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From the very beginning, the United Kingdom has been the most involved in the Ukrainian war from all Western countries. Analysing the reasons we should note not only the great changes on the global geopolitical chessboard, but also some important details, less obvious motives of London’s pro-Kiev attitude. Just like the government-funded public places of worship for the 14th Waffen-SS Division Galizien, located in Lockerbie, on the Scottish English border.
SS-men in an idyllic landscape
Lockerbie stara tablica
Dumfries and Galloway is unanimously considered to be one of the UK’s most friendly counties. From the mountains to the sea, with numerous castles and attractions, such as the famous wedding venue for fleeing English teenagers, Gretna Green, it is somewhat of a miniature Scotland, also inhabited by English people and (which is admitted slightly less often) by a significant minority of Ukrainian roots.
Lockerbie is small, bur relatively widely known town there, remembered from tragic Pan Am Flight 103 crash in December 1988, which the Libyan government was accused for, what much later became one of the excuses of the Western invasion against Libya. The town itself, however charming, is off the main tourist routes, but offers another (next to the monument to the victims of Pan Am Flight 103) dramatic attraction:
a chapel erected by the hands of Ukrainian immigrants, former Waffen-SS soldiers who were allowed to live in the UK after WW2.
Britons used them in the military and intelligence tasks of NATO forces against the Eastern Bloc, preparing WW3. Now it seems these attempts have resumed.
Volunteer workers of World War 3
The first large Ukrainian group admitted to the British Isles yet in 1946 were soldiers recommended by the 2nd Corps of the auxiliary Polish Armed Forces, still stationed in Italy at the time. Before 1944, there were no more than 850 Ukrainians within this unit.
However, along with the increase in the size of the Polish forces in Italy and the admission of the released Polish prisoners of war from German camps, the number of Ukrainians also increased. In this way, 176 soldiers of the collaborative with Nazis Ukrainian National Army (i.e. the rebranded Waffen-SS Galizien) were recruited into service in the Polish Armed Forces by a personal decision of General Władysław Anders (made at the express request of the British).
Anyway, there were still no more than 1,000 people declaring Ukrainian nationality or ethnic origin within the 2nd Corps in the spring of 1946, but yet, as part of the gradual relocation of Polish units to the UK, as many as 5,000 Ukrainians, mainly former SS-men, reached there with the IDs of the Polish Armed Forces.
The next ones, in May and June 1947, arrived openly and under their own signs. 8,500 Ukrainian Nazis were deployed in several camps (not POW, but training ones!) in England and Scotland, as Hampton (Norfolk) – 1,682, Mildenhall (Suffolk) – 1,401, Allington (Lincolnshire) – 1,319, Moorby (Lincolnshire) – 1,264, Botsdale (Suffolk) – 1,010, Dalkeith (Scotland) – 958, other areas (including hospitals in which the disabled were staying) – 300, and Lockerbie (Scotland) – 463.
They officially received the status of Volunteer European Workers (VER) to undertake work, mainly physical, in British industry and agriculture.
However, the former SS-men were in fact still under British military command. Over the next three years, the number of these Ukrainian “workers” prepared for the anticipated World War 3 in the UK exceeded 21,000, making it the largest group of the 91,000 Volunteers. It was not until 1951 that the VER was gradually disbanded, and its members gained the full right to continue their work and service for the Empire.
„Always with Batko Bandera!”
Mike Ostapko who cares of the chapel and Waffen-SS monument in Lockerbie is one of such distinguished British veterans and descendent of Ukrainian Nazi immigrants. Today, 70-year-old, Mike willingly talks about his service in the Royal Scots Greys, i.e. the famous The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, as well as participation in The British Commanders’-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany, BRIXIMIS in East Berlin, where he served for MI6.
Mike modestly recognises that his own gainings pale in comparison to the achievements of his father, Mykhailo, who in July 1944, while fighting in the ranks of the 14th Ukrainian Waffen-SS Division Galizien (German Centre Army Group), was wounded at the Battle of Brody against the Red Army. – My father was also part of a group that set up the first Ukrainian building in Munich where they were working with Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera – Ostapko emphasises, speaking about the HQ of Zakordonni Czastyny OUN, Anglo-Saxon controlled operational centre of former Hitler’s collaborators. Thanks to the merits of such people, thousands of Ukrainian Nazis could not only live in the UK, but also acquire citizenship and the possibility of gradual merging with British society, primarily as part of military service while providing other tasks within the public administration.
Ukrainian Nazi centres in Canada and the UK
Of the total group of approximately 250,000 Ukrainians, German collaborators who remained in the West after World War 2, nearly half decided to emigrate to Canada, where today they create a thriving centre of jingoist propaganda, exerting a strong influence on the government in Ottawa.
The rest of the diaspora has gradually and often only seemingly integrated into the societies of the host countries, often gaining prominent positions in the local media or politics. At the same time, however, it was not in the interest of the Anglo-Saxons to let Ukrainians to be fully assimilated, but on the contrary, it was important to keep their ties with the country of origin and the prospect of using them for further actions in the East.
Therefore one of the most significant units of The Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain (AUGB) is the Association of Ukrainian Former Combatants in Great Britain, proudly cultivating the tradition of the Waffen-SS Galizien, but also the UPA, the Ukrainian Legion and other Nazi-collaborative formations. Nazi cult sites, seemingly forgotten and decaying, could thus be easily re-opened and honoured when London saw an interest in it again. In July 2022, the British Heritage Minister, Nigel Huddleston, officially marked the status of Grade II listing of a cross erected in 1948 by former SS-men in Mylor Bridge, Cornwall. In the ceremony attended by the Ukrainian vice-ambassador Taras Krykun, the representative of His Majesty’s Government neatly linked the contemporary British Government’s support for the Ukrainian war with Russia with the historical experience of “refugees from Russian communism” arriving to UK.
Mylor Bridge (Source: augb.co.uk)
In Lockerbie support for the Nazi cult took on even more tangible expression. In May 2022 the South of Scotland Enterprise donated £50,000 for the renovation of the chapel and the Interestingly, although the works were to be completed in the summer, and the chapel itself was recommended as a humanitarian help collection centre for Kiev, when I arrived there at the beginning of October 2022, the area was still something between a scrap yard and a parking and the building was stripped of religious elements, with no signs of renovation work.
Anglo-Saxon Recreation of Ukrainian Nazism
So, we are dealing with the quintessence of the Western attitude to the Ukrainian crisis. The Nazi Ukrainian tradition is being accustomed at an accelerated pace. It is revealed that all the time this tendency has existed, hidden, but for the last several decades kept under the protection of the Anglo-Saxon powers. This is proved by such places of Nazi worship as the Scottish Lockerbie, the Cornish Mylor Bridge or the Canadian Oakville. And the same time, the public money put into that undertaking disappear somewhere imperceptibly…
Mylor Bridge
Nazi entryism
Altars and monuments for SS-men and Banderites are symptoms of an even more serious problem. Entryism and mimicry have been recognised as the basic and main strategy of Ukrainian Nazi circles around the world. In addition to sustaining nationalist agitation among Ukrainians, the key method of chauvinists’ conduct is infiltration and influencing the political class of chosen states, considered hostile (such as Poland and the Soviet Union, and then Russia) and those potentially useful ones (the Third Reich, UK , USA, Canada).
Towards the “occupants”, the infiltration technique was used primarily for intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, protecting its own structures, but also for directly influencing politics and culture in directions considered beneficial to the Greater Ukraine. On the other hand, lobbying among the allies made it possible to diversify the message: once Ukrainians acted as an influential group of voters (Canada, locally the USA), sometimes as an effective external agent, with a broad base in the area of a common enemy, and sometimes simply as … normal citizens, with grandparents somewhere in Eastern Europe, what could not affect the fact that someone is a good subject of the Crown or a valued employee of the American or Canadian administration. Without conspiracy theories, we can see today how the OUN’s, Ukrainian Nazis’ line adopted 75 years ago is bearing fruit, perfectly fitting into one of the main global geopolitical clashes of modernity.
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Konrad Rękas is a renowned geopolitical analyst and a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from InfoBrics; all other images in this article are from the author
