A French senator said something similar in 2016. She had to apologize, claiming her words were misunderstood in an “indecent and miserable” way.
by Massimo Introvigne
Archpriest Alexander Novopashin is the deputy director of RATsIRS, the Russian national anti-cult organization that was until March 2023 part of the European anti-cult federation FECRIS. Since he is one of the most fanatical apologists of the aggression against Ukraine, a country he describes as dominated by “cults” and infiltrating “cults” into Russia, his opinions on pretty much everything are increasingly solicited by Russian national media. He is interviewed almost daily.
On June 16, he gave an interview to the Orthodox newspaper “Radonezh,” where he was congratulated for having called Ukraine “a terrorist state” well before Foreign Minister Lavrov and other politicians did. He reiterated his confidence that soon there will be “no Ukraine” on the map, which would be a benefit for the humanity, he said, since Ukrainians study and then apply the teachings of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Novopashin quoted Eichmann saying that “In order to destroy a nation, children must be destroyed first of all.” And this is what “the Ukrainians are doing now,” he claimed, they “kill Russian children,” as many as they can, and corrupt and pervert through “immorality” and “cults” those they do not manage to kill.
“Cults,” Novopashin argued, are not really religious organizations but tools used by the American intelligence. “Cults are engaged in intelligence activities, collecting dossiers and compromising evidence on entrepreneurs, politicians, officials. All this information remains in the archives of the cults for their use but also goes to the CIA and other American agencies. Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists—their activities in the world are definitely connected with the CIA. I think that now the words of Barack Obama, who back in 2008 said that limiting the activities of cults in a particular country, poses a threat to US security, will become more understandable.” By the way, President Obama was talking about religious liberty in general, not “cults.”
One day before, on June 15, Novopashin had given another interview to “SM News Agency” in his home city of Novosibirsk. The theme was comparing Ukraine to Afghanistan, in different ways. That the Americans will one day abandon Ukraine as they did Afghanistan is a recurring theme in Russian propaganda. More original is the claim that the Soviet Union and the local Afghan Communists created a heaven on earth in Afghanistan, where good leaders and their Soviet advisors “worked for the benefit of the people,” until the envious West decided to destroy it by inventing false “freedom fighters.” Obviously, the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan is best remembered for the massive detention, torture, and extra-judicial killing of opponents but these details are conveniently forgotten by Novopashin.
The core of this second Novopashin interview is that the present Ukrainian government uses the strategies, the tactics, the methods, and even parts of the immoral ideology of the Taliban, ISIS, and al-Qa’ida. “The Ukronazis, he said, adopted not only the experience of the Nazis, but also adopted many of the ‘developments’ of Islamic terrorists.”
This was not coincidental, Novopashin explained, since the Ukrainians train Islamic State terrorists in their country: “Back in 2016, French Senator Nathalie Goulet spoke on France-Inter radio about the Islamic State training base in Ukraine. ‘There is a jihadist training camp operating in the middle of Ukraine. The camp is in the Dnepropetrovsk region… My source is the head of the Ukrainian intelligence service Vasyl Hrytsak.’”
Novopashin is reviving an old story fabricated by the Russian propaganda in 2016, with the (perhaps unwilling) cooperation of a French senator of the center-right party Union of Democrats and Independents. Senator Goulet has cooperated, for reasons of her own, with Ukrainians close to the disgraced formed pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. As late as 2021, she continued to invite to France pro-Kremlin Ukrainian figures. To her credit, however, after the 2022 Russian aggression, she asked for harsher measures to seize the properties of Russian oligarchs in France and use them to support Ukraine.
But what about Ukraine training Islamic State terrorists in the Dnepropetrovsk area? She really did say something similar to France-Inter, but then she claimed she had been misunderstood. In a letter to the same chief of Ukrainian intelligence Vasyl Hrytsak, she wrote that “any claim that Ukraine cooperates with the Islamic State is an aberration, a lie, and a manipulation absolutely unacceptable.” She called the use of her interview by anti-Ukrainian propaganda “indecent and miserable,” and expressed her support for the association agreement between the European Union and Ukraine. She defined the fight of Ukrainian intelligence against Islamic radical terrorism “exemplary,” and expressed the hope that the “deplorable anti-Ukrainian propaganda may backfire and hit those who spread it.”
At the end of the day, it seemed that she wanted to congratulate the Ukrainian intelligence for having identified and dismantled an Islamic State “camp” rather than accusing Ukraine of cooperating with terrorists. But she misunderstood what Hrytsak told her. There was no “camp,” just an apartment where four non-Ukrainian citizens suspected of connections with the Islamic State had been arrested. Whether the senator was just naïve or manipulated by her dubious Ukrainian friends is unclear. At any rate, her letter of April 4, 2016, should have put the matter to rest. Novopashin, however, has a unique ability to fish old and rotten materials out of the sewers of Russian propaganda. It seems he has now been unleashed to resurrect the fake news of the Ukrainians training Islamic State terrorists in Dnepropetrovsk.
