Ukrainian Nationalist Leader Calls For Concentration Camps, Bombing Pro-Russian Rebels

Ukrainian nationalist leader Dmytro Korchynsky called on the government to bomb residential areas in war-torn Donbass and create concentration camps for residents living in the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Korchynsky, who heads the Ukrainian Bratstvao (Brotherhood) party, said the United States successfully used this method during the Second World War, and Ukrainians should act as the Americans did in the occupied territories, Sputnik News reported.

“During World War II, the U.S. preserved all the democratic institutions – elections and so on. Nevertheless, several million American citizens were deported to special concentration camps,” Korchynsky said in a live broadcast on a Ukrainian TV channel Thursday, according to Sputnik News. “U.S. citizens of Japanese origin, because they were potentially dangerous.”

The politician said Ukrainians should look to the Americans as teachers and bomb residences in the separatist eastern territories, just as the Anglo-American aviation destroyed German houses “to undermine the moral spirt of German soldiers who fought on the front.” But the United States preserved a “high level of humanism” while launching its attacks during WWII, Korchynsky said.

“Ukraine needs a broader level of freedom. We do not have enough freedom, we need more freedom,” he said. “But in the front zone and in the occupied territories we should act absolutely as the Americans. It is the only possible way of communicating with the moskals [an ethnic slur referring to the Russians or ethnic Russians living in Ukraine].”

Korchynsky made headlines when he fled Ukraine last year after he was accused of provoking violence against the police during the Maidan protests. His controversial comments on Thursday come as pro-government and rebel forces accused each other of increasing attacks in recent weeks.

More than 6,200 people have been killed and thousands more wounded since fighting started in April 2014, when pro-Russian rebels seized control of government buildings across the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and declared independence from Kiev. The separatists saw Ukraine’s newly-elected government as pro-Western because after nationalists attempted to remove Russian as the country’s second language.

Diplomats from Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany will meet in Paris next week in another bid to solve the bloody conflict and restore peace in the region. The high-level talks will focus on the ceasefire, which the warring sides agreed to on Feb. 12 in Minsk but have repeatedly ignored.