DISINFO: CIA reveals that the ‘Hero of Ukraine’ Stepan Bandera worked for Hitler
SUMMARY
In 2010, Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko granted posthumously to Stepan Bandera the highest distinction of the country, the title of ‘Hero of Ukraine” for “having fought for an independent Ukrainian State”. However, the CIA recently published documents which prove that Bandera was indeed an agent for Hitler. In a report titled Stepan Bandera and the 1941 ‘Ukraine State'”, US intelligence call Bandera “a Ukrainian fascist and Hitler’s professional agent” whose codename was Consul 2.
RESPONSE
The claim that the CIA revealed that Stepan Bandera was Hitler’s agent is false. The mentioned CIA document is a translation of an article published in the journal of the Russian Social-Democratic party in exile, the Sotstialistichaskiy Vestnik publication in June-July 1951 and reviewed by the US intelligence’s foreign languages monitoring service. The allegations against Bandera were made by the author of the article, Petro Yarovyy, who was echoing the official accusations of the USSR, and not by the CIA. Besides, the original document includes a standard legend affirming that its content is unevaluated information. This is a part of a recurrent Russian narrative to deny Ukraine’s identity and Ukrainian nationalism by equating them to Nazism. You can see other examples, such as the allegations that the Ukrainian project is nothing but its Nazi ideology, derived from a Western-sponsored coup carried out by Ukrainian fascists (also known as Neo-Banderas), using Russophobia in Ukraine and other countries to encircle Russia, and that this led to Ukraine’s division in three parts including Banderastan.