Steppe sicarios, 9/11 now

Proxy warriors betrayed. Threats to the West. Glorious terrorism or forgotten oblivion. Lucky to die.

Glory, love, beauty, the soul, and faith. The economy rests on them as on a rock. On September 11, an experiment was carried out that confirmed this.

The west’s most ardent warriors feel betrayed. Stabbed in the back. In an August 16 piece, Ukraine’s premier liberal nationalist press put out a piece gloating - or threatening - that NATO’s strategy of ‘exhausting Russia with Ukrainian hands’ has doomed it to a future of cartels and terrorists launching drone attacks on ‘the comfortable west’.

Such sentiment is no surprise to those stuck behind the Ukrainian iron curtain.

I have male friends trapped in sleepy Ukrainian towns. They peek out of their apartment’s windows; ragged columns of foreign men walk by. Shell-shocked Arabs. Talkative Colombians. Out of place, but more comfortable than the locals. Just one more stop on their global voyages. Maybe the last, but maybe not.

You may have heard about the latest news of Latin American organized crime elements fighting in the Ukrainian army to gain experience in drone warfare. With an eye to selling their skills to the hombres back home. Hardly revelations. I wrote a few months back about nazi-satanist-militarist-sicario links.

Anyway, Ukraine’s liberal nationalist press has put out a short opinion piece on the matter. ‘The School of Death’, it’s called. It wasn’t translated to English.

The article’s conclusion – the west deserves what’s coming to it.

Journalism

Surprising? The publication in question, Ukrainska Pravda, has long been the flagship of Ukraine’s pro-western press. Set up in the 2000s on USAID money after the murder and decapitation of journalist Georgiy Gongadze. Killed by Ukraine’s then ‘pro-Russian dictator’ (who until then had been Clinton’s best friend) Leonid Kuchma. A murder never solved during successive pro-western administrations. Like many other murders of Ukrainska Pravda journalists under pro-western administrations (Pavlo Sheremet in 2016, for one).

Gongadze’s mother was sure he was never killed. Kuchma, the godfather of Ukraine’s oligarchy, remains as powerful as ever - now squarely on the side of NATO. A long life for a man once in charge of the Soviet Union’s most secretive intercontinental ballistic missile factory.

Anyway, Ukrainska Pravda was bought in 2021 by Tomas Fiala, Czech financier in charge of ‘Dragon Capital’. A string of media purchases, agrobusiness assets. The business partner of George Soros. Ukrainska Pravda and his other papers have always been the most militaristic, pro-western, anti-Russian out there.

Constantly accusing Zelensky and his team of being Russian deep agents, all a heartbeat away from signing over Ukraine to a ‘capitulation’ peace treaty that would halt Ukraine’s ‘euro-atlantic integration’. Last week, they put out an article praising the mobilization techniques of the short-lived 1920 Ukrainian People’s Republic –send artillery fire on villages that refuse to give up their men. Kill the draft-dodgers. I’ll cover it this week.

Back to Ukrainska Pravda’s piece on Ukraine’s Latin American allies. A timely article, given how much the army is desperate for more such mercenaries, as the following recent advertisement shows:

Reaping and sowing

The article begins by quoting the Intellinews report on the matter of cartel operatives fighting on Ukraine’s side to gain drone techniques.

But it quickly moves onto matters of more global importance – the historical significance of the Russo-Ukrainian war. In 2022, it was merely the ‘epilogue to the cold war’. The same 20th century weapons and tactics. NATO instructors came to Ukraine.

The phrase "NATO standards" sounded like a revelation from above.

One can sense the disappointment – NATO standards didn’t end up helping much. And the slighted honor - all your lecturing, for what. You saw us as inferior, and now you blame all the failures on us. But what did you teach us?

But how the tables have turned:

By 2025, the recent student himself became a teacher – and now foreigners are already adopting the Ukrainian experience.

All kinds of foreigners - both NATO and the likes of Los Zetas. Not that there’s much of a difference. The article compares Ukraine to Spain in the 1930s.

[Anyone] who arrived in Spain turned out to be the owner of invaluable experience… Spain became the ideal testing ground for the latest military equipment

The usual pride in this variation of the mantra uttered a thousand times by Ukraine’s top officials in the daily pleas for NATO to step up its involvement.

Now, the article writes, the war is no longer simply an epilogue to the cold war. It is no longer a 20^th century war. It is the first 21^st century war. The battlefield has been ‘qualitatively transformed’. ‘Drones and artificial intelligence’.

This scares the west, UP writes. The technologies emerging in Ukraine are beyond their control.

The example of ‘Operation Spiderweb’ in June of this year is of course utilized.

I won’t go into whether it really was simply plucky Ukrainian spooks that came up with the idea of smuggling drones into Russia to blow up its long-range strategic bombers. But the point is undeniable – a few thousand dollars took out billions in military equipment. The enemy could use that too, the writer reminds the reader.

For foreign observers, this came as a surprise – and a very unpleasant one at that. In the new conditions, the military power and security of the West were also called into question. Suffice it to recall the reaction of the United States to the audacious Operation "Web" on June 1, 2025.

"For a cost of only tens of thousands of dollars, Ukraine inflicted billions of dollars in damage, potentially setting back years of Russian bomber capabilities. The world saw in real time how readily available technology can disrupt established power dynamics," said U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll.

"This should make you more aware of how vulnerable our nation is," said Republican Senator John Boozman, chairman of the House Armed Services and Veterans Affairs subcommittee.

"Objects that seemed impregnable may not be so," emphasized US Air Force Chief of Staff General David Allwin, who called the Ukrainian special operation a "wake-up call."

You can sense the gloating. The author continues:

The concern of Americans and other foreign commentators is understandable. First, not only Ukraine, but also Russia, together with its authoritarian allies, is mastering new technologies of war. And, unfortunately, in some positions, the axis of evil has already broken through.

Indeed, I’ve written many times here about the constant warnings by Ukrainian drone operators that Russia has long led the race in technologies and their application.

The warnings keep on escalating:

the spread of these technologies across the planet in any case is only a matter of time. The relative cheapness makes them accessible not only to aggressive dictatorships, but also to criminal groups and, of course, to terrorists. Obviously, bloody terrorist attacks using unmanned systems are a matter of the near future. This is a serious challenge for the comfortable existence of the West.

A serious challenge for the comfortable existence of the West. Again, the gloating.

And finally, the accusations:

if Western politicians and military officials are concerned about this turn of events, then they have themselves to blame, first of all…

Theoretically, the collective West could have stopped Putin in 2022, when Russia had not yet adapted to a major military confrontation.

In this case, the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine would remain an epilogue to the Cold War – and would not turn into a prologue to the wars of the future. The old technologies that the West had three years ago would have proven their effectiveness. And the new deadly technologies simply would not have had time to evolve and be tested in combat on Ukrainian soil and in Ukrainian skies.

Instead of risking nuclear war for Ukraine, the west chose appeasement. The Ukrainska Pravda author doesn’t mince words: they chose to fight a cowardly proxy war:

In 2022, the idea prevailed in Europe and the United States that the strategy of slowly and gradually exhausting Russia with Ukrainian hands was the least risky and therefore optimal.

And now, the west receives its karma:

But, ironically, this cautious strategy gave rise to qualitatively new risks. The Western partners became like doctors who tried to treat a dangerous infection with insufficient doses of antibiotics. As a result, the pathogen acquired resistance to old drugs and became even more dangerous.

As you can see, the article is not very interested in the mechanisms of global security. There’s nothing here about how to make sure Mexicans and Colombians in the Ukrainian army are truly fighting for Western Democracy and Civilization.

The article isn’t so much of a warning as a threat. You leave us out here to dry. But don’t say we didn’t warn you. You’ll feel our war, too.

The classic threat is that Russia will invade Brussels next. But while this already has doubtful power over western European burghers, it certainly isn’t convincing to the average Joe at Bass Pro.

But when Ukrainska Pravda writes of the ‘criminal groups and, of course, terrorist groups’ using ‘unmanned systems… to challenge the comfortable life of the west’…

Was there ever a scene better articulated to the tastes and fears of the Fox audience? Mexican cartel terrorists infiltrating into the heart of America…

And is it a coincidence that such material comes out right as Russia and the US are negotiating what has already been called by Ukrainian officials a ‘stab in the back’? These are the final lines of the article:

The war that was not stopped in 2022 has changed with each passing year. It has become more sophisticated, more inventive, and more deadly. It has gradually said goodbye to the twentieth century and adapted to the twenty-first. It has moved away from the past and embraced the future. And now there is no way to put the genie of modern warfare back in the bottle. Not Donald Trump, not anyone else.

At this point, the war has long forgotten petty questions like tactics, strategies, goals. What matters is revenge. The fury of betrayal. We can hit the Russians however times we want, but they don’t feel a thing, the fucking orcs. No doubt the Americans would feel something. Those lazy, pampered westerners. Only capable of fighting through others, not for themselves.

Well, they’ll feel it one day.

There’s something primal here, the urge for recognition. We aren’t just a borderland. Not just an eastern European, post-soviet shithole. We’re the center of Europe. The beating heart of Western Civilization. The makers of History. You arrogant NATO instructors and state department bureaucrats know nothing of the values you preach.

The urban intelligentsia at Ukrainska Pravda feel this more than anyone. The most naïve believers are those most painfully hurt. It turns out that all the great abstractions they were fighting for were merely the window dressing to cold geopolitical interests.

As someone subscribed to a great deal of Kyivan hipster nationalists, let me tell you – ever since about 2023, the chief enemy of their hateful Instagram stories has transformed away from the degenerate Russian and into the lazy, pacifist westerner.

Once they were techno DJs, coders. All they ever wanted was to ‘live in Europe’. But their salaries, high enough in Ukraine to put them far above the uncivilized, dirty masses, were still too low for Berlin. Now, stuck in their avant-garde of western civilization, some of them have done time at the frontlines. Some of their friends have been killed there. And for what? The trendsetters they once looked up to in western capitals care little for this murky conflict.

They were told so long they were fighting for all of Civilization. And then to be dumped like this.

Darya Kaleniuk is an excellent example of this rarefied western-funded elite. Head of an anti-corruption organ on USAID money, known for accomplishing absolutely nothing. At the start of the war, she was also known for crashing Boris Johnson’s press conference with hysterical demands to ‘implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine’.

Her colleague at the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, Vitaliy Shabunin, started out his life at an ultra-nationalist youth camp, and has many friends in that world (see Moss Robeson’s excellent article). Shabunin is hardly a killer, but he knows plenty of them. All of these liberal NGO culture warriors are hand-in-hand with the spooked-up cold warriors of the World Anti-Communist League. The network against capitulation. All centered in Washington, the same sponsors. Covert warriors and trained killers.

Roman Chervinsky is a good example of this sort of ‘rogue agents’ - the western press and Zelensky officials ended up blaming the Nord Stream bombing on this ultra-nationalist covert warrior. I wrote about Chervinsky’s pre-2022 war against the Zelensky ‘capitulationist regime’ here. Chervinsky is very close to Ukraine’s pro-western elite, the likes of Ukrainska Pravda.

Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot.

— Libra, Don Delillo

The glory of September 11

So much hope, so much disappointment. I remember the Kiev metro, February 28, when everyone was sure ‘it’ was about to happen. NATO is sending their fighters to Ukraine, a middle-aged women all of a sudden urgently told me. So many believed so strongly.

The Ukrainian poet, novelist, fascist philosopher, anti-Soviet human rights dissident (member of the Helsinki committee in the 80s), paramilitary leader, self-described leader of the ‘Christian Taliban’ has a relevant passage on all these powerful yearnings.

I’m speaking of Dmytro Korchinsky, who since 2022 has led the ‘Brotherhood’ unit of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR). This was merely the latest form taken by his paramilitary group of the same name, which has existed since 2004.

The ‘brotherhood’ unit at war

I wrote about the dreams of esoteric Hitlerism and propaganda of school shootings and assassinations in Russia and the US professed by other creatures of the HUR here and here. Korchinsky is in good company.

A famous photo of Korchinsky, an example of the image he tries to cultivate

Korchinsky’s 2016 novel ‘the Shining Path’ is about petty criminals in a regional Ukrainian town. Crime, war, and terror – since it was written in 2016, Colombians are absent from its pages. The characters are salt of the earth Ukrainian ex-cons.

The book opens with an excellent distillation of the same desperate desire pumping through Ukrainska Pravda’s latest article. Anything to avoid being forgotten:

In the Atlantic Ocean, there is an island. Deep within it — a grave. On the slab — the inscription: “Unhappy unknown.” That is also what will be written on our shared grave. Ukraine’s. I am afraid of this.

I long for glory. Glory is the most important thing. The most important things in the world are irrational, weightless, elusive. Glory, love, beauty, the soul, and faith. The economy rests on them as on a rock. On September 11, an experiment was carried out that confirmed this. Three buildings and four airplanes were destroyed then. Very important buildings and expensive airplanes. Yet the economy should not have felt these losses, since the U.S. budget surplus is around 180 billion dollars.

And yet, today we can go to that currency exchange kiosk and see for ourselves that the U.S. economy is down for the count. Because Americans are desperate and confused. The indicator numbers crawl downward under the influence of phenomena that cannot be calculated, only felt. Economists will not help. Poets are needed, and they, damn it, are all Muslims today.

This is what my uncle Petro foretold to me and to the girl we had just picked up in the pastry shop on Lenin Street in the fall of 2001. The three of us wandered through the park near the regional council. He was already fifty, about a month out of prison (sixth conviction), the girl devoured him with her eyes and ears (if ears can eat), enchanted by the smoothness of his incomprehensible speech. An important quality of a conman — to be able to speak continuously for a long time, not letting the listener get a word in, and then the victim becomes hypnotized.

However, Uncle Petro was not a swindler, more of an adventurer than a bandit. By no means a handsome man, always penniless, seldom free, yet much younger women swooned over him. He continued:
— Bush is not a very bright man, yet he is not without a kind of rustic shrewdness. He does not deal with the economy—that’s what accountants are for. He is concerned with the collective subconscious. He does not think about how to raise the Dow Jones index, but about how to raise faith. That is why he withdrew from the ABM treaty precisely today. It wasn’t the Taliban who opposed America’s withdrawal from this treaty—they didn’t care. It was all of the United States’ allies in the anti-terrorist coalition who were against it. This was a deliberate tactlessness. Americans must feel that, as before, they do not depend on the world, while the world depends on them. Wanting to lift the economy, Bush does not intend to put money into it. Instead, he will invest many billions into missile defense. In other words, into faith.

Glory and faith, this is what matters. Women are best seduced by conmen. Terrorist poets are needed to save the confused, economistic Americans.

If only Bush were around today. Pure willpower is what it takes to confront the forces of Terror. The careful calculations of Biden’s bureaucrats be damned.

The passage continues. Korchinsky’s hero envies the relationship that ‘radical Muslim’ terrorists enjoy with the US - as opposed to the ‘miserable unknown’ Ukraine languishes in:

— He’s just back from America, the “maximum security” kind, that’s why he knows so much about the Americans, — I told the girl.
— Does it really matter where from? — Uncle objected. — America is global, so it is everywhere. America and the radical Muslims filled this year. Their relationship will enter the textbooks. And we have remained a “unhappy unknown” land. So hopelessly “unhappy unknown” that there is hope in it. The thing is, God deliberately keeps such neglected lands in the bottom drawer. From time to time he pulls one out at random, when he wants to accomplish something truly grand.

We are toys, abandoned in corners,
Covered with dust, waiting for years,
For Olympian children to compose with us
The plot of tragedies upon broken spines,
To string necklaces with our hearts.

Korchinsky, like Ukrainska Pravda, wants the war to be taken as far as possible. Let Olympian children accomplish something grand with our country. Anything to avoid a grave titled ‘unhappy unknown’.

Last week, Korchinsky called to execute anyone who resists mobilization. ‘I eagerly look forward to the day they open fire on those who resist’.

Last year, he called to mobilize those aged 14 and up, citing the positive example of central Africa. It’s as if he’s joking, but it’s always beneficial to shift the Overton window. Mobilizing those 18 and up will seem like a reasonable compromise.

Korchinsky’s son, apparently, has a comfortable position as his bodyguard. But Korchinsky never stops attacking the despicable draft dodgers:

What do these people cling to? To the senselessness of their own existence, to their drugged-up life, to trivialities. Instead of that, they could receive a great adventure [at war]. Whatever we do, we will end in death. But death in battle, for the fatherland — that is a death filled with great meaning, that is wonderful. And to die in a hospital in deep old age — that is the worst that can happen.

The devout young ‘brothers’ in Korchinsky’s mystical unit constantly die in covert operations on Russian soil. What if the war ends, and such affairs become less permissible. They’ll have to go somewhere.

Source

Sure, Korchinsky seems ridiculous. But doesn’t every terrorist?

Korchinsky relishes terms like ‘terror’, ‘fascist’, ‘dictatorship’. His old political anti-advertisements condemning democracy and elections seemed like an elaborate joke. As did his blunt admissions on camera of participating in bloody gangland wars in the 1990s and 2000s - hundreds died during ever election, he boasted. The line between shock value and sincerity is always impossible to parse. He’s also long been accused of being a Russian deep agent.

All past sins are forgotten in the fog of war. Now, he faithfully serves the Ukrainian State.

Whatever he is, he was never an armchair warrior. 1992 was a busy year - Korchinsky and his mystical nationalists fought in Karabakh on the side of the Azerbaijanis, Yugoslavia on the side of the Serbs, Georgia on the side of the Abkhaz separatists. The next year, he was fighting on the side of the Georgian government against the separatists and the Russians. He even fought in Zaire, today known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1994, his forces fought in Chechnya alongside radicals such as Shamil Basayev.

Korchinsky in Iraq, 2004

In the 2000s, he was a close associate of Alexander Dugin. A fellow critic of western degeneracy.

The 2005 photo of Arestovych, Korchinsky, and Dugin. Korchinsky now claims he was there merely as a Ukrainian covert operative, working for the Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR).

A glorious death is all he has ever preached. The power of death over life, of belief over monotonous routine. ‘War in the crowd’, the title of his 1999 memoirs. The subtitle: ‘Our experience of political violence’.

Vitaliy Portnikov seems quite different to Korchinsky. Portnikov was known in 2013 for homosexual sex tapes– quite the contrast from the Christian Mudjahid Korchinsky.

But Portnikov, the most well-known thought-leader of Ukraine’s pro-European liberals, lifelong writer at Ukrainska Pravda and lifelong recipient of grants from USAID and Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation, is just as bloodthirsty a Crusader as Korchinsky.

I’ve written before about Portnikov’s assertions that ‘getting politicians to fight is a return to feudalism. We live in democracy, the people must fight’. That women need to be mobilized if the war continues. Or his pessimistic predictions that after any peace, pro-Russian, anti-militaristic political parties will win Ukrainian elections. The time will be over for men like Portnikov.

Just last month, Portnikov went viral again for claiming that nuclear war would be a preferable option for Ukraine to a 'capitulation’ peace’:

Could [Trump’s threats of sanctions] lead to a nuclear strike from Russia? Yes, it could… In the event of a nuclear strike on Ukraine, Trump might even enter the war with Russia himself. This does not mean that in 50 days World War III will begin, but the speed with which we are approaching it is definitely increasing. And yes, World War III is one of the possible scenarios for preserving Ukrainian statehood. For in a global fire it is easier to survive on the periphery.

There’s another famous statement of his I haven’t covered. In 2019, he was full of excitement for the future:

— I don’t know how much and what lies ahead. I know that Ukraine faces thrilling, astonishing, turbulent years of crises, anxieties, disappointments, victories, and defeats. For journalism, this is simply a treasure — not a state, but a real treasure for journalists, of course.

— For journalists, sure, but for the people who perish and die…

—-And the people who perish and die are building their country. They have gained an opportunity they would never have had if they had lived in Great Britain, France, Germany, or Poland. It is simply amazing how lucky they are.

Woe be the one to live in historical times. The phrase should be amended – unless you’re a journalist, a poet, or an anti-corruption NGO leader.