The Fourth Reich demands peace and purges

Ukrainian hitlerites for ceasefire. Struggle between Zelenskyite opportunists and Azovite strategists. Poroshenko, Zaluzhny, Sodol. 100 million dollar bribes. The angry officers movement

When it comes to hitler-loving military nationalists, you’d think they’d be lean more towards peace than a former comedian Jewish president who came to government on a peace platform, right? The reality is much more interesting.

Enter the fourth reich

Tales of the IV Reich (now renamed Tales of the IV Empire), likely run by an Azov lieutenant, is characterized by more sobriety than other similar channels, which is why I love reading it.

Most interestingly, his posts often seem to hint at a sentiment among certain ‘army men’, that the 1991-borders slogan is unrealistic and is leading to the destruction of Ukraine’s finest nationalists through politically-motivated meat storms. Not without the insinuation, of course, that Zelensky is quite happy to see these dangerous competitors die.

The fear of peace

One of the reasons that Tales is worried about endless war is the political pressure it puts on the broader population, which has always been frustratingly disloyal to the aims of radical nationalism.

Tales has always worried about popular demands for peace. Four days before February 24 2022, he was writing paranoid posts about how the west and Russia are trying to pressure Ukraine into implementing the Minsk peace agreements:

Among the participants in the combat actions, I know many disappointed and disoriented people. Some are tired, some have not seen clear changes, some have started families. Not everyone is ready to take up arms again now. Such tendencies are detrimental in the current situation.

The implementation of the "Minsk" agreements into the Constitution of Ukraine is worse for us - the Ukrainian right-wing - than a full-scale war. We are accustomed to fighting the Russians - the thousand-year war of freedom-loving Eastern Europeans against the Tatar horde continues to this day. If the Ukrainian authorities are pressured by the Russians and [western - EIU]"partners", we will get a "war zone" throughout the country. For us, the military veterans there will be no life in such a Ukraine. We will be under constant pressure from the system, with the possibility of being eliminated by amnestied separatist militants, and living in constant fear is not a life anyone wants.

If we fiercely resist the Russian army and unite the nation in the fight against the enemy, we cannot lose. Those who are burnt out and stay at home, in case of our defeat, will rot in prison or be killed. Some Ukrainians already believed the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and laid down their arms - they all either died of hunger or lived out their last years in camps.

To arms!

On July 13, Tales published a telegram post in response to the calls by popular Ukrainian bloggers for peace through negotiations and compromise in response to Russian rocket strikes on the capital (see my post on the matter). He was also responding to the parliamentarian Artem Dmytruk, who vigorously supported the bloggers.

Medvedchuk refers to the leader of Ukraine’s ‘Opposition Platform for Life’ party, whose main slogan was an end to the war through negotiations, until it was banned in 2022, along with the arrest and deportation of Medvedchuk.

Here’s the post:

If the war continues for another year, the population will bring the Dmytruks to power. So far, the Dmytruks are quite marginal. If it lasts two years, Medvedchuk will return here with the Russian flag. It's simple.

Being in the [frontline] Zaporizhzhia steppes or the command posts of the Donetsk region, you become quite detached from the population: you don't hear what ordinary citizens of Lviv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, or Kyiv are talking about and dreaming of. The fact that a huge number of people supported the Instabloggers (and how many were too embarrassed to write words of support?) irritates those who advocate for the continuation of the war. Because real people with open profiles wrote there, not Moscow bots. There are many of these people, and this must be taken into account. According to my observations, this number is increasing exponentially despite the fabricated results of sociological surveys.

The population sees corruption scandals. Constant loss of territories. Endless shelling. Inflation. Decline in the standard of living. Hundreds of new graves in cemeteries. Maimed veterans on the streets. Videos from the military registration and enlistment office. The West's incomprehensible behavior. Now, there are also extremely uncomfortable conditions with power outages in +35°C heat and prospects of water supply cuts. This list can go on.

I'm surprised that people with higher education and quite a high level of intelligence do not see the pattern.

Hitlerite civil war

In another recent post, he was openly pessimistic about Ukraine’s military prospects and its western allies:

Once again, for a day, calls to "fight to victory" are spreading through social media following the terrorist attacks by Muscovites in Kyiv and Kryvyi Rih. Here are my thoughts in theses:

1. Mobilization and a massive influx to the military registration and enlistment offices will not produce modern fighters, missile systems, or the latest strike UAVs. It won't even add Patriot SAM systems and missiles to them. Unfortunately, even the mobilization of 10 million Ukrainians will not stop the takeoff of strategic fighters in Russia, will not destroy existing nuclear weapons, and will not significantly reduce the population of Russia, its natural resources, etc.

2. Strong entities respond to terrorist acts with double the force. Yesterday in Belgorod, in the evening, windows in residential buildings were shattered, one civilian died, two were slightly injured. Such a "response" personally shakes me with despair and hopelessness. I emphasize once again that our military capabilities can destroy everything living within a 100 km radius from the state border. Special thanks to the tactical level commanders who take responsibility for leveling the Shebekino and Rylsky districts of the Russian Federation. These are young officers up to the battalion commander level. In other words, this is the grassroots initiative of a conscious part of the army, there is no political will for such actions.

3. We will not be invited to the NATO summit to join the alliance. We are not as cool as Albania. The topic of "Ukraine in NATO" will be a bargaining chip for many years, it will be a reason for wars and political crises. Moreover, in the coming days, NATO will solidify its impotence with a series of resolutions that will exclude the actual unilateral power of the United States in the alliance. The Western establishment is afraid of Trump coming to power, fearing that the war will end.

4. NATO only needs to allocate 10% of its available weapons, which are gathering dust in warehouses since the alliance is not fighting anyone, and we would defeat the Muscovites. However, Western politicians are stretching this aid over the years, while hundreds of the best Ukrainians are dying and becoming disabled, and Ukrainian cities cease to exist because of the war. They have been juggling planes, high-precision MLRS, and missiles in front of the bloodied faces of Ukrainians for years.

Note also his praise for ‘tactical level commanders’ who take initiative in hitting Russian civilian targets. See my recent post about the Sodol drama for more on this emerging caste of young nationalists, which positions itself against the so-called ‘old corrupt Soviet general caste’.

Anyway, given such sorry prospects for winning the war, Tales is clearly hinting that a ceasefire to regroup and strengthen defenses (as well as a good old-fashioned domestic purge) is a better idea than staying in the self-destructive meatgrinder.

I’ve discussed on my substack Evgeny Dyky, the corpulent supposed ex-commander of the violent Aidar Batallion. Among his many achievements, he is also in charge of spending sizeable sums of money on Ukraine’s wartime antarctic research project (read about it here). Otherwise, he spends a great deal of time on the Ukrainian talk-show circuit, explaining viewers how Ukraine’s military industry is just getting started while that of Russia’s has already reached its final peak, and so on and on.

Well, Dyky’s effusive optimism really annoys IV Reich. Yesterday, he posted this:

⚡️ An F-16 that managed to reach Ukraine crashed into a high-rise building in Nizhny Tagil (RF). The pilot was identified as Yevhen Dykyi, a military expert and former platoon commander of the Aidar Battalion (in 2015). According to preliminary reports, the fighter jet could not withstand the pilot's weight. Another version suggests that the pilot's unkempt homeless-like beard got tangled in the control stick.

Tales’ opinion on the 1991 borders slogan came out more clearly in March of this year. It all started in response to a hit-piece against a popular young commander by ‘the Centre for Countering of Disinformation’, a beautifully-named government-funded organ (my bolding). Here’s the hysterical hit-piece from the CCD:

The CCD logo.

Recently, interviews with military personnel have gained immense popularity in the Ukrainian information space, where they talk about the problems they allegedly face at the front: lack of ammunition, incompetent command, mistakes of the country's leadership, and so on.

A striking example of this is a recent interview with the commander of the K2 battalion, Kyrylo Veres, in which he claims that we will not be able to win this war, and his personal victory is when his battalion's soldiers stop dying. Thus, he is effectively hinting at negotiations and freezing the conflict. Such statements are absolutely unacceptable - they contradict the task set by the Leader of our country: to reach the borders of 1991 at any cost.

Obviously, it is high time to move to healthy military censorship - military personnel should be prohibited from giving interviews. Endless whining about the lack of ammunition and "meat assaults" does not bring us any closer to victory but contributes to the spread of defeatist sentiments in society. Moreover, in reality, there are no "meat assaults" in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and the military personnel are fully provided with everything necessary to accomplish the assigned tasks.

We remind you that you can always get reliable information about what is happening at the front on the "Unified News" telethon.

Commander Veres, the man being criticized. Looks a lot more trustworthy than the angry blue cube.

Ah, how times have changed over the past few months. Now even the Great Leader of is indulging in absolutely unacceptable narratives hinting at negotiations and freezing the conflict! But back to the response from Tales:

I have personally known Kyrylo since 2017 to be a decent and dedicated officer, back when he was still a reconnaissance platoon commander in one of the mechanized brigade's battalions. Over a few years, he rose to become the commander of one of the top battalions in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and received the "Hero's Star." We had many joint operations aimed at eliminating the Muscovites and their lackeys while the "defenders against disinformation" were siphoning grants in peaceful Kyiv.

Idiots don't like that the battalion commander wants his personnel to live to see peace in the country and return home alive. This is an absolutely healthy and adequate position for a Ukrainian officer.

"What does victory mean to everyone? It's when my people stop dying. If I said a year ago that victory is when the Russian Federation ends, then I was young and I did not command such a large number of people and did not give orders on who should go into battle and who should not."

The last part is quoting Veres, the lines that made the Center for Countering Disinformation so furious.

The heavyweights

I know some people who regret having voted for Zelensky, who think that previous war-hawk president Petro Poroshenko, with his greater experience dealing with Russia and as a statesman (however reprehensible), wouldn’t have allowed the war to happen in 2022.

Poroshenko in his signature black gloves and expensive vyshyvanka (the folk costume no bourgeois nationalist can leave home without).

I think it’s possible that Zelensky’s curious talent for aggravating everyone imaginable played a special role. Recall Zelensky’s wise decision to start reminiscing about soviet Ukraine’s nuclear missile capacity on February 19 2022.

But perhaps more importantly, Poroshenko hasn’t gone away either. He and his party certainly constitution the most powerful remaining opposition force in wartime. Could they be getting ready to attack Zelensky for wasting the army in an unwinnable war instead of preserving its fighting core?

Until his early 2024 removal, Zaluzhny was juicing up head of the army Zaluzhny as an anti-Zelensky icebreaker. And Zaluzhny wrote a 2023 article he wrote in the Economist about how Ukraine has no real prospects of victory against Russia and finds itself in a stalemate position. Zelensky was enraged by this violation of his slogan ‘1991 borders or bust’, and it was this article, along with Zaluzhny’s excessive popularity, that led to his eventual replacement.

It was Poroshenko that signed the Minsk agreements back in 2014 and 2015 to avert Ukraine’s military collapse. Maybe he can do it again, with the help of the ‘Iron General’ Zaluzhny.

Kiev mayor Klitchko - a real heavyweight - also said in a recent western interview that Zelensky should conduct a referendum on peace and abandoning some territories. Klitchko is another open critic of Zelensky’s authoritarianism, and has allied with Poroshenko against Zelensky numerous times in the past. There are rumors he is coordinating actions with him at the moment as well.

The angry officers movement

Opposition heavyweights like Poroshenko, Zaluzhny and Klitchko (don’t laugh about the last one) also have an important base of supporters to draw on - young, confident nationalists in the army.

A crucial fault-line at the moment is that between younger brigade commanders and the generals. The combrigs accuse the generals of sending them on pointless suicide missions because of the political leadership’s ‘obsession with maps’, rather than real strategic objectives. This ‘maps over strategy’ metaphor is often used by Azov spokesmen like Kukharchuk or Krotevych in their interviews with liberal nationalist (anti-Zelensky) media like Ukrainska Pravda.

Indeed, Zelensky must be map-fixated. His key priority is opportunistic - stay in power, keep the aid flowing, desperately showcase small successes. To put off his many days of reckoning.

For instance. with the countless businessmen he has imprisoned, extorted and otherwise enraged. Like the still-jailed Kolomoisky. Or a business partner of Kolomoisky, Bogolyubov, who recently escaped the country and claimed the government tried to extort him of 100 million USD in exchange for legal protection. Or, obviously, the questions society will have towards him after a war that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, and brought… what?

The young nationalists in the army launched the opening salvo in this increasingly public battle in late June, against General Sodol, who they accused of murderous graphomania. The battle has been rapidly developing in the past few weeks, a topic for a future post. But for now, I’d like to draw attention to Bohdan Krotevych, the Azovite who led the charge against General Sodol.

Krotevych said in a July 26 interview that he is ‘angry’ with Zelensky for apparently never having visited Azov’s headquarters at the frontline, while he does visit other military units. He said he considers this condescension. The interview, titled ‘I am very angry’, has already received a million views.

Another major topic of discussion is how Lieutenant Colonel Prokopenko, Commander of the Azov Brigade, is a ‘genius’. This is in turn fairly obviously compared to the stupidity of the generals, who he castigates for wasting human resources in impossible goals, and never learning from their mistakes (unlike the Russians, he stresses). Among other things, Krotevych calls the 2023 counteroffensive ‘retarded’.

A peaceful yet stern reich

He also boasts about hanging out with his close friend Zaluzhny while in England recently. They and their wives met, and Krotevych gifted Zaluzhny an antique British army knife (knives are highly beloved among rightwing nationalists).

Best of all, he cryptically promises that people would be hearing much more from Zaluzhny in the future.

And Zaluzhny’s July 23 speech at the RUSI Land Warfare Conference in London on the topic of ‘Third World War’ made it clear that he’s hardly a democrat:

Society must agree to temporarily give up a number of freedoms for the sake of survival,…

Unfortunately, modern wars are total. They require the efforts not only of the army, but of the whole society. Politicians can and should mobilize society. To do so, they use military and other state resources in a comprehensive way. These resources include the economy, finance, the population, and allies. Such actions will, of course, influence the political processes in the country.

Any ceasefire of the type that Zaluzhny, Tales, or Krotevych or the rest may want would be a brutal one. On July 30, Commander Romanov of the Azov brigade published a video stating he had given the order to shoot to kill any civilians attempting to destroy Ukrainian military equipment.

With less energy to spend on the foreign enemy, more to spend on purging the internal enemy. The bloggers won’t be bothering anyone else with their pacifist demands.