By KIT KLARENBERG – The Grey Zone
The killing of ultra-nationalist Ukrainian politician Iryna Farion at the hands of a Neo-Nazi is filled with irony. Linked to the Maidan false flag massacre, Farion was instrumental in bringing fascist forces into the mainstream.
On July 19, prominent Ukrainian Neo-Nazi Iryna Farion, a former lawmaker with the fascist Svoboda party, was shot dead in Lviv. A longtime advocate of purging her country of all Russian speakers through violence, she and her political faction were directly linked to the false flag sniper massacre of Maidan protesters in February 2014. Local officials initially seemed uninterested in cracking the case, lamely suggesting Moscow’s involvement couldn’t be ruled out. Now however, an 18-year-old Neo-Nazi is in custody.
The killer appears to have led investigators straight to his door by publishing a video of Farion’s murder and an accompanying “manifesto” on Telegram, while posting a slew of racist and antisemitic statements on an assortment of the messaging app’s Neo-Nazi groups. He openly confessed to assassinating Farion for insulting Russian-speaking Ukrainian soldiers in November 2023. Branding them “Muscovites,” she declared that she “could not call” them Ukrainians.
Farion’s tirade resulted in her dismissal from her university job and triggered an investigation by Ukraine’s SBU, which kept her under investigation until the day she died. Some might question how Ukrainian security services failed to prevent her assassination in that context, given her executioner was reportedly camped outside her apartment complex for two straight weeks.
As Ukrainian-born Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, a University of Ottawa political studies professor who has published multiple peer-reviewed studies on the Maidan false flag, explained to The Grayzone:
“It looks like intra-far-right rivalry. Officials first said they had no information about Farion’s suspected killer, whose photo was published by local Lviv Telegram channels. Her neighbors said this man was sitting all day long near the entrance to her apartment building for the last two weeks. She was shot in the head right there after she exited her building. Such apparent impunity is similar to numerous assassinations and killings with far-right involvement, including the Maidan and Odesa massacres.”
The slaying marked an ironic end for Farion, who appeared to have participated in the 2014 Maidan massacre that saw over 100 protesters killed in an incident that has since been exposed as a devious false flag. Like others involved in the slaughter, Farion had been granted immunity from prosecution. But this July, she became a target of lethal violence from a member of the hardcore Neo-Nazi forces unleashed by the Maidan coup she helped to lead.
A front row view of the Maidan false flag massacre
The US-backed opposition blamed the 2014 Maidan killings on then-president Viktor Yanukovich, while the West seized on the apparent sniper attacks to invalidate negotiations with the elected government and push for his violent ouster.
Officially, the killings remained unsolved until 2023, when dramatic, years-long trial of five former Ukrainian policemen accused of carrying out the Maidan massacre concluded. The verdict indirectly implicated Iryna Farion.
Though the court found three former Ukrainian police officers guilty in absentia, it confirmed that in some killings, the accused’s culpability was not only unproven, but the involvement of “other unknown persons” in the deaths “cannot be ruled out.” The judgment explicitly stated that the Kiev hotel from which the unknown snipers operated was “territory… not controlled by law enforcement.”
A growing body of evidence has emerged since February 2014 suggesting the gunfire emanated from the windows of rooms situated on Hotel Ukraina’s 11th floor, overlooking Kiev’s then-Freedom Square. A BBC correspondent has recalled seeing a sniper wearing a green helmet like the kind worn by Maidan protesters, while firing from this area.
The reporter later testified that he saw a handwritten note attached to the door of a room on the 11th floor, 1109, warning visitors not to enter “at the request of the SBU.” Police raided the homes of prominent Svoboda representatives Ihor Yankiv, Oleh Pankevich and Oleksandr Sych in October 2015. Authorities determined in their ensuing investigation that all three had resided on Hotel Ukraina’s 11th floor during the Maidan massacre. So too did Iryna Farion, in room 1109.
“The recent Maidan massacre trial verdict confirmed the BBC TV crew was shot by a Maidan activist from Hotel Ukraina and this building was ‘activist-controlled,” Katchanovski told The Grayzone. “Ukrainian government investigations revealed another Svoboda MP lived in the room on the same 11th floor from which the BBC crew was shot. Kiev’s ICTV filmed snipers in the same hotel room shooting Maidan activists in the back.”
Farion hopes for ‘World War III’ with Russia
For two years before the Maidan coup, Farion served as a member of parliament for the ultra-nationalist Svoboda party. At the time, Ukraine was still officially neutral, with its government enforcing laws protecting the country’s ethnic Russian minority from discrimination. In an environment like this, an anti-Russian fanatic like Farion was in legal hot water on a perpetual basis.
In February 2010, on International Mother Language Day, before even entering parliament, the ultra-nationalist legislator was filmed strutting around a Lviv classroom, warning children they must exclusively use the Ukrainian form of their names, or “you’ll have to pack your bags and leave for Moscow.”
That intervention prompted the ruling Party of Regions to request prosecutors file a criminal case against her on the grounds of language- and nationality-based discrimination. But her virulent Russophobic rhetoric, once relegated to the fringes of Ukrainian society, became increasingly normalized following the consummation of the Maidan coup. She quickly emerged as a fervent advocate of the fascist coup government’s push to ban the use of Russian as an official language, which sparked local rebellions throughout the country’s east.
In October 2014, as Farion prepared to seek reelection in the snap vote called by President Petro Poroshenko, she met with fighters from Sich Battalion, a fascist paramilitary formed by Svoboda, as they prepared to depart for Kiev’s “anti-terror operation” in Donbass. The Ukrainian government’s brutal assault on the largely defenseless residents of the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, who rejected the Maidan government, set the stage for the war that erupted when Russia launched its so-called Special Military Operation in February 2022.
Throughout the war in the Donbas, Farion and her neo-Nazi confederates baited Russia with calls for escalation. In her meeting with the Sich Battalion, Farion declared that the “anti-terrorist operation” would become “the spearhead of the Third World War… from which a great victory will begin.” Claiming Ukraine had been at war with Russia since 1654, when Kiev formally submitted to Mocow’s rule, she called upon the assembled fascists to “make us not just a nation of fighters, but an avenging nation out of us,” and “[take] revenge cruelly and harshly.”
Farion went on to demand that the Sich Battalion fighters settle this centuries-long struggle once and for all: “This is not just a challenge to history, it is a challenge to the heavens. The whole of Ukraine should become a front.”
Two weeks later, she made similarly incendiary comments, employing openly genocidal rhetoric when speaking about Russian-speaking Ukrainians. “This is what we live for and why we came into the world, to destroy Moscow, not just the Moskals on our lands,” she fulminated, “but [also] the black hole in European security that should be wiped off the world map.”
In the end, Farion failed to be reelected that year, and multiple subsequent attempts to reenter parliament were likewise unsuccessful. But even from the sidelines, she remained an aggressive cheerleader for Russia’s destruction, and the creation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state. Despite the increasingly fascist-friendly climate in Ukraine, however, her Neo-Nazism ultimately proved so venomous that it led to her personal and professional undoing.
As with Maidan, justice is fleeting
In November 2023, Farion insulted Ukrainian soldiers for speaking Russian, including fighters drawn from ultra-nationalist Azov Regiment and the 3rd Assault Brigade. Crudely branding them as “Muscovites,” she declared that she “could not call” them Ukrainians. She was immediately dismissed from her position within Lviv university’s Ukrainian language department, and the SBU initiated criminal proceedings against Farion for “[insulting] the honor and dignity of a serviceman” and “threats to a serviceman.” She remained under investigation until her death.
While still venerated as heroes by Kiev and the Western leaders who provide it with arms, the outsized influence of Azov has waned significantly since the war with Russia began, largely due to the ultranationalists’ attrition rate under enemy artillery fire.
Volodymyr Zelensky’s government may have also sought to undermine Azov, as two bloody friendly fire incidents suggested. First, in July 2022, a Russian pre-trial detention center was reportedly struck in a HIMARS missile strike, killing 40 prisoners from the Azov Regiment. Then, in January 2024, a plane carrying 65 Ukrainian POWs was shot down in Belgorod. Many on board were Azov members.
Accordingly, Farion’s assassination raises the question of whether civil society actors rejecting any form of settlement with Moscow are being eliminated too. The CIA spent expended heavy resources to training a dedicated assassination squad for Kiev. The unit is so effective, US officials fear its operatives could go rogue and execute targeted killings the world over, with one former senior CIA figure reportedly warning: “We are seeing the birth of a set of intelligence services that are like Mossad in the 1970s.” The Washington Post has reported that Ukraine’s proficiency at such operations “has risks for Russia… but it carries broader risks as well” for the rest of the world.
If a CIA-backed outfit in Ukraine is turning its guns on its former sponsors, it would follow a well-document history of blowback. Whether or not Farion’s assassination was the product of an intelligence intrigue, it is clear that Kiev’s chickens are coming home to roost.