The US didn't want a peace deal at the Maidan; Ukrainian fascists still don't

More incomparable work by Ivan Katchanovski, this time in the German mag Junge Welt, or Young World.

I offer Google Translate's English, in full:

Headline: "False flag action by Ukrainian fascists"

Subhed: Shots in the back: evidence speaks against government massacre on Kiev Maidan in 2014 

At the end of January 2014, the "Euromaidan" on Kiev's Independence Square seemed to be running out of steam. The square and the streets leading to it were lined with military tents in which sinister figures slept with machetes strapped to their belts. “Ask for donations for cigarettes and ammunition,” wrote the “Volhynian Detachment of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army” on a cardboard sign in front of their tent. So they must have already had the weapons back then. None of the respondents knew what their political goals were.

Anyone you met on Khreshchatik Boulevard was a member of the infantry, recruited for $20 a day from the unemployed in western Ukraine. The strings behind it were pulled by oligarchs competing with President Viktor Yanukovych for access to the national economy, who also ensured that the tent camp was supplied with food and firewood. Middle-class women from “civil society” spread bread and distributed soup. In the evening they went home again. The police remained strangely passive - there were obviously sympathizers of the other option even in Yanukovych's circle. There was hypocritical excitement in January when the government issued a ban on arming and masking for demonstrations, as has been standard in Germany since the 1970s and was never enforced anyway.

In mid-February, activists trained in hand-to-hand combat began attacking police barriers between the Maidan and the government district with incendiary devices. Mixtures with phosphorus were also used. The first shots were fired around eight o'clock on the morning of February 20th. They first encountered police officers stationed around Independence Square; there were dead and injured among them. It has now emerged that the shots came from several buildings controlled by Maidan activists. In particular, the Hotel “Ukraina,” where the fascist Svoboda party was staying, and the adjacent conservatory, which was controlled by Yulia Tymoshenko’s “Fatherland Party.”

In the confusion and the beginning of panic, the direction on stage called on the demonstrators to move towards the government district via Institutska Street. Dozens of demonstrators were killed or injured by gunfire here. But the bullet channels and the type of wounds quickly indicated that they could not have been fired from the front - by the police, who were holed up behind a chain of trucks - because the whole thing took place in a blind spot.

Rather, the fire came from behind again, again from the Hotel "Ukraina" and the conservatory as well as the trade union hall, where the "Right Sector" had its headquarters. The Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist Ivan Katchanovski has researched this meticulously over the years from hundreds of timecoded video reports and other sources. He cites strong evidence that Western politicians were also informed in advance about the planned storm and the use of firearms. The perpetrators were covered up and disappeared without a trace; not a single police officer has been convicted to date. The official legend of the Yanukovych massacre was apparently impossible to prove, even for the Ukrainian justice system.

But the facts were established. Yanukovych fled, and the entire West immediately recognized the regime that emerged from Maidan, even though three EU foreign ministers - Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Radosław Sikorski and Laurent Fabius - had negotiated an early resignation with Yanukovych the day before the massacre. But a compromise was no longer desired by the USA (“Fuck the EU”) and the Ukrainian fascists.

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More detail on who was firing, and scheming, from an old Junge Welt piece by Moss Robeson, talking about the role of the Bandera group within the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists:

The Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) played a central role in the “Revolution of Dignity,” also known as “Euromaidan.” Trisub, the former paramilitary wing of the OUN-B, which had cooperated closely with a nationalist faction of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) since its founding in 1993, spearheaded the Right Sector. This collective movement of fascist and other ultra-right organizations led the violent street battles on the Maidan.

The OUN-B played a more direct role in the lesser-known but important “civil sector of the Maidan,” which, according to the primarily US government-funded NGO Freedom House, “formed the protest camp into a socially sustainable organism for many weeks.” ... The OUN-B also had some high-ranking members in the fascist Svoboda party, including its ideologue Olexander Sitsch, who became Ukraine's first deputy prime minister in 2014.

Andriy Levus, who publicly announced in 2022 that he is vice-chairman of the international OUN-B, was for many years assistant to the commander of the “Maidan Self-Defense Forces”, Andriy Parubiy, who was also one of the co-founders of the Social-National Party, forerunner of Svoboda , belonged. In 2013, Lewus worked closely with the politician and ex-SBU official Sergij Bondarchuk, who announced the "beginning of 'Euromaidan'" at the beginning of November. ... During the mysterious February 20, 2014 sniper massacre that made the coup possible, Andriy Levus negotiated a ceasefire with a government official. He told the New York Times that he was prepared for a much bloodier confrontation. After the "Revolution" he was appointed deputy director of the SBU.

On November 22, 2013, the day after the first "Euromaidan" protest, a meeting of the World Council of Ukrainian Statehood Organizations, formerly known as the World Ukrainian Liberation Front, took place at the OUN-B headquarters in Kiev. This is the international coordination body for the façade structures of the OUN-B, which received orders from Munich during the Cold War. The diaspora leaders of the OUN-B came to this Banderist conclave and also formed the front of the “Holodomor” memorial march alongside future Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Vitaly Klitschko, who became mayor of Kiev in May 2014.

After the change of power, the Banderists took over the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance in Kiev, as well as the Ministry of Education and Health. The “Civil Sector of the Maidan,” which was permeated by the Banderists, created the Western-financed “Resuscitation Package of Reforms,” which pushed forward the Banderization of the state’s official Ukrainian memory policy. In the 2014 elections, OUN-B leaders Oleg Medunitsya and Andriy Levus, who ran on Arseniy Yatsenyuk's nationalist Popular Front list, were elected to the Verkhovna Rada. Five years after the coup, the OUN-B threatened another “revolution.” This time against the newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky - in the event that he would keep his promise and end the civil war raging in the East with a negotiated solution. The “surrender resistance movement” was led by Andrij Lewus. ... When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Banderists took credit for provoking the government in Moscow and declared: "Our victory is the victory of our ideas."

Highlight on last paragraph mine.