by Victor Rud
May 7, 2025
EU Today
If you doubted that Putin’s mind slaughter works, it does. Reality reversal, reflex control, conditioned response, and altered consciousness will be all be on display at Putin’s May 9 “Victory Parade.”
It solidifies Russia’s shattering of the “rules-based international order” secured by that very cataclysm.
And It’s worse than you think.
Stalin conspires with Hitler to ignite WWII, diverting Hitler against Europe, and feeding the Nazi its war machine.
For years previous, Moscow had collaborated with Germany to rebuild Germany’s war capacity in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, abetting Hitler’s rise.
Simultaneously, the U.S. was putting Moscow on its economic and military feet, and in 1933 recognized the genocidal regime that was starving Ukraine into near oblivion and sworn to America’s destruction.
Hitler’s purpose for the war in Europe was to colonize Ukraine.
The largest payment for ensuing “world order” was made by Ukraine, losing more humanity than any nation in the world. Russia’s losses were a fraction.
The “order” failed, utterly and hypocritically, to prevent Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and annexing Ukrainian territory and humanity.
Seven years of abject Western pusillanimity provoked Putin to exponentially expand the invasion.
Ukraine is the only country battling against Russia, (now joined by North Korean troops and Chinese “volunteers”) to preserve that “order,” doing NATO’s job for it.
America, the lead architect of the order, has joined in Russia’s demands, denying Ukraine membership in NATO, is prepared to recognize Crimea’s annexation, and is slamming Ukraine to surrender more territory and humanity in the face of the genocide that Russia proudly declares is one of its goals. Ukraine’s renewal of independence in 1991finally dissolved the Evil Empire and “made America great again.”
Days ago, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev sniggered that Ukraine “is about to disappear.”
Let’s celebrate
Russia doesn’t have an independence day. Why? From whom? Instead, it has retooled the history of the “Great Patriotic War” into a memorial without a memory or rather, hyperlinked to faux memories. More accurately, it’s not a commemoration of the past, but a subliminal power projection into the future. But it’s more than the domestic behavioral stimulus for Russia’s accelerating assault against the US and the rest of the West, contempt for which Putin shares with Hitler. It’s also the stimulus for the West, subverting its ability to discern and counteract that assault. WWII’s “Never Again” is kneaded into “Just Watch Me.” Ukraine is the fulcrum.
Pavlov’s bell works. It curates Western guilt psychosis about an “eternally victimized Russia.” Small wonder that Russia is merely being defensive, it has historical grievances and legitimate security interests, it needs “security guarantees” (the largest country on the planet?), NATO is an existential threat to its own backyard. This translates into thermobaric levelling of Ukraine and more horrors than can be described. Invasion is liberation, annexation is protection and perpetrator is victim. Examples are endless and also outside any WWII background. A future Trump Russia expert captioned a New York Times Op-ed, “Stop Blaming Putin and Start Helping Him.” In 2004. The expert has since learned.
America is the trophy. Regardless of Secretary of State Rubio’s rumored reported (or any other Western) possible presence at the May 9 parade (some US veterans apparently will attend), in Ukraine we’re being played to administer the coup de grace to the global system and to erase our own sacrifices. America is interring its own Arlington National Military Cemetery. It’s more efficient than Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “We will bury you!” Never mind the cymbal crash sounded by Foreign Minister Lavrov upon Russia’s reinvasion in 2022: “it reflects the battle over what the world order will look like.” The bell rings louder.
The Basics
Putin’s extravaganza is an acid rinse of Moscow’s own criminal responsibility that, with Hitler, ignited that cataclysm under the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Valentyn Berezhkov was the Soviet interpreter during the talks leading up to the 1939 Pact. He wrote: “Hitler admired Stalin’s ruthlessness, cruelty, and mercilessness. He identified with these traits.” For decades the Kremlin denied the existence of the Pact’s secret protocol, then admitted it, then justified it and now celebrates it. Stalin’s NKVD and Hitler’s Gestapo bonded.
Shortly before, Stalin laid it out to his Politburo: “The dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party [in Europe] will only become possible as the result of a major war. Our choice is clear. Our task is to ensure that Germany be engaged in war for as long as possible and that Britain and France be exhausted.”
But Moscow’s culpability runs deeper. From 1922 to 1933, it helped rebuild Germany’s war industry, evading the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty and abetting Hitler’s rise to power.
Shipments of agricultural goods and raw materials that Moscow plundered in Ukraine were massive. Hitler said to Carl Burckhardt, a Swiss and High Commissioner of the League of Nations, German officers had been “trained in Russia” under German command – air combat (Lipetsk), tank warfare (Kama), chemical warfare (Tomka). Tours of the Gulag were de rigeur for future executioners in German camps.
Later, Stalin’s trade deal allowed Hitler to circumvent the British blockade, enabling the Nazi invasion of France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia and Greece. Fuel from Baku in Russian-occupied Azerbaijan powered the Luftwaffe’s bombing of London. Mikhail Tuckhachevsky, the leading Soviet military theoretician, was giddy: “Germany and the USSR can dictate terms to the world if we act together.”
Shockingly, America was simultaneously putting the USSR on its own economic and military feet. After Stalin, it was the American engineer who was god. Washington extended diplomatic recognition to the USSR in 1933 during Moscow’s forced starvation of Ukraine, breaking the spine of its resistance for generations. (The survivors would become targets for American and British troops after the war.)
The Democratic West
America’s Lend-Lease program was a “blank check” for the Kremlin. Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s “Elon Musk” and until recently celebrated by the KGB as its most successful asset, was resident in the White House. He headed the Program.
There was no accountability, no restrictions on use. Aid was often prioritized over even America’s own troops’ needs. Among them were ships for the Gulag fleet delivering human cargo to the Gulag’s northern ports. So huge was the flood of American war material that Moscow sold some of it to Japan. And so intent was the White House not to “offend the Russians” that US personnel investigating the betrayal were “ordered by higher authority: drop the subject.”
At war’s end, Hitler was dead, and Stalin was left standing and was ecstatic. Washington measured and financed the Iron Curtain, bloating his empire, from Prague to the Sea of Japan. Northernmost Japan remains under Russian occupation to this day. More countries and peoples were bound in tyranny than Hitler ever dreamed of. American aid also helped Stalin crush resistance movements in Ukraine and the Baltics, and to install communist regimes in North Korea and China after that war.
Cocooning itself from reality, the West had celebrated the Yalta agreements as “a gigantic step forward toward the ultimate establishment of a peaceful and orderly world.”
The Kremlin’s dispositive advantage was President Roosevelt himself. He was in a state of rapture and inexplicably enamored of Stalin, “determined to make himself liked.” Convinced he could charm Stalin, Roosevelt told Winston Churchill, “Stalin hates the guts of all your people. He thinks he likes me better.” Roosevelt was obsequious, “I think that if I give him [Stalin] everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try
to annex anything.” This was before even meeting Stalin. Later, “I couldn’t get any personal connection with Stalin, although I had done everything he asked me to do.”
Among other matters, Roosevelt refused to believe that Stalin had signed the 1939 Pact or had ordered the heinous Katyn massacre of Polish officers. Even though not requested, America’s high altitude Norden bombsight, which we didn’t dare to share even with the British, was ceremoniously gifted to Stalin.
The Malware
Scarcely a soul in the West knows what Hitler’s war in Europe was all about. “The purpose of the second World War, from Hitler’s point of view, was the conquest of Ukraine.” Professor Timothy Snyder further schooled the German Bundestag. “The Ukrainians were to be the center of a project of colonization and enslavement. The idea was to create a slavery-driven, exterminatory regime in Eastern Europe with the center in Ukraine.”
U.S. war correspondent for The Saturday Evening Post, Edgar Snow, wrote at the time:
“Ukraine was the scene of Hitler’s greatest attempt at ‘colonization’ and of his greatest defeat. The whole titanic struggle, which some are so apt to dismiss as the Russian glory, was first of all a Ukrainian war. A relatively small part of the Russian Soviet Republic itself was actually invaded, but the whole of Ukraine was devastated. No single European country suffered deeper wounds to its cities, its industry, its farmlands and its humanity.”
Little wonder. Ukraine was one of the few countries ruled directly from Berlin. It had no collaborationist government like Vichy France or Quisling Norway, nor was it another Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, or Italy, all in various degrees in the Nazi camp as well.
It was thus Ukraine, not “Russia,” that paid the highest price of WWII. Snyder and Oxford’s Norman Davies wrote that Ukraine suffered the greatest human loss of any country in the world, some 8-9 million souls. And with Russia’s population multiple times larger than Ukraine’s, the proportionate number of Ukrainian losses was mind-bending. Belarus lost a third of its population, and the Baltic nations’ losses were staggering.
Do we understand Putin’s vivisection of our brain? — “Ukrainians are Nazis” and simultaneously, “Ukrainians don’t exist.” (Likewise, Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s SS commander, on June 30, 1943, decreed: “The word ‘Ukrainian’ is forbidden, now and for all time.”)
Putin secures Western applause not of a “common cause,” of an Allied victory, or even of a Soviet victory, but specifically of a “Russian” victory. A mutant train of logic vaporizes reality, both reinforcing and exploiting what Western Russia experts have absorbed to their innermost core: a multi-national empire– “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”—that the experts re-engineered into a unitary national state, “Russia.” Not even Stalin dared the alchemy.
To this day, Western representatives catatonically respool USSR = Russia, implicitly legitimizing Moscow clawing back its empire. No room for Ukraine, perhaps a region of sorts, a “historic part of Russia.” In 1948 a State Department memo, circulated to the National Security
Council, analogized Ukraine to simply a geographic expanse, like “the Midwest.” “The” Ukraine.
Ever quick on the uptake, Putin intoned: “After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, which in the Soviet era was called the Soviet Union – that’s what it was called abroad – Soviet Russia – if we talk about our national borders, lost 23.8% of the territory.”
Victimhood, the Soviet/Russia equivalence, and the numbers game were all in play in a talk by a former US Ambassador to the UN: “U.S. and Russian interests have frequently aligned. We fought together in both of the 20th century’s world wars. The colossal sacrifices were made by the Soviet Union in World War Two–in which they lost more than 20 million lives. Russia’s immense contribution in that war is part of their proud history of standing up to imperialist powers.”
Our infamy continued. Telford Taylor, America’s chief counsel, wrote that at the Nuremberg Tribunal we sought to protect the Kremlin from embarrassment, ensuring that the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was not entered into evidence lest we “offend the Russians.” Moscow’s war crimes, such as Stalin’s massacre of Polish officers at Katyn’ in 1940 and its atrocities in and outside the Soviet Union during WWII, simply never happened.
It gets worse
Some of the Ukrainian famine survivors who had survived Stain and Hitler managed to escape to Western Europe. They saw America as their salvation, despite our legitimization in 1933 of Stalin’s starvation of that nation. They were desperate to “tell the West!”
Simultaneously with the Nuremberg proceedings, the U.S. partnered with the Soviet NKVD and Britain in “Operation Keelhaul,” forcibly repatriating the wretched humanity back to the Gulag. Why? They were the truth tellers. Their message: security for the West would only come with the dissolution of the USSR and then ensuring against Russia’s claw back of the empire. Stalin insisted at Yalta that that was “the deal” and we dutifully obliged. The Displaced Persons camps of post-war Europe exploded with suicides of entire families, others were beaten, sometimes killed. For a period of time, American and British troops were taking orders from the Kremlin.
With a source in the NKVD’s office at Allied headquarters in Frankfurt, the Ukrainians warned Washington of Stalin’s intention to assassinate General George Patton. Moscow however had penetrated every US federal agency of any consequence, whether military or civilian, including the vaunted Office of Strategic Services. Duncan Lee, top assistant to OSS head “Wild Bill” Donovan, was one of the traitors. Washington betrayed the Ukrainian informants, issued an arrest warrant, and warned the NKVD of a Ukrainian mole in its midst.
For good measure, American troops confiscated from the DP camps copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, translated into Ukrainian by one of the refugees and for which Orwell had written a special introduction. “Too provocative.” We delivered the copies to the NKVD.
Remember Tomorrow
The “rules-based international order” borne of a cataclysmic war was paid, first and foremost, by Ukraine. That order has — utterly, shamefully and alarmingly — failed to prevent, stop or (Heaven forbid) reverse Russia’s incineration of the nation and with it that same “order.”
The same Western naivete about Moscow, strategic myopia, and moral aphasia in WWII is in play today in Ukraine, where Russia shatters everything that the post-war world achieved. Yes, we’ve provided much assistance to Ukraine but too little and too late. We never had as our goal, our purpose, to do what for 80 years we repeatedly agreed to do.
The bell rings clear, as Trump invents a death toll of “50 million Russians,” praises Putin, castigates Zelensky, and blames Ukraine for invading itself. Washington has endorsed Putin’s reality reversal, demanding to impose on Ukraine, the victim, limitations on its borders and population, and restrictions on its security and existence that everyone agreed after WWII should be imposed on the invader. Reality reversal feeds reflex control feeds reality reversal.
Today, there is not a single issue to be “negotiated” that hasn’t been repeatedly agreed to in WWII ‘s aftermath—outlawing genocide and wars of aggression and securing national sovereignty. Indeed, what of Russia’s openly declared genocidal campaign against Ukrainians?
“The genocide of these cretins is due and inevitable,” reads the Russian church-issued wallet cards to Russian troops. “Your task is to wipe the Ukrainian nation off the face of the earth.” It’s a “Holy War.” Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev dismissed Ukraine’s recent mineral resource deal with America, chortling that Ukraine “is about to disappear.”
Ukraine’s renewal of independence in 1991 finally dissolved the Evil Empire and “made America great again.” No matter. Beezness beckons, and the American president steps on the crowbar leveraged against Ukraine — Ukraine started the war, Zelensky is a dictator, Crimea would be recognized by the US. The genocidaire is brilliant and praised for his concession of not annexing the entire country. The Kremlin is right: “There isn’t a single country in the world that is as easily manipulated as America. We can take them down without it [nuclear arms].”
Children in Ukraine, ignited by Putin’s phosphorus bombs into screaming running torches, illuminate our sinkhole.
Victor Rud is a board member of the Ukrainian American Bar Association and chairman of its Committee on Foreign Affairs. Rud has more than 35-years of experience as an international attorney. Before Ukrainian independence, he was co-counsel, in the West, for members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Accords Watch Group, and for other dissidents in Ukraine. He was also counsel to the US Public Member to the Helsinki Accords Review Conference in Madrid. He is an honors graduate of Harvard College and Duke Law School.