern terrorism: The true horror of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s policies serves as a poignant afterword to the above historical text:

Brzezinski died safely in a hospital bed, unlike the millions of displaced and murdered civilians who were pawns in Brzezinski’s twisted, geopolitical chess games of blood and lunacy. His legacy is one of militant jihadism, the formation of al-Qaeda, the most devastating attack on U.S. soil by a foreign entity in our recent history, and the complete denigration of Russia as an everlasting adversary with which peace cannot — and should not — ever be attained.

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Postscriptum from the same article

Brzezinski himself advocated taking over Ukraine in his 1998 book, “The Grand Chessboard”, stating Ukraine was “a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard…a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country (means) Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” Brzezinski warned against allowing Russia to control Ukraine because “Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.”

The CIA first tested the Maidan technology 70 years ago in Hungary

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Channel FKT – Geschichte der Sowjetunion — History of the Soviet Union — details the run-up to the attempted fascist coup in Hungary in October of 1956. The publication translated by us at “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

👉 Read also our prior multi-part article The Hungarian “Revolt” of 1956 – a detailed historical look at the events!

On July 18, 1956, the country’s leadership resigned due to street protests. Three months later, a bloody coup took place there. The American intelligence service had been preparing this special operation for eight years.

Declassified archival documents reveal the intentions of the secret operations of the USA, reports the writer and intelligence historian Gennadi Sokolov.

THE COLD WAR

♦️The experience with organising subversive activities against the USSR is still well utilised by US intelligence agencies today. In modern history, again against Russia with the Ukrainian Maidan.

❓ How did the Maidan protests begin back then?

In Washington, it was not immediately realised that they were necessary. Initially, the goal was set to directly destroy the former ally in World War II. For this purpose, US President Harry Truman already in September 1945, the year of victory, ordered the Pentagon to develop Operation “Totality”. It was planned to drop 196 atomic bombs on the 20 largest cities and industrial centers of the USSR.

However, the enthusiasm of the American generals was dampened by the possible heavy losses of the famous “Flying Fortresses” – B-29 bombers with atomic bombs – in attacks on Soviet cities. According to Pentagon estimates, up to 55 percent!

Military experts also warned that in the event of a conflict, the Soviet tank armies stationed in Eastern Europe would reach the Atlantic coast within one to two weeks! This was also a restraining factor. However, the development of similar secret plans for a nuclear war against the USSR continued (“Chariot,” “Fleetwood,” “Trojal,” “Dropshot,” etc.).

The appearance of the atomic bomb in the USSR in 1949 forced the American “hawks” to retreat to avoid a nuclear counterstrike from Moscow. The plans for a “hot” war were replaced by a “cold” war.

Overseas, a whole complex of measures was developed in various areas:

  1. Geopolitics – founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NATO under the aegis of the USA in 1949.
  2. Economy and finance – introduction of the Bretton Woods system after the war, based on the dollar instead of gold, as well as the Marshall Plan in 1948.
  3. Propaganda – broadcasting of the radio stations “Radio Free Europe” and “Radio Liberty” in the countries of the Socialist Bloc since 1953.
  4. Secret subversive activities – founding of the CIA’s Special Operations division in 1948.

Essentially, it was already a multi-layered or, as we say today, hybrid war. Its goal was to undermine the power of the USSR and the Eastern European countries, which according to the agreements of Yalta between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill in 1945 on the division of spheres of influence after the war had fallen into the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. Thus, “Directive 10/2” was created.

What kind of directive is this?

June 10, 1948

Top secret

National Security Council of the United States

Directive NSC 10/2

… The National Security Council has decided that in the interest of world peace, the measures of the US government must be supplemented by covert operations…

This mission is assigned to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) …

The head of the new “covert” operational area of the CIA was the veteran of the American intelligence service Frank George Wisner. He is the father of secret sabotage operations, including Maidan movements, uprisings, and coups far beyond America’s borders. In countries that Washington did not approve of. However, he made a name for himself not only through the first Maidan movements in Hungary, Poland, and East Germany.
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Katyn – a lie that has become history. Why do some Russian politicians continue to repent for everything that our ancestors did not do?

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The article, the translation of which we are presenting here, was written by Yuri Krinitsky and Philip Sorokin, and first published by Military Industrial Courier (WebArchived version) on June 8, 2021 (Issue No. 21 (884)). It was later re-blogged by historian Nikolai Starikov.

“Today Katyn is a propaganda weapon of the Polish establishment in the struggle for political dividends. It uses various methods, including falsifications, lies, and double standards.”

Mikhail Gorbachev’s transfer of the “Special Folder No. 1” to the President of the Republic of Poland, Wojciech Jaruzelski

On August 25, 1993, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said: “Forgive us,” he laid a wreath at the monument to the victims of Katyn in Warsaw. After that, the governments of Russia and Poland agreed on the construction of memorials in Katyn and Mednoye. It would seem that a a mutual rapprochement step has been taken… But over the years, the inaccuracies and falsifications in the “official” (Goebbel-Polish-Gorbachev-Yeltsin) version of the shooting of Poles have become more and more obvious. Especially if both Katyn and Mednoye themes are viewed as a whole.

There are two burials on the territory of Russia, the history of which is deliberately muddled and used for information warfare purposes. One is in the Smolensk region (Katyn forest, Kozye Gory tract), the second is in the Tver (former Kalinin) region, near the village of Mednoye. Polish prisoners of war were shot and laid to rest here in the early 40s of the twentieth century. But there are two fundamentally different opinions about the number of people killed, the date and the perpetrators of the crime.

According to the version of the Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels – which is also the version of the current Polish leadership and the liberal elite of modern Russia – Poles were executed by NKVD officers a year before the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. According to the Soviet version, the prisoners did not have time to evacuate during the retreat of the Red Army. They ended up on the territory occupied by German troops, and in the fall of 1941 they were shot by the Nazis.
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The Katyn Schism. Gorbachev and his followers became confounded in repentance

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The article by Yuri Krinitsky and Andrey Romanchenko was published in Military Industrial Courier (WebArchived version ) on May 22, 2018 (Issue No. 19 (732)).

Representatives of the NKVD-NKGB commission and the special commission at the ChGK in Katyn. Photo: 2w.su

The West’s desire to weaken the authority of our country is dragging up to the surface even old disagreements that arose decades ago. In the Katyn tragedy, which any enlightened person knows about today, there are proven and controversial facts. The mass execution of captured Polish officers is generally recognised. But there is uncertainty about the date of the shooting, the number of people killed, and the perpetrators of the crime.

The discussion around these “minor details” has long acquired the character of an information struggle, in which history has become a weapon of politics. But what if, without taking a priori anyone’s position in this dispute, we conduct an uncompromising and independent assessment to what degree the knowledge that exists about the events in the Kozye Gory tract of the Smolensk region is sufficient to identify the true perpetrators of the crime committed there?
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“I’m the tsar, if I want to, I’ll give it away!”: Yeltsin was going to give the Kuril Islands to Japan

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The Russian Federation was not yet a year old, when Yeltsin was planning to give away the land, required with the blood of the Soviet soldiers in 1945. This is the story of how Yeltsin’s grand giveaway of the Kuril Islands was thwarted. It is told over 3 articles, each bringing additional details and food for thought.

“I’m the tsar, if I want to, I’ll give it away!”

Boris Konstantinovich Ratnikov

Boris Konstantinovich Ratnikov, 71, Retired Major General of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. In 1969 he graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute, in 1974 he graduated from the Higher Courses of the KGB of the USSR. He spent 3.5 years on a mission in the Republic of Afghanistan through the KGB. He participated in combat operations, was awarded orders and medals. 1991-1994 – First Deputy Head of the Main Directorate of Security of the Russian Federation. He was engaged in ensuring the security of the country’s top officials, including through the use of psi technologies. Then he became the chief consultant in the Security Service of the President of Russia, adviser to the head of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. Currently, he is the head of the Information and Analytical Center of the National Association of Bodyguards of Russia.

Below is an interview of B.K.Ratnikov conducted by the correspondent of Komzomolskaya Pravda, Evegeny Chernyh on October 19, 2017.

Ratnikov: On August 21, 1992, the decree of the Government of the Russian Federation No. 1553-r “On the preparation of the visit of the President of the Russian Federation B.N. Yeltsin to Japan” was signed by Gaidar, General Ratnikov recalls. – A working group was created headed by S. Glazyev, the then First Deputy Minister of Foreign Economic Relations of Russia. The historic visit was scheduled for September. I learned that in Tokyo Yeltsin was preparing to transfer 2-3 islands of the Kuril Ridge to Japan to demonstrate his new political course. Boris Nikolaevich wanted to show himself as a peacemaker. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev did not give up the islands, I could! He was encouraged to take this step by a number of figures from his inner circle.

Chernyh: Who exactly?

– Kozyrev, for example, who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Japanese had already happily promised us the first loan of $100 million. But the Kuril Islands are a very sensitive issue. This is both the integrity of Russia and the fate of our citizens living there. Where would they go? There was no relocation or employment program. All this would have caused outrage in the country. General Georgy Rogozin and I decided to test the situation and see possible scenarios.

Rogozin was a strong “psychic operator” (BATS note: that is, an able analyst). We were literally stunned by the information we received. As soon as Yeltsin hands over the islands to Japan, China will immediately lay claim to its disputed territories to Russia. At that time, hundreds of kilometers of the border with China were not demarcated. An armed conflict could have started.

– As on Damansky Island in the spring of 1969. Then we lost 58 border guards, the Chinese lost about three hundred.

– This time, the conflict could become more widespread and even escalate into a major war that would weaken Russia and China, two competitors of the United States. That’s what the calculation was for overseas. Through agents of influence in the CPC Central Committee, Washington would have pushed the Chinese leadership to take decisive action. The Russians gave the disputed Kuril Islands to Japan, and what about us? If they don’t give up the territory, we’ll take it ourselves! After all, the Yankees had their hands not only on Kozyrev, who now lives in the United States, but also on responsible Chinese comrades. The international community would declare China an aggressor. The United Nations and a number of countries would apply economic and political sanctions against an aggressor who encroached on the sovereign territory of another state. Or perhaps they would have divided the Celestial Empire into ethnic regions. Beijing was in Washington’s way in establishing a unipolar world after the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. Moscow was also in the way, but having lost the Soviet republics, it was in the background.

It was this catastrophic scenario that a seemingly innocent, peacemaking transfer of the disputed Kuril Islands to Japan led to, to which Yeltsin was pushed by Kozyrev.

I decided to check through the intelligence and counterintelligence agencies whether this information has a basis, can events develop according to the predicted scenario? A thorough check has shown that the alleged situation and its consequences are quite real. The islands could not be given away.
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Nuremberg Trials through the eyes of the Soviet caricaturists

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Several of the episodes described in the article Nuremberg at 80: How do you put a death machine on trial? An article reblog were immortalised in the caricatures, drawn by the Soviet caricaturists observing the trials.

The last line of the German-Fascist defence. The defenders at work

A 1945 caricature from the Nuremberg trials by “Kukryniksy”.

In Krokodil issue №6 of 1982, there was a large publication, celebrating the famous Soviet art collective “Kukryniksy” — Mihail Kupriyanov, Porfiry Krylov, Nikolai Sokolov. The publication went under the title “My Veterans”, and featured, among other, excerpts from their book “The Three of Us Together”. Below is one such fragment:
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Nuremberg at 80: How do you put a death machine on trial? An article reblog

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— An article by Evgeny Norin, Russian journalist and historian focused on war and conflict in the former Soviet Union, published at RT.

A courtroom gave the defeated Reich’s leaders a chance to defend themselves – and the world a record of crimes they could no longer conceal

RT composite. © Getty Images

On the night of October 16, 1946, 10 individuals were hanged in the Nuremberg prison. These were the main Nazi criminals who had been captured and brought to trial.

Despite the horrifying scale and brutality of the crimes, the Nuremberg Trials remain one of the most controversial proceedings in world history.

Justice instead of revenge

The idea of an international tribunal to address Nazi atrocities had been considered for some time. In 1942, the Soviet Union established a special Extraordinary Commission that gathered information about these crimes. Tragically, it had a lot of work to do. The USSR became the primary battleground for the bloodiest and most brutal war in Europe.

The range and nature of the crimes committed on Soviet soil were staggering: genocide against multiple peoples, mass killings on various grounds, all sorts of war crimes, deliberate attacks on medical facilities and civilian infrastructure, arbitrary executions, economic exploitation, and sexual violence. Essentially, every town liberated from the Nazis had enough evidence to warrant its own tribunal. When the concentration camps were liberated, it became clear that Allied propaganda had not exaggerated but rather understated the extent of Nazi atrocities.

In addition to the Soviet government, the exiled governments of occupied countries – Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, France, and Yugoslavia – also wanted to hold the Nazis legally accountable for their crimes.

On October 19, 1943, the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers of the Soviet Union, the USA, and Great Britain began, with Vyacheslav Molotov, Cordell Hull, and Anthony Eden.
On October 30, they and the Chinese Ambassador to the USSR, Fu Bingchang, adopted the Declaration of the Four Governments on General Security, proclaiming the determination of the governments of the USA, Great Britain, the USSR, and China “in accordance with the Declaration of the United Nations of January 1, 1942, and subsequent declarations, to continue military actions against those Axis powers with which they are respectively at war until those powers lay down their arms on the basis of unconditional surrender.”
At the initiative of the USSR, on October 30, the Moscow Declaration on the Responsibility of the Hitlerites for Atrocities Committed was adopted.
It contained a warning that “German soldiers and officers and members of the Nazi Party <…> will be sent to the countries where their heinous crimes were committed so that they can be tried and punished according to the laws of these liberated countries.”
The declaration stated that “the Allied powers will surely find them even at the ends of the earth and hand them over to their accusers so that justice may be done.”
The leaders of the Third Reich and other officials, “whose crimes are not connected with a specific geographic location,” were to be handed over to an international tribunal.
Source: Historian Magazine, translated by Beorn And The Shieldmaiden

The outlines of the future tribunal began to take shape in the fall of 1943 during a conference in Moscow attended by the foreign ministers of the ‘Big Three’ – the USSR, the UK, and the US. The three powers agreed that Nazi leaders who committed crimes across multiple nations should be tried by an international court.

At that time, even the idea of lynching Nazi leaders seemed valid. Benito Mussolini was executed along with his mistress by Italian partisans on April 28, 1945, without any trial. Their mutilated bodies were publicly displayed. No one mourned Mussolini; similarly, no one would have objected if a Red Army soldier had shot Hitler.

Mussolini’s corpse hanged at Piazzale Loretto after his execution in Milan in 1945. © Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

Sporadic acts of vigilante justice also occurred as the war neared its end. A well-known incident involved American soldiers executing the staff of the Dachau concentration camp. Polish troops beat to death Oscar Dirlewanger, the commander of a punitive brigade responsible for countless deaths in Belarus and Poland.

Yet vigilante justice was not what the Allied leaders envisioned.
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Japanese Yasukuni Shrine and what kind of demons worship there

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On October 17, 2026, TASS News Agency reported that Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has sent an offering to the Yasukuni Shinto shrine, which is considered a symbol of militarism in China and several other Asian countries, according to Kyodo news agency.

Takaichi refrained from making a personal visit to the shrine not to create diplomatic problems with South Korea and China, which react sharply to such pilgrimages. The offering was made on the occasion of the traditional autumn festival celebrated at the shrine.

On September 8, 2024, it was the ambassador of Ukranazistan who was worshipping at the Yasukuni Shrine

In a slightly sarcastic post at LiveJournal we could read a bemused description of somewhat of an unreal event, should we have lived in a normal world:

The Ukrainian Embassy in Japan dropped by to the Yasukuni Shrine to worship the “ghosts of fallen soldiers.” (allies of the hitlerites)

There is a memorial in the Yasukuni Shrine to all those who fought for the Third Reich, and occupied China on top of that.

Well, it’s understandable – where else would the Hohols go if there’s no SS march nearby (this is not the Baltics, after all), but for their relations with China this is a veritable control shot in the head. Flowers were laid at the memorial of “employees of detachment 731”, and all that jazz.

And the Chinese went all out with the topic of the visit of the Ukrainian ambassador to Japan – on the date of the end of World War II and the date of remembrance of those killed in China – to the Japanese Yasukuni Shrine, worshipping the Nazi criminals.

Back then, the Ukro-Nazi ambassador to Japan visited the temple just a week after Russian FSB , on August 31, 2024, had declassified certain documents pertaining Detachment 731.

❗The FSB has released a declassified archival document about Japan’s use of bacteriological weapons against Soviet troops during the battles at the Khalkhin-Gol River in late August 1939.

This atrocity was committed by Detachment No. 731 of the Kwantung Army, infamous for its monstrous experiments in infecting people with deadly infections.

By the way, we call it the “Battles of Khalkhin Gol,” Mongolia – the “Khalkhin Gol War”, and Japan called just the “Nomon Khan Incident”.

The atrocities that Detachment 731 committed are too numerous to describe in one publication. Below is an article from “Arumenty i Fakty” about the declassified documents.

The experiment of the killer doctors. Japan used biological weapons against the USSR

The FSB published declassified archival documents stating that at the end of August 1939, Japan used bacteriological weapons against the USSR. The documents contain the protocol of the interrogation of a non-commissioned officer of the Japanese army, who served under the command of Japanese microbiologist Ishii Shiro (photo) near Harbin.

Shiro is a famous Japanese war criminal who conducted experiments on living people while commanding the infamous secret unit “Detachment 731”. Under his command, Japanese doctors infected prisoners with bacteria of deadly diseases, extracted organs from living victims and conducted many other savage experiments. At the same time, most of the fanatical doctors managed to evade responsibility – they were given asylum by Americans who were very interested in the results of their work.

What do the declassified documents say?

The interrogation of senior non-commissioned officer of the Japanese army Hayashi Kazuo was conducted in Morshansk on January 15, 1947. According to his testimony, from October 1938 to February 1941, he served as a treasurer in the Ishii Shiro unit located in the village of Heibo, 30 km south of Harbin. By the unit of “Ishii Shiro”, one obviously means “Detachment 731”, whose direct leader at the time was Shiro.
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The Turkish Missile Crisis. How Khrushev twisted Fidel Castro’s words.

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On October 16, 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was informed that Soviet nuclear missiles had been discovered in Cuba. 45 of them. Moscow had deployed them on the island in response to the appearance of American “Jupiters” in Turkey, from where a missile could reach Moscow in ten minutes. From our telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

The Cuban Missile Crisis began — 13 days when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war.

U.S. declared a naval blockade of Cuba, raised strategic aviation and fleet to alert. Readiness level was raised to DEFCON-2 — first time in the country’s history. This meant one thing: everything was ready, only the order remained.

However, commander of U.S. strategic aviation announced on radio his readiness to bomb the “Reds” without the sanction of U.S. Secretary of Defense and the President. The Soviet command intercepted these messages but considered them a bluff. But they could have given the order for a preemptive strike.
An American U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba, and the military urged Kennedy to strike “before it was too late”. Kennedy delayed — and, as it turned out later, acted correctly.

The generals did not know that 12 missile complexes were already on minute readiness to launch. CIA was also mistaken, believing there were no more than 5,000 Soviet troops in Cuba — there were about 40,000.

Fidel Castro urged Khrushchev not to hesitate to use the missiles in case USA invades Cuba. When Khrushchev later pulled the missiles without consulting with Castro, it caused a cooling of relations between Moscow and Havana (more on it below). At the same time, Khrushchev granted commander of Soviet forces in Cuba, General Isa Pliev, authority to independently decide on the use of nuclear weapons in case of an attack or invasion.

Meanwhile, back-channel diplomacy was saving the world. KGB resident in Washington Alexander Fomin (operational pseudonym Alexander Feklisov) conducted difficult unofficial negotiations with the White House. He conveyed Khrushchev’s proposals, clarified the positions of the parties, and effectively became a live communication channel in the absence of a direct line. It was through him that the USSR and U.S. were able to reach an agreement. Later, Fomin would be called the first person to save the world from nuclear war.

The crisis was unfolding not only in offices. On October 7, the Soviet submarine B-59 was blocked by U.S. destroyers off Cuba’s coast. The U.S. dropped training depth charges, trying to force the submarine to surface. Inside, temperature exceeded forty degrees, communication with Moscow was lost, and air supplies were running out.

The commander, deciding that war had already begun, ordered the nuclear torpedo to be prepared for launch. Launching required the consent of three senior officers. Two were “for.” Senior assistant, Captain Second Rank Vasily Arkhipov, said “no.” The torpedo did not launch.
The same night, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, on Okinawa Island, four American bases received radio orders to launch MGM-13 Mace nuclear cruise missiles with Mark 28 warheads. The codes matched, the signal was genuine. Targets were Beijing, Hanoi, Pyongyang, and Vladivostok.
However, the readiness level remained DEFCON-2: the state of war (DEFCON-1) was not officially declared. Air Force Captain William Bassett realised something was wrong and postponed the launch. One officer accused him of treason and demanded to “immediately start frying the communists”. Bassett then ordered “to send two armed pilots to shoot anyone at the controls if they attempted to launch”. He contacted command — and the order was horrifiedly canceled.

As a result of negotiations, USSR agreed to withdraw missiles from Cuba, and the U.S. to remove theirs from Turkey and lift the blockade.
After these events, a direct “hotline” was established between Moscow and Washington — a teletype connection for transmitting text messages to avoid misunderstandings and translation errors.

It remains in operation to this day.

Source

What Fidel Castro really told Khrushev amidst the Cuban Missile Crisis

A fake quote of what Fidel Castro presumably wrote to Khrushev appeared in the source of the text above, which we edited with a comment.

It went like this: “Cuba is ready to die, but communism must win.”

The quote did not seem authentic, painting Castro as someone indifferent to the fate of the people of Cuba. So we did some reasearch, and it turned out we were not the only ones curious about that quote.

The complete research can be read here.

In short, the legs, so to speak, grow from Khrushev’s publications. The following two fragments are of interest.
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Stepan Bandera — the Cat Strangler. An article by Oles Buzina, translated by Nina Byzantina

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On October 15, 1959, KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky carried out the assassination of the leader of the OUN-UPA criminal group, Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Ukrainian nationalist organisations began to appear in the Western Ukrainian lands, which at that time belonged to Poland, the largest of which was the OUN.

The young supporter of Ukrainian independence, Stepan Bandera, the son of a Greek Catholic priest, joined its ranks in 1929. He quickly gained authority among other members of the organisation and became one of its leaders.

Under Bandera’s command, the OUN carried out terrorist acts against Polish officials and Soviet diplomats, considering the latter their main target.

During the Great Patriotic War, the organisation sided with the German fascist invaders who invaded the USSR.

Led by Bandera, the OUN participated in Jewish pogroms, executions of communists, partisans, civilians, and Soviet prisoners of war. Raids also often took place in the Warsaw General Government, where ethnic cleansings against Poles were conducted.

During the war years, the OUN-UPA committed numerous war crimes. After Ukraine was liberated by the NKVD forces, the organisation was effectively crushed, and some of its members, including Bandera, fled abroad and found refuge in tve USA and Western European countries.

In the autumn of 1949, the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced the leader of the Ukrainian nationalists to death in absentia for the crimes he committed. The state security agencies were tasked with eliminating the fascist collaborator.

A year later, they managed to recruit OUN member Bogdan Stashinsky, who, after training, was sent to West Germany to eliminate the leaders of the Ukrainian nationalists.

On October 14, 1959, Stashinsky arrived in Munich and the next day, without planning to kill Bandera at that moment, accidentally saw him at the entrance to his home. Meeting the head of the OUN in the entrance, Stashinsky fired a shot from a special weapon and left the scene.

The operation was successful: Bandera died on the way to the hospital. For the successful completion of the mission, Bogdan Stashinsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner on November 3, 1959.

Source: Communist Party of the Russian Federation, translated by Beorn And The Shieldmaiden.

The following article by Oles Buzina was translated by Nina Byzantina at her blog, accompanied by an introductory text:

Oles Buzina in 2008

The original article was entitled “Stories from Oles Buzina: Bandera—the Cat Strangler” written by a prominent Ukrainian journalist Oles Buzina and published on January 29, 2010. Buzina was a Ukrainian patriot who believed Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians were triune. He was critical of the gradual imposition of the minority Galician (western Ukrainian) identity onto the majority of Ukraine even before the 2014 Maidan. For example, in this article, the author criticizes Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yushchenko brought to power through the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004. Some consider the 2004 event to be a proto-regime change in that country that succeeded in 2014. In 2010, Yushchenko posthumously granted Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera the Hero of Ukraine title. Bandera lived in Polish-controlled Galicia outside the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the 1920s-1930s and then in Munich, Germany. The latter is an early negative-identity example along the same trajectory as the post-2014 attempts to “cancel” the Russian language and heritage and even remove monuments to the Soviet WWII military leaders.

«Any politician who tries to impose Bandera as Ukraine’s hero will not only destroy his personal career…but will also destroy the country.»
– Oles Buzina, in “Unheroic ‘bandera’,” January 2011

In April 2015, Buzina was assassinated outside his Kiev home—allegedly for his vocal criticism of the Maidan. The murder was one of the first key signs of political radicalization in Ukraine.

Stepan Bandera — the Cat Strangler

by Oles Buzina

It’s too bad that [Ukraine’s President (2005-2010)] Viktor Yushchenko doesn’t know history very well. With his decree making Stepan Bandera a national hero [of Ukraine], he spat in the soul of animal rights advocates all around the world by awarding an animal abuser.

As a writer, what impresses me the most in the story of the newly minted “hero of Ukraine,” is the completeness of the gastronomical theme. On Bandera’s order in 1934, the Interior Minister of Poland, Bronisław Pieracki, was assassinated as he entered a cafe in Warsaw to grab a bite to eat. The mastermind and organizer of this “attentat” (what they call assassination attempts in Galicia [Ukraine]), the half-educated student Bandera was only 25 years old. He was halfway through his life path which he did not suspect.
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White House, Black Smoke – A documentary by Vladimir Chernyshyov

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Reading time: 70 minutes

The balanced and well-researched film was released in 2013, to the 20th anniversary of the “Bloody October”, when most of the direct participants of the events were still alive.

In his author’s project “White House, Black Smoke”, NTV columnist Vladimir Chernyshyov is trying to find the true causes of what happened in October 1993. The film crew managed to collect versions of what happened from almost all participants in the events and build from this mosaic a picture of the turmoil into which society plunged after the collapse of the USSR.


Backup at Rumble.
The transcript of the film is further down.

Related materials from our past publications

The People Will Curse Yeltsin

Towards the end of the documentary, fragments of Yeltsin’s address from October 4, 1993 are given.

The complete text of Yeltsin’s address from October 4, 1993 can be found on the site of the Historian Magazine. A recording on the YouTube channel of Yeltsin Centre (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GERxlYw5d2k) only shows a part of the speech.

The epochal document is unique in that not a single word of the address corresponds to reality, there is not a single grain of truth in it. But Yeltsin successfully applied the Western principle of blaming your opponent for what you have done yourself. On October 4, 1993 a fascist-capitalist counter-revolution that had been in progress in Russia ever since August of 1991, was concluded.

On the afternoon of October 4, 1993, when the shooting in Moscow began to subside, Boris Yeltsin addressed the nation with an explanation of what had happened. According to him, “communist revanchists” and “fascist leaders” were to blame for everything.
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Declassified: MI6 Support For Nazi ‘Forest Brothers’, a reblog of Kit Klarenberg’s article, with a follow-up

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Reading time: 9 minutes

First, an article by Kit Klarenberg from October 12, 2025. Make sure to visit Kit’s site and support the author. Then we will round off with the most significant for this case legal update coming from Russia on October 5, 2026.

Lithuanian monument to Viktoras Vitkauskas-Saidokas, Nazi collaborator turned Forest Brother who beheaded a rabbi in June 1941

September 22nd marked “Resistance Fighting Day”. It was on this date in 1944 anti-Communist guerrilla forces in Estonia declared war on the Soviet Union’s local ‘occupation’. Parallel paramilitary factions rapidly formed in neighbouring Latvia and Lithuania. For over a decade, these violent factions – popularly known as the Forest Brothers – waged a brutal, ill-fated insurgency against Soviet authorities. They remain venerated in the region and beyond today as courageous freedom fighters, immortalised by commemorative monuments, street names and statues throughout the Baltic states.

In reality, the vast majority of the tens of thousands of Forest Brothers were Holocaust perpetrators and Nazi collaborators. In many cases, militants joined the movement due to fear of prosecution and punishment for their activities during World War II. While waging their anti-Soviet crusade, the Brothers also murdered thousands of innocent civilians, including many children. However, critical scrutiny of the Forest Brothers’ genocidal legacy is criminalised throughout the Baltics. Academics, journalists and lawyers have been jailed for exposing the truth.

The same legislation moreover prohibits any public discussion (https://www.jpost.com/opinion/lithuania-promotes-a-false-holocaust-narrative-opinion-655487) of how the Jewish populations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were slaughtered in their virtual totality, largely before the Wehrmacht arrived in June 1941 under Operation Barbarossa. Western powers are aggressively complicit in this historical coverup. In July 2017, NATO produced a slick propaganda film heroising the Forest Brothers. Meanwhile, mainstream pundits routinely whitewash Baltic Nazi collaboration, on the risible basis local populations simply sought to resist Communist rule.

There is another core component of the Forest Brothers’ history their advocates at home and abroad are keen to conceal. Namely, the Baltic Nazi guerrilla war was covertly supported financially, materially and practically by MI6. Britain’s foreign spying agency assisted their attempted insurrection by supplying explosives and weapons, infiltrating and exfiltrating agents, and sponsoring assassinations and sabotage attacks. Yet, MI6 records documenting this dark alliance are unforthcoming. Evidence of London’s cloak-and-dagger assistance to the Forest Brothers is provided largely by declassified CIA files.

Lithuanian Forest Brothers pose in the woods, 1945

The documents indicate Langley glommed onto MI6’s secret bond with the Baltic insurgents some time after British intelligence first struck up a relationship with the Forest Brothers, in the precise manner London recruited Nazi-created ‘stay-behind’ units in Ukraine before World War II was even over. It was the CIA’s first covert action targeting the Soviet Union, and the Agency was extremely concerned about its exposure. “Any breaches of security” revealing US involvement would lead “to an immediate cessation of financial support” for the Brothers.
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A Nazi collaborator was buried with honours in Lvov

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Reading time: 3 minutes

By Marta Havryshko, published at Steigan.no on October 5, 2026

Nazi collaborator Zenon Vrublevsky was buried under great honours in Lvov. Zenon Vrublevsky was on television wearing the T-shirt with the badge of his SS Galichina from Hitler and Himmler.

Zenon Vrublevsky served in the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, took an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler and fought in the service of the Third Reich.
Marta Havryshko.

Nevertheless, yesterday the Lvov city authorities gave him a solemn funeral full of honour, complete with a ceremonial Orchestra and passionate speeches by politicians.

Active members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces also participated.

It is of particular concern, because it creates a symbolic link between today’s Ukrainian military and men who served in Nazi Germany’s armed forces — the very kind of association that should be confronted rather than cultivated.

Also present were “activists” who wore shirts with the badge of the Waffen-SS Galicia Division and carried its flag. Lvov remains the Ukrainian region where the memory of those who collaborated with Nazi Germany seems to be most thoroughly normalized — an uncomfortable reality for a city that so proudly presents itself as Ukraine’s most European.

Yes, Nazism was a European product after all.

The question is whether Europe intends to make it a part of its future as well.

👉 See also The Portal of the Ukranazistan!

The symbol of the SS Division Galichina is prominently carried by the AFU procession

Activists with the T-shirts displaying the SS “Galichina” emblem

Parade of the Nazi collaborators in Lvov in 1941, the SS “Galichina” emblem is prominently visible

NATO officers are training AFU soldies
An SS officer is overseeing training of the artillery men of the Ukrainian SS division “Galichina”.
We remember everything!

85 Years Since the Tragedy of Babi Yar: “They Were All Soviet Citizens, Murdered by Fascists”

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Words of remembrance by historian, Yaroslav Listov.

September 29th marks the 85th anniversary of the beginning of mass shootings at the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev. While it has become an exclusive symbol of the Jewish Holocaust in the post-Soviet era, the tragedy that occurred here was deeper, more extensive, and more devastating.

🕯️ The shootings at Babi Yar did not begin with Jews. Just days before the tragedy of September 29-30, 1941, the Nazis murdered 752 patients from the Ivan Pavlov psychiatric hospital, which was located near the ravine. Hundreds of people were shot, unable to escape, hide, or understand what was happening.

🕯️ Then it was Kiev’s turn. On September 29, 1941, an order was posted throughout the city: all Jews were to gather on the outskirts. In two days, approximately 60,000 people were exterminated in the ravines of Babi Yar.

🕯️ Among the victims were tens of thousands of Jews – from the elderly to children of Kiev, but they were not the only victims of fascism. In Babi Yar, partisans, communists, Komsomol members, underground fighters, and prisoners of war – Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Tatars, and people of other nationalities from the vast Soviet Union – were shot. The “factory of death” operated throughout the entire period of German occupation.

🕯️ On January 10, 1942, approximately 100 sailors from the Dniepropetrovsk Detachment of the Pinsk Military Flotilla were executed here. They were driven through the frost naked and barefoot, and they sang «The Internationale» before their deaths.

🕯️ Babi Yar became the site of the execution of five Gypsy camps.

🕯️ Near Babi Yar, the Syrets KZ camp was established, where communists, Komsomol members, underground fighters, prisoners of war, and others were held. At least 25,000 people died there.

An experimental soap factory was set up in Babi Yar to produce soap from the murdered. The Germans did not manage to complete its construction.
Prisoners were used for the most horrific task – burning the corpses. Semyon Berlyant, one of those who worked near the furnaces, testified:

“All of us, 180 people, worked (in Babi Yar) chained in iron. People literally collapsed and could not work. The gendarmerie beat these people with sticks and rifle butts… and shot and burned them in these furnaces.”

⚡️ As they retreated from Kiev and tried to hide their crimes, the Nazis partially destroyed the camp in August-September 1943, digging up and burning tens of thousands of corpses in the open “furnaces.” The bones were crushed in machines brought from Germany, and the ashes were scattered around the area.

⛓️ On the night of September 29, 1943, a rebellion broke out in Babi Yar involving 329 prisoner-of-war inmates who were working near the furnaces. 18 people survived. The remaining 311 were shot.

🗣️ The memories of witnesses are chilling:
Nadezhda Gorbacheva, a resident of Kiev:

“I personally saw Germans throwing infants into the ravine. There were not only those who had been shot in the ravine, but also the wounded, as well as living children. The Germans were burying the ravine, and it was noticeable how a small layer of earth moved from the movement of living people.”

Dina Pronicheva, an actress who miraculously survived:

“I saw women, old people, and children being undressed group by group… They were all led to an open pit, and machine gunners shot them… I saw this horror with my own eyes…
Young people became gray before my eyes.”

Raisa Dashkevich, who lost her entire family:

“The procession was terrifying – a stream of thousands of people doomed to death was moving towards Babi Yar. There was still hope that they would be sent somewhere… but when they were ordered to undress and led to this ravine – our grave – everyone realised that it was the end.”

🕯️ According to various estimates, between 100,000 and 200,000 people were shot in Babi Yar between 1941 and 1943. People of different nationalities. Different views. Different destinies.
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Were the events of August of 1991 a coup d’état?

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Can the events that took place on August 19–21, 1991, be called a coup d’état? And why did the coup plotters lose so quickly? Maxim Artemyev, the author of the book “The Gekachepists”, a historian and journalist reflects on this in an interview with the “Historian” magazine in a conversation with Arseny Zamostyanov. July, 2021

This was perhaps the most striking and dramatic event of the turbulent perestroika period. Top leaders of the state removed Mikhail Gorbachev, the current president of the USSR, from power and declared a state of emergency. Armoured personnel carriers on Moscow’s pavements and barricades around the residence of the President and government of the RSFSR, the White House, became symbols of the confrontation that took to the streets. However, a few days later, the political fiesta ended with the unexpectedly rapid surrender of the Emergency Committee and crowded rallies, where supporters of the President of the RSFSR Boris Yeltsin, who initially called the actions of the Emergency Committee a “right-wing reactionary unconstitutional coup”, noisily celebrated the victory. Three days of “great upheavals”, which effectively became a fleeting epilogue to the entire history of the Soviet Union.

The actions of the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP) are now perceived by many primarily as a gesture of desperation, doomed to failure from the outset. To this day, heated debates continue about the events of those three days. Indeed, what was it? An inept attempt to impose a harsh, semi‑military dictatorship on the country, or the last chance to save the Soviet Union? Maxim Artemyev has his own answer to this question. The biographer of the GKChP members generally believes that “their actions can be studied as a guide on how not to stage a coup”. However, Artemyev believes that the failure of the August coup is a verdict on the entire late‑Soviet elite, which by that time had already proven to be “too weak‑willed and uncompetitive”.

Press conference of the State Committee on the State of Emergency. From left to right: Alexander Tizyakov, Vasily Starodubtsev, Boris Pugo, Gennady Yanayev, and Oleg Baklanov. August 19, 1991

Was There a Coup?

– Do you consider the GKChP’s actions to be a state coup?

– I think that’s too strong a formulation. The events related to the creation and collapse of the State Emergency Committee are unique, and it is difficult to find an adequate definition for them. A coup or a coup d’etat is, as a rule, an action against the current government, while all the participants in the Emergency Committee themselves were members of the ruling elite of the Soviet Union. Head of Government and Vice-President, Chairman of the KGB, Minister of Defence, Minister of Internal Affairs…

– But they still isolated their boss, the President of the USSR…

– Please note that they constantly emphasised that Gorbachev was only temporarily unable to fulfil the duties of the President of the USSR due to his health condition. And Gennady Yanayev, at the famous press conference on August 19, kept insisting that Mikhail Sergeyevich was simply tired and, once he recovered, he would definitely return to fulfilling his duties. And it’s hardly possible to speak of complete isolation. Gorbachev simply made no attempts to leave Foros. It’s unlikely that the guards would have refused to carry out his orders if the president had decided to rush to Moscow in a hurry. According to many participants of those events (including Boris Yeltsin), Gorbachev was waiting in those days to see who would prevail and was in a kind of self‑imposed isolation. It is noteworthy that the GKChP’s appeal “To the Soviet People” contains no criticism of Gorbachev, and the only “dark forces” mentioned are nameless “extremists”, who are hard to equate with the President of the USSR.

– The main mystery surrounding the August events remains the question to which different memoirists and researchers give contradictory answers: was the “GKChP” project a surprise to Mikhail Gorbachev?

– Let’s put it this way: events took an unexpected turn for him. Gorbachev was preparing in Foros to sign the Union Treaty, which he regarded as his tactical success. The signing ceremony was scheduled for August 20. But the ideas that the GKChP relied on were up in the air. It is enough to recall Alexander Kabakov’s popular story “The Defector”, which, after the August events, was seen as a prediction of the so‑called coup. Or the popular leaflets that were distributed at democratic rallies in 1990 and early 1991: one of the most popular slogans was “Let’s not allow the revenge of the apparatus!” Society was so often spooked up by the advance of “anti‑perestroika forces” that it began to resemble the well‑known parable about the boy who jokingly shouted: “Wolves! Wolves!”, and when the real wolves appeared, no one believed him. So many perceived the GKCHP’s speech as a kind of apparatus revenge attempt, an attempt to “undo the changes”. Of course, Gorbachev was aware of the position of his conservative–minded colleagues, perhaps he considered them a counterweight to the radical Democrats, while he saw his line as centrist. At the same time, he was shocked that people who owed him everything had acted without his knowledge.
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