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Special think tanks work for heroization of Ukraine's neo-Nazis — Russian Security Council

The Ukrainian diaspora’s influence became particularly noticeable during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, Deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council Alexander Venediktov noted

MOSCOW, May 18. /TASS/. Russia’s Security Council is aware of the great risks posed by the special pseudo-scholarly infrastructure that generates myths about the Ukrainian nationalists’ allegedly "heroic struggle."

"After World War II thousands of Western Ukrainians, many of them Nazi collaborators, fled the territory of Ukraine to the United States, Canada and Latin America, where large diasporas emerged in the second half of last century," the deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Alexander Venediktov, said at a meeting with foreign ambassadors in Moscow on Wednesday.

He stressed that "in this environment there emerge and multiply myths of a ‘heroic struggle’ by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, OUN (outlawed in Russia) for independent Ukraine and, what is still more important, a whole pseudo-scholarly infrastructure has been created to enhance this narrative. Harvard Ukrainian Studies has become one of the largest such centers," Venediktov said.

He stressed that "this environment cultivates a very specific interpretation of the issue of famine in Ukraine, which the Ukrainian diaspora’s historians have turned into Ukraine’s equivalent of the Holocaust."

"Involved in the efforts to propagate this version were the CIA, its operation Aerodynamic and its mastermind Zbigniew Brzezinski (US President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser in 1977-1981 - TASS)," Venediktov said. In his opinion "it is there that the OUN’s crimes have been and will be called into question, played down or rationalized."

Venediktov believes that "the Ukrainian diaspora’s influence became particularly noticeable during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, who for the first time officially acknowledged the version of the mass famine of the early 1930s as an act of genocide by Moscow."

"Further on, the pantheon of Ukraine’s ‘heroes’ began to be complemented not by ancient princes, but OUN ringleaders, whose names were awarded to avenues, whose monuments were erected, and who started to be looked at as a source of inspiration by those who suffered the most from the socio-economic depression of modern Ukraine," Venediktov said.