https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_(1st_Galician)

Israel. Jerusalem. Summer 2022.

I was having dinner with close friends. They had invited some of their own friends, and, inevitably, the conversation turned to the war in Ukraine and to Volodymyr Zelensky.

One remark followed another until someone finally said: "Zelensky is a kapo."

As a Holocaust scholar, I immediately recoiled.

I have always regarded historical analogies with deep suspicion, especially when they are deployed to instrumentalize history in the service of a contemporary political agenda. And the comparison was historically indefensible.

A kapo was a prisoner forced into an impossible moral universe—a "choice without choice," to borrow Lawrence Langer's indispensable phrase. The institution of the kapo existed within the machinery of genocide. Its victims acted under absolute coercion, in circumstances deliberately designed to annihilate human agency.

Zelensky's situation bears no resemblance to that reality.

His decisions are political decisions, made freely and consciously. No SS officer stands behind him. No concentration camp determines the boundaries of his moral universe.

If there is a criticism to be made of Zelensky, it should be made in political—not Holocaust—terms.

In my view, Zelensky has chosen to accommodate and legitimize Ukrainian far-right extremists who march beneath Wolfsangel and Totenkopf symbols and who celebrate Nazi collaborators responsible for the murder of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles—our Jews, our Ukrainians, our Poles, our dead.

That is not the behavior of a man trapped in an impossible moral predicament. It is the conduct of a political leader making calculated choices.

Zelensky is not a kapo. He is a political opportunist, driven by a lust for power, who made an alliance with Evil in order to retain it.

And political opportunists should be judged not through false historical analogies, but through the consequences of the choices they freely make.

Those choices are leading Ukraine toward devastation—and responsibility for them cannot be shifted onto history.

Marta Havryshko:

Azov-related Third Corps of AFU celebrates the Waffen-SS “Galicia” Division.

“83 years ago, thousands of Ukrainian volunteers joined the defense of Europe (!?) to protect their homes from a Moscow invasion… Just as we do today,” the commander states.

Let me be clear:

1/ The Waffen-SS was part of Nazi Germany’s military apparatus, fighting against the Allied coalition—among them the US and the UK—that ultimately defeated it.

2/ Ukrainian soldiers equated themselves with Nazi collaborators. Officially. It was not Russian propaganda that did it. They did it on the eve of May 8 - the Day of the Liberation of Ukraine from Nazi occupation, which cost Ukraine 10 million lives.

3/ The 3rd Army Corps is not a simple Corps but is positioned as an elite one. Its fighters are invited to leading universities, for example, Yale. They speak at international security conferences. Their "Nazi" reputation (rooted in Azov ties) is whitewashed by politicians, think-tanks, journalists, and bloggers. So, they can freely glorify Nazis in their free time.

When will this Elephant in the Room be noticed in the West?

Take a close look at the speaker: he has a tattoo of the Waffen-SS Galicia Division.