When Victoria Nuland made the media rounds in February 2024, many analysts believed that the war in Ukraine had reached a permanent stalemate. It had been two years since Vladimir Putin ordered the Special Military Operation (SMO) into eastern Ukraine, and Russian forces were entrenched across 20 percent of the country, including Crimea, most of Luhansk and Donetsk, and parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Ukraine’s much-touted 2023 counteroffensive had fallen apart against Russia’s fortified lines, leaving Kyiv unable to reclaim its territory and many Western observers publicly doubting Ukraine’s ability to ever expel the Russian military. To many of Ukraine’s supporters, the war appeared to be lost.
But on February 23, Nuland, then the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and director of U.S. policy in Ukraine over the previous decade, told PBS Newshour that the conduct of the war was about to change.
Nuland tacitly conceded that because conventional victory was unattainable, Ukraine would turn to new, more ruthless and perhaps desperate tactics against Russia: “Putin's going to get some very nasty surprises on the battlefield,” she promised with a smile.
At the time, Ukrainian forces had already carried out assassinations of public figures in Russia, including the 2023 bombing in a Saint Petersburg café that killed pro-war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, a car bomb attack in Moscow that ended the life of 29-year-old journalist Daria Dugina, and the ambush of Ilya Kiva, a pro-Kremlin former Ukrainian lawmaker who was shot dead in a contract-style killing in a forest outside Moscow. Many observers speculated that “far-right” Ukrainian nationalists, known for their murderous anti-Russian racism and militant prosecution of the war, were responsible for the assassinations.
Following Nuland’s promise of nasty surprises, Ukraine intensified its dirty war with a new series of operations against Russian military and civilian targets that manifested the genocidal anti-Russian rhetoric of Ukraine’s right-wing nationalists.
What very few observers have noted is that these neo-Nazis, now at the front of Ukraine’s dirty war, have been funded, assisted, trained, and directed by the United States government since 1945.
In late July 2024, the Ukrainian Foreign Legion, which had attracted a number of neo-Nazi enlistees upon its founding, played a central role in a lethal ambush in Mali’s Tinzaouaten region, where a convoy of Russian Wagner Group mercenaries and Malian government soldiers came under coordinated attack. Ukrainian operatives led a devastating strike that left 84 Wagner fighters and 47 Malian troops dead. The attack, which occurred under the cover of a sandstorm, employed improvised explosive devices and guerrilla tactics to inflict maximum casualties and damage.
By the end of 2024, Ukraine had turned its focus toward the Russian homeland, launching a series of high-profile assassinations within Russian territory itself. Mikhail Shatsky, a senior missile scientist, was gunned down in a Moscow park. Just days later, on December 17, a scooter-rigged explosive device detonated outside an apartment building in central Moscow, killing Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov along with his assistant.
The campaign of assassinations escalated further in 2025. On April 25, Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik of Russia’s General Staff was killed by a car bomb in the Moscow suburb of Balashikha. The following month, former Russian Major Zaur Gurtsiev was vaporized on camera by a concealed grenade, continuing a pattern of strikes marked by tactical sophistication and ruthless intent.
Even supporters of Ukraine have noted the turn to Nazi-like total war. “The goal has been to strike in unexpected locations through devious means and make Russia bleed far beyond the front lines in Ukraine,” wrote David Ignatius in the Washington Post this June, in an opinion column titled “Ukraine’s Dirty War Is Just Getting Started.”
In recent months, several reports have linked the perpetrators of extreme tactics against Russians to “far-right” and “ultranationalist” factions within Ukraine. These groups, which have long been tied to both the original Nazis and neo-Nazi movements, were deeply embedded in Ukraine’s military and intelligence infrastructure by the time of Russia’s invasion.
These groups are all genealogically linked to the original Ukrainian nationalist organization, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Formed in the 1920s to rid Ukraine of Soviet and Russian influence, the OUN’s principal leaders, Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed, found common cause with the Nazi regime immediately after the German invasion of Ukraine in June 1941. They believed that the Third Reich would free Ukrainians from Russian oppression and also shared with the Nazis a genocidal racism toward Poles, Jews, and Russians. Shortly after the German invasion, the OUN sent word to Adolf Hitler pledging their support for his mission and declaring their commitment to the “consolidation of the new ethnic order in Eastern Europe” and the “destruction of the seditious Jewish-Bolshevist influence.”